My first computer was an 8086 Epson Equity II monochrome screen, dual 5.25" floppy disks, no hard drive so the only thing I can do on it that was worthwhile was make my own text adventure games. I followed GW-BASIC book and had a blast! I made music using sheet music and painstakingly convert notes into Hz and made silly games. Granted I was about 9 or 10 years old at the time, but I was annoyed I couldn't do more. Eventually when I got a colour computer (CGA), I had a blast playing with colours and different graphic modes (or screens as it was in QBasic, I think it was screen 12 that I liked the most. I heard about C/C++ and I thought it was stupid, thought BASIC was the way to go (I was a tween or so), then when I got into high school we started playing with Pascal. I found some site in the Netherlands that was a Pascal god doing crazy shit with assembly and I emailed him for help and he graciously did, and my teacher used my rocket ship as an example of what the students were doing on back to school night (it was the centre piece, other students had theirs up too). It was pretty cool. When I became a senior the college board switched from Pascal to C++ so I retook Intro to comp sci to learn C++ and I am glad I did. Not only do I love the language now, loathe basic (ironic, isn't it?), but it helped learn so many other languages that are C-based. While I never formally learned K&R C, I been meaning to pickup their book for quite some time. I think it'll help with learning Objective C, but anyway, I digress. To answer the question I am self taught to get the basics (no pun intended) and was formally educated after getting a descent elementary grasp. I suppose in Elementary school, we were taught Logo, so I suppose that counted, but I guess I never saw it as programming other than maybe scripting or telling a computer to draw something, so yeah I guess it does count. Though in middle school, we had Lego Logo which was sick, having lego projects interact with the logo code we wrote.

yes drinking water after each drink is good, i also might add drinking a litre before bed to be a good option as well. and if your stomach can tolerate it, taking two ASA tablets wouldn't be a bad idea either.

That's why I use the Privacy settings. The people I add for those stupid Facebook games I put in a special group that sees none of my personal information. Just access to the game and no more. The games own websites provide instructions on doing so usually as a sticky on the very forums where people swap Facebook handles!

I don't user a colour laser jet for photos, I use it for reports and other things one used to use a colour inkjet for. For photos I will use a dyesub printer from the local store down the road. I know what you were referring to that getting a b&w printer is a good investment for the quality, though there are instances when a decent colour laser is needed too. You can get comparable quality with a deskjet, sure, yes the price is a tad high, but I change replace toners maybe twice a year. Or less. It is a network printer so depends how often my family prints to it as well.

The problem is I bought my colour laser printer for $300, due to a crazy promotion I got through one of our vendors in the office. Toner is about $70 each. It is still more expensive to buy four new toners than it is to buy a new HP Colour LaserJet since they now always have promotions. Sure the toner lasts much longer than those 4 ml ink carts, but still, I've been tempted to buy a new printer, if only to get the latest thing. I hate to waste, and too lazy to reprogram my Cisco router to issue its new static IP since I do it via hardware address on the router.

I suppose I am old enough to when I got my licence about 13 years ago, I had to rely on going to the motor club to get my free maps and just learn the back roads. Even though my current car I own today does have a Sat-Nav built-in, I seldom use the directional part of it and just mainly use it for the map itself since I get that auto-scrolling map of where my car is and I can locate a detour if needed. Heck, I took a cross-country trip a few years ago with a friend and we just relied on maps and the GPS map, not it routing where I am going. Though I remember when I first was driving I didn't even know my town that well since I was always driven by my parents and never paid any attention where we were going. I was embarrassed to say I had to use MapQuest to get to the local ice cream store across town which was 6 km away! But soon afterwards, I just drove anywhere and everywhere and I didn't rely on using MapQuest any longer because I got the feel of the road. I remember when I was still a senior in high school, a friend of mine needed a lift to get his car from a service station several towns away. It was around rush hour when we got there, so I didn't want to take the motorway back to his house so I took the back roads and when we got back home, my friend was really amazed how we did that. And I had no Sat-Nav unit that told me where to go, I just know where I was and which roads went where but taking them in the past.

Well I was in classes all morning at university when the attacks occurred. There is no central PA system, so nobody had a clue. On the way to my next class is where a janitor told me about what happened. Even then, it didn't register how tragic the events were because it was all second-hand information, so I just went into my next class. I just thought it was like what happened last time, a car bomb blew up, and little damage was really done.

Just as class started, somebody came in screaming the WTC just collapses, my wife works there, I'm going to try to call her!!

The teacher didn't know what to do, so he kept teaching. Half the class was ignoring him, trying to call family and friends, my dad worked near the WTC so I left and called, and thankfully he was all right. But the point is, even with all these technologies, it wouldn't of helped me. Up to the second news is simply stupid really. It can wait until I get to a terminal to read it.