Rico Mariani has posted a very interesting and excellent blog entry that is essentially a history of Microsoft programming languages and environments. In it, I learned that C# is actually a recycled name.

So where am I? Ah yes, 1988. The project I'd been hired to work on was cancelled after a few months (I expect I'm in good company on that score), that project by the way was a cute variant on the C language designed for incremental compilation - it was called, cough, C#. Strangely, through the lens of 2009, it looks remarkably like what you would get if you tried to make C.Net.

I must have blocked some traumatic memories because he reminds me about working in some very tight memory space.

Now the thing about having only 640k of memory and trying to have an IDE is that you can't actually expect the thing to be loaded and running while you're doing something like a build, or debugging, or basically anything other than editing really because you simply don't have the memory.

He tries not to drop names, but I remember working with the Borland products, Power C, and dabbling in Modula-2 in my off-time.

For those of you that can't stand the old, smelly, bearded guy, that drops by your cube to tell you about programming with punch cards (guilty), this may not be the post for you.

In 1984, I voted for Mondale/Ferraro. The race that year was pathetic, but the one thing I knew was that I didn't want Reagan/Bush for another 4 years. The U.S. was entering into a really bad social, economic, and spiritual time. We were leaving people on the streets, Wall St. was running amok, and religious zealots were getting more than their share of access to the halls of power.

About the only thing I agreed with Reagan on was the handling of the USSR. I was finishing up an extended hitch in the USAF, I was an MTI (drill instructor to the uninitiated) at Lackland AFB, TX, and I was taking heat for my political views and the Mondale sticker on the back of my 1980 Chevy Shovette...Chevette(remember the hatchback?)

We knew back then that Ted Kennedy was a self absorbed, self entitled prick. But now comes this. I had heard from a friend in the intel circles a few years ago that with the fall of the USSR and the access to KGB records came a wealth of information. He had told me that a number of high placed politicians were almost certainly "agents" of the USSR. He may have been referring to Kennedy.

I've read this, about Kennedy trying to get the Soviets to influence the American people so that he could be drafted by the Democrats to run against Reagan. He conspired, or offered to, with the avowed enemy of the USA for his own political power.

As a military man, who knows some of the people under headstones in Arlington and other national cemeteries, it turns my stomach to think of this traitor lying amongst our heroes.

I will not dishonor the others there by pissing on his grave the next time I'm there, but I will not honor him, nor will I weep for his passing.

Akahige's Rules of Causes

For every cause, there exists spokespersons who produce more negative images, feelings, press, and other sundry effects regarding the cause.

The most extreme elements of that cause will tout the same spokesperson(s) as the saviour of the movement.

The same spokesperson is usually the loudest voice in the room and if not chosen as the saviour of the movement, will appoint themselves as such.

If the saviour of the movement is criticized, questioned, or it appears they are challenged by others, the backers of that saviour will attack, excoriate, deride the perceived attackers.

Once a Saviour of the Movement has been appointed/annointed the cause becomes religious in nature and has less to do with reason and more to do with jihadist fervor.