Power Friday
It's the inaugural #PowerFriday theme curated by +Natosha Davis and I didn't really have a chance to take anything for it specifically today but decided it wouldn't hurt to dive back through the archives and find something that counted just so I could take part. This was shot in the car park of a nearby DIY store just after sunset back in October. Google+: View post on...
My Computers
For no other reason than spotting that it was the 31st anniversary of the launch of the ZX81 recently I decided to take a trip down memory lane at the computers I’ve owned, loved, and not-quite-loved and how I became the rich, world-famous web developer still waiting to become famous or earn any riches that I am today. Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K Oh, how I loved this small, warm computer with its rubber keyboard! This computer taught me to program and, since I’m a web developer these days, that means I owe it and Sir Clive Sinclair a great deal of thanks. But not money because, if you’ll remember, I don’t have any. In fact, since I knew I was getting this computer months in advance I started teaching myself how to program before I even had it, writing lines of pseudo-code guessed from program listings in magazines down in little orange notebooks, waiting for the day to arrive when I could finally realise I was way off thinking that’s how software worked. It had some issues, of course, but only if you compared it to the big rival of the times: the Commodore 64. But why would you? Sure, the Speccy’s sound wasn’t that great (single channel, BEEP heaven!) and the 8×8 sprites were limited to a single background and foreground colour which often meant blocks of colours changing as characters in games passed in front of the scenery, but even still, it was a wonderful machine. I wrote a text adventure game engine in my teens on this thing, capable of parsing input into verbs and nouns and working out valid or invalid responses; just thinking about it makes me want to do the same thing now! Note to self: do that. And speaking of games… this here is nostalgia overload, my friends: I moved from the BASIC I’d already learnt to Z80 assembly language coding, directly PEEKing and POKEing parts of the memory to do things you couldn’t otherwise do in an effort to reproduce some of the things I enjoyed playing so much but, eventually, something interesting popped up on the market and I was able to persuade my parents that it would make a lovely birthday present and Christmas present rolled into one. Amstrad CPC 6128 Gone (well, not really, but almost) were the tape cassettes of the Spectrum era as the Amstrad came complete with a built-in floppy disk drive. And not just any floppy disk drive! A three-inch floppy disk drive! None of your three-point-five inch or five-and-a-quarter inch nonsense for Amstrad users! I almost loved this computer with its Locomotive BASIC...
Old Man And Bike
I've decided to call this photo "Old Man And Bike" on account of it featuring an old man and a bike. If you look towards the centre of the picture you might see the old man and the bike to which I'm referring. It had rained all morning, hence the dark, light-reflecting flagstones of the precinct. It was also cold and parts of the precinct were cordoned off while policemen and glaziers were overseeing the boarding up of windows of two of the jewellers that had had their glass fronts smashed in overnight so there wasn't a great deal to see today; apparently, the robbery culprits were apprehended, or so I understand. Google+: View post on...
M Window
One third of the windows above the HMV store in East Street, Chichester. I bet you can't guess what is in the other two windows! No, don't even bother guessing! You won't be able to guess! For #WindowWednesday curated by +Jules Hunter, +Simon Kitcher, and +Jason Kowing. Google+: View post on...
Mr Porridge Head
The last shot I took today was one I spotted out of the corner of my eye as I walked past a café on the way back to the office; it took my mind a couple of seconds to realise the potential of the sign for fresh porridge and I had to backtrack along the road to get the positioning just right for this. Google+: View post on...
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Dance Music Triple Nov 19, 2016 -
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