tales from an ordinary world

1999-08-10

So I'm listening to the The Trinity Sessions, by the Cowboy Junkies. I got it on the weekend, about 10 or 11 years after everyone else did, but of course, back in those days I still thought Pink Floyd (or maybe Joe Satriani) was the best thing that ever happened to music. I was a much less complex person at 16...I pretty much just assumed I'd go and do computer science and end up in some programming job or other that'd be heaps of fun and that'd be my life. I had a good group of friends at high school, who I still keep in touch with today (one of whom I'm sharing a unit/flat with at the moment). I may have, at 16, still been convinced the world would end in a nuclear war one day, although I suspect I got over that fear a year or two earlier. Despite my claims of a lack of complexity, I was certainly a very awkward teenager, though. Even then I worried a lot about things. The more I try to think about it though, the less I can remember about 1989. I was in year 11, the second-last year of high school.

Aha ! My notes ! I just remembered. Ever since the end of 1988, I started carrying a notebook with me (these days I have a Palm V, but it's all the same in the end). I had so many ideas in my head I had to write them down somewhere. Sometimes it was horribly abbreviated, such that a few months later I had no idea what I'd written down (much less 10 years later...I mean, wtf does "play R on the S on g." mean ?) All that Pascal programming I was doing (I'd been using Turbo Basic before that). Reminders of records (and later, CDs) that I wanted to get. Friends to talk to. Things I had to do for school. Back then, I was obsessed with quotes, and prompted by something Dad mentioned about a program on some "unix"^* box he used at work that gave you a random quote when you logged in (he'd printed them all out for me), I wrote myself a program that took a file full of quotes and printed one at random.

^* It wouldn't be until 1991 before we had some sort of unix at home - first Xenix/386, then SCO Open Desktop (40 floppies of it !), and, in August 1992, 5 floppies of MCC Linux graced our computer for the first time...

I'm poking through the first notebook, from the and of 1988. There's ideas for some program or other I was trying to write, that I think was meant to be some sort of Natural Language shell thing...Phone numbers for bulletins boards I used to call, "Maxitel" being one I used to frequent...Info I'd worked out from hacking about in save game files for an old role-playing computer game called The Bard's Tale...A folded up bit of A4 paper at the back, with really bad poetry on it (it rhymed, but at what cost ?), lamenting various things - the usual teen angst kind of stuff, plus one mentioning my best friend in year 11 or 12, who I clung to like a leech. He went off to do medicine at uni, and we never saw each other again.

Onto one of my 1989 notebooks. Results from Formula 1 and 500cc grand prix races - For some reason or other, I'd been writing a program in Turbo Pascal, about 1500 lines or so (plus another 1500 lines or so of library code I wrote that did text-mode windows and menus and mouse handling and stuff like that) that tracked the progress of Formula 1 teams over a year, graphing positions through the races and all that sort of stuff. I wrote it as much for the library code as anything, really, but it was fun and hell, at least I was using my brain for something vaguely useful.

A quote (from William Blake ?) I'd written on 2 pages in a row - "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." Reminders of where to go to play the compulsory Saturday morning sport - "Xavier, 9am on the chapel oval. White shorts !". More quotes written down to remind myself to put in my quote program...A reminder to "yell at Lionel" (the friend I mentioned above). I wonder what for ? Details for going and seeing The The at Festival Hall when they came touring that year (1989) - I remember my friend, who was a Smiths fan at the time (I didn't catch on to them until a few years later), going on about it being the first time Johnny Marr was coming to Australia. Sure enough, there were plenty of Morrissey fans at the concert, with the hairdos and the t-shirts, trying to dance to Matt Johnson's music.

Where was this entry going ? I'm really not sure...