Jason Scott's Weblog
Blockparty already has the dates for next year, thanks to the forward-thinking efforts and planning of the Notacon crew: April 4-6, 2008. I’ve already gotten general commitment from 4-5 speakers or workshop presenters, pending a number of factors. The magic number is 4; there have never been 4 successive iterations of a demo party in […]
So some time ago I acquired 120,000 mods. MODs, in this context, are music files. Created in the 1980s as a brilliant way to save space while giving you good music, they’re basically collections of music samples paired with sequencing data, all inside one file. Like a lot of very brilliant things, it either makes […]
Quag7, one of my contemporaries and collaborators, absolutely nails how to put up an informative webpage about a technically geeky and nostalgic subject. (Archive) I thought I’d spend a little time describing what about this page I like so much that makes me think of it as an absolute nailing, so it might explain other […]
So, I’ve had this HVX-200 camera, this monstrosity that I and 50 really great people paid for, and perhaps it’s time to just give some overview/insight/thoughts on the thing, since I’ve been living with it through over 60 interviews of various types (as well as a lot of recreational/test footage and one music video). A […]
I was reminded recently of the joy and hazards of following referrers. Referrers are one of those things that, if it hadn’t already been extant at the starting gun of the world wide web, would have been decried as a privacy-killing who-sis, but which, because it existed as part of the initial technology, an awful […]
Peter Hirschberg, who I raved about some time ago, did a bunch of animation and graphics and design work for a documentary called Chasing Ghosts, about arcades. (Don’t worry, my film’s on a somewhat different trajectory.) Besides being a great programmer and nostalgia engineer, he’s also a really, really good design/graphics guy. I was struck […]
I got the DEFCON Schedule and browsed it for my location. Point of fact, I got an excellent time-frame: 9pm, Friday. People will have arrived in droves, Dinner will potentially be had, and folks will be open to hearing my stories and suggestions around computer history. But then my eyes drift to the left, and […]
I’ve tried to figure out when a portion of software and application development started to truly hate its users. First, we need to go back in time a bit, to 1983. IBM PCs are still sparkling new. Time magazine has made the personal computer “machine of the year” because of the effect it’s having. Comparatively, […]
Another day, another person telling me I wouldn’t be interested in them and they’re not interested in being interviewed. In this case, it was a coin-op and electronics business somewhat near my home. They put the whole shebang up for sale on Craigslist ($175k, firm!) and included some numbers to call. What the heck’s to […]
I spent a good portion of the weekend not doing much of anything. While at an interview on Friday, I called my buddy Chris and asked if he had some time and a couch. And he did. So instead of running around, instead of doing a bunch of technical stuff, and instead of touching computers, […]