Tag: lighting

Deer at Dusk

Timothy Price38 Comments

White-tailed deer on the Rio Grande at dusk.

A white-tailed deer came out of the bosque on the east side to the Rio Grande to forage on a sandbar. This is the first deer I have seen in the bosque and along the river.

 

Colorful Crow Highway

Timothy Price40 Comments

Coming in from the north.

The crow highway was in full swing at dusk with thousands of crows flying south over the Rio Grande and bosque.

Heading south.

The Sandias in dusk purple make a beautiful background.

A lone crow taking a break in a cottonwood that stands between the clearwater ditch and the irrigation ditch.

 

MacMemories From 1984

Timothy Price57 Comments

I’ve been cleaning out shelves in my office area and I came across the media packets that came with the first Macintosh we got in 1984 followed by the first Macintosh Plus we got in 1986. The Macintosh had 128K of RAM and one 3.5 inch diskette drive, no hard drive. The process for using it was 1) you booted the computer with the System diskette. 2) You ejected the system diskette and inserted the Program diskette and opened the program, such as MacPaint. 3) You MacPainted to create your graphics. 4) You selected Save to save your graphic file, which ejected the Program diskette. 5) You inserted a diskette to save your file. 6) If the diskette wasn’t formatted, then you would have to click on Yes to format the diskette, and 7) save your file.

I’m trying to remember if when you quit the Program and Shut Down the Macintosh if it asked you to put the Program diskette and then the System diskette back in before it shut down, or if it simply ejected whichever diskette was in the drive before it shut down. I think there was a lot of ejecting and inserting the different diskettes before it shutdown.

We got an external disk drive with the first Macintosh Plus, which meant we could have a program diskette in the computer and a file diskette in the external drive. Our next Macintosh plus had two disk drives. We got external hard drives for the Macintosh Pluses before the SEs and SE/30s came out with internal hard drives. When we got one Macintosh Plus and a Macintosh Laserwrtier in 1986, the pair cost over $10,000 — around $3K for the Macintosh Plus and $7K for Laserwriter. That’s around $23,700 ($7.1K and $16.6K respectively) in 2020 dollars. Macintosh computers always came with the system software and at least a sample of programs.

Those were the really expensive, bad old days of computing. The first IBM PC we got, with similar specs (it had two 5.25″ floppy drives) was around $3K in 1981 (~$8,600 today) plus you had to buy whichever DOS you wanted to use, plus buy the programs, the drivers, etc. Nowadays you can easily pay $7,000 or $24,000 or more for a new Macintosh Pro. However, you get a lot of CPUs, RAM, and disk space for the money and a lot of powerful programs included in the price. But most computers today cost a fraction of what they did in the bad old days of computing.

 

On The Eve Of Recovery?

Timothy Price41 Comments

Waxing Gibbous Moon at 97.8% full

One would think a Blue Moon on Halloween would foreshadow a coming disaster. However, perhaps the Blue Moon on Halloween 2020 portends restoration and recovery after an already strange and disastrous year.

If you recall, there was a full moon on October 1, 2020, and the moon will be full again on October 31, 2020. As with all notable astronomical events, the world as someone knows it comes to an end, but, then again, a new world opens up for someone else and their self, their being is restored to begin life anew.

As with the few notable astronomical events I can witness, I try to document the events near the day or on the day they happen to keep my own record of each time the world ends and begins again.

Rising moon behind Resa’s Tree