[Coco] Where did you get that? - - - WAS -> Getting .pdf copies of patents for free

[wdg3rd at comcast.net]

From: "Rogelio Perea" <os9dude at gmail.com>
> Ok, I'll bring my "I own a TRS-80" ribbon and tack it to one of the monitors
> in my workstation at the office... see who many pay attention and *what*
> they ask/comment...

I'd do that, except I know I'd never get anything except blank stares.  The office sells truck box parts and is a purely (except where I've snuck in services that work better on the machine I switched to Linux to do some real work on the catalog and website) XP shop.  Funny, there's less SPAM in the email lately.  But I'm basically a clerk (I burned out on the tech support and sysadmin stuff, waiting until La Esposa is finally willing to dump this house and move up to New Hampshire and open the restaurant) and that is mostly low stress.  (The newspaper ad said "Computer Guy", but I'm mostly a clerk and paid a clerks wage).

After over a quarter century, I'll be a janitor before I'll do tech support again.  Less pay but less liver damage.  Anybody with my Y-chromosome that didn't die of Black Lung died from liver damage.  And while I spent half my life in Los Angeles, smog doesn't cause black lung like the mines did, and like many of my ancestors I drink more than is healthy.  (My grandfather and my father married weaklings when it comes to defense against liver damage, eugenics in the wrong direction).

But I have my Color Computers in the basement (every major version except the MC-10) along with the Mod 1, the Mod 2, the 4 and 4p, the 6000HD and several Mod 100s.  So I try to keep my hand in.  I learned back I'll never be a serious coder (my main language is the Bourne shell and its descendants Korn shell and BASH) so I play Doubleback while waiting for inspiration to show up.

(I really, really want that restaurant to happen -- New Hampshire needs real chili, made of meat not hamburger, beans on the side, not cooked in.  Ghod nose I could have used that when I was living there in the early '70s, my high school years).
--
Ward Griffiths    wdg3rd at comcast.net

"What I know [about the art of the sword] boils down to this:  If you see a guy running at you with a sword, put two rounds in his chest to slow him down, then one into his brain to finish him off".  Aaron Allston, _Sidhe Devil_