I have never been tempted to go for a first post, until now.

http://meta.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=313513&op=Reply&threshold=2&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=20811157

I saw the 10th anniversary discussion pop up, with no comments, as I was checking email this morning. I've never even seen a first post opportunity before. I've never gone for it. And here was the chance to get the 10th anniversary first post.

I had only seconds to think. What would I say? How could I craft the perfect post?

I couldn't. I had to go for something simple, short, quick to type.

I went for a post that would:
a) seem completely banal.
b) show the 'typical' slashdot bravado about lower user nums being better.
c) NOT mention the first post. That was a tough call, but I thought it would be better to seem as if I didn't care about such a 'monumental' accomplishment. As though I were just posting because I thought my comment were actually germane to the conversation.

All in all, for 5 seconds of thought, I feel like it came off ok. If I'd had more time I would have tried to craft something more interesting, but I had no idea this was coming up.

Happened to notice this post, but it was too old to reply:

  by eddy the lip (20794) Alter Relationship on Mon Aug 15, '05 03:28 PM (#13326226)

(sorry, been away from slashdot for a few days, or I would have replied sooner).

You got me on that one - I never did this myself. A friend way back in the day claimed to have jacked his TRS-80 up to 1MB. Now, this was many years ago, when people actually used the TRS-80 for other than geek nostalgia value, so I may be misremembering (or have been outright duped. I was young. It could happen....) He bragged to me about it 'cause I was stuck with the standard 32KB.

A bit of googling didn't turn up anything that would substantiate the viability of the claim. And now I have an unresolved mystery from my youth to contend with. Thanks a lot ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_Z80 (the processor in the TRS-80)

16 bit address registers + 8 bit data = 64k bytes memory max.
Hence your friend with the 1MB was lying.
Well, maybe he managed to solder on a MB chip, but the TRS-80 couldn't have used it.

If you're wondering why I friended you, it's usually that you posted something I found interesting, and I don't want to trust the moderators to interesting your other posts.

For anyone interested, squish has changed quite a bit since I last journaled. I have worked on the layout to make it more friendly for 800x600 resolution. It also no longer requires accepting an applet signature, which seemed to scare some people.

http://ptth.net/squish/

Please journal comments here.

There is now a how to play page linked from the main page.

Note: requires java 5. If you don't have Java 5 installed and usable from your browser, you'll get a class loader error in your java console, or an applet loading failure. I'm interested in pretty much any other bug reports, as there is nothing I can do about how Sun handles these errors (I've had no error reports so far that did not trace back to not having Java 5 installed & set up to be used from the browser).

Well, now that I have lots of friends fans foes and freaks, I think my new slashdot goal will have to be the octuple crown. To get one post to have one rating each of each of the 8 ratings:

Insightful Offtopic Interesting Flamebait Funny Troll Informative Redundant

So far I've gotten one post with 5 different ratings, and one post with six ratings with two duplicates.

Recently I got asked for an explanation of my sig.

For anyone who doesn't recognize who Steven Hawking is, he is a fairly famous physicist. Pretty much as famous as you can get as a physicist without being Albert Einstein. He has written a number of bestselling books about physics. And he has accomplished all that he has while confined to a wheel chair, speaking with the aid of a computer voice synthesizer.

His quote refers to a situation in which he stole a physics idea from an associate. When the associate complained that in all fairness the idea was his, Steven Hawking replied with the quote from my sig:

"Who is The Journal Of Quantum Physics going to believe?"

Of course, the quote is taken grossly out of context, and is in fact from an animated humor television program called Futurama. However, Steven Hawking did in fact portray (a perhaps more evil version of) himself, and did in fact actually speak those words, so the quote is factually accurate on its face. And who knows, maybe Steven Hawking actually does steal (as most Ph.Ds do) ideas from associates and claim them as his own.

I like the quote because it emphasizes one of my favorite pet peeves: an (in my opinion) excessive trust in our society of authority. I think the quote is particularly relevant to slashdot, where seemingly 87% of all the postings are from people claiming to have knowledge and authority on a subject that they do not actually have. Worse, responsive postings seem to suggest that many people are taking this 'information' as a factual resource. To help combat this problem, I deliberately include gross misinformation in about 1 in 5 of my posts.

Anyway, that's the explanation of my sig.

A small update to this: after a recent flamewar over a post that was actually just intended to be factual, I realized it might help to clarify that I only post misinformation that can be easily falsified by google search, and pretty much exclusively on political topics (in other words, not in games.slashdot.org).