arin's attic | tagged as: photos

Tagged as: photos

~looks like we made it~

my power went out friday night about 2am, as ike blew through the area. sleep was completely out, so i spent the rest of the night watching the tree outside being blown back and forth and listening to things thud against the house scary enough on it’s own, but when the sky is flashing green... ~really~ scary. just when you’d think, “ok, this must be as bad as it’s going to get”, the winds would pick up. the eye never actually passed over my area, so we had no break from the storm. just a constant onslaught.

that’s the shnazzy area a mile or so to the north of me you’ve heard of the “wrong side of the tracks”, i’m the “wrong side of the bayou”

around 8am, the storm was lessening. checked the bayou, it was up over it’s banks and the street was flooded, but no water in our complex. we had fences down, a couple of carports damaged, broken window, gutters blown down, tree limbs and leaves ~everywhere~, a few shingles on the ground, and stucco siding ripped off one buiding, but otherwise, our condos seem to have weathered the storm just fine.

when i remembered to take my camera with me, this was the bayou:

Blogged, Texas, Politics, Comments (3)
Tagged as: texas,photos,videos,hurricanes September 14, 2008 @ 10:53 am

finally, camera works.

back when i was having foundation repair being done in the house, i went to take a pic of the work and after one picture, the camera went dead. so i recharged the batteries, took one picture, the camera went dead. etc etc etc :| i finally bought a new battery charger and the camera works again!! :D i was able to grab the couple of pictures i did manage to take of the ~~damage~~ done to my floors, even if they did come out incredibly poor. there were about 9 other holes inside the house which i didn’t get to photograph and the picture looking down into one of the holes didn’t come out ~at all~.

Blogged, Personal, Comments (2)
Tagged as: photos,me,home August 14, 2008 @ 12:59 pm

in this world by wendell berry

The hill pasture, an open place among the trees,
tilts into the valley. The clovers and tall grasses
are in bloom. Along the foot of the hill
dark floodwater moves down the river.
The sun sets. Ahead of nightfall the birds sing.
I have climbed up to water the horses
and now sit and rest, high on the hillside,
letting the day gather and pass. Below me
cattle graze out across the wide fields of the bottomlands,
slow and preoccupied as stars. In this world
men are making plans, wearing themselves out,
spending their lives, in order to kill each other.

Blogged, Just for Fun, Writing,
Tagged as: photos,poetry July 14, 2008 @ 01:28 am

aww, arin’s first computer

... is an internet computer museum relic ;o

The Victor 9000 / Sirius S1 was conceived by Chuck Peddle who also designed the first Commodore PETs. This machine was quite innovative and superior in many points to the original IBM PC. It met a certain success in Europe as the IBM PC was not yet available there, whereas the Sirius S1 (european name of the Victor 9000) was. ACT sold a lot of these systems in UK, and their first “homemade” computer, the Apricot PC, borrowed a lot to the Sirius S1.

The mechanical keyboard is very complete and has its own 8035 cpu. The 12’’ monochrome monitor is equiped with an anti-relflection filter and can be adjusted horizontaly and verticaly. Contrast and luminosity are controlled directly from the keyboard. The computer can display text ranging from 80 x 25 to 132 x 50. But the best feature is the high resolution reaching 800 x 400 pixels!

The Victor 9000 is equiped with a Codec which can sample and replay sounds in telephone quality. There are two V24 / RS232 ports and one parallel connector which can also be used as an IEEE-488 interface (to connect measurement instruments for example). There is also an optional light-pen, which is in fact a touch pen using resistive mesh on the CRT.

The two 5.25” disk-drives are single-sided and offer 600 kb each. But double-sided models were available as an option and offered 1.2 Mb each.
The Victor 9000 was perhaps best known for how it was able to achieve such high density on it’s floppy disks. It used variable speed disk drives; there were 9 different speeds used. As the drive head moved outward the speed would increase. It was really neat to hear the speed change as the drive head moved.

The Victor 9000 could run with MS-DOS or CP/M 86. Many languages were available: Basic 86, C-Basic, Cobol, CIS-Cobol, Pascal, Fortran, PL1, PLM, etc.; as well as some software: Wordstar, Spellstar, Mailmerge, Multiplan, etc.

Blogged, WTF,
Tagged as: computers,internet,photos,me,wtf March 02, 2008 @ 06:06 am