Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

I’m glad I’m not the only person who read this excellent excerpt from Christopher Buckley’s upcoming Losing Mum and Pup to take from it the profound and moving thought of “Hey! WordStar!” John Derbyshire did as well:

One little detail that caught my eye was Bill’s insistence on sticking with WordStar as his word processor of choice. I understand this perfectly. Once you’ve mastered a piece of software, why should you have to go to the trouble of ditching it to learn a new one? Bill actually out-conservatived me there. I am proud to tell anyone who asks that I write everything (including this diary) using KEDIT, a nifty text editor from the mid-1980s. KEDIT is modeled on XEDIT, which I used in my mainframe days in the early 1980s. I’m well into my third decade with KEDIT and see no reason to change. Still, KEDIT’s first release was 1983; WordStar was already five years old at that point.

I believe I have used WordStar, inasmuch as someone opened it for me and I went “Hey! I can type my name! ooooooh green letters”

… ok, I was four years old.

I have, however, been formally introduced to vi as of last semester, and while I can’t say I’m ready to participate in any holy wars yet, I can see why other people might feel compelled to stand by their text editor with great enthusiasm.

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

I’m so out of it with regard to music now, I only just found out that Ben Folds Five had a reunion concert in September. But! I found the whole video online when I logged into myspace for the first time in forever. The guys play the entirety of The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner live before an incredibly lucky audience — yes, even “Your Most Valuable Possessions,” which Ben’s dad comes out to nervously read from a cue card.

Reinhold Messner has gotta be one of my top five albums of all time, easily, and I know Ben Folds is awesome to watch live. I bought Sessions at West 54th DVD beforeI even owned a DVD player and bought it to my boyfriend’s house to watch, and we were all astounded by it. I bought the official score, borrowed my boyfriend’s keyboard, and almost learned to play “Narcolepsy” except for these chords that are made to played by someone with giant Ben Folds hands amd not freaky midget hands like mine.

So, being unable to really play Ben Folds Five songs, I did the next best thing and named my computer after one of them. Looking back, it wasn’t that great of a computer, so maybe that was unfair of me. At any rate, this got me reminiscing while I watched Ben Folds Five perform, about all my computers:

• Firefly, my graduation present, the K6-2, which eventually got cannibalized into other machines by Troy.
• Leo, my mom’s old computer, the other K6-2, that we loaded with an absurd amount of RAM and used to run Mandrake Linux after Jeff’s old iMac exploded.
• Jane, which I got from Wal-Mart and ran Linux.
• Una, which Josh Rowe built, and ran Windows XP so I could play FFXI. But it was NOT named for Yuna or anything like that, but after Una from Faerie Queene.
• Daenerys, the first computer I built. It was a learning experience, so I thought her epithet “Stormborn” was quite fitting. I sold it to my father, and he used it until it was stolen just recently.
• And finally… Mal. There have been a number of things that I can credit for keeping me almost-sane while working at the casino, and Joss Whedon’s Firefly and the joy that came from building this computer are two of them. When I switched it on and it worked, I went “Aha! I can really do this! I rule!”

Not even counting my family’s nameless computers, all the way back to the Kaypro and Commodore-64. Well, there’s two ways of navel-gazing into my past, right there.

Originally published at Firefly the Great. Please leave any comments there.

Well, apart from the whole “worrying about money and getting job” bit, I could handle being unemployed. Without the restrictions like “going to work,” I find all sorts of projects to throw myself into.

The first projects were web-related; redesigning Action Entertainment and the Grunts page to take advantage of some CSS tricks and get everything validated. But that was not enough, so Friday I decided it was time that I install Ubuntu.

I had already purchased a second hard drive for this purpose, so I’m now dual-booting Ubuntu 8.04 (”Hardy Heron”) and Windows Vista (which my bootloader likes to refer to by its production name of Longhorn, for some reason).

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