For several months now I've had the desire to add more content to this website, but I don't have many subjects to talk about that could fill out an entire article by itself. So, here's just a bunch of random things I thought of throughout the day. This could be considered a blog, I wouldn't know as I have never read a blog.
My alarm went off at 7:01AM since I forgot to turn it off when I went to work yesterday. It took me several minutes to remember I had the day off today, So I ended up hitting snooze until around 7:40AM. I drank the last bottled Starbucks Mocha Frappachino I had in the fridge and... I completely forgot what I did until 9:47AM.
9:47AM I head off walking towards the nearest Goodwill. Other than the old man sleeping out front with a Fender branded guitar gig bag I didn't find anything of interest there, so I took a detour to Russ's (A Nebraskan chain of grocery stores) and bought two bags of Smarties and a box of Strawberry Pop-Tarts. The name brand Pop-Tarts, mind you. Usually the off brand junk food sold at grocery stores tastes like the real thing a month or two past expiration, but no matter who is selling them off brand Pop-Tarts are TERRIBLE. And for one reason: you can't finish a single pastry since they make you feverishly thirsty. Not even whole milk will save your mouth from that garbage!
That Russ's is interesting because it's the original location from the 1960s, and they're just finishing up with a massive renovation. Yet for some reason they didn't bother to fix the sidewalk issue. In the previous configuration there was an atrium where you would either turn left or right and continue down the sidewalk along the front of the building. That entire sidewalk was closed off while they demolished the atrium, meaning you had to walk in the middle of the busy, cramped parking lot. They opened the rebuilt atrium a couple months ago (If I remember correctly, time is meaningless these days.) but the new one has doors on the front spilling right into the parking lot. Where there used to be doors for people on the sides, those are now only for shopping carts. There is a narrow piece of sidewalk along the front of the new atrium that takes two right angles to reconnect to the old sidewalk, but there are decorative pillars in the way, leaving only enough space for one person. And of course there is always somebody smoking a cigarette between the new atrium and the pillar, so you MUST step into the parking lot.
Once I got back to the house I continued a failed project from yesterday which was to send a fax to my job using a U.S. Robotics Sportster v.90 faxmodem from 1998. I bought it at the Goodwill Electronics Store on O and Cotner in Lincoln (RIP) back in 2014 for a short film I was working on that never came to fruition. It was to be called A Teen's Guide to the Internet, and was an awfully written parody of The Kids' Guide to the Internet, which is a VHS training tape from 1997 that was going viral in 2014 thanks to The Fine Bros. featuring it on Teens React. Of the things that did come together for that video before I scrapped it, the aforementioned faxmodem still exists, as well as the LPT printer cable I bought with it that silly 14 y/o Argot thought would have somehow connected to a computer from the 90s, despite having never seen a female mini-Centronix connector at that point. There's also the KDS CRT monitor I spray painted beige which I have actually used extensively since abandoning the project; it was my main display for my real computer from 2014 to 2021 and I still use it for my IBM PS/ValuePoint 433DX/D. There's also the Power Macintosh 6100 keyboard (The only beige keyboard I owned), and the purple era Dell Dimension I spray painted beige since it would be a long time until I would own a real beige computer, which has amassed a massive amount of dust in the basement over the past eight years. The last thing that still exists is a proof of concept for the intro, which only survived the great disk crash of '17 because I uploaded it to my Google Drive.
Anyways, the fax! It kept failing when I was trying to send it last night, but this morning at around 10:30AM it worked the first time. A couple hours later I ended up having to drop in to work to get some stuff anyway, so while I was there I asked about the fax and turns out they received the cover sheet every time, but only the actual document on the last attempt that morning.
It was pretty exciting to send a fax myself, as I had actually never sent a fax before, and it was only after we moved to a new house without a landline that Cathode Ray Dude uploaded a YouTube video talking about how you could send a fax with a modem. I was never able to do that because I was never had the cable to connect my modem to any of my computers, And once I had the cable I didn't have a landline. So after some hard consideration I paid Windstream to activate the landline one of the previous owners of this house left installed, that had simply sat dormant for as long as we have lived here. Now I can fax and connect to BBSes whenever I want. Yay money!
And of course I just had to install Windows XP on one of my machines for the occasion. I immediately switched to the Olive Green theme and set the desktop background to Gone Fishing tiled, because I had to do something to tie together the ugly 2003 home office aesthetic :)
After that I went to Walmart with my dear mother, which was too boring for me to say anything about. Fast forward to about 2:50PM, I realize I could go to Star City Recycling, as the only time they are open that I don't work is on Fridays, and they closed at 4PM. So I put on my knock-off Birkenstocks and walk well over a mile to Star City Recycling. This is the place I bought the aforementioned IBM 486, which I originally bought just to aid in the repair of my Compaq Portable 1. I had corrupted the hard disk and needed a 360k MS-DOS boot disk to reinstall. The IBM 486 has a 1.2M 5 1/4" drive, but fortunately I had just enough preformatted 360k disks to figure out what I was doing and create a functional boot disk.
By the time I get there it's 3:20PM and my Birkenstocks are full of shredded grass. Being that Star City Recycling is in an industrial park on the other side of a Co-Op there wasn't a sidewalk for most of the trek, and when I finally got off the shoulderless road I had to walk through Sawyer Snell park, which was still being mowed.
I honestly wasn't expecting to buy anything there, I made the trip just to look, but I actually made an unexpected purchase, not because I needed it, but because I knew if I ever did need it I wouldn't be able to get it at the price offered to me...
An IBM Model M for $15. No cable, but sure as hell fully functional when I plugged it in with the cable for my current Model M. They actually had two Model Ms, but the other was a Lexmark Model M. The one I got is a real IBM with a build date of August 15th, 1986. Fascinatingly, there are overlays on the keys to use it as an APL keyboard. Keep in mind right now I'm looking at eBay prices for Model Ms and I'm seeing $125 listings and up. Nothing below $97 for Buy It Now. Interesting to note, it sounds and feels different than the Model M I'm typing this on right now. And yes, I'm still using the $90 eBay Model M from 2017 to type all of this. I know, waste of $15, am I right???
I'm not sure if I have a preference between the two, the $15 Model M certainly sounds closer to the brand-new Model M from 1988 Clint Basinger unboxed with his PC/AT. The $15 one also has much less resistance on the keys. If anyone knows anything about this, send me an E-Mail.
It's now 7:46PM as I write this very sentence, so that's basically everything up to now. Oh no, there's nothing left to say!
Argot
Page created: Friday, June 10th, 2022