Monday, November 27, 2006

One of the problems with being old enough to be my oldest daughter's grandad (I just did the math, it's true) is the huge changes that have happened in the 43 years since I was her age. I remember my first encounter with a computer in school. I was 13. It was a teletype terminal linked to some huge valve operated mainframe in the council office basements the other side of the city. The class queued up and one at a time pounded in our programs line by line (Forth or Basic, I can't remember which) :

10 Do this
20 do that
30 sub routine this
35 put in the bit I got wrong last time
40 end

If it didn't do what you expected you went away and worked it out and got on the back of the queue to type it all it again. It must have been worth it, because one of the kids I stood in line with was Alan Dix now Professor Alan Dix, of the Computing Department of Lancaster University.

Holly, aged four, was doing stop motion animation on the nursery laptop last week.

This afternoon she started walking around stiff legged for a bit before announcing. "My legs don't work very well. I have an error message in my head."

The sooner we get this kid to ballet classes the better.




I went into the Fort this afternoon to pick up some shopping while Merriol went for a walk with the kids. As I was driving in, a motorbike overtook me. He passed the car in front of me a few moments later and shot off away up the road. A couple of miles on, on a particularly bendy bit of the A82, I spotted something at the side of the road. I had just worked out it was a crash helmet when I realised the mass lying on the grass next to it was the biker who had passed me a few moments ago. I couldn't see the bike, it must have been down off the road in the trees, half way to the loch. There was no way I could stop. I had a car right behind me. So I turned in the next lay-by (thus becoming one of those arseholes who do three point turns on trunk roads) and went back. By the time I get there he was on his feet and talking on his mobile. His face was covered in blood but he insisted he was all right. All of my life I have been convinced that one day I will find a dead body. I'm glad today wasn't it.


2 comments:

Phoebe J. Southwood said...

spooky - glad he was sort of ok.

(The word verification today is: zpugee)

Junk Monkey said...

no it isn't. it's

"tqulxx"

You realise of course these aren't randomly generated, they are all in the Ikea catalogue.

Missing CD? Contact vendor

Free CD
Please take care
in removing from cover.

Copyright (c) 2004-2007 by me, Liam Baldwin. That's real copyright, not any 'creative commons' internet hippy type thing.

(this copyright notice stolen from http://jonnybillericay.blogspot.com/)

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