Better luck next time. Or no luck at all. Tough times to be an entrepreneur. Back to school then.

This one is a classic. I learned the lyrics of this song, by singing along with my late 'Commodore Amigas'. I never heard the actual song until a few years back, when I searched for it on YouTube.

Very funny indeed.

This video-clip is from a renowned band here where I live. I talks about the life of folks that don't want to work, and expect that others will do stuff for them. It's on a comic note, because basically it's about stupid people.

I am totally a fan o this band, and will be posting another song by them, that I learned how to sing with the morons that I used to hang out with back in the day, without ever listening to it.

Phew! The objective was set, the task was executed, you did all the work, and the results are delivered. I will never do that again. Anyway, I only had one chance, and failure was not an option. Now to enjoy the bit that remains, with my old computer museum that keeps growing, and my corporate job that keeps me busy. Who knows where the Teletubbies will be at in five years time. And who cares ?!!

Been reading a book on Common Lisp. The first example presented is a program that implements a simple CD database. Well, to call it a database is a bit over the edge. It's implemented through a list of lists. Then the list interpreter has facilities to serialize and deserialize the data structure to a file on disk. I looked at one of these files and its in a textual form processable by the lisp (read) function.

But the program mostly exemplifies the way one can do list manipulations in the language. And it's really straightforward. Lists support keyword arguments, and functions can be passed into other functions making the code very flexible.

And I'm doing the coding remotely through a telnet session on my trusty SUN Sparc Station 5. I have the X server running locally on a Windows 11 box on Cygwin, and launch xterminals to connect to the remote machine. Once there I run emacs in text mode in one window, and the clisp interpreter in another window. The source files are on a NFS share mounted from my home server where I can ssh into and use the git version control system to version the source code.

Been playing around with radar data from satellites that measure the height of the earths surface. Now I am trying to render a portion of the surface of Thailand. Above is a screenshot of where I got so far. I am doing it in OpenGL, and it's hard to make the model look anything similar to a terrain. But I got down the parsing of the sattelite's data files, so I got that going for me which is nice.

Will totally, download more interesting locations with mountains an such. Thailand is a bit flat. Right now I want to be able to get a nice picture and move the camera freely above it. Then I will get down to making a coordinate system, and getting only the data that is supposed to be visible at a certain location and render that. For performance reasons.

In the screenshot to the left is my trusty ZX Spectrum +2 with the game "Super hang-on" game loaded. This game is a motor cycle racing game, where the several races take place around the world. The player races a track, and if he finishes on time, he gets to go to another track some place else and race again. Until you run out of tracks.

Loved this game back in the day, and already have the version for my "Amestrado" computers. Will totally play that one, and check out the colorful graphics and enhanced sound.

As can be seen in the screen shot, the upper terminal window is the server, and the lower is the client. The server is listening for connections. The client made a connection, sent a request to execute a method on the server with no parameters, and the server defined method executed its code (just a simple print) and returned an empty result. Yeay!

Now to move on to more complicated calls exchanging multiple parameters of different types and getting back results. Its small but it's a start !

All this that has happened was nothing but a little story, a fairy tale of a parallel reality that doesn't really exist. As civilization is on it's way out, also me will be going the in the same direction. Things will never be the same as they were before. Time marches on, and the food is all rotting away in the suburbs. Luck is over and it should never have existed, we should all get the same. Because it's not like that, shit happens and the world changes. Get used to it.

I have been in party mode for as long as I remember. A party where I am the only one. And now that I know that my plan worked brilliantly, I can finally put you out of your misery. Don't need to thank me. Eat your veggies and keep reading all night. The sound track below is an excellent way to celebrate these days that I am living. Life is good. So am I. At least to myself. HAHA!

I am an all time fan of Lee Perry and the Upsetters. One of the songs I like the most is this one linked below. It makes me remember all the stories that my "Commodore Amigas" told me the years that I hang out with them. Strangely, I don't remember any one of them. I guess this song explains my attitude from ever since. Lesson to be learned : be careful in who and what you believe. First of all don't forget to believe in yourself. HAHA!

Back to subsimming on Silent Hunter 4! I made a ton of small videos of the convoy actions while playing this game. Always listening to good music as can be examplified by the Madness - "Night boat to Cairo" video.

I am now starting to also get into modern submarine warfare (I mean the from the 80's), with the game "Cold Waters" in which I command a Nuclear attack sub against other subs and ships. It's a bit harder because the weapons are remote controlled, but I am getting the hang of it. Will totally be putting some videos of that soon here. Found that this game was also heavilly modded, and there are two mods I want to try. But first I have to learn how to play the stock game, which I think is in fact very good.

My experience with Lisp (LISt Processing), was in university, when I did the Artificial Intelligence course project. The goal was to develop a Heuristic to plug in to a program that was already made by the teachers. The program I developed was a strategy to win the game with the least effort possible.

I remember developing two or three strategies, and then leave my home PC running the game on its own, and later come back and collect the results. I even ran it on weekends, when I would start the game before going out at night, and then spend the following hours drinking with my 'Commodore Amigas'.

It was fun times, and now I am getting back to learning lisp. I maybe will be embedding it into my simulator, to execute the algorithms that decide what each agent will do next.

I am starting a topic page with my musical tastes. Check it out in the Random Stuff section.

For marking this event, I selected the Nirvana song "On a plain" because I listened to it when I was 15 years and it ringed a bell to me : I'm on a plane. And In fact I am. Good luck.

Working on porting a XML RPC C++ library to ObjC/NeXTStep. It's going well, I'm finding several translation errors from the original source to my source, but up until now they are not too severe.

Really going to do some extensive testing on this one, because I plan to use it to enable communication between machines of several decades apart. Might even port it to some other languages too, but for now I'm focusing on getting a modern machine talking to a NeXTStep process over this.

Thanks to a helpful member of the Vintage Unix Hardware community, I got hold of the RSC card software to re-flash the configuration since the last user. As can be seen from the screenshot, the configuration I made was successfully written to the RSC card, and now I can remote control the whole server. Yeay! That means I can power it on and off from my condo, without having to go to the basement and press the power button.

Finally got the chance to install a DDI-5 disk interface to my Amstrad CPC 464, or as I call it my 'computador Amestrado'. There are tons of abandonware games for it in DSK format, so I just need to download them, unpack them and put them on a USB stick and I am off to the races.

Now I get to tell the difference between the Amstrad computers and the ZX spectrum, which I had when I was a kid. These Amstrads do more colours and have more memory, and sound is also better than on the speccy. But oddly, the games that I played on the speccy are exactly the same as the ones on this machine. Only the visuals and the sound are better.

The price tag on the Amstrads was heavier, than on a speccy, but if you had the money back then, I think it was worth it.

I had started this one a few days ago, but only finished it today. Its a small stream coming out of a forest, through some rocks. I avoided filling up the drawing with shades so that the contours stand out more. Only the backdrop and the lower side of the rocks are shaded.

I just wiped the MacOS that was on my Intel Mac Mini (that had little use lately), and put the latest version of FreeBSD on it. Starting to get to know the OS, but it resembles, from the user perspective, an earlier version of Linux, but with recent packages. I kind of like it. It is simpler to maintain, and as a workstation it has everything I need. Window Maker, After Step, Emacs, and other tools.

On the softwaree development side of things, its main C compiler is CLang and debugger is LLDB. Never used those before,so gonna give them a try. Right now I am trying to get Bluetooth to work so I can stream music to my Bluetooth speaker. Still no success, but hey, it it was easy it would not be as much fun.

Another Amiga 1200 arrived a while ago in the mail. I bought this one because I have a PiStorm 32 lying around doing nothing. Also, with this one, I can install recent versions of Amiga OS, to try out. This one even has a recently manufactured mainboad, called a Re-Amiga.

The idea behind that project was to have a new mainboard and then place the original components of the original mainboard on it. Now I have to buy some CF cards to install the new OS's and extract the ROM images from the chips into files that I can put in the PiStorm.

This afternoon, after lunch I went for a really loooong walk around the other side of the island. It was tough, because I started out on the side that is adjacent to the river and has mud banks. The progression was slow but the scenery was amazing. I saw a lot of native wild life like exotic birds, crabs feeding in the low tide, and small schools of fish.

It was a bit windy, but because I was wearing my headphones, the music was entertaining. I got to the end of the island where there were a lot of tourists in small boats from the nearby hotels. I went around the tip of the island and returned home along the coast line facing the ocean. Man, when I finally got home I was tired. Took a shower and went downtown for a hard earned beer.

Guess what. Three assholes that I used to fool around with back in the day, came to visit me at my vacation spot. Not much to say, I just said hi, and politely told them to fuck off, and sent them on their way. Like I already said before, I am always glad to see them, so I can fuck around their idiot faces.

I have been thinking of all the stuff I have pending at home, stuff to do, that I have work to the end of the year. This post begins with two pictures of my home office, where in one of them I am drinking a brewsky.

I now have another Amiga 1200 on order because the one I have now is in its original non-accelerated state and has the 3.1 kickstart ROMS in it. I have a PiStorm 32 that I have to put to some use, so I got this new amiga to put it in. I am now finally installing the kickstart 3.1.2 ROMS and Workbench in a SD card to boot on the PiStorm and try that out.

I also bought the 3.2 kickstart and Workbench so I can also try that with the PiStorm. This is a great acceleration platform to try new versions of the operating system. Just put everything in a Raspbian SD card and go from there.

It's been years since I used to make drawings. I used to draw in my pre-teen years at school and at home, but since I got into computers I had lost interest. Mostly because I don't have much inspiration on what subjects should I draw. I like landscapes, nature and lastly I have been doing a lot of marine scenes. The explanation for that, is a book I was given many years ago, on techinques to draw ships and harbours.

I have been doing some courses on an art related online teching platform, so I can expand my skills to draw other subject matters. I am sticking for now with ink pens and graphite, but I would also like to learn water colour. I bought the suppliees a few years ago, but that never really took off. I am now trying to get into the habit of sitting down and drawing more to improve my technique and widen my imagination.

I have now 13 NeXT machines and one NeXT Dimension board. I really nedd to do recapping of the capacitors on the boards. The ones I got through my regular supplier are already done. But the ones I got in the wild are not. They are not very difficult to do, because they have a low electrolytic capacitor count, and they alre all through hole. Just need to check the values and purchase the replacements in quantity.

Fourteen years ago went to Paris to stay there for three months. I was in training for a job in the company where I work nowadays. One of those days, it was international Marijuana day. By then I had quit smoking shit, but the encounter I had with the protesters that day, brought me fond memories of the times I was a pot head.

I got the chance to film it and upload it to my youtube channel.

I am making a 10-way KVM switch to be able to operate all the NeXT mono stations I have been hoarding during the past years. With this I am going to just use just one monitor, keyboard and mouse to use them all. Then I have to find a way of shutting them down through the network, still don't know how to do that. I am using the open source KiCad software to create the schematic and, will attempt to simulate the circuit before sending it to be printed.

The water temperature is just right. Sun all day long, warm weather, and good food. And a lot of rest, and doing nothing. Those are the perfect vacation days. Nothing to worry about.

Just started to make contacts to the next wave of vintage computer hardware I will be getting when I go back home. Two more NeXT slabs for my collection. Just can't have enough of them. These are going to my crazy scientist laboratory. I am going to try to make a KVM switch for connecting one sound box with keyboard and mouse to more than one NeXT machine. Need to get my IBM Xeon server installed with a server version of MS Windows. Still missing that ecosystem from my collection. I will be setting up a Domain-Controller, and then put the windows clients I have on the domain.

I also plan to seriously get into learning to play the guitar. I just finished reading a book that may help me a bit in structuring my practice schedule. Heck, I have a lot of music gear, production stuff also, and I still can't play a shitty song on a guitar. All those GAS attacks I had In the past will have to materialize in me getting my shit toghether and actually start learning.

Back to doing stuffs on the computer. I have this text editor that I was doing in BASIC for the sinclair ZX spectrum, and I was coding it in the actual machine. Which is a pain, because the spectrum keyboard works in a different way than other keyboards. You press a key and out comes a BASIC language keyword. So you have to remember where each keyword is on the keyboard, in order to type the programs.

So I gave up on that. And also on vacation I don't have access to a zx machine, I got a tool off the internet, that allows me to type the program in a regular text editor, and generate a tape archive that I can load in a emulator (that's what I am doing now), or a real ZX spectrum. The tools name is zmakebas and is very minimal. It does not validate the BASIC program, it just converts it to a text format accepted by the ZX spectrum.

So I am now copying the program from the tape archive I have since last developing it, by loading it in the emulator and typing it in a text window in the guest machine. Its kind of boring, but one of the things I like doing in computers is pressing the keys, so no problem.

Problems, problems, problems. I couldn't care less. With the outcome of my quick plan, this planet is headed for a 'no future' kind of situation. Millions of birds will just wither away slowly, while hiding in the confines of big cities, and the rest of us will be headed for greatness.

And I'm sitting here in my mom's beach house, eating grilled fish, and enjoying the sun and the beach. Two weeks of this and my batteries will be recharged to go back to work and do all that shit I have at home in my backlog. I have said what needed to be said, and that's that.

And to all those morons that listen to my phone calls and my retarded neighbor family that lives above me, just stop to think a little, how you have been seeing in which part of my apartment I'm in and how with my excellent plan of action, have reached your house, and am going to kick your asses out of there.

Facebook has been a great tool to communicate what I needed to say. First all the stuff I have been buying and what I have been doing with it. Then came the big annoucement. They way I let the world know how I ripped off these morons and left them to die on the side of the road. But life goes on. From now on I will be posting only positive stuff about what I do, and how I do it. Life is so much more than a side project of getting rid of a bunch of stupid people.

I have a ton of stuff on my hands at the moment. Below is a short list :

• Continue to develop the tool that lets me easily and quickly add blog posts to my personal website
• I have some reading to catch up. I recently subscribed to the O'Reilly platform to have access to a ton of books and information on computer systems and other topics.
• I recently got an IBM Intel based server. I have to buy some SSD's and a Windows server license to set it up
• I have a few computers that need repair on refurbishment. Got to get that going
• I am currently porting a xml rpc client server software to NeXTStep. I now have communication, but need to debug more.
• I integrated a file upload/download app into shampoos, and need to make image thumbnail previews on the directory listings
• Continue on the Boobs project, where I now am getting to the point where I left off a few years ago.
• Continue the GNUStep feature I started working on. Now it does not sound a good idea as when I came up with it, but I will turn it into code to see if it works
• Get my shit together in my sub simulation project. I was in the process of generating the 3D view of the landscape, and need to get back to that.
• I want to make an alarm clock that synchronizes the time and date through NNTP. I am tired of having to set the time on my current alarm clock whenever the power goes out and back on.
• I have my first robot done. Must get back to that. Need to make a new method of aproximating curved trajectories and put the stop motion switches to work
• Install Free BSD on my Intel Mac Mini
• I just received DSP memory in the mail from the US, to put in my NeXT cubes.