Archive - Aug 2011
August 21st
Sunday on the Cape
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 08/21/2011 - 18:11Well, out was a pretty great day on the Cape. We got off to a leisurely start. Coffee at the picnic table next to the trailer. Afterwards, we headed off to Race Point. Typically, we spend most of our days on the Cape at Race Point.
It was low tide when we arrived and the water was 61 degrees. That's pretty cold when you get in, but after a while, you get used to it.
I started turning people and after I got out, I broke out in hives. They went away and now, mostly I'm just sore from swimming and from places where I didn't have enough sun block.
As we were leaving, we saw whales playing in the distance off of Race Point. We had seen a few seals earlier in the day and plenty of different types of birds.
Fiona and I also visited many dogs at the beach as well as went to the life saving museum.
I read a little news on Twitter while Kim was picking up supplies st the grocery store. The question of the day, how do you make a Libyan freedom cocktail?
August 20th
Saturday on the Cape
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 08/20/2011 - 20:12We got off to a slow start and didn't stop in Little Compton where an old high school classmate runs a general store. Also, I didn't manage to connect up with an old college classmate that lives a few towns over from Little Compton.
We made it to the Cape a little after noon. Our first stop was st the Cape house of some friends not fdr from the bridge. We socialized, swam and sailed for a while before heading the rest of the way.
In the evening, we arrived in Truro. We are staying in a rented trailer. It is a compromise between camping in a tent and renting a house. The trailer is very nice. We headed off to a great seafood dinner and are now back at the trailer and I am about ready for bed.
August 19th
Vacation
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 08/19/2011 - 18:47As of 5 PM this afternoon, I am officially on vacation. For the next week, I’ll be out on Cape Cod. Most of the time, I expect to be on the beach, resting, maybe reading a little, and swimming and walking a bit. It has been an especially long and hard week, so I’m trying to decide my media strategy for the week. For several years, I’ve managed to get a blog post up, every day, even when I’ve been on vacation. Typically, these blog posts are much shorter, sometimes just a picture with a paragraph talking about it. I’ve often sent some messages to Twitter or Facebook, and checked in on Foursquare when I’ve gone to a really great clam bar.
Now, I’m even more entwined with social media. I won’t be making as much on Adgitize while I’m gone, and it will drop to almost nothing if I don’t blog. My stock on Empire Avenue has done very well, but it is sure to decrease over the coming week. The question is, how much? It will be more of a drop depending on how little I am really involved with social media.
My vacation is going to be fun, and I want my friends to share with the fun. Yet I also want to make sure that social media doesn’t get in the way of the fun.
So, I’m going to take this day by day. Maybe I’ll put up a blog post tomorrow. Maybe I won’t. Even if I do, I might just stop part way through, or this might be my last blog post for a few days, and I’ll post something in the middle of the vacation. We’ll see. Meanwhile, I really need this vacation.
August 18th
Digital Nostalgia
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 08/18/2011 - 21:22This evening, I participated in a Tweetchat about online social networking. One of the first questions was about when people started networking online. I mentioned Usenet back in 1982 when I was working at Bell Labs. Yes, if you know where to look, you can find stuff I wrote back in 1982 still online. I believe I first used Minitel at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1983 when I was hitchhiking around Europe.
I had also visited bulletin board systems in the 1970s, but they weren’t particularly connected. Later, when Fidonet came along I was on that for a bit. I can’t recall if I ever accessed Minitel or Arpanet via Fidonet. Latter, I had accounts on ATTMail, SprintNet, and Compuserve. I also believe I did a little bit on GEnie in the late seventies, but I pretty much used it to access some programs that I translated to run on calculators, and never really used it for networking. Also in the seventies, I had been on Battelle’s computer network, and used to play Star Trek there. For other games, in the evenings at Bell Labs, I used to play Rogue on their computers. At times I’ve had versions of these programs that ran on my PCs.
One of the challenges back in the day was to send emails across multiple networks. My connection to Usenet back in 1982 was via UUCP, and addresses were of the form machine1!machine2!...!user Of course, these days, everyone knows the SMTP email addresses, user@machine However, the user part could be an address on a different email address if the host machine was a gateway, so I regularly sent email through a machine called ucbvax. It took several UUCP connections for me to get to ucbvax, so my email address was something like machine1!machine2!machine3!machine4!machine5!myid@ucbvax I don’t remember if the .berkely.edu was in use at the time. For me to send an email, it would go to machine4!machine3!machine2!machine1!ucbvax!user@othermachine.
There were also ways of connecting to Decnet, which used two colons to separate a userid from a machine name, bitnet, and of course X.400. X.400 addresses were long an complicated /C=US/ADMD=Att/PRMD=attmail/ou1=somethine/ou2=somethingelse I think Sprint used semicolons instead of slashes. Many of the networks had gateways, and if you knew the gateways you could email many different places.
One place I used to email to was FTPMAIL. You could send FTP commands via email to a machine that would grab a file and send it to you in small pieces that you put together and decoded to get your file. Another person on the mailing list mentioned XNS, but I never used that. Someone else mentioned PROFS. PROFS ran over RSCS which is what Bitnet used, so I never was on PROFS, but I had access to it via Bitnet and various RSCS programs I wrote.
Then, there were the speed issues. The first device I used had a 110 bps connection. Bps is bits per second. Now, people talk about megabits, or in somecases gigabits per second. I later used a 300 bps modem, a 1200 bps modem, a 2400 bps modem, a 9600 bps modem, a 14,400 bps modem and then moved over to ISDN which would allow 56K.
Enough for the early digital nostalgia. Maybe this will stir memories for other digital aborigines out there.
August 17th
