But, looking over other people’s shoulders, and listening to the groans and cries, I’m struck by something. We’ve been here before. Icon jail, I mean (“Squircle” jail specifically in Tahoe’s case):

This isn’t the first time Apple’s put icons in grey jail. Mac OS 9 already did this:

This mode made the icons activate with a single click rather than a double-click. It was a window-specific (and desktop-specific) setting. I vaguely recall it being sold as a simpler, more efficient way of using the Finder – fewer clicks! It did not catch on, though possibly there were some fans. I vaguely recall encountering Macs in the wild that had this mode enabled.

It wasn’t new in Mac OS 9 either, really – it was actually introduced with At Ease circa System 7.1:

In a way, Apple is just returning to its roots; continuing to try to dumb-down the Mac.

Of course, a big difference between all these prior incarnations and macOS 26 Tahoe’s is that previously the user controlled it, and could turn it off. You didn’t have to install At Ease at all. Mac OS 9 didn’t use the Buttons view mode by default, you had to enable it, and anyone could disable it again at any time.

That’s where today’s Apple actually differs from yesteryear’s – they used to respect the user, and now they don’t.

Circa 2011, not long after I joined Google, I pitched a 20% project idea to my boss. In a nutshell, I wanted to optimise traffic light systems to improve traffic throughput. My motivation was to reduce wasted fuel – and therefore pollution and cost to drivers. Granted I didn’t have much more than the goal at that point – with some ideas about starting with simulations and models, and working with the Google Maps & Streetview teams, if I recall correctly. In any case, my boss said no. That wasn’t relevant to Google nor something Google was interested in, I was told.

Well, apparently now it is – Google has a publicly disclosed project “Green Light” to do exactly that. Evidently as far more than merely a 20% project (although I’m curious if that’s how it started).

I always felt the denial by management was misguided. It seemed at odds with official company policy. But, contrary to what this post might seem to imply, it didn’t weigh on me. I was a bit miffed, but largely forgot about it until I happened to hear about Green Light and was reminded. Now it’s perhaps a sliding doors thought exercise.

Executive decrees, employee handbooks, even public promises, are all weak against undermining management.

Canary Wharf traffic lights photo by Martin Pearce, CC BY-ND 2.0.

1. The ambiguity there reflects the wildly differing opinions I encountered while at Google starting in 2010. Though there was some official guidance about 20% time (e.g. in the employee handbook), asserting in writing that it did in fact exist and was supposedly encouraged, in my first- and second-hand experience management were not at all keen on it. I met few Googlers who actually worked on a 20% project, and some kept it secret from management. ↩︎

I don’t really remember the timing – sometime between 2006 and 2010 – but presumably around 2006 as I recall it was when Core Data was still relatively new. For whatever reason, there was a huge push internal to Apple to use Core Data everywhere. People were running around all over the place asking “can it be made to use Core Data?”, for Apple’s frameworks and applications.

Keep in mind that Core Data at that time was similar to SwiftData now – very limited functionality, and chock full of bugs. But of course it’s the nature of ‘shiny’ new things that their proponents think it’s the second coming and the cure for all ills.

So, I recall sitting down with a couple of folks from the Core Data team, that were there to see if Shark could adopt Core Data. A little like letting the missionaries in, if only out of morbid curiosity.

Have you heard the good news? Core Data is here to save your very data. It’s effortless and divine and its unintuitive, thread-unsafe API will definitely not be the bane of all its users for the next fifteen years.

Jokes aside, they were in fact earnestly curious if Shark could use Core Data, instead of its own purpose-built binary formats, for storing & querying its profiling data. It was perhaps the classic case of naively underestimating the complexity of a foreign domain. By my recollection, they assumed our profiling data was just a small handful of homogenous, relatively trivial records. “At second N, the program ran the function named XYZ” or somesuch.

I think we (Shark engineers) tried to be open-minded and kind. We were sceptical, but you never know until you actually look. We could see some potential for a more general query capability, for example. But of course the first and most obvious hurdle was: how well does Core Data handle sizeable numbers of records? Oh yes, was the response, it’s great even with tens of thousands of records.

We asked how it did with tens of millions of records, and that was pretty much the end of the conversation.

It wasn’t just the volume of data, it was also the dramatic difference in representation efficiency. The in-memory representation in Shark was basically as efficient as it could be – basically just arrays of compact structs, sometimes with pointers to other arrays (which might share a malloc block to avoid the overhead of small allocations) which were usually just of uint32_t or uint64_t. The most important operations – indexing to an arbitrary point in the profile’s timeline, then scanning forward over the data – were about as fast as they can possibly be.

In contrast, Core Data would have required an entire object (NSManagedObject subclass) for at least every sample, if not every uintXX_t in the callstack (depending on how ‘pure’ you wanted the design to be). It would have increased memory usage by at least an order of magnitude – and Shark already struggled with big profiles on the hardware of the day, which typically had just a couple of GiB of RAM. Even the most trivial operations – like reading the data in from disk and iterating it sequentially would have been thousands of times slower.

In defence of the Core Data folks in the meeting – and I don’t remember who specifically it was – they never tried to misrepresent or exaggerate what Core Data could do. I seem to recall them being quite nice people. But as soon as we started explaining the type and volume of data that we worked with, they clearly gave up on any kind of pitch. Core Data was designed for developer convenience, not runtime efficiency or performance.

It’s never ceased to surprise and disappoint me how many folks try to arbitrarily apply generalised data storage systems – particularly SQLite and MySQL, or wrappers thereover. Usually for the same reasons – perceived convenience to them, right now, not necessarily efficiency (nor the convenience of their successors).

I guess by modern standards SQLite is considered efficient and fast, but – hah – back in my day SQLite was what you used when you didn’t have time to write your own, efficient and fast persistent data management system.

See also JSON and its older sister XML. 😔

The question was raised whether an official Swift backtracer should try to support code that doesn’t use frame pointers. Which immediately raised the question – in my mind – of if anyone is still using the “optimisation” of omitting frame pointers, anyway. And perhaps more importantly, whether they should still be omitting frame pointers.

What is a frame pointer?

A pointer to a stack frame, held in a well-known location. That location can be in the stack itself (forming a linked-list of the stack frames) or in registers (e.g. the x29 register on AArch64, or RBP register on x86-64).

The controversial part – insofar as there is any controversy – is in dedicating a CPU register to hold a frame pointer (to point to the start of the current stack frame). It’s super convenient for a lot of things, but particularly for debuggers and profilers as it gives them a reliable and very fast way to find the top of the current callstack. But it’s not technically required for the program to function.

No live CPU architectures, that I’m aware of, have a dedicated hardware register for frame pointers. So you nominally have to “give up” a GPR (general-purpose register) in order to have a frame pointer.

Franz Busch pointed out that some notable software still ships with frame pointers omitted, e.g. apparently some major Linux distros. I suspect it’s merely some inertia (or simply oversight) that’s delaying getting people off of that old crutch. I’m not remotely surprised that some big Linux distros are in this bucket – they tend to be absurdly conservative and slow to change¹. And it’s mind-boggling how much vitriol restoring frame pointers generates from the peanut gallery.

From watches to servers these days – and frankly most of the embedded space, since it’s mostly ARM – everything generally has an ISA with sufficiently many GPRs to negate any big benefit from omitting frame pointers. Giving up one of 31 GPRs (for e.g. AArch64, the dominant CPU architecture family today) is pretty insignificant for the vast majority of code, because almost nothing actually uses all 31 GPRs anyway. It only makes a significant difference² when the CPU design is register-starved to begin with, like i386. And those architectures are largely dead, in museums, or restricted to very tiny CPUs as used in some microcontrollers (“embedded” systems).

Even back when i386 et al were still a concern, the proponents of -fomit-frame-pointer often argued not on the potential merits of the trade-off, but rather that it was a “free” performance boost, so even if it was only by a percentage point or two, why not? They of course were either naively or deliberately overlooking the detrimental effects.

There may still be software for which omitting frame pointers is the right trade-off, even on modern CPUs. But I find it hard to believe there’s enough cases like that to warrant accomodation in standard tools.

A brief trip back to Apple circa 2007

Back in the brief window of time when i386 was a thing for the Mac (32-bit Intel, e.g. Core Duos³ as used in the first MacBooks), I was at Apple in the Performance Tools teams (Shark & Instruments), and it was a frustration of ours that -fomit-frame-pointer was a noticeable performance-booster on the register-starved i386⁴ architecture⁵, so it was hard to just bluntly tell people not to use it… yet, by breaking the ability to profile their code, people who used it often left even bigger performance gains on the table (or otherwise had to invest much more labour into identifying & resolving performance problems).

At one point there was even an Apple-internal debate about whether to abandon kernel-based profiling in favour of user-space profiling⁶ because implementing backtracing without frame pointers is possible but very expensive and requires masses of debug metadata (e.g. DWARF), making it highly unpalatable to put in the kernel. Thankfully there were too many obvious problems with user-space profiling, so that notion never really got its legs, and then x86-64 finally arrived⁷ and it was mooted.

1. e.g. Ubuntu still not officially supporting ImageMagick 7 even though it’s been out for nearly a decade. ↩︎
2. Aside from the question of register space, there is additional cost to implementing frame pointers, as additional instructions are required around function entry & exit in order to maintain the frame pointers – to push & pop them off the stack, etc. The cost of those is usually insignificant – especially in superscalar microarchitectures, as is the norm – so that aspect is not typically the focus of the controversy. ↩︎
3. Tangentially, I vaguely recall us Apple engineers kinda hating the Core Duo (Yonah), or more specifically Apple’s choice to use it. Apple used them only for a tiny window of time, from May 2006 to about November 2006 when the Core 2 Duo (Merom) finally replaced them across the line. I don’t recall all the reasons that the Core 2 Duo was superior, but they included that Core 2 Duo corrected the 32-bit regression (for Macs) and performed much better. Anytime Apple releases a Mac with a dud processor in it, like those Core Duos, a lot of Apple engineers die a little inside because they know they’re going to be stuck supporting the damn things for many years even after the last cursed one rolls off the assembly line.
   
   It’s still a mystery to me why Apple rushed the Intel transition in this regard. They only had to wait six more months and they could have had a clean start on Intel, with no 32-bit to burden on them for the next seven years. ↩︎
4. Why do I keep calling it “i386”? Isn’t it officially “IA-32”? Well, yes, but that’s (a) only retroactively and (b) only ever used by Intel. Though I guess “x86” is probably the more common name? Yet “i386” is in my mental muscle memory. Maybe that’s just how we used to refer to it, at Apple? Maybe just because that’s the name used in gcc / clang arch & target flags?
   
   Incidentally, clang -arch i386 -print-supported-cpus on my M2 MacBook Air still lists Yonah (those damn Core Duos) as supported. Gah! They won’t die! 😆 ↩︎
5. It’s funny how the Intel transition is now heralded as being amazing and how much better Intel Macs were than PPC Macs, but for a while there we lost a lot of things, like a 64-bit architecture, an excellent SIMD implementation, and the notion of more than [effectively] six GPRs.  ↩︎
6. There were at the time already some Apple developer tools that did user-space profiling, most notably Sampler (now a niche feature in Activity Monitor) and early versions of Instruments (in fact Instruments still has the Sampler plug-in which does this, although I can’t really fathom why anyone would ever intentionally use it over the Time Profiler plug-in). ↩︎
7. In the sense of all Macs adopting it, not just the Mac Pro. It was easy to ignore i386 at that point because it was then all but officially a dead architecture as far as Apple were concerned. ↩︎

It immediately reminded me of the Shark 5 re-implementation of the profiling interface between the kernel and Shark. Shark 5 of course didn’t actually survive to birth – it was snuffed out by politics and, admittedly, a bit of our own hubris in the Shark team – but that underlying infrastructure did, as the guts of Instruments‘ Time Profiler and System Trace features.

In Shark 4 and earlier, userspace would allocate a single big buffer of memory for the profiling data, hand it [back] to the kernel¹, the kernel – specifically the Shark kernel extension – would write into that buffer, then when the buffer was full profiling would end². The userspace driver – Shark – could technically start profiling again immediately, but of course you’d often have a gap in your profiling – potentially a big one, for the more expensive profiling modes (e.g. System Trace) or on heavily-loaded machines. Shark didn’t run with elevated priority, as far as I recall, so it could get crowded off the CPU(s) by other programs. All communication between user & kernel spaces was via Mach messages, which are ultimately syscalls, and was time-sensitive since kernel- & user-space had to be in lock-step all the time.

For Shark 5, we wanted to up the ante and remove limitations. We wanted to be able to record indefinitely, limited only by disk space. More importantly, we also wanted to be able show profiling results live.

So, we – and I use the term loosely, as I think it was mostly Rick Altherr with possibly the help of Ryan du Bois – came up with a mechanism that’s very similar to io_uring, but years earlier, in ~2008. Userspace would allocate multiple smaller buffers – also easier to acquire given the requirement to be physically contiguous – and hand those to the kernel somewhat as needed. Userspace merely needed to stay ahead of the kernel’s use, which didn’t necessarily mean pre-allocating all the buffers. When each of those individual buffers filled up with profiling data from the kernel, they’d be made available back to the userspace side³. Shark (in userspace) would optionally – if in ‘live’ mode or if running short on empty buffers – process those buffers while profiling was still actively occurring, freeing them up to go back into the ring for the kernel’s use. It did mean you slightly increased the probability of perturbing the program(s) under profiling, but that was mostly just a matter of ensuring the buffers were large enough to sufficiently amortise the cost of their processing & handling. I don’t recall the extent of the processing, but I think it was not necessarily much more than copying the data out into non-wired memory (maybe even a memory-mapped file?). That was cheaper than allocating and wiring new buffers.

It worked really well, and is possibly still the implementation used to date – while it appears a lot of the frameworks (e.g. CoreProfile) have disappeared from macOS, presumably rewritten somewhere else, I’d be surprised if the kernel-user interface itself has changed much. It was pretty much perfect.

The creation of this new, superior profiling system also spurred me to create rample, a CLI tool kind of like top which showed you what your CPUs were doing in real time⁴ as a heavy tree, much like you’d get in a Time Profile in Shark (and later Instruments). It was super quick to write – just a day or two, I believe – and yet I unexpectedly found that it was more useful than Shark itself. Being able to see – practically instantly by virtue of how lightweight it is to launch a simple CLI program – what’s chewing on the CPU, including inside the kernel, was incredibly useful. Instruments is the closest you can get today on a Mac, but it’s super slow and clunky in comparison. It’s one of my top regrets, of my time at Apple, that I didn’t get rample into Mac OS X, or at least into the Dev Tools.

1. I don’t recall precisely why, but it was apparently better (or only possible?) to allocate the buffer in userspace, even though that was ultimately done with syscalls serviced by the kernel. I think it had something to do with being easier to handle failures, like being out of memory, in particular contiguous memory – the memory was wired during use to ensure the kernel wouldn’t have to deal with the practical nor performance problems of page faults while recording profiling data. ↩︎
2. Which was a problem because generally profiling sessions were specified to run for a specific time duration, by the end-user. So the buffer had to be sized to avoid filling prematurely, which meant wasting memory. ↩︎
3. Technically they were always available – we didn’t bother changing access permissions – but the userspace app would coordinate with the kernel via an elegant lockfree state machine. That state machine was a superb design – it deserves its own detailed nostalgia trip. ↩︎
4. Well, updated every second or so, like top. ↩︎

They even put a picture of me on the cover, which seems mean [to their readers].

This was the follow-up to an article a year earlier that announced we three were set to intern at Apple.

I’m posting it here now because I apparently never did prior, and I’d just like to include it in my records. I actually remember reading the article, although oddly not providing any of the quotes used in it (I’m sure I did; I genuinely have just forgotten).

I’m not sure what I was referring to – if anything specific – regarding “so that’s how they do that!” but I do vaguely recall that it was indeed a real pleasure to have access to a lot of Apple frameworks’ source code. I dove into a whole bunch of it purely out of curiosity. Of course, fifteen years later I don’t remember anything about it.

I had forgotten – until I chanced upon this Wheels for the Mind article a few weeks ago – about Brett’s project entirely. I did vaguely remember that Ashley worked in the Core Audio team, although in my mind it was “FireWire audio” specifically that he was involved with. I vaguely recall some discussions about isochronous transport support – something unique to FireWire at the time, notably as opposed to its competitor USB – and its huge benefits for live audio. We [Apple fans] were all particularly bullish on FireWire and quite offended by the mass-market success of the comically inferior USB. So we relished specific examples where FireWire embarrassed USB, in terms of not just its speed but its basic capabilities (like live media).

I haven’t spoken with Ashley or Brett in what must be at least a decade – probably since about when our internship ended and we all separated once more on our return to Oz. We’d barely met before the internship – perhaps just at the AUC 2005 conference in Hobart; I know at least Brett was there for that – and being thrown together into a two-bedroom apartment in Cupertino. 😆

Where are they now?

I’m here now, obviously. 😜

Ashley interned at Apple at least twice more – in fact I think we ran into each other once or twice as a result, as I was there full-time by the time of his third internship at least. He eventually joined for real, as a full-time employee. And that’s where he still is! And still doing audio – from his early days with IEEE presentations to working on Milan (for synchronising clocks over a network, for AV media purposes specifically) to at least as recently as 2020 with work on IEEE 1722 (AVTP, Audio Visual Transport Protocol). As well as some AV timing-related working on 802.11 (wifi). And possibly more – digging through IEEE papers & websites is not the most entertaining nor rapid escapade. 😝

Brett appears to have done some iOS consulting and fitness coaching, of all things! That’s particularly poetic because – when we were Apple interns – we were all a bit plump; very stereotypical computer nerds. As his coach bio says:

Brett started at VidaFit doing an Overhaul back in 2014 as a self-proclaimed overweight, headache prone, generally sluggish computer geek.

He’s also been fighting Motor Neurone Disease on behalf of his sister and all its sufferers, which it seems led him into social media consulting and general computer support under the business name Little Brown Monkey – an ironic name, given how search-engine-hostile it is 😆. Apparently it’s based on sentimental value. Still, it’s particularly funny since “Brett Brooks” is a fairly common name – with multiple minor celebrities using it – so he is already a little hard to find.

iTools

Long before iCloud, iTools was was of Apple’s first forays into web services as we recognise them today. The headlining features were the ability to create an email address (free!) under the @mac.com domain (which I still use to this day!) and an online file storage and sharing system called iDisk, which was the foundation for several other services & tools within the bundle including HomePage and Backup.

Backup wasn’t exclusively tied to iDisk, and I used it (in the later .Mac era) for a couple of years to backup my essential documents to iDisk and my entire computer to a external hard drives and CDs. I think it was my first real backup system…? And I still have all those backups!

I don’t recall that I used iTools, or at least not in any serious way. I was still in high school when it came out (just), going into university, and I recall using my university email address during that time.

If I remember correctly, iTools was pretty well received by actual users but panned critically, with the press and technorati unimpressed by it in light of antecedents like Hotmail (launched three years earlier in 1997) and numerous existing “DIY” website builders and free webhosts (GeoCities!).

There was also some resentment due to its Mac-only nature, although technically most of the services worked through a web browser on any platform, you just couldn’t create an account except on a Mac.

Remember, too, that Mac OS X didn’t exist when iTools launched. It was Mac OS 9 – retroactively named “Classic Mac OS” re. Rosetta etc – and for Mac users the world was a very different place. Once Mac OS X did launch, iTools became even better with integration into the Finder (for iDisk). This was over six years before Dropbox even existed.

Hotmail and lesser known contemporaries pioneered free email, but with tight limits on usage (e.g. only 2 MB of email storage, enough for about two modern spam emails!). .Mac offered 50 MB (upgradable to 2 GB for a fee). This was three years before Gmail was launched, too (at which time the word “unlimited” started to get thrown around, although technically Gmail only offered 1 GB initially).

My old website dates back to at the latest September 2005 when I launched my blog, although I’m pretty sure I’d been using it for quite some time before that (though the Wayback Machine didn’t notice it for three more years, until September 2008 😂).

It took a little bit of effort to get it functioning again – it contained a lot of references to 3rd party resources (Google Adsense & Analytics, Haloscan, etc) that are no longer valid / necessary, as well as to some more intrinsic .Mac HomePage functionality that’s long gone, like iDisk (the early file-sharing functionality a la Dropbox / iCloud Drive). I pruned out most of that for the sake of removing long-dead, broken links & images.

.Mac

.Mac was a relaunch of iTools – a major version update in technical terms, but also a major departure in that it was no longer free for all Mac users. You now had to buy it! For actual money! And keep paying for it, every year, like a caveman! $100!

I still remember receiving an actual box for .Mac, and I suspect that was when I first really used the service. I think I might have received it through the AUC as part of their scholarship program which effectively launched my career, lining me up to work at Apple, move to California, and all the rest.

As for .Mac, it was somewhat ill-received, and despite Apple bragging about receiving 100,000 sign-ups, the general attitude was that it was too little for too much. It didn’t help that it then went years without much improvement or attention from Apple.

The name was a bit weird, too – clearly playing on the .com TLD, but in an era long before the expansion of TLDs, back when there was basically just .com, .net, .org, and .edu¹. It’s interesting that to this day there’s still no .mac TLD (although there is .apple, albeit for no apparent reason since it’s retained by Apple for their exclusive use, and they don’t use it).

Years later, in 2008, it was rebranded and “relaunched” yet again as MobileMe. I for one don’t recall ever having significant issues with MobileMe, but it was widely lambasted for being unreliable. I certainly don’t think it was any worse than iCloud (especially in light of macOS Sonoma’s catastrophic embuggering of iCloud Drive).

Incidentally, as part of this trip down memory lane, I also went through and fixed the broken images on my very earliest blog posts, that didn’t originally import into WordPress when I migrated off of MobileMe HomePage in 2012, when the product was shut down by Apple (in favour of iCloud, which was mostly a PR move to distance themselves from perceived reliability problems with MobileMe – notably not an actual improvement in reliability, which to this day remains sorely needed).

1. Well, plus .gov and .mil, but regular people never encountered those in everyday life. ↩︎

I don’t recall why exactly, but evidently I had to write some kind of cover letter in order to intern at Apple. I don’t even know if this was addressed to Apple, or was perhaps just part of the visa process.

Statement of Motivation

My internship offered at Apple Computer Inc. is a fantastic opportunity for me to be introduced to and get involved with one of the worlds leading and most innovative technology companies.  It will provide exposure to their current – and possibly future – hardware products, as well as the processes by which they develop them.

Additionally, the time in the U.S.A. will provide exposure to U.S. culture and general life, which will be an invaluable grounding should I pursue further work in the U.S.A. (at a later date).  While I have no immediate plans to do so, I would certainly like to have the option, as the U.S.A. is the worldwide hub for development of advanced computer technology – the best place for someone in my industry to end up.

In terms of furthering my studies and career, the impact is almost immeasurable.  My employability – not just in Australia, but also internationally – will be increased tremendously by the internship, both from the training and experience provided as well as from the impressive addition it would make to any resume.  Specifically, I hope it will open the door to future employment at Apple Computer Inc.

On a personal level, I’d like to see a bit of North America as a tourist, as much as I can – visit all the cliché spots, like the Grand Canyon, Death Valley, Yosemite, all those.  I think it’d be a great experience, and hopefully a lot of fun.

21-year-old me, in 2005

I’ve been to all three of those places now. Two out of the three were indeed fun, as hoped.

A fun footnote was that the internship paid $25 US / hour, @ 40 hours per week. That was about $33 AUD / hour, given exchange rates at the time. That compared preeetty favourably with my prior internships – $18.50 AUD / hour at NEC, $15.79 AUD / hour at PIRVic – and beat the pants off the first real job I recall having, at a flower nursery, in high school, for an amazing $5 AUD / hour.

• The Hotline File Transfer Protocol v1.1.1.  I presume I was interested in, or actively doing, a third party Hotline client.  I did tend to make lots of data transfer clients back then (e.g. HTTP, FTP, even POP3 & SMTP).
• My little gallery of childhood toys & memorabilia.  I hadn’t forgotten about this per se, but it’d certainly been a long time since I’d look at it.  In hindsight I’m really glad I took the time to take these photos – most of this stuff is long gone now, so the photos are all the remains to pique my nostalgia.
• Apparently I discovered some ‘fix’ for Apple breaking dial-up modems in a Mac OS X Jaguar (10.2.4) update.  I vaguely recall that, though I’m pretty sure that’s not the only time I’ve had to fix stupid regressions in Mac OS X by reinstalling frameworks, kexts, etc from a prior OS build.  Sigh.
  • Here’s a second reference to the same thing.
• I’m listed in the National Park Foundation’s 2015 donor list.  I’m also in the 2016 one too, though it doesn’t show up in a web search [yet], and expect to be in the 2017 one as well.
  • If you’re interested, here’s the many ways you can contribute to the NPF too.  Not listed prominently, but relevant for others in the tech industry, is that you can donate stock without paying capital gains on it, while still receiving the tax benefits of the stock’s full, current market value.  I wish I’d known this years ago when I started doing non-trivial charitable giving. 😔
• Steven Troughton-Smith gives a call out to me (among others) in his little SceneKit demo program and his pretty impressive “OpenWorldTest” (i.e. Minecraft tech demo clone).  I don’t recall have any specific contribution, but way back when Steven & I did chat a bunch about SceneKit, and other topics.
  • It tickles me now, though I haven’t talked to Steven much in years, that his name appears increasingly often in pretty high profile places (e.g. the ATP podcast mentions him almost every episode lately).  He’s certainly made a name for himself.
  • Someone called “Taka Taka” has also run with OpenWorldTest a bit, to add VR support among other things.  Nothing to do with me any more than Steven’s original version – I mention it just because it’s cool.
• I’m cited in the USF Maritime Law Journal (alas a broken link as I write).  Yep, I’m a big mover & shaker in the legal circle… which is to say, Marisa had an article published there and thanked me for supporting her as she wrote it. 😉
  • And I get a mention on every single page on her website too, for taking one of the photos of her on it.  Booyah!
• In reference to my hacking on CoreGraphicsServices, Nat! (no other name given, as far as I can see) wrote a journal entry about how some people in the Apple community can be, well, wet towels.
• A bajillion years ago I wrote the Keychain Framework, a relatively clean ‘Cocoa’ (Objective-C & Foundation) framework that wrapped Apple’s C-based libraries for keychain access & basic security functionality (which is in turn an implementation & based on the CDSA ‘standard’ that nobody but Apple appears to have ever actually implemented).  Anyway, apparently it’s used in SQLEditor.  I’m pretty stoked – I sunk a spectacular amount of time into that framework, for very dubious benefit in hindsight. 😕
• And another old pet project that shows up is my Mailcash plug-in for Apple Mail.  This was an implementation of Hashcash, which I still think is a neat idea for reducing email spam, by making senders ‘pay’ for every email like a virtual stamp.  I have no idea if anyone ever really adopted it, nor if my Apple Mail plug-in still works at all.  Presumably not – I recall Apple Mail breaking plug-ins repeatedly over the last ten years or so, since I wrote Mailcash.
  • Oh how easy it is to date an open-source project when it’s still hosted on Sourceforge.  Poor, sad, lost-its-way Sourceforge.

Curiously, there’s several other open-source projects of mine on Sourceforge that don’t show up in a web search for my name:

• Build Installer, a template for software installers that build the software from source on the user’s machine – assuming they’ve installed Apple’s developer tools, that is.  From memory this was inspired by the tedious and error-prone nature of various open-source projects, w.r.t. how they distributed & installed their software on Mac OS X.  Sadly, nothing much has changed – there’s now brew & such package managers, but in my experience they make just as a big a mess as doing it manually & ad-hoc did.
• DePC, a tool for stripping files of those nasty DOS-based file extensions, and instead setting the files’ type & creator codes correctly.  Sigh… I lost that battle.  To this day I still think that was a bad choice, that Apple made, to cave in to file extensions.  They’re still ugly and error-prone.
• Mission to the ISS, the horrible group project I did with various folks in university, for the CSE32PRO (3rd-year Computer Science Project) class.  Back in 2004, I’d guess, based on the open-source release being in January 2005.  That was a fun project in many ways, though the end result was a bit embarrassing – we ran out of time, during the class, to actually finish it properly, so for example the underlying algorithms that control the simulation are fundamentally step-based, but are stepped every time the user provides any input, so high user interaction makes the simulation run faster than intended, with silly and sometimes outright broken results.  Sad panda.

This was a little hack I worked on back in 2004, with Mac OS X Tiger (10.4).  Yes, kids, macOS was called Mac OS X back in ye Olden Times.

Wow, Slashdot looked even uglier than I remember, back then.  Though amusingly my daily reading list hasn’t changed substantially – it still features Slashdot and MacSurfer’s Headline News.

Also… 1024 x 768.  That’s just over 5% of the resolution of my current display (27″ Retina iMac).  It’s nearly as big as my iPhone 6s’s screen.

Man, do I not miss those shitty old monitors.

I don’t recall what the exact impetus was for the project.  I do recall that I was spurred on by Claus Atzenbeck, who was doing some kind of academic work into graphical user interfaces and, IIRC, wanted a way to explore window rotation and general manipulation in a real OS.

Claus’s personal website still exists, all these years later, though alas the link to his relevant research is now broken.

What reminded me of this was finding an attribution to me in a header file that was associated with the project – CoreGraphicsServices.h.  This was something I generated (presumably with the help of class-dump or similar) from the CoreGraphicsServices framework, and then partially reverse-engineered (in the sense of figuring out parameter types, function prerequisites, etc).  It’s what was necessary to find & use the private APIs for doing window geometry manipulation.

And the only reason my name is on it is because I splatted a 3-clause BSD license into the header file I made, which in hindsight seems highly dubious since the APIs themselves are owned by Apple (insofar as one can ‘own’ APIs, I guess…).

A quick web search reveals a few more mentions:

• The aforementioned header is apparently used by Growl.
• “BOMGAR”, some kind of remote computer support software, apparently uses the header too.
• As does something on marsthemes.com, though at time of writing that website has been largely destroyed for some reason.
• This one particularly amuses me – a brief thread on cocoa-dev@ about the header, in which John C. Randolph categorically takes no particular position on the hack. :)

The source & other paraphernalia were originally posted on my La Trobe University student web hosting account, though of course that’s long gone.  Here’s the original StuffIt archive, if you’re interested.  I don’t actually know if it’s the very latest version – I do still have the project in full – but it’s the latest version I ever published, AFAIR.

I leave it as an exercise to the reader on how to decompress StuffIt files in this day and age. :)

That was my first iPod.

And I still have that song, too.

I don’t really recall my impression of the original iPod when it launched.  I want to say I was interested in it, and thought it was cool.  Prior to receiving my iPod I had a MP3 disc player – a Rio Volt, like this one:

I don’t seem to have any photos of my actual one, nor any idea where it is now – I’m pretty sure I got rid of it – so that one’s courtesy of Nicole Hennig via Flickr.

And no, prior to writing this post I didn’t actually remember what it was, just what it looked like.  Internet image search is awesome.

I didn’t have that – or any – case for it though.  I just carried it bare.  Until very recently, with the iPhone 6s and iPad Air 2, I eschewed cases for portable devices.

Well, other than that original iPod Photo, that is – I did actually buy one of Apple’s iPod socks.  I still have it all, too!

I used it constantly, to my own recollection.  I’d use it while commuting in particular, from home to uni, or to parents’ & girlfriend’s homes on weekends, etc.  Very handy for two+ hour tram & train commutes.

I recall also using it at the Apple gym when I was first there, to pass the time.  Though I fuzzily recall I gradually transitioned to watching TV instead – that was the first place I saw Big Bang Theory & How I Met Your Mother, I think…

After some number of years the battery basically stopped working (due to age), and it was relegated to my car where it could be plugged in via a power adapter.

I don’t really recall when I stopped using it entirely… presumably it was eventually obsoleted by an iPhone.  That’s certainly what I use for audio in the car now, like most people.

But it’s still in my car.  Or at least, it was, until I wrote this and dug it out again.  Now it can take pride of place in my museum of ancient Apple devices, next to my original iPad.

And it still works, too.

Other than the fact that the Menu button often registers as the centre-click instead, which makes it very hard to use.  Looks like it gets stuck… possibly a consequence of spending the better part of a decade at the bottom of my car’s centre console.

Apparently I used it in some fashion until at least 2010 – it has photos & podcasts from that era synced to it.  Marisa remembers me still using it frequently when we first dated.

And I also still have the Altec Lansing AHS502i over-ear headphones from way back… I know I started with the iPod earbuds initially, but after they all just kept dying (known reliability issue with them for years… I’m surprised there weren’t more class actions), I eventually got some real headphones.

It was difficult to actually get anything thrown out, though – pop insisted on keeping so much stuff, particularly books, that he really doesn’t need. I could understand sentimental value, but it wasn’t that – he was happy to throw out all his old hand-written letters, documents, etc. What he really wanted to keep were his books on “modern” electronics from the 50’s and 60’s, and things like “Science Fact”, “The latest amazing developments that will transform your life”, from 1977. It includes all manner of precisely accurate predictions, such as that by the late 80’s there will be a giant American space station carrying hundreds of people, or that at the turn of the next century (i.e. now) computer A.I.’s will be at least as intelligent as humans, and we may indeed already be in a man vs machine war. I think I’ve seen that movie. 😄

There’s also one little gem we’ve discovered which is actually worth a look – a copy of “Rising Tide”, the Mornington High School annual magazine / yearbook, from 1969. Scary stuff. The house names back then were Beleura, Coolart, Tuerong and Tanti. Yes, Tanti. No written record (in here, at least) as to whether you had to bring your own moccasins to belong to Tanti house. 😝

Their description of the house name is:

Tanti House takes its name from Tanti Park, first selected by William Robertson in 1855. A later owner, Justice Webb, laid the foundation stone of the Mornington Mechanics’ Institution in 1885. The origin of the word ‘Tanti’, also given to an important Mornington street and a historic hotel, is believed to be from the aboriginal ‘Yanty Cran’ which meant black dog.

There you go, bet you didn’t know that. 🙂

That year the school production was Gilbert and Sullivan’s “H.M.S. Pinafore”. And I love the description for Senior Football in the Sport reports:

Although the scores for each game indicated that we were defeated, they did not give an accurate indication as to how the games were played. In each match we were by far the better side for the first three quarters, but owing to a lack of fitness, we were defeated in the last quarter.

*cough*cough*wtf?!*cough*

It continues, though, with Boys’ Baseball:

After an enthusiastic beginning to the season, we lost the source of inspiration, our coach, Mr Harrison, and also lost every match, to keep up the tradition.

And the girls’ hockey notes, which end with – after three long paragraphs on what must be the two senior teams – “The under 15 hockey team performed very well also.”. Sucks to be them. 😕

What’s really the scariest, though, is the photos. While only B&W – which is probably for the best, really – they reveal perfectly the fashion of the day. There are these so-called “mini skirts”, you see, which would be more accurately described as “almost skirts”, in so far as a belt is one. And school girls today hike up their knee-length dresses that extra inch, to the horror of their mothers… boy, I wish I could give every school girl on the peninsula a copy of their mum’s school photos… that’d sure settle a few disputes quick smart.

I used this photo not because it demonstrated the point most succinctly, but because it was one of the few that was re-printable; someone needed to tell a few of those girls to keep their legs together – I mean, I know it was the 60’s and all, but at least for the school photos..

Also, in the photos section, hidden down the bottom, is this small tirade – an oxymoron, I know, but I liked the word “tirade” 😝:

There were three reasons why no senior boys’ team photographs were taken:

(i) Many boys did not have the correct sporting attire;
(ii) Several were excluded from the photographs because of their long hair;
(iii) The rest of the boys boycotted the photographer, because of reason (ii) above.

There you are then.

Of course, while that sentiment was rather green and fuzzy, in practice it turned out to be surprisingly difficult to carry through on. The nearest computer recycler I’ve yet found is in Ringwood. Hmm. They sound like exactly what I want – they refurbish old machines and give them to people in need. Hopefully all the crap I’ve got isn’t too old, even for them. :)

Anyway, they’re also only open Tuesdays and Thursdays, which is annoying because there’s little chance I’ll ever happen to be up that way on one of those days. Thus, it looks like this Thursday I’ll be making a trip up there for no other reason. Perhaps I can catch up with people while I’m there, and not make it such a trip.

But before I do that I need to clean the machines up – wipe off all the proprietary software, any documents and whatnot still on them, etc. I hadn’t actually expected there to be much there – certainly nothing of interest. But hey, as most people who know me will attest, I’m a bit of a hoarder of information, and have a stubborn, strong nostalgic streak. I happened by chance to pull out the oldest machine first, the IIvx – the first computer we ever owned – and it is a veritable treasure trove of ancient history. I didn’t really remember, but as it turns out I had internet access back then – it’s got Eudora and Netscape 2.0 installed, along with NCSA Telnet, Fetch 3.0.3, and a few other utilities. In terms of general apps we have Adobe Dimensions (1.0?), Illustrator 5.5, Photoshop 3.0, Streamline 3.1… then there’s Word 5, Quark XPress 3.3, GraphicConverter 3.0.2 – built on 11/03/97, according to Get Info – and of course the once ubiquitous StuffIt – version 3.0.7! :D

And, most handily, there’s still a copy of Norton Utilities 2.0 on it, which includes the “Wipe Info” program I’ll need to clear this machine out. It also has “Speed Disk”, which I now recall quite clearly – I used to run that every other week, it seems, so as to squeeze out that extra few % performance. These days it’s just a lost cause, I guess – within a week of doing a clean OS install you’re down to half speed, and there ain’t much you can do about it. :/

Ah, things were simpler back in the old days. There was no Spotlight or .Mac Sync, to conveniently kill performance at random intervals. There were no 2 gigabyte temp directories, filled with precompiled headers and icon caches and whatever else. Heck, this IIvx has a 230 meg hard drive, and with all the apps and documents on it still has 57.1 meg free.

And there was no hard drive failure. This 230 meg drive is now at least 12 years old – the IIvx was released in October 1993, discontinued in October 1994, according to Mactracker. Back in those days it came with four 30-pin SIMM slots (in addition to the 4 meg SIMM soldered onto the motherboard), which when filled with the extortionately expensive 16 meg RAM modules, could take you up to an almost unheard of 68 meg of memory. That’s enough to run over 130 copies of Eudora simultaneously. Outrageous! :D

It has a 230W max power rating, which is a laugh when you consider that the 33MHz 68030 CPU in it (with a 68882 FPU) uses probably all of a couple of Watts.

And the scary things is, this had a RRP in the U.S. of $2,950. I think we paid about $3,500 Australian for it with a 13″ screen (256 colours @ 640×480! :D )… I don’t recall that we had a printer. Maybe the Aussie dollar was worth something back then, or maybe we just bought it close to EOL. Anyway, when you think about that in today’s money, that’s well over $4,000 U.S. (In terms of opportunity cost against bank savings, it’s more like $6,000 U.S.)

Would you pay $4,000 U.S. (~$5,000 AU, presently) for a machine like that today? :D

‘course, it still works, and is still newer than pop’s old Amstrad PC (as in, original IBM PC clone kind of stuff – even scarier :D ), which he until a few years ago still used occasionally.

In amongst all my email – which I’m saving as I write to a Zip disk, which seems to be the fastest (if not the only) way to actually get stuff off that machine and onto my Powerbook (via the G4 tower) – there’s a whole bunch of things I’d forgotten about. I’ll go through the email properly later – I’ve already found a few tidbits that I think I’ll publish here for general public inquiry and ridicule ;) – but a few things can be noted immediately. First, there was the Merced mailing list. If memory serves, Merced was the code name of an Intel project which was supposedly going to be the CPU to end all CPUs, replacing the ageing IA-32 architecture. In reality I think I remember someone mentioning a while ago that Merced more or less faded into oblivion, but did have some eventual impact on the Itanium or somesuch. I don’t know… back then I knew so little about the hardware itself; it was all childish showboating and rampant speculation.

Anyway, this mailing list was similarly predominantly just wanton speculation and hyperbole about this fancy new architecture that supposedly actually existed. I can’t recall any more details than that… but I suspect I was only on the mailing list to keep a watchful eye on Intel; one of the other mailing lists I was on – you got all your news and whatnot through email in those days, not the web – was “Anti-Microsoft News”… that pretty much says it all. :)

I was also on the Apple “EvangeList”. I can’t recall anything much about that; I’ll see if anything jumps out when I go through it later. :) Although I’ve just noticed, while it saves them out to Zip disk – I may well never complain about Mail’s lack of speed again – that there’s one titled “Will Apple Survive? discussion at suite101″… that’s dated the 19th of January 1998… that’s not long before the original Bondi Blue iMacs were released, in May 1998 (well, announced; they didn’t ship until August). And I think we know how that story goes since then. :)

I’m reminded also about the benefits of OS X over Classic MacOS… Eudora just shat itself trying to open a mailbox which was supposedly corrupt – or, given it was the Anti-Microsoft News one, simply too full of flammable material to be processed – which caused it to quit, and when I tried to relaunch it the whole system froze. Ah yes, the good old days. And now I have to wait another ten minutes for it to boot again. Gah!

And it died again upon restart when I tried to mount the Zip disk. No automount for you. The error was that the FPU coprocessor wasn’t installed. I had thought it didn’t have an FPU, but Mactracker says otherwise… as does some of the system utils. Well, the ones that aren’t part FWB Hard Disk Toolkit.

This may be the end of this particular archaeological expedition. :/

Also, “SM <addy>” is the command to read memory in Macsbug. :D I’m yet to discover any others. “Die in the arse” didn’t seem to produce any immediate effect, although of course that may be because it already had. ;)

Gah, error type 1! It returns!

Apparently the gods of ancient technology have forsaken me… that or are providing me with an unexpected nostalgic bounty of failure. Maybe I was being a bit to optimistic when I claimed these machines were all still in working order… :)

And just for one final finale (eat me grammatical gremlins :P ), here’s Netscape 2.02 (or was it 2.03?) in all it’s glory. I can’t believe we actually used to get around on the web with this… although it’s conversely pretty sad how little we’ve progressed. :(

Anyway, I took a few hundred photos, so it took a while to go through them. I’ve put most of them up here. There’s a bit of chaff in amongst all that wheat, so please don’t try to go through them all individually; you’ll be bored to tears. But there are some nifty things there.

Also, if you can identify anything shown – i.e. where and whom it came from, and if possible when – then by all means please do. You can comment the images themselves (or failing that this journal entry).

The logs from this day spew pages and pages of conversation on this topic, which I won’t quote here because they’re long, rambling and largely boring. Not too much of it was useful – a lot of arguing over everything with Ducky. He was trying to convince me that a constant frequency, constant intensity beam could transmit five separate signals, triggered by five different inputs. I tried to convince him that it just wasn’t possible without some form of modulation, but he was quite certain he was correct.

Until of course Data eventually asked him how he expected a TV remote to work, and his answer was “audio”… boink. So anyway… the biggest reason it never happened back then was because none of us had the skill to do it, nor really the motivation beyond “hey, this’d be really cool”. Although Ducky was also a big factor – he wouldn’t let anyone else play any sort of constructive part, but never did anything himself. Pity.

Of course, I still plan on doing it, anyway. Except now I can do it properly, using a microcontroller and custom PCBs and all sorts. I’m hoping to do something like it next year for my project, which if nothing else will let me syphon supplies off to the real DarkZone stuff behind the scenes. ;)

Anyway, this bit is from a week before that, and she’s referred to as my girlfriend by Data… it’s not just me who thought of our anniversary as the 11th; Sarah agrees on that. So, I guess it really was true that everyone already assumed we were together. Huh.

[10:59] faRq: U know that nice gal from last night
[10:59] Lord-Data: seah?
[11:00] faRq: yeah
[11:00] faRq: well I think she's a nice gal
[11:00] Lord-Data: sys's gf
[11:01] faRq: ok
[11:01] Sys: :)
[11:01] * Sys whistles innocently.
[11:01] Sys: Assuming Data hadn't mentioned that, what would you have said? Go on, don't be shy... ;)
[11:01] faRq: she seems to me to be a "real" friend
[11:01] faRq: Hiya Sys
[11:01] Lord-Data: but yes, she is nice
[11:01] faRq: I hope U don't mind me talking about your girl
[11:01] * Sys shrugs.
[11:01] Sys: Doesn't bother me.
[11:01] faRq: same as I am saying now
[11:02] Lord-Data: lol
[11:02] faRq: "real" friends are hard to find
[11:02] Sys: Why do you keep putting real in quotation marks?
[11:03] faRq: and I thought she was very nice from what I saw last night
[11:03] faRq: and I don't mean as in g/f b/f stuff I mean as in liftime friends
[11:03] Lord-Data: yea, she doesnt have to be nice to me
[11:03] faRq: because there are friends and there are friends and there are "real" friends

And that’s it. In the logs, anyway… although there’s no sign of corruption, which should be obvious if it were present.

I’m not entirely sure what Data’s last comment means… :)

Plus, I berated any PC users who also used distributed.net, since it ran way faster on Mac’s at the time – especially on G4’s with Altivec.

Anyway, onwards…. hehe, and I’m still younger and richer than Damien. :P No idea how we rank with Data these days; his car’s probably worth more than all my assets put together. Awww. :)

[5:30] Sleazball: A Dream of Wolves in Snow...good song.
[5:30] Lord-Data: no idea whos its by
[5:31] De`Impact: dream of wolves in the snow?
[5:31] Sleazball: De: Yes. What about it?
[5:31] De`Impact: that song sucks.. isnt that the one where he goes : listen to the children of the night, what swwet music they make?
[5:31] Lord-Data: mm... swet music
[5:31] De`Impact: mmm children
[5:32] Sleazball: You are a child De.
[5:32] Lord-Data: mmm indeed
[5:32] De`Impact: i'm older that you, sonny
[5:32] Sleazball: I'm richer than you, Balnaaring boy. :P
[5:33] De`Impact: bs
[5:33] Lord-Data: im older and richer than both of you :)
[5:33] De`Impact: how much money do you have right now?
[5:33] Lord-Data: mwagah, i have all the money
[5:33] De`Impact: heheh
[5:34] Lord-Data: and all the age
[5:34] De`Impact: no, me and wade togethor have a lot more age than you
[5:34] Sleazball: You know, being older just means you'll become senile first, and that means we'll be able to steal all your money from you. :P

And of course back in those days I ran an online company (i.e. made up) called 2100 Software, selling assorted shareware stuff made in RealBasic. It was a lot of fun, and I made a fair bit of money out of it – enough more or less to buy a G4 PowerMac (the year before these logs, I think). By this point in time I was no longer actively developing anything much at all – once I was with Sarah, I spent virtually no time doing anything else. :)

[5:40] Sleazball: In total, I've made $1687.11 US in the last 16 months.

Hehe… Data ran a whole boat-load of bots to maintain control of the channel. He had access to plenty of servers all over the place, so the bots could be spread out for reliability. He did this originally to prevent op-wars… back in the early days of #geektree, people weren’t around all the time, so the channel came and went. If you’re not familiar with irc, an “op” is someone who can kick people out of the channel, ban them, and do other such stuff. The only way to become an op is to either create the channel yourself, or get someone else who’s already an op to op you.

So anyway, with the channel coming and going, the op’s went around, and were lightly abused at times. So Data shifted in his bots, which would auto-op any and all of the regulars, and try to maintain those ops. It worked more or less. And resulted in a lot of this:

[6:35] ***: De`Impact has deopped faRq
[6:35] ***: |fux0r| has opped faRq
[6:37] De`Impact: >:(

Poor poor false-powered Damien. :P

And there’s pages and pages of talking about Lord of the Rings, given the first of the movies had been announced and the trailer was out. So Data was reading the books, and had just finished the first one. There was a fair bit of weirdness in that conversation… Damien though Legolas was played by Hugo Weaving (!!!), and at one point came out with this in regards to the number of Lord of the Rings books:

[7:00] De`Impact: he wrote and published like 16

And more disproof of common sense by Windows example:

[9:06] Lord-Data: something doesnt survive if it isnt good
[9:06] Sys: Windows survived.

And then there was this, below. A fairly standard conversation for us. :)

[11:09] Lord-Data: talkative pair
[11:09] * Sys is doing a chem sat.
[11:09] Sys: Seah's doing a biol sat.
[11:10] Lord-Data: ah yes, yr 12 .. i remember that
[11:12] Sys: I give up. If I fail, I fail.
[11:13] Lord-Data: i dont think its possiblefor sys to fail
[11:13] Sys: Watch me.
[11:13] Lord-Data: i shall
[11:13] * Lord-Data gets his satelite into position
[11:14] * Sys blows up Lord-Data's satellite. :P
[11:14] Lord-Data: aww
[11:14] Lord-Data: i needed that
[11:14] Sys: :)
[11:15] * Sys gives Data a shiny new satellite with 1000000x optical zoom. :)
[11:16] faRq: oh I want one of those
[11:16] * Sys gives Farq a shiny satellite too. :)
[11:16] Sys: Plenty for all!
[11:17] Lord-Data: mmm.. .zooom ..
[11:17] Lord-Data: now what would i do with said zoom .. hrm ..
[11:17] * Lord-Data contemplates
[11:17] faRq: god imagine all those teenie gals I can practice my voyerism on whilst they are masterbating in the parks ;P
[11:17] Lord-Data: oop, better get some tissues
[11:17] Lord-Data: ;D
[11:17] Lord-Data: faRq: ahh, smart minds thinks alike ;)
[11:17] Sys: They do what in parks?
[11:17] faRq: ROFL
[11:17] Sys: They only person you'll find whacking off in a park is Ducky, in Mornington, on the pirate ship.

The background on the comment about Ducky was that he was with Amanda around this time (possibly the year before, whatever). They had a thing about having sex in public places – such as down alleyways, in stairwells in buildings, at a bus stop if memory serves, etc. And not at some ungodly hour of night, either – from memory they did it in the stairwell next to the bus stop in Mt. Eliza at about 4 in the afternoon, on a weekday. How they got away without someone walking in… well… there is one possible answer. ;)

Anyway, one of their evening rendezvous took place on the chipbark underneath the pirate ship in Mornington park. On chipbark. Owww.

Oh, and that reminds me – one of Chelle’s New Years Eve parties, Ducky, Jon & I were bouncing around on the trampoline talking, and the conversation got onto sexual stamina. As it does. And Ducky came out with “hey, I once went for half an hour with Amanda”, to which Jon deftly replied “Kept your eyes open that time, did you?”. Ducky just about knocked himself out falling off the trampoline, laughing hysterically. It was a fantastic call. Worthy of the ages. :)

Sorry it’s a pdf, but there’s no other easy way to maintain the footnotes in a usable fashion. If you can’t view pdf’s easily, get a better OS. :P

And I’m sorry that it doesn’t have much of a conclusion… I don’t know if I was meant to be going somewhere with it, or if that’s it. I think it was a school assignment, so there was probably a word limit… I guess I may just have stopped writing once I hit it.

First up, there’s Nightmare on Dungeon St. I have no idea why I picked that title… it doesn’t really bear any relevance to the story. I’ve never even seen Nightmare on Elm Street. I suspect I picked it somewhat arbitrarily as a baseless play on words.

It’s interesting to see the effect gaming had had on me by that point. The way I describe combat is very methodical, and at one point I describe a blow as not having “damaged” me.

Next, we have Escape from Stonehenge. I can vaguely remember writing this, and that my female friend in the story, Johanna, is representative of someone. Probably whoever I had the strongest crush on at that point. I thought it was immensely clever and subtle to write my crushes into my stories… my teachers must have been enthralled to know of my pre-pubescent fantasies. :)

Next up is Memiors of a survivor. And yes, I know it’s not event spelt correctly. I think I went through a stage, for quite some time, where I refused to use electronic spellchecking. I figured it could only harm my own, real spelling. I suspect that’s true; I’ve been using OS X’s real-time spell checking for ages, and it must be getting so terribly sick of correcting the same few words a hundred times over.

I think “Memiors” wasn’t actually a school assignment; about this time I started writing a few of my own things independently. I liked creative writing; in fact, I liked indulging anything of my creative side. Take Lands of 8, our next entry… the idea with this was to get a bunch of random people together to write the story, and illustrate it. I don’t think anyone else ever contributed though, and let’s be honest; can you blame them? :)

Last but not least, there’s Quasar. I don’t think this was a school assignment either; I name Kate Whittman as my main character, without any shallow euphemisms. I had a big crush on Kate through pretty much all of high school – she was very attractive, extremely nice, and intelligent. Actually, we’re getting married in about 9 years. You see, she promised me back in high school that if I wasn’t married by the time I was 30, she’d marry me. So now I’m hanging out for it. :)

Of course, recently I hear she’s now engaged, which puts a bit of a kink in my plans. But no matter… there’s always ways to eliminate the competition. ;)

Although, in any case, I don’t think I can really hold her to that promise. Pity. :)