| The door to nowhere |
[Mar. 11th, 2009|09:53 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  amused | ] |
| [ | music |
| | In The Middle Of Summer, Panic At The Disco | ] |
When I'm going home from work, I sometimes go down the fire escape (rather than waiting for the agonisingly slow lifts).
Somewhere between the Ground and First floors, there is a DoorToNowhere(TM).
...I sometimes wonder what kind of building restructure occurred.
(Why yes, I am cleaning photos out of my memory cards. Why do you ask?)
-Mmaster |
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[Mar. 11th, 2009|11:27 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  nostalgic | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Song 13, The Ataris | ] |
I got my first email address when I was in about Year 6 - maybe late Year 5.
At this point, we still didn't have Internet access at home. I would have to visit my parents at work to leech off the University network.
One day, I'd run out of things to do, and hence went searching for games. Judging the era, I probably would have been using Yahoo as the search engine. I'm guessing this was too early for Flash to really have come into its own, so they probably would have been Shockwave.
But wait! Why do I need to search? Yahoo has games already.
...Which required an email address for registration.
So, I went to hunt down my mother to ask for her permission to get an email address. For some reason, she refused.
In a rare moment of rebellion, I signed up for a Yahoo account anyway, and played the games I'd been drooling over.
The next time I returned, I was up to my elbows in rebellion! I searched for all the free webmail providers I could find, and signed up for all of them. The fact that an email address isn't much use to you if no-one else knows it apparently didn't occur to me.
But, now that I had all these email addresses, with different usernames and passwords for each, how on Earth was I going to remember all those details?
So, I created a text file listing the assorted details. But then I needed to figure out where to put the file - I couldn't leave it in Mum's account, she might realise I'd been sneaking around behind her back! And anyway, they wiped the machines fairly regularly.
I managed to dredge up a floppy from somewhere, and added the text file to that. But how to label it? "Passwords list", again, would make my rebellion obvious - I didn't want her to find it and know what I'd been up to. I didn't want to leave it unlabelled; that would mean it would probably get mixed in with the random blank floppies we had lying around at home.
I tried to think of the most boring title I could conceivably imagine - something so dull that noone would bother to check the contents of the disk to see that it was what it said on the label. I wound up writing "A Brief History Of Horticulture"; I may even have renamed my text file to match. Admittedly, I was still probably too young to understand the "What I find boring, my parents may find interesting" concept.
Several months later, a classmate was flicking through my folder, and came across the disk slipped into the last plastic sleeve. He read the title, then gave me the weirdest look I'd ever seen. I tried to explain the history, but I think he just dismissed it out of hand.
I think we still have that disk, somewhere. We may have finally thrown it out; I have a feeling age and wear & tear may have finally rendered it unusable. But it stands as testament to one of my few efforts of actively going against what my parents told me to do - I was mostly a good kid, and they were pretty lenient anyway.
I think this is springing to mind, because when I showed Mum a list of Motorcycle Training Courses, her reaction was "My baby's commiting suicide!" ...Apparently this is my delayed adolescent rebellion kicking in. At least I now (as of today) have a reasonable level of private health cover, so I can be well patched up when I kill myself.
-Mmaster |
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