5 August, 2004

Painful Work Patterns

This is actually getting quite painful. I’ve now been at work for 13 hours straight, and for a total of 40 hours so far this week. Still; next week should be marginally better.

The knackeredness I can deal with. What’s nasty is that I’m not seeing as much of Claire as I’d like.

I’m Surrounded By Idiots

Conversation with a co-worker, who shall remain nameless:

Her: Is anybody any good at Fireworks?
Me: Yeh; you just light the blue touchpaper and run. But seriously, you ought’a be using Corel Photo-Paint.

(I wander over to her desk, and see that she’s working with a bitmapped image of our logo – she’s trying to remove some of the text from it… using the text tool… the text is jaggedy and quite obviously bitmapped)

Her: Why can’t I select this text?
Me: Umm… because it’s not text; it’s an image. The same reason that if I scanned in some of my handwriting and gave you that as a file, you couldn’t select it.
Her: But it is text: look…

(at this point, I collapse into a blubbering heap on the floor… this person has several years of an internet computer science degree tucked under her belt, but can’t understand the difference between vector-based and bitmap graphics [pretty fundamental year one web design stuff])

Computer Hardware For Sale: Bargain Prices

Overclockers Australia is running an article, collecting together advertisements for computer hardware and software over the last quarter of a century. I’ve pulled out a few of my favourites:

1989 Tandy 500 MC Professional – only $8499; VGA graphics, 386/20MHz, 2MB RAM – this computer’s a real beast: and what a bargain!
Late-80’s Portable Computer – just $2295; 8" (monochrome) screen, CP/M (w/ WORDSTAR, MAILMERGE, and SUPERCALC). Has 64K of RAM and not one but two floppy disk drives (double-density)!
Looking to increase your hard storage space (this means you, Paul)? There’s a 10-MB Hard Disk (sold in 1981) for the sweet price of $3398! Yes, that’s 10 megabytes, not gigabytes. About the same size as a modern desktop computer CD-ROM drive, and with a slower seek time.
TRS-80 Model 16 (wonderful piece of hardware) for just $8499: 128K of RAM, dual-processors (one MC68000, one Z-80), multi-processing, page-capable memory model, optional 8MB HDD, two serial and one parallel port, and an 80×24 character 30.5cm green screen. Add a second floppy drive for just $500 more!

Those offers sound fresh! I think I’ll see if I can get a trade in against Duality…