Richard BF

I’ve had quite a few emails asking when I’m going to comment on the U.S. disaster elections, but to be honest I don’t think I’ve got much to add to the noise, and it probably conflicts a little with what I’ve been trying to do with this site. And anyway, I’ve already spoken about our local version of G.W. in It’s time to stay, John Howard and The search for the last Liberal voter, the Liberal Party being the Australian version of the U.S. Republican Party.

So let me instead weave in a related story, try to tie up the loose ends, and return us to our regular programming.

About a month ago, I was in the backyard attending to my beetroots, and L* comes out, looking proud of herself, and the following exchange took place:

L*: Hey, notice anything about the back room?

R: The back room? Umm… no why?

L*: Have you noticed how it looks a lot neater?

R: Uhh, what do you mean neater? You mean the back room where I keep all my collectable computer gear?

L*: Collectable? Umm… I’ve been throwing a box out each week since we moved, because you said they all had to go.

R: You what?! Yeah! They all had to go INTO STORAGE!

So it turns out that she’s now done me a favour in throwing out all my old AppleII gear. Out went all my hard drives, source code, finished products, my backup hard drives and cartridges. My AppleIIgs Tenspeed prototype, my custom built (by Zip Technology for GraphicWriterIII development) Zip GSX 14MHz, two high speed SCSI cards, two RAMFasts, a bunch of rare Australian RAM cards, an Apple Integer Card with my custom serial port debugging roms built in, two Transwarp GS cards, an original first edition Apple CD ROM drive, two industrial strength power supplies, a 110V to 240V power transformer, several other cards and AppleIIgs machines including my Woz edition which I used to develop pretty much every product I wrote for the AppleIIgs.

Lucky though, she was about to throw out the old laser printer which no longer works and the old green screen with the bad flicker. Phew, saved in the nick of time!

Pretty much all the gear mentioned on my history page is now gone, sitting in a city dump somehwere as land fill. Thousands of years from now, someone is going to dig up that stuff, think to themselves “What is this crap?” and subsequently bury it all again.

So the last few months have been a bit of a watershed for me, a turning point if you will. Well, at least after the crying and screaming subsided, and when L* was finally allowed to move back home again.

With no more AppleII gear, the home and U.S. elections looming, and several other changes to my world, things were looking up, a time for change, a fresh start… and then the world suddenly plunged into another four years of darkness. I feel ripped off.

The blogosphere learned a good lesson this week about isolation and visibility. I’ll leave you with two of my favourite perspectives on the election (and yes, I’ve read a lot of them): Gina Trapani’s personal before and after journey into politics; and Dave Pollard’s post UNDERSTANDING THE PEOPLE, PART 2, and to show what is wrong with this world, I quote:

Yesterday eight million anxious, fearful white American suburbanites, male and female, who didn’t vote in 2000, pried themselves out of their isolated, insulated, heavily-mortgaged, two-income-trap homes, and voted for the devil they knew over of the devil they didn’t. And then they went home and prayed. And as a consequence, we have four more years of George Bush.