I've been cutting my own hair for the last 14 years for this exact same reason. I still have the same pair of clippers too so I must have hundreds by now
Tried that but I forget the planner exists and inevitably lose it so I stick to cloud-based apps now. ToDoist is my go to for personal checklists and planning now
Yeah i'm the world's worst listener and I absolutely hate it so I'm always trying to find ways to fix it. I can watch entire season runs without knowing what happened. I've been known to go to the cinema and leave without having paid attention to a single thing. I've listened to literally hundreds of podcasts but don't bother any more because there's just no point. Five minutes at best and my mind goes elsewhere.
Ironically if there's something else I'm trying to focus on and there is a TV or something happening in my peripheral I often can't tune it out.. lol
OK I'm sold - I hear a lot of good things about OneNote but I struggled to understand the appeal on first glance. If it is good enough that you can find notes that far back then that could work well for me.
Btw Planner is great if you haven't used it. It's designed as a collaborative tool but I use it mostly as a way of keeping track of where I am with various tasks. I put it in my startup folder so it comes up as soon as I log on. I'll make checklists and basically talk to myself via card comments. Comments are timestamped and are forwarded to outlook so it's a better way of logging things than my usual method of digging through old Outlook messages. It has a couple of shortfalls but its really keeping me sane at the moment
Techniques and Strategies For Maintaining Focus
I take notes and write up mini reviews on my laptop when I watch shows as its the only way I can follow what's happening. Even with no distractions I tend to drift off into my thoughts.
Once or a twice a year at work I'll go through the cycle of creating a new planning system, doing really well with it before it ultimately fails. It's better than nothing though. I'm using Microsoft Planner a lot now.
I have a Galaxy Watch which I use to help with my morning routine. It syncs with google calendar and I schedule in everything I need to do in minute detail (wake up, get up, make breakfast, eat breakfast etc....) it kinda works but not so much just recently. Again better than nothing.
How about you?
I went back to Windows a few years ago because I needed audio production software but would go back to vanilla Debian in a heartbeat if I needed a PC for anything else.
I switched to I3WM later on with my Debian PC and that was godlike too
I actually love vi to this day. As long as you understand the basic concepts (how to navigate, append/insert, switch between modes, save and exit) it's great. I'm a touch-typer so I could whiz around vi like nobody's business.
HATED Emacs though
I managed to beat the cast of Friends a couple times but the Steve Ballmer boss level fucked me up every time
I had similar problems with BASIC type-ins and would not eat, drink or sleep until I had figured out the problem. Trying to do the same with assembly would have killed me
All unlabelled, with a bunch of corrupted ones but you never threw them out just in case it was a one off and you really needed that extra megabyte? Or was that just me?
Another thing - my windows 95 era PC was packed to the gills with bad desktop themes. Usually South Park related with annoying soundclips that played whenever you did something. Obnoxious mouse cursors and wallpapers that hurt the eyes.
I was upset when everything moved to ATX and computers powered off by themselves because I didn't get to see the modded 'It Is Now Safe To Turn Off Your Computer' screens that came with the themes
I didn't even realise Mortal Kombat was available on those 2 platforms! My friend's dad sold me 2 A500s, an A500+ and a crate of cracked floppies for £20 back in the early 2000s when they were out of favour. I hunted down a null-modem cable so I could copy ADFs over from the PC,. Played a lot of Premier Manager on those, and reading old disk magazines. But mostly my memories are of guru meditation errors, cleaning the dust from the mouseball and contending with dodgy floppy disks / drives.
I remember installing either Red Hat or Mandriva linux years ago and being in absolute disbelief that it was free. I went straight back to Windows when I realised i couldn't play my games anymore and it crashed all the time but it was still phenomenal.
I never had a voodoo and my old AMD CPU + ATI card could never manage to run glide wrappers properly I don't think. Super jealous of voodoo owners. I remember drooling over the old magazine ads they used to publish
I had an obsession with the LucasArts adventures. I hunted down copies of just about all of them when I was younger. Monkey Island being my all time favourite. Was nice that they didn't kill you off at every opportunity like the Sierra games did.
Shareware games were crazy. I had a CD compilation of called '250 bat and ball games' with clone after clone of breakout/arkanoid and nothing else. What a time to be alive
The most fun you could possibly have short of watching paint dry!
I remember we had a copy of the game Trolls, but didn't know the password to run it. Never deterred me from spending hours typing random words in trying to guess it.
We had Lemmings and Prince of Persia too actually. I sank a ton of time into those
To be fair I would expect someone with a user name such as your to have played your fair share of them. I would usually get frustrated when my graph paper maps stopped making sense.. Likely a 'me' problem I think
Didn't have Repton but had something similar on an old PS1 Net Yarose compilation (demo 42 from the UK Playstation magazine). Game was called Rocks and Gems. Good times!
I don't know if it's just me but did anyone ever actually complete those games? I might have just about finished Zork one time years later but for all the games I started that was about it. Good times though. Scott Adams will always be a hero of mine
What are your defining memories of computing in the old days?
I remember my dad bringing home a BBC Micro when we were kids. I knew just enough to get Chuckie Egg running.
Later we had a PC running Windows 3.1. I was an expert in crashing the plane on F-19 Stealth Fighter. One day I deleted the OS and that was the end of that computer..
Some years later we got an old Elonex PC that dad's work were getting rid of. It was just good enough to run Windows 95. We had dial-up internet from Freeserve for a time - we would have I think 2 hours in the evening to use it.
I remember
- Trying and failing to download shitty quality videos from wwf.com (I was a huge Attitude-era Wrestling mark...)
- Playing questionable games on Newgrounds
- Trawling Yahoo directories and webrings for random weird stuff
- Trying to download a low-bitrate rip of the Macarena from Kazaa and giving up when it estimated 2 days DL time.
- Terrible browser-war era websites. Broken Javascript/HTML. BLINKING TEXT. Incompatible flash videos.
I broke our family computers so often that I knew the Windows licence key without having to look. I learned how to fix the computer out of sheer terror for what my dad might do if he came home from work to find the PC broken again.
After we got rid of the dialup I would go the library pretty much every day. I had literally boxes of floppy disks that I would stuff into my pockets so that I could download stuff to take home. Mostly old emulators, ROMs and text adventures from ifarchive.
Crazy to think the lengths I would happily go to for things we take for granted now.
80s TV Rewatch
I've been watching 80s TV in realtime for the last 7 years on a 35-year delay. Started in 1982, it's 1988 now. Here are my thoughts. Wall of text incoming...
Comedy From the earlier half of the decade Newhart and Cheers are the absolute cream of the crop and nothing even comes close at the time. Most people probably think of Larry, Daryl and Daryl when they think of Newhart but Peter Scolari and Julia Duffy are the stars in my opinion (along with Bob Newhart obviously, and Tom Poston as George Utley is a treasure). They steal the show every time they show up. Shoutout to Jim and Chester too. The earlier seasons aren't as great but they are still watchable. I look forward to Newhart more than any other show.
There is nothing I could say about Cheers that hasn't already been said. It's an all-time great sitcom. For me it's the link between the greatest 70s sitcoms (Mary Tyler Moore Show, and Bob Newhart Show) and Seinfeld. Contender and probably winner for the best ensemble comedy cast ever.
Golden Girls is brilliant but not my absolute favourite. I think people place it on a higher level than it really deserves, but it is way above average.
Night Court is OK mostly because the cast are so great. But the material is not the best and I don't think it aged well.
The Wonder Years is brilliant so far (just watched first season). Feels like a 90s show.
Silver Spoons and Diff'rent Strokes were fun in the earlier seasons but took a serious nosedive when the kids got older. Gimme a Break managed to ride out a VERY questionable format thanks to Nell Carter's talents, but totally lost its way when the Chief died. That guy from Weekend At Bernies doing pratfalls every scene he's in is a notable low point.
Family Ties manages to raise a laugh most of the time despite a few dips in quality. I don't think it suffered like the others did in later series. Justine Bateman and Michael J Fox mostly carry the show though.
Married With Children is as funny as it ever was. I love it. It's dumb fun done right.
ALF is derided these days but whoever was writing those wisecracks had some real talent. It's a fun watch.
It's Garry Shandling's Show is cool. Probably one of the most influential comedies of the 80s in how it played with conventions and broke the fourth wall. Seeing Gilda Radner in her final appearance is bittersweet, but hilarious.
Full House and Growing Pains are full-bore 80s corniness. But they are enjoyable enough so far. A LOT of hugging and learning in these.
Pee-Wee's Playhouse is insane. Best enjoyed in small doses.
I won't mention Cosby apart from that I watched it and he deserves to rot in hell. I feel bad for the supporting cast.
Drama 80s TV drama pretty much sucked. There is nothing I would really go back to apart from maybe Wiseguy. Knightrider was a fun concept but got stale quick. Same with Airwolf. Top-notch theme tunes though.
I couldn't get past 3 episodes of thirtysomething. Dull.
Moonlighting was actually pretty great and it's no surprise that Bruce Willis became such a big star. He is in his element here.
Apart from that St Elsewhere and Hill Street Blues are probably about as good as it gets for the early 80s and even then they can be hard work. Most the rest is filled up with bad cop / detective shows. Hard to watch nowadays. I really wanted to enjoy Miami Vice but I couldn't get into it. Maybe I'll give it a second chance one day. Beauty and the Beast is kind of decent but super cheesy.
The Fall Guy is a ridiculous show. Nice to see a cameo from Andre the Giant in there.
I almost want to put TJ Hooker in the comedy and/or fantasy categories for its pure stupidity. Was anybody really buying Shatner as a tough cop? If you want something to laugh at just watch the opening credits. Turn it off after though - it stinks.
Horror/Sci-Fi/Fantasy. The 80s weren't great for genre TV. There was a weird anthology show boom in the mid 80s I think due to the Twilight Zone Movie coming out. Shows like Tales From The Darkside, Amazing Stories, New Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents were decent but I prefer episodic content and I lost interest as time went on. Production quality was good on these shows, for the time. Particularly Amazing Stories. Jim Henson's Storyteller series is my favourite out of these. Friday the 13th series is probably the worst.
Upcoming shows 1988 suffered from a writers strike and seems a little light on new shows that look to be worth watching. I am looking forward to Roseanne, Murphy Brown and Mystery Science Theater 3000 but that's about it.
1989 doesn't seem to be up to much either but at least there's Seinfeld and Simpsons debuting. Family Matters will be on my watchlist too but I couldn't mention it in the same sentence as the other 2.
What do you guys think? Did I miss anything?
I can't get over how great of a sitcom Buffalo Bill was
For a comedy that came out in 1983 the show is incredibly ahead of its time. Even compared to Cheers and Newhart (not to knock those shows) it feels fresh and unique
Dabney Coleman is great in the title role and plays the part of a unrepentant narcissist brilliantly. The supporting cast is littered with great comedy actors (Charles Robinson. John Fiedler, Max Wright, Geena Davis) too.
Brandon Tartikoff mentioned in his memoir that it cancelling it so early in its run was his biggest regret, and I have to agree it deserved way better.
Any other fans of the show around here? There are some full episodes on Youtube btw