Happy Thanksgiving?

So, how was everyones Thanksgiving?

I thought so.

Mine was great, thanks for asking.

We didn't do much, but that was nice anyway. We just sat around at home and at my dads hotel. We got to go swimming in the nice pool that they have there. It was all good fun. We watched the Macy's Thanksgiving parade march all around downtown.

So, look at what arrived in the mail the other day:

Any guesses as to what it is?

No?

Well, here is a hint:

That's right. It's a HUMUNGO floppy drive. A Commodore VIC-1541. It takes floppy discs that are 5 1/4 inches across. And the sad part is: that little floppy disc, the one we all remember from the '90s, actually has more capacity than the larger 5 1/4 inch ones. The big boys actually can only hold about 360K, while the normal ones that we are all familiar to can hold 1.44MB, or 1474.56K. I hope that i will be able to find some programs on floppies which i can play games or something eventually... Christmas ;)

Whatever.

See you next week or something.

Das Commodore 64

Well, there's not much to say except that THE COMMODORE 64 HAS LANDED!!!!! OH MY GOD!!!!

I was having lots of fun just messing around with it and making random programs. There was this one that i made earlier today where i had to find the time it took my virtual boat to go from place to place on my marine biology project chart thing.

So to solve this problem, i wrote in this.

10 INPUT "ENTER DISTANCE: ";D

20 A = (D/4)*60

30 PRINT A;"MINUTES"

40 GOTO 10

Now while this may mean nothing to you, it tells the computer to first: ask me for the distance of the leg the boat needs to travel. to then divide that number with the fixed number of knots that my boat was going (4kts) and then multiply that with 60. After that, the next line told the computer to show me the answer on the screen. Next, it told the computer to repeat that whole process.

That was the first real useful thing i got it to do.

thats all folks!

mushroomz?

so all that really was interesting today was that i found some little mushroomz growing above our garage.

Here they are:

I thought they were pretty awesome.

So here comes a story. Are we ready? Then we shall begin.

once there was a little boy. he fell in love with an old computer that he found on ebay. this little boy wished very much to get that computer on ebay. so he bid on it. it did not work :)

but this little boy did not give up so easily. so in his fit of rage at loosing the auction, he clicked his way to the nearest computer of the same type on ebay, and clicked the buy it now!?! button next to it.

the end.

nobody knows what happened to the little boy after that. some say he would fall into poverty from ebaying so much, and he eventually would die a poor old man. others believe that when his parents would find out, that there would be hell to pay for the him.

now, i kinda think that that last one makes more sense.

here is a photo of the little boy:

OMG!!!

OH MY GOD!

i caught myself almost not blogging for almost a week!!!! AAAAAUGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

oh well. here i am again.

so what i have been obsessing over recently:

Getting my mitts on a COMMODORE 64 COMPUTER

possibly the most amazing thing on the planet... for this month at least. just kidding.

so here comes the torrent of whining. are we ready? then lets begin.

1. I F___ING HATE MACS!!!
2. from what i can tell, the reason for auctionsniper not working for two of the auctions that i bid on was that i was using it with our stupid apple MINI.
3. so thanks to this little mess up, i now have no commodore 64.
4. (i think the mini didn't wanna be replaced)
5. ..........well, there really is no number five.

so let me leave you with this.

SOME DAY... i shall present you with a commodore 64 computer and take some beautiful pictures of it, and you shall love it.

guten nacht

oh and by the way, i am now officially Canadian. i'll show you in a picture on my next blog post.

16mm movie camera

well. after school is over, and twilight has laid its blanket across the land, I like to go over to my shelf of wonders and play with some of the things on it.

this being one of them.

this i got just last summer from a friend's father. he collects old things as well. this is a bell and howell 'filmo' 16mm movie camera. if i remember correctly, i saw an ad for it online from 1925. yeah. pretty old. the price on the 1925 poster said they wanted $180 for it. just out of curiosity, i went to an inflation calculator, and in 2008, that would have cost $2193.22.

this camera is fully functional. despite the fact that there is no winding key. i opened the side of the monster up and wound the mainspring inside it. it ran at a constant rate for just about one and a half minutes.

when i say this guy is a monster i mean it. if you are used to holding little video cameras or digital cameras, this guy will come as quite a shock to you. i went to my fathers bathroom scale and it said it came in at only 5.2 lbs. that kinda surprised me, because it feels more like 10 lbs.

the body has some basic controls displayed on it. on the front of the camera on the lens you can see an F~stop adjuster. on the right side near the top there is a film counter. underneath the winding key on the same side there is a beautiful impression of a coat of arms which proudly states 'STANDARD BELL & HOWELL COMPANY CINE~MACHINERY. beautiful. above the coat of arms and kind of on the top, you see a push~button style shutter release, and directly underneath that, as you can see in the picture, is an info plate. and the rest is just some film door keys and the viewfinder on the other side.

underneath the film door, there is a set of sprockets which transport the film from a 100 ft roll onto an empty spool. and again, when i wound it up on the inside, i could see all of the mechanism working when i pressed the shutter. and i tell you, it was one of the most beautiful things i have ever seen.

so at any rate, goodnight everybody. this time change has done weird things with my sleeping habits, i'm tellin' ya now.

taizomaizer punching out.