dive into mark

Michael Barrish: Banana split. I closed the aptitude test book and went back to what I was doing before I came up with this plan to take an aptitude test, which was to drop out of school and write poetry for as long as I could and then fucking kill myself.

I did that when I was sixteen (the taking-a-stupid-aptitude-test part, not the planning-to-drop-out-of-school part, and certainly not the planning-to-fucking-kill-myself part, although I did have a writing-poetry-every-waking-moment phase that lasted for a few months in freshman year of high school, and then resurged every so often, into my 20s, some of which I may dredge up and try to convert to plain text (as I had not yet become versed in the wonders of plain text as a freshman in high school so the poems are probably stuck in some legacy format like Appleworks (and by that I mean Appleworks for the Apple //e, not Appleworks that is all bright and shiny and comes with new bright and shiny Apple hardware (and come to think of it, I vaguely remember doing just that sort of conversion a few years ago, bringing all my old writing into a more modern format, but again, it was before my age of enlightenment about the wonders of plain text, so it’s probably a legacy format again by now, but I’ll see if I can dredge it up anyway to compete with the writing skills of the masters like Michael Barrish (did I mention that programmers become very skilled at balancing parentheses? it’s just one of those stupid little things you get good at as a programmer that doesn’t really have any value to anyone else))))). It said I should be a high school math teacher. I never took another aptitude test again, and I’m quite sure I’m a better person for it.

OK, I didn’t find any poetry worth sharing, but I did find an autobiography I wrote when I was 17. (No, it wasn’t vanity; it was an assignment for English class.) Excerpt:

In sixth grade, we got an Apple //e computer. Actually, my father got it so he could type up the book he was writing for his sabbatical. But I found out that by programming it, I could make it do whatever I wanted. Or at least whatever I could break down into simple enough steps that the computer could understand. This had four effects on my personality.

1. The computer replaced my social life. This went more or less unnoticed.
2. Because I was constantly programming, I learned to break down everything I did into simple, logical steps, as if I were writing a computer program. I very rarely now get overwhelmed by the amount of work I have to do, because I never look at all of it at once. I take this bit and finish it, then that bit, then the next.
3. 75% of my creative juices went down the drain forever.
4. I discovered that I was in complete control while I was in front of the computer, and when I did have to interact with people, I wanted that same control. I am not an outgoing person, but I am dominating.

Reactions to this now, 12 years later:

• It shows a surprising level of self-awareness not normally found in teenagers.
• My sense of humor was etched in stone by then, and it has not changed a bit since.
• The rest of my personality has also changed very little. I have mellowed (slightly) in the past 12 years, but not actually changed much.
• I would now disagree with the creative-juices-down-the-drain part. I didn’t realize at the time how creative programming could be.

So anyway, I found the converted files, as well as the original files. Stuff dating back to 1985. The originals are in Apple //e Appleworks format, which is what I used during high school and even into the first few months of college (until I switched to Macs and used WriteNow, an equally useless format). (Side note: does anyone remember those heady glory days when there was actually competition in the word processor market?) In my infinite wisdom, I converted them all into Microsoft Word .DOC files. Brilliant.

Dora’s iBook came with MacLinkPlus, so maybe I should batch convert all of them again into plain text. It’s not like they had any special formatting anyway (other than carriage returns and spaces).

Convert your old stuff now, before it’s too late. Eventually, data just disappears. Formats change, and old formats fall off the end of the upgrade treadmill. Even with (wonderful) translator programs like MacLinkPlus, many old formats aren’t readable. And media itself becomes unreadable; when I bought an Apple //e a few years ago, I discovered that only about 75% of the floppy disks that I had growing up were still readable. And media, even if readable, becomes inaccessible due to hardware changes. When I got my Apple IIgs, I had the unintentional foresight to copy all my writing from 5.25″ floppies onto 3.5″ floppies. 7 years later, I was able to stick those floppies into the floppy drive of my PowerMac 8500 and copy them to my hard drive, convert them to .DOC files, and burn them onto a Mac-formatted CD-ROM. Now my current Mac (an iMac) doesn’t have a floppy drive, but it can read .DOC files off a CD-ROM. I can reconvert them into plain text and burn them onto an ISO-9660-formatted CD-ROM, which any current PC or Mac running any current operating system will be able to read. If I’m lucky, that should last me another 10 years.

§

Respond privately

I am no longer accepting public comments on this post, but you can use this form to contact me privately. (Your message will not be published.)

§