A brief update

Hello again, dear readers!

Thank you for bearing with me these past few days (most of you in the US were probably celebrating and enjoying the holiday weekend anyway - I know I was!)

I'm actually at work now, and I gotta say, not typing on a computer since Thursday, it's a nice change of pace from typing on my phone! I'm thankful I can still access my email, Facebook, Twitter, etc from my phone, but there's just something about typing on an actual computer with a screen that's bigger than a few inches - after awhile, it starts to give me a headache!

Don't worry though - I may not be commenting much on here or on your blogs lately, but I have my Blogaway app for posting and checking up on my blogs, and I have my Greed2 RSS/Google Reader app so I'm still following all my blogs that I regularly read =)

If you're bored, feel free to read through some of my past posts, via the keywords in the left column, or you can check out my movie review blog Movie Bits (which I'm hoping to update a bit since I have some time at work today) or my newer baby blog.

Also, feel free to follow me on Twitter, as I can easily update that on my phone and respond to my readers/Blogland Friends.

Hopefully, it won't be too much longer til our computer is fixed! 

In case you missed the drama (feel free to read my last few posts), I accidentally put our Windows Vista PC in hibernate mode instead of sleep mode or shutting it off (which we've had problems with in the past - what's the point of that button if all it does is break your computer?!). When hubby came home, he couldn't get it to wake up or turn back on. We tried a bunch of stuff, Googling solutions on our phones, I even called Gateway for help but that was a bust... a co-worker of his at the cell phone store knows computers though and was able to test the power supply by swapping ours with his and sure enough, his worked just fine in ours, while ours wouldn't work in his either. He said he gave one to a guy awhile back but doesn't think he did anything with it, so he's trying to see if he can get that one back from him, so we're waiting on that. Otherwise it might take a little longer as we may need to order one. (And no, our computer doesn't look like the one in the photo! lol...)

Ironically, the day this happened, hubby gave me the go ahead to reactivate my WoW account! Good thing I was asleep when he sent me that text, otherwise we'd paying for playing time that wasn't getting used! I wouldn't mind getting an email soon though saying that I have a Cataclysm Beta invite waiting for me though...

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So how was everyone's 4th of July? 

Mine wasn't too bad - hubby got off work at like 3 because really, who's out shopping for cell phones on the 4th of July? He said they had a whole 3 people walk in since they opened at 10am and it was all "my phone won't work" people. He called to check up on the store at like 5pm and they said they sent everyone home at 4 because it was so slow. I mean really - in our town, most people are cooking out by 5pm, the city parade downtown is at 7pm and the fireworks start at 930 - them being open their normal hours (til 7pm) was a little ridiculous!

We went over to my aunt's for a cookout, since my mom was by herself (dad's gone on business and my sis is on a church missions trip to inner city Chicago) and hung out with them, my uncle and my cousin. My uncle had like 2 whole grosses of bottle rockets and a bunch of sparklers - my 11 year old cousin had fun with the sparklers while hubby had a little too much fun shooting off ALL the bottle rockets. At one point I had to go inside and watch through the door as the sound and smell and smoke was making my head hurt - my mom said hubby looked like a little kid in a candy store though, he was getting super into shooting them off! It was cute!

We hung out there for a little bit before we took my mom and cousin downtown with us to watch the fireworks. I got my cardio exercise in for the day, as we had to park quite a bit away from the river and walk. We found a nice spot on one of the main bridges and you could see all the higher up fireworks, but not the lower ones (I think the only way you could see those is if you the paid the $6/person to watch from the main park downtown, as it's directly across from where they're set off from). We took a few pictures for my dad too, as the area he's at is too poor for fireworks and he didn't feel like driving 40 miles for them.

I also learned, that (according to the local news) apparently my city now has the largest fireworks display in the state of Illinois - I'm only really surprised that we beat out Chicago, as I've seen a few other city's fireworks over the years and none of them can compare to 20-30 minute show set to music that we put on!

20 days til our first ultrasound! I'm sooooo excited!

My first computer and the good ol' Prodigy days

I remember when we got our first computer in the late 80s - it was an IBM PS/1 that ran via DOS (see the image).

To create banners and greeting cards and the like, it came with a program called "Print Shop" and used very basic graphics - nothing like the Adobe products I use today!

It also came with MS Works, which is still similar to the current MS Works, as you could make basic word documents as well as spreadsheets and other similar typing documents. I remember in 4th grade, in '94, I would type up an entire newspaper for my class at school (with stories written by my friends) in the document program and print it off on our continuous feed paper-using printer.

This machine also took floppy disks and we had quite a few! There was the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade game (which I couldn't past the Venice crypts level), Classic Concentration and of course Wheel of Fortune. There was also a game with a little man that you had to navigate through a maze-like room on the screen, but not get attacked by certain objects like passing boulders or snakes or guards (I can't remember the name of this game, but I LOVED it, as it included strategy puzzle-like thinking and timing).

And also included on this wonderful old school computer was the online pioneer, Prodigy (or Prodigy Classic, as it's referred to nowadays).
 

Prodigy was a whole new experience and my first ever with the World Wide Web.

Originally, I remember it had various subject pages where you could read stories and play games - I spent time playing around on the Baby Sitters Club and Sesame Street pages. There was also the classic (and probably the most popular and remembered game on Prodigy) Mad Maze. Screen by screen, choosing to go left, right, forward or backward, you navigated your way through various mazes to progress in the storyline (you were like a knight traveling around the kingdom and fighting off monsters). At the end of each maze there was often a quest or monster to defeat and whether or not you moved forward was determined by what decision you made (there were often like 5 different options that lead to various outcomes), if you made the wrong decisions too many times in a row you'd eventually die and return to the last maze you saved at. I eventually got to the monster near the end of the game that I honestly couldn't figure out how to beat, as it seemed every option I tried was wrong.

You can actually still play Mad Maze via an Internet Explorer emulator here, however make sure your pop-blocker is turned off, otherwise the game won't work.

By the mid-90s Prodigy had progressed a little bit, keeping up with rival AOL, and implemented an e-mail function and a variety of message boards (or bulletin boards - BBs - as they were called).

I was active on a few of these BBs - first the X-Files one, as at the time (5th grade) I was pretty much obsessed with the X-Files. I remember reading various fanfics that people would post, and I think I even wrote a few. I remember some of us Roleplayed, creating characters and then building a story off each other's posts - someone would make a post to start the story, then someone else would submit their portion, etc. I remember my character was JJ Walker - Scully's niece who was partnered with the very HOT Alex Krycek, who was also JJ's boyfriend. Being that Krycek was a renegade, my character was his mole inside the FBI, working with both Mulder and Scully on the X-Files, however, since she was related to Scully, she and Krycek often had immunity, despite Mulder's hatred for Krycek, Scully wouldn't let him go after them once JJ's cover was blown and she became full renegade.

Yeah, I had quite the imagination for being in 5th/6th grade.

The summer between 8th and 9th grade I became very active on one of the Music BB's and clicked with a group of people on there (some names that come to mind were Jammer, Hydra, Erin, and Christien who was a chick). Yeah okay, so we kinda picked on people who were waaaay too into whatever MTV played back then (thing Spice Girls, Britney, Christina, Nsync, etc) and there was always some drama. Don't ask - I don't know what I was thinking, as most of these people weren't exactly the nicest and royally freaked my mom out when they somehow got our phone number and party-called the house one night, after I had told them I didn't want in on their little party chat (they got the number by looking up the A-name on our accounts, as Prodigy assigned a letter for each member on the account - mine was the C-name - and putting dad's last name into the online directory).

That summer Prodigy also finally implemented the one thing AOL had on them - Instant Messaging. While AOL's was a bit better in the sense that you could lock in a screenname and create a buddylist, Prodigy's worked (despite the fact someone could easily take your regular screenname - mine was Peaches0182 by the way!). I remembering making full use of this function, chatting with online boyfriend.

By the time 1999 came around, Prodigy had launched Prodigy Internet, which allowed for use of viewing full webpages. Remember the days of Geocities and Expages where anyone could make a free page for themselves? I did - online boyfriend had a Geocities page with a friend of his (The Beefy Kingdom - again, don't ask! lol..), and I had an Expage (Land of the Peach!) which hubby figured out my password to and would constantly "hack" into it and delete everything I had on it (this little "war" of ours lasted a good week or so). I used to get so mad at him over it, lol...

Looking back, while it was still a distraction, it wasn't nearly to the degree that it is today!

Haven't computers and the internet come a long way from those days???

FinallyFast.com

This commercial plays on tv all the time and is a service that is supposed to make your computer run faster.

Whether or not it's a scam, who knows... but what I want to know is...

If it says it's strictly for MS Windows and PC, then why in the commercial are 2 out of the 3 computers shown clearly macs??? One's a white iBook, another is an iMac - the black computer is the only one that's actually a PC!

This completely baffles me - if you're making a commercial for Windows/PC clean up software you would think the computers used in your commercial would be a PC!