This News.com.com story takes some famous names in the IT biz and asks them each what their first computer was. Then the story invites readers to share their own “first computer” info.

But… you have to subscribe to their website to do so. Wow, no, thanks, I’ll just… hey! I have my own site!

Anyway. I must have been about twelve years old, as I’m pretty sure this was during the later stretch of Mom’s marriage to Mike Schomler, and we were living in the (rather nice) double-wide on the hillside above the Westerdahl property. (My stepdad worked for them at the time. I’ll have to tell some more stories about those years, later, won’t I?) I don’t remember how I came into possession of such a thing, but my first computer was a quirky self-contained lump of metal and plastic dubbed the Commodore PET 2001. It sported a built-in (cassette) tape drive and a quaint chiclet-style keyboard. Yes, it was many years later that I learned to touch-type, as it’s nigh-impossible to do so on a purely rectangular layout. Almost all of the actual programming (from scratch) that I’ve ever done in my life was on that machine, though. Hell, I even still have some of the tapes… though I’m pretty sure they’re degraded beyond all use, now, if not entirely copied over with music I recorded from the radio. (My other favorite toy during those years was my portable cassette/radio deck, after all.)

While I made use of a variety of other machines (those of friends and classrooms) in the years since I gave up on the PET, it wasn’t until the mid-’90s that I owned a computer of my own again. Ah, back when a 486 was a wonder to behold…

Among the things the kids and I got up to over the course of last weekend while I was staying at their place was a fun-filled game of Carcassonne. Now, this is one of those games where there are two stages of scoring. Someone who’s far and away in the lead during the main part of the game can get screwed when it comes time to add up partials, farms and trade goods. Case in point:

Alex was blue, Erica was red and I was yellow. He had the trade goods advantage (yes, those are his barrels and textiles at the bottom of the picture) but only one little chunk of farmland. Erica had equal share of The Unfinishable City with me, but I managed to connect both of my farmers, thus cutting her out of that scoring opportunity entirely. (Alex helped, mind you. He didn’t realize until later what a bad idea that was. Heh.)The Unfinishable City? Oh yes, indeed. Let me show you:

This is what happens when the time-honored tradition we call “horning in” is taken to its (il)logical extreme. I started a city, then put my builder on it. Erica positioned herself to horn in on it, and added her builder. Once she succeeded at that, I horned in again to take control of the city, which was followed by her doing the same yet again. She actually tried to get a third meeple into the fray, but it sat on what became the two-point micro-city, because of the straight-through city piece (with the shield) I played above it.Eventually the whole thing became a place to sink city pieces that couldn’t really go anywhere else usefully. By the time the place looked like what you see here, we had only about sixteen tiles left in the bag. No, that thing wasn’t going to be finished, even had I wanted it to be finished.

Ah, I love Carcassonne…

Back in the distant reaches of time, namely 1992, my distant but still good friend Steve McMullen and I cooked up a scheme. The opportunity to see our all-time favorite band, not just once but twice in the same week, simply could not be passed up. This is back in the days when you could get free tickets to really big concerts just by working at a radio station, and so I procured tickets to the Tacoma Dome show while Steve bought tickets to the Dodger Stadium concert. We both managed to get floor seats, good ones even.

Here’s the catch: the concerts were three days and most of the west coast of the USA apart, and I didn’t drive. (I still don’t, mind you.)

Steve, bless his diehard-fanboy soul, drove up from L.A. to Portland to retrieve me. Wendi and I were living with her folks at the time in that big crowded house on Ivon Street. Steve also arranged crash space with his folks in Seattle so we could catch at least a bit of shuteye before the big drive south.

The Genesis show in Tacoma counts as the first time I’d ever seen my favorite band live on stage, and it was an exceptional show. I especially loved the old medley, as well as some of the longer pieces and the inevitable drum duet.

That night we slept, and early the next morning we started southward. Steve drove almost straight through. We didn’t have the time to actually stop anywhere for the night. Sure, we were fueled by enthusiasm and the energy of the previous night’s show, but that can only carry you so far. I remember a dreary, dry, flat stretch of I-5 in California during which we had no choice but to pull over for a couple of hours and catch some brief shuteye at a rest stop. As it is, we still made it to his place just in time to get a solid night’s (and most of the following day’s) sleep.

My one and only visit to Dodger Stadium involved nothing to do with baseball. This time Steve and I knew (more or less) what to expect, so in some ways we could relax and look beyond the most obvious parts of the live performance and really get a feel for everything that was put into it. The set list was a bit different, but the showmanship still impressed the hell out of us. Mind you, Phil still goofed up the lines to a particular song the same way in both cities, but that was made up for by the amusing change to the lyrics of “I Can’t Dance” for the live performance. All in all, it was another outstanding show.

I crashed on Steve’s living room floor once again, then took the Greyhound home. That was, sad to say, the last time I saw my old friend, though we were in touch for a few months longer. I do wonder what he’s up to nowadays… and what he thinks of the last Genesis album, for that matter. Heh.

Here’s a story I like to tell, and I just realized that it’s precisely the sort of slice-of-life material that you crazy “blog readers” eat up with a spork. So here goes…

I work in radio. Not on the air, though, just as the “IT Department Of One.” (Hey, if you can’t rip off US Army advertising copy, what can you rip off?).

My first five years with the stations was as a part-time board operator, basically an occasionally-multitasking button pusher. The only difference between myself and a DeeJay was that the DJ got to crack the mic and I didn’t. But I still had to take the phone calls from all the drunken crazies… and when you’re a rock-n-roll station, the phoners are as crazy as they come. One night/morning early in my career (in other words, “before I knew better”) I took a call from a guy who wanted to know what the Greatest Classic Rock Song Of All Time ™ was.

Stupid me, I tried using logic. “Well, you know, it’s really a subjective thing… yadda yadda.”

“But, man, what’s the best one ever?”

“It depends on who you ask… blah blah blah.”

“Dude, I just need to know which one it is!”

Eventually the utter knob on the phone… okay, the other end of the phone… managed to convey that he was trying to settle a bet with his buddy: Was the Greatest Classic Rock Song “Stairway to Heaven” or “Hotel California”?

I hate Hotel Cali, so I settled the bet in favor of Led Zep. The entire process only took maybe fifteen minutes… but that was about twelve minutes longer than it should’ve, had I any sense…

And some things never change. Heh.

(Aren’t you all glad I’ve taken to jotting down little reminders in my phone to jog my memory? Yes, I’m sure you are. Heh.)

The TriMet bus (and light rail) system is, all things being equal, a tremendous asset to the Portland metropolitan area. It is also, from time to time, a source of amusement.

The #14 line runs along Hawthorne Street in southeast Portland, and so is known as the “#14 Hawthorne,” which is displayed on the electronic signboards on the front and side of the bus itself. But what happens when the rightmost half of the sign is malfunctioning?

Well, it makes the bus Hawt, apparently. 14 Hawt, to be precise.

*cough*

Okay. Moving right along… am I the only Portland resident to notice that cast-off couches are virtually everywhere, even in places you wouldn’t think a couch could migrate to? You sort of expect to see on one a curbside from time to time, but in the middle of a berry thicket? In a gully? I swear, there are couches (and I’m lumping loveseats into the “couch” category, if you must know, you pedantic person you) everywhere in this city. I’ve never particularly thought of a couch as an outdoor accessory, but clearly a fair number of people have.

I was discussing this phenomenon with Lilith recently, prompted (of course) by yet another curbside couch sighting. She, too, had noticed the proliferation of couches, but hadn’t assigned to it quite the same level of fascination (or obsession, if you prefer) that I have. If nothing else, this clearly establishes which one of us is crazier. Useful, that.

Her joking comment was that perhaps instead of calling Portland “Stumptown” we should call this place “Couchtown.” But then, of course, we’d have to pronounce it like we pronounce Couch Street…

Oh, wait. “Cooch Town.” Scratch that idea, folks…

Welcome to the new Memories section, where I write about things I really should have written about at the time but for some reason or other (that would be “laziness,” most of the time) I didn’t.

Oh, and bonus points if anyone catches where I got this entry’s title. Heh.

So. A while back, Lil’ and Geoffrey and I were at Freddy’s. I think it was so she could buy cosmetics, or some such. Geoff’ and I snarked a lot, as usual. Shortly before the end of the shopping trip, I spotted this:

Well now. What have we here? It’s a giant chicken for sale!

“It’s a duck,” Geoffrey insisted. I was, of course, mildly offended… mainly because that’s the worst excuse for a duck I’ve ever seen. Besides, it had a comb on its head. That makes it a chicken, right? We went back and forth about that for a few minutes without either being convinced of the other’s position.

So he found the box it came in. Sure enough… that’s supposed to be a duck. Go figure, eh?

What have we shown here, folks? Shopping with me is always bound to be a snark-filled experience! That, and apparently I can’t tell the difference between a giant inflatable duck and a giant inflatable chicken…