Home improvement

Apparently home improvement doesn't work like they show in those reality TV shows. I am at my brother's place and thought that while I am there we could improve the place since he recently bought a house and it needs some upgrading. My plan was, we take the dining room and paint it and change the old carpet. So far so good.
There were some tapes covering up cracks and I decided that they should be done away with for a proper job. When we started removing the tapes, parts of wallpaper came off, so I thought we might as well do away with the wallpaper. Then, at some points, removing both caused the plaster to fall off. So we decided to take off the plaster where it was really damaged and put up drywall there.
The scope of the project was rapidly expanding. While removing stuff in the room we also noticed a piece of the carpet soaked and stained with cat pee that was covered with a mat.

Then I noticed that some of the ceiling tiles showed water damage and they were ugly anyway so why not see what's behind them.
We found some plastic covering the whole ceiling. Cutting through it, it looked like there was significant water damage at some point which was covered up by a false ceiling. We decided we could do away with the false ceiling and put up drywall (or plywood) and make it a better looking ceiling. I did not foresee how much our job would increase with that.

For some reason, there were insulating foam in the middle of the ceiling. Now all the plastic's gone and the wooden slats in one direction from the false ceiling are gone. Removing the rest of the wood doesn't look like its going to be easy. What I thought would be a 12 hr project seems to have turned into a 2 week or so project.

My first computer

A post on IIDB triggered a flood of memories about my first programming experiences. My first computer was a Casio PB-80 as shown below.


My father gave it to me when I was in the 4^th grade. This places this around 1986 or so. Apparently this was a rather limited release computer. It boasted 512 bytes of RAM (0.5 KB, 0.0005 MB) and a rather limited BASIC programming language. Despite the limitations I managed to get it to do an impressive range of things some of which were thought impossible by my dad. Kids in my school got officially introduced to computers in the 5th grade so this one-year headstart gave me massive number of nerdpoints and most of them bowed to my superior knowledge of all things computer related.

Among the things I managed to get it to do that it was never meant to were things like "animations" by rapidly placing different characters at the same spot to produce weird shapes. I used them for making action games figures though you needed a little imagination to play the game. I think me and my bro were the only ones to really get into it. The programming skills did come in handy on bigger machines though some habits I picked up were hard to lose like using only single character variables to save space and reusing variables as it allowed for only 26 variables.

We only got 2 hrs a week of actual "real computer" time in the school which had to be shared among so 6 or so kids so to maximize the use of that time I made shorter programs which I tested out on this beast. Eventually, in the next 3-4 years, the membrane keyboard started giving out. The shift key was the first to go. I tried to repair it with a separator piece of tape and some copper but it made things worse as often as it made them work. I never threw it away and I wonder if it is still at my home in my junk somewhere. I cried the day when I realized the shift key was definitely dead.

Scab picking gone bad

Scab picking gone bad, originally uploaded by RadsWiki.

Just when you think you've seen everything possible. This patient picked at forehead scab for a full year until she finally made it through her skull.