Save the shell people

[firecat]

I'm outside the target demographic but charmed enough to play yenta:

http://newyork.craigslist.org/fct/m4w/485967082.html

(The OH knows him and advised him to add the PPS about vi.)

Comments

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

aw!

i use pico and live nowhere near new york. both of which, i'm certain, disqualify me.

[brooksmoses]

Pico! Seeble!

(Though I can also claim a certain ability to use EDLIN if need be, which would recover my geek cred except that it doesn't run on a respectable OS.)

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

pico is a perfectly good text editor.

vi is a very fine does everything including washing the windows, walking the dog, doing massive search and replace using regex, and also running the federal government sort of program.

however, usually i just want to edit text, and remembering the key combination so that i can actually *type* in my text editor makes me cranky. cranky! so pico, it is.

[firecat]

And here I was thinking that it was emacs that ran the federal government while vi was just one of those corrupt urban mayors with thousands of dead people on the voter rolls.

[brooksmoses]

May it give him the same joy as the one other looking-for-a-marriage-partner Craigslist post I've heard stories about. (I happened to be in a class with the woman he started dating out of the 50 or 60 date-worthy replies he got, a couple of years after they got married.)

Meanwhile, he may be cheered to know -- though I am ineligible in all the ways kalmn is and a couple of more significant ones -- that recently, when I got a gift Macintosh, I considered it happily set up to my liking as soon as I had it running headless with an SSH login.

[firecat]

Yay!

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I forwarded the link to a geo-and-demographically-appropriate geeky person I know, but I'm afraid that she's heavily GUI-based. ;) Still, that's very cute!

Except that everybody pines after green whereas my nostlagia is amber. *sniff*

I have to admit that sometimes I put my Mac in full-screen terminal mode and find myself inordinately happy.

[firecat]

I think I'm more fond of amber too. I'll have to try that full screen terminal mode and see if it causes me to write a specific kind of poetry the way writing on the DECSYSTEM10 used to.

[brooksmoses]

The first computer we had at home, when I was a kid, had a monitor with dip-switches on the back to set the color mode. It had four monochrome modes -- white-on-black, green-on-black, amber-on-black, and white-on-blue -- and two 16-color modes, one for the IBM color palette (red bit, blue bit, green bit, brightness bit) and one for the Apple color palette (a rather more random selection).

The computer itself was an IBM 5155 "Portable" PC, so it also had a built-in amber monochrome monitor.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

LOL That's great!

[opalmirror.livejournal.com]

My sister feels that the only serious wrong she may have inflicted on her children, is that she did not make them go to church or Sunday school. She feels like if she had, then like parents who expose their kids to dirt to reduce incidence of adult asthma, they would have developed a heartier immune system against dogma and unreasoned belief.

As much as I like the idea of procreating to create more beings like oneself, people are people and offspring ought to be encouraged to spring in the ways for they are uniquely self-determined... I worry what might happen if the child were forbidden the ways of the GUI... or even worse, not have experience with GUIs understand what it is they are to rebel against?

[firecat]

Your sister might be onto something, based on my experience with church/Sunday school.

I think it's OK for people to raise children to believe what they believe, but people should be prepared for their children to go in some other direction once they reach adolescence.

(The OH and I knew that if we had children they'd probably turn out to be football players and cheerleaders.)