Robin Harbron

Here’s big sisters Heidi and Rianna holding the newest of their ilk, Kyla Jane Harbron, born at 7:29 a.m. on October 24th, 2005. She weighed in at 10 pounds, 14 ounces, and both mom and baby are doing great.

Before I continue (finally), I want to publically thank Dave Ross and Scott (I think it’s McCoy but I’m not sure because the swrapexpo.org site seems to be missing) for putting on another great Expo. (Dave: very cool that Amy did the NaNoWriMo last year.)

I had heard that Paul Slocum was going to be at the Expo this year, and was really looking forward to meeting him. I was actually somewhat preoccupied with looking for him during the day, and I was getting nervous he was a no-show when it was late afternoon, and the show was about to end. Paul rates very high on my personal cool-o-meter because not only is he a C-64 programmer (my favourite platform), an exceptionally good Atari 2600 programmer (my second fav. platform) and a musician (music is my next favourite hobby after video games and computers), but he combines all three in his band, Treewave.

Anyway, he did show up with mutual friend Bohus (check out his website – eventually he wants to have a weekly video blog there, and he did post one, it’s about halfway down and quite fun) right at the end, and we got to talk for a while. Quite cool to talk about music, coding, art, and all that sort of thing, and he knew about some of my stuff (like Minima and Splatform and the DTV) so that was quite gratifying.

We then packed up and it was time for our annual tradition – skipping the annual post-Expo meal and striking out on our own. This time we went to Dave and Busters, which is the most gigantinormous restaurant I’ve ever been in. There’s actually a map of the place when you walk in, so you can figure out where you want to go. There’s a big games area, casino type thing, billiards, bar, and lots and lots of tables in different areas. It was pretty overwhelming, and part of our crew actually bailed out to just head back to the hotel. The remainder of us had a good time – we had to wait an hour for a table, but the time went quickly. The food and company were great.

Back to the hotel after for the post-expo party, where a couple dozen of the people left gather, set up computers, play music, and talk loudly. At this point I bought a Cynthcart from Paul. I still haven’t tried it out, but when I do, I’ll blog about it.

I didn’t feel so great later in the evening, so I turned in relatively early, while the revelry continued well into the night.

Though you might not believe it (I certainly didn’t for quite a while), I am (or at least, have been) a professional writer, if by professional writer I can mean “have been paid to write”, even if it was just $50 an article for a monthly newsletter about 8-bit Commodore computers (and that was pretty good money, in my opinion).

This initial success gave me a bit of confidence, and eventually I came to think of myself as a writer, at least, sort of, and this led me to start blogging when the opportunity arose. But I still don’t consider myself a real writer, since I’ve never really “paid my dues” by working through a big project. A friend of mine has, by completing his first novel (or is there a more fancy word for it?) and that is both inspirational and remarkable to me. He’s a real writer, and if he ever makes money from it, then he’ll really be a really real writer.

Although this can’t be compared to the effort he’s put into his book, I’m intrigued by the upcoming National Novel Writing Month. Tens of thousands enter each year, and it seems about 1 in 7 actually win, by achieving the goal of writing a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. More information can be found on their About page. I’m really considering joining in – any other takers?

Also, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure type books have always interested me, despite their general campiness. I have a fairly large collection of the genre. Another Robin has started writing one in his blog, where readers get to vote on what happens next. The storyline hooked me right away, and so I’m eagerly awaiting the next installment of Angels and Operators.

Travelling to Chicago is my annual chance to listen to a bunch of cool tapes from my aging collection. This year I brought a bag of about 50 cassettes. I play a bit of a game with it, randomly drawing a tape out and listening to the whole thing, whether I like it or not. I listened to 31 tapes this trip – and I only lost once – I just could not finish one of them.

Only because it might spark some discussion, here’s what I listened to:

Stuff I really enjoyed:
MxPx: On the Cover, Crowded House: Crowded House, PFR: Great Lengths, joy electric: We Are The Music Makers, the choir: love songs and prayers (a retrospective) and wide-eyed wonder, Various: Never Say Dinosaur, Midnight Oil: Red Sails in the Sunset, Charlie Peacock: West Coast Diaries Volume Two, Randy Stonehill: Wonderama, john schlitt: unfit for swine, Monty Python: The final rip off, poor old lu: sin, the dustkickers: the dustkickers, Seventy Sevens: 88, Petra: Petra, Hokus Pick: the B-Sides and Bookaboom, R.E.M.: Automatic for the People, Richard Pepper: Greatest Hits, Nice Teeth, Look, STEVE, CAMP songs, Kindness, Working Title

Stuff I managed to listen all the way through:
The Dream Academy: The Dream Academy, Seventy Sevens: tom tom Blues, INXS: Live Baby Live, Phil Keaggy: true believer, Holy Soldier: encore, Rich Mullins: Brother’s Keeper

The only tape that beat me in my game:
Charlie Peacock: Everything That’s On My Mind

Saturday – expo day!

As usual, Friday night hanging-out-itude went way too late, so we were late for the 9 a.m. start time. Mark and I (the two dads) managed to wake up well before Adrian – this too, is usual.

The conference room was once again in the basement of banishment. I think that the conversation between expo organizers and hotel staff must go something like this: “What sort of people are you expecting at your conference?” “We’re vintage computer users and hackers.” “Oh, you’re geeks? We’ll put you in the basement then.”

It also seems to be a rule that Commodore expos are held on days with perfect weather. Even at the Toronto show in *December* it was so nice that I sat outside the hotel in short-sleeves!

Although we used the elevator most of the time since we had equipment to haul, I was glad to use the stairs once so we could re-witness the Level of Discharge sign (picture from 2003).

Dave Haynie was at the expo. He was an engineer for Commodore back in the day (and right to the bitter end in 1994). He played a major role in creating a lot of the hardware Commodore was famous for. Quite cool.

Mark and I were supposed to do a demo of Steve Judd’s Slang langugage. I had a lot of trouble transferring the files from the interweb over to my SCPU machine. I only managed to get the whole package running properly right at the end of the day, when there was little time left to show anyone. I actually had to hex edit the disk directory to fix the filenames – I guess the file transfer software was putting illegal chars in the file names. We did manage to hand out a fair number of Slang quick reference sheets we had photo-copied, so maybe that’ll get a few more people interested.

I managed to pick up a fair bit of C-64 stuff, cheap as free. I should have time in the coming weeks to go through it and have a play/try. I’m particularly interested in some of the educational stuff, such as a digital thermometer you can plug into the C64 and some accompanying science-experiment type software.

Part Two later…

Sorry about my absence. I’ve got drafts of the rest of my expo experience, but I’ve been finding it difficult to write, and there have been plenty of distractions.

Two weeks ago I found out I would finally get a job interview for a programming position I had applied for back in August. Knowing there was going to be a test to “determine my programming skills” I studied all weekend. There were no details given about what would actually be on the test, so I could only make some educated guesses. I wrote my first Java program, I brushed up on my SQL, reviewed some of the PHP programs I’d written in the spring, and read an awful lot of articles on Wikipedia.

The interview was on Monday, and I thought the actual interview went pretty good. I was also given a chance to show some of my recent (commercial game) projects where I’ve been credited as lead programmer, and also ended up being a project manager, at a certain level of the project, anyway. The written test went very poorly though. In my opinion, it ended up being a sort of trivia-quiz, with most of the questions being specific things you look up in books or google when you’re programming. They didn’t have to do with the fundamentals of systems analysis or programming, they had a lot more to do with fine points that just prove you have a good memory or lots of experience with a very narrow part of computering. Well, that’s my take on it.

I was told last Tuesday that I didn’t get the job, due to my lack of experience, and my poor performance on the test. I was very disappointed. Talking to my computer-type friends that evening, I found out it had been a rough day for many of them – one guy had his computer die (tragic for folks like us, and at least expensive for more regular-type people), two guys were having a whole bunch of frustrating problems at work, and to put everything in perspective, another friend was told that evening by his wife that she was ending their marriage. Things don’t seem to have gotten any better on that front in the past week, either.

It was all a reminder that I have plenty to be thankful for, and getting hung up on this disappointment isn’t going to do me any good. Admittedly, I’m very excited by all the possibilities that are ahead, so that makes it much easier to be positive too. More on that later, I think.

I’m already back in Thunder Bay, and wasn’t able to do much writing while I was away, so I’ll work on catching up with my trip blog over this week. Back to Friday…

While I was still waiting for folks to show up, I thought I’d take a (short) hike and find some lunch. Only a McDonalds and Burger King were visible from the hotel parking lot, so choosing the lesser of two evils, I went towards the B.K. The hotel property is nicely landscaped, including a tidy sidewalk, so I followed that. But as soon as the property ended, so did the sidewalk – and instead of leading just to grass or something, it lead right into a small swamp. Rather than that, I ended up having to walk right on the curb of this busy 6-lane Chicago street. I’ve never seen a less pedestrian-friendly location. Then I needed to cross the next intersection. There still wasn’t any sidewalk, nor any indication of how or where pedestrians should cross. It somehow seemed somewhat safer to cross about 30 feet down from the intersection, but then I got marooned on the median, stuck between traffic. There were guys wandering up and down all 4 medians at the intersection, all wearing red shirts that said “Mental Retards” in big letters. It seemed like they were trying to collect money from passing cars, presumably to help Mental Retards. Sure enough, I was also wearing a red shirt, and felt extremely conspicuous.

I finally reached the Burger King, and was rewarded with the most dull, bland, disinteresting onion rings I’ve ever experienced. There was also some guy there with what I guess were his girlfriend/wife and mother-in-law. He was a strange composite of a couple people I know, and at least one semi-famous actor/TV personality, and really stood out. I felt like I should start talking to him, but didn’t.

I returned to the van, and then Adrian and Mark showed up. We spent the first while figuring out how to communicate (this is an annual event – it generally involves me slowing down my speech, and adding “Eh?” to the end of every sentence until they seem to clue in).

We hung out for a bit in the Hospitality Suite and saw a few other Expo-goers. We also went to Portillo’s (a very excellent hot dog etc. type restaraunt, which has 20 locations in Chicago, and none anywhere else) for supper, and I had an excellent chili dog, much to the eventual dismay of my roomates.

Okay, Saturday Expo stuff next!

I left for Chicago Thursday after work. I took the two benches out of the van, and in their place put in an air mattress, sleeping bag, and a bunch of computer stuff.

I had thought I was being really clever when I bought a bunch of cheap sandwich type things at Superstore for the trip. Actually, it was really dumb. As I drove towards the border I started thinking about the beef ban. I managed to get through to Carla on the cell phone, and with some Googling she found that all “processed beef” products were banned. Not wanting any border hassles, I threw all the food out before I got to the border.

Good thing too, because for the first time in my 9 solo geek-event outings, I got stopped and searched at the border. It seemed the guy thought I was participating in some big computer show, like I was a vendor or something. It’s useless arguing with these guys, of course, so what could I do but just co-operate. It ended up being fine, though it did delay me by almost an hour, meaning I ended up having to do a fair bit of the north-shore drive to Duluth in the dark. Fear of hitting a deer or moose really gets to me. I even spotted a deer right on the edge of the road, but it must have been one of those uber-intelligent evolved deer I read about somewhere. It just watched me go by.

I slept at the wayside just north of Eau Claire, WI on highway 53, and made it safely to the Expo hotel early Friday afternoon. I am now hanging out in the back of my van in the hotel parking lot, listening to MxPx’s “On the Cover”, surfing on a open WiFi connection I found, waiting for Adrian and Mark to show.

Fall has pretty much always been my favourite time of year. My birthday and Thanksgiving always fall close together in October, and those days have always meant good food, presents, and good times with family and friends. I also like fall weather the best – it’s the only time of year I really like being outside.

More recently, fall has meant it’s time for my annual pilgrimage to the Chicago area, to the SWRAP Fall Commodore Expo. I’ll be heading there next weekend (Lord willing and the creek don’t rise) for my 8th consecutive time. I do like checking out the computers and what people are doing with them, but it’s the friends I’ve made there that really make the difference.

This year in particular it’ll be great to see them in person after pulling countless all-nighters to meet deadlines on some of the commercial game projects we’ve virtually worked on together over the past year. It’s amazing that we got through those jobs and still get along fine. I can only assume it’s due to mutual respect, as each of us had low and high points on the projects. It’s great to have a chance to impress your peers with a brilliant idea, or piece of code, or whatever.

Thinking about it more, I think it’s the team aspect that’s really drawn us together. People working together, relying on one another to achieve goals that they could not attain alone. And when you share success, you want to celebrate it. Now this is making me think of the coming NHL season. Go Leafs! 🙂

Friday, July 1st, 2005 (Canada Day):

Not a whole lot happened our last day of vacation, so I can editorialize a bit more.

After leaving the hotel, we went back up to the shopping district of Duluth, north west of town. We hit the big Target which in name, if not location or anything else, is where I bought my first Commodore 64, 21 years ago. Wandering the toy aisles (man, it took me a while to find the spelling of aisles) I found a “Constructible Strategy Game” called Pirates of the Spanish Main. I’m a sucker for stuff about pirates, even though I’ve wasted a bunch of money in the past on similar games based on Star Trek and Lord of the Rings. In each case I’ve only played a couple games of each (with Richard) and found them lacking. But then, I find most games lacking.

However, this Pirates game is nifty, if only because you can make neat little minature pirate ship models with the cards, and the rules are very similar to Car Wars. Here’s hoping SJ Games will decide to relaunch Car Wars yet again and steal back the ideas that Pirates have taken.

I also ran into the Kmart on a hunch, and found a bunch of cheap pop (4 cases for $9) so I stocked up on Cherry Coke for Carla, and American Mountain Dew for me. American Dew has caffeine, unlike Canadian Dew which does not due to some weird Canadian laws. This has become mostly irrelevant now, due to the launch of Mountain Dew Energy in Canada, which does have caffeine, due to some even weirder Canadian Laws.

It was also weird to run into Pastor Dave from my church at the Kmart, though I guess that’s not nearly as coincidental as it seemed to me at the time.

For our next biggish family trip (maybe in Summer 2006 or 2007) we want to go to North and South Dakota.