- Dion still has a large debt from the Liberal leadership campaign :: There is a persistent rumour that Mr. Dion has done little since taking over as leader to reduce his debt and now he is putting off defeating the government until he pays up in full. The view is that if he lost the election and was forced out as leader, he would have considerably more trouble paying his debts.
- A cartridge programmer looks back at his years at Atari 21 years ago :: My very first day at work I arrived at my office after orientation and found an Atari 800 computer in a boxes. I spent a little while setting the machine up, got it working, and went to get coffee. When I returned, a staffer appeared in my door. “Oh,” she exclaimed, “You knew how to set up your computer! I was going to do that.” “Well, thanks, but…” Didn’t everybody know how? Setting up an Atari computer wasn’t amazingly simple and obvious, but it wasn’t all that hard, either. It was a portent of things to come. My first office mate didn’t know how to set up his computer. He didn’t know anything, it appeared. He’d been hired to work on Dig Dug, and he was completely at sea. I had to teach him a lot, including how to program in assembly, how the Atari hardware worked, how to download stuff, how to debug. It was pretty bad. That would be a general theme throughout my tenure at Atari. Newly hired people didn’t necessarily know how to do their jobs, and I spent a lot of time helping them figure stuff out that they should have known in order to land a job in the first place. Atari’s hiring practices were not very careful.
- Saskatoon is #2! :: Regina has been ranked the “most dangerous” city in Canada, with Saskatoon a close second, by the national news magazine, Maclean’s. Using 2006 data from the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Maclean’s based its ranking on tabulated results for six crimes — murder, sexual assault, aggravated assault, robbery, auto theft, and breaking and entering.
A weblog about urbanism, technology, & culture.
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This is a weblog about urban issues, technology, & culture published by Jordon Cooper since 2001. You can read about me and the site here and if you are looking for one of my columns in The StarPhoenix, you can find them here. If you've got questions, concerns, or an interesting link for me, let me know
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> … at Atari 21 years ago …
I remember those days. I was not at Atari, but at Digital Systems of Garland, a maker of S-100 boards. We got a contract with the State of New Jersey to make a video game – sort of a “glass scratcher.”
You put in a bunch of quarters, and had a few seconds to shoot down these dollar (and five dollar) bills, floating across the screen. Sort of space invaders – the trick was to blast a hole in one of the barriers, and shoot through the hole at the right time.
It was an arcade game, not a home game, so all the XOR was hardware, just like PacMan or Galaga. But the coding was the same, and the development tools, debuggers, etc., were awful.
DRG (surprisingly, there’s no history of this landmark company) was very hardware oriented, and the few programmers had free run of the place after 5 PM. Garland (Texas) was a blue-collar town, unlike Richardson, so high tech really didn’t flourish.
But, it was fun!
One use for the high line would be to extend the L (Canarsie) subway from 14th and 8th to Javits. That would provide subway access to an area that’s becoming less industrial and more residential. The L line runs under the 8th avenue line, so then greater depth means less infrastructure (water, sewers, electricity) to move for the initial, underground, extension.
But, west side subways are not on MTA’s radar – State of the MTA
Elevated railways can be noisy, but straight track, welded rail and curve greasers can minimize the noise.