Black Friday Benefit

After the delicious irony of Black Friday, it is only fair that there out to be some great benefit. In this case there are two significant benefits worth mentioning. The first is that Tandy loves her new camera. For the most part she stopped taking photos when her old film camera broke and I bought a digital (Canon A75) for myself. Now that she owns her own digital camera she is snapping away like a madwoman. Hopefully I can coax her onto Flickr that we might all enjoy superior skills, at least superior to my skills. It will also be nice to return to the photographic record of the family. Since I have been taking the pictures I have been in few of them.

The other "benefit" has been sorting through a lifetime of digital data. I have kept stacks of floppies and Zip disks and CD-Rs with the assorted records of my digital life. Now armed with a 40GB pocket drive I can easily store all my music, photos sources and documents in one place. In the process I have found records of heartbreaking online conversions, my horrific attempts at fiction from high school and even my very first extra-curricular computer program.

The latter is a terribly embarrassing piece of work which ought to have kept me far from both the craft and science of software development. Unfortunately, it did not such thing other than imprint a subtle paranoia about security and an abiding interest in computer mediated communication, which was then called a "BBS." The only inspired bit in there was that I was apparently sufficiently aware of two key points: the need for a control-break handler and the benefit of peer review. The two most keenly embarrassing elements are the nick names my friend and I gave each other in comments and the use of social security numbers as an identifier. Fortunately, I was not aware of my number back then, so it must have been a concept. The program was called Cerberus, the three-headed dog which guards the Greek underworld, and I actually uploaded it as "cerebrus_pascal.txt". What can I say, the computer programming class I took at Warwick High School encouraged us to explore our own interests if we could finish the in-class material.