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I just received notice that the fund has reached its goal. It took less than 48 hours. I am happy to have been part of it.

So I decided to start a computer reminiscing thread inspired by the derail on the COVID-19 thread. It is intended to share stories about old computers we once loved. Any story is good, be it technical, a tale of frustrations, amusing or all three. My first computer ever was an Amstrad CPC 64. I loved that thing so much. At the time I practically lived together with a guy named Karsten who was a bigger computer fanatic than I was. It had an amazing 64K of memory, putting it way ahead of the ZX Spectrum and most of the rest of the field. You could eventually get a lot of good games for it, but one of our big joys was creating our own programs for the thing. We also played pranks on one another. Karsten discovered the joys of the SPEED KEY command. The keyboard was set to a default of 30 milliseconds before pressure would result in a character repeating and 3 more milliseconds before further repeats. Thus you held a key down and got character repeats to that time. But with SPEED KEY you could change the parameters any way you liked. So Karsten waited till I had entered a large program without saving and gone off for a minute, and entered a SPEED KEY (1,1) plus a clear screen command so I wouldn't suspect anything. As you could imagine, this made typing completely impossible because even grazing a key would guarantee two or three character repeats. At the end I had to give up my attempts to restore normal function and thus lost an hour of work. Karsten was a little taken aback when he saw that his prank could not be undone and apologised, but I was not pleased and swore vengeance. So I did some peeking into the manual and discovered that you could set a function key to execute a specific command. I waited patiently until Karsten had left a huge program of his own unsaved and gone off into the kitchen. I then defined a function key to execute SPEED KEY (30,3) and then again entered a SPEED KEY (1,1) plus clear screen command. When Karsten returned and saw what I had done, he was furious. He yelled at me and said that that was just mean and that he had apologised and that it was really petty of me, and so forth. I merely listened with a bland expression until he had run dry, whereupon I pressed my predefined function key to restore normal keyboard speed. Then I executed a LIST command to show that his program was still fine. He stared at the computer with an expression like a poleaxed steer. That was a very satisfying moment for me.

As I said in the covid thread, my first computer was a DEC PDP-11. I had a time share account on it where I had a total of 20 blocks of disk storage. As near as I can calculate a block was 2K of storage, meaning I had a massive 40K of storage available., unless I used the tape drive, which was tricky because you could not be sure the right tape was loaded from day to day.

Poleaxed Steers would be a good band name.

Well, it's time to stop running around the house and take stock of the bedroom.

My brother says that right now emergency surgeries are going on as normal, but ones that are "just" for painful conditions are on hold for a while. Good luck in getting it taken care of as soon as possible.

"Before I start running around, I better make The Human have problems using the computer this morning"

If Explorer the Cat keeps doing the wolf it down thing I may have to start that.

Explorer the Cat on the table by the overstuffed chair. First time I've seen her on that table.

I feel right now like I could star in a movie called "My Right Foot." Last Saturday, I woke up with serious pain through my right arch, combined with major swelling. My pain level was an 8.5 on a 1 to 10 scale. This has persisted, although going down somewhat to a 6.5 as of yesterday when I saw my podiatrist. He did some poking and prodding in and around the area, then started pushing at the back left side of my heel. That bit hurt like hell. "Yep! New problem," he said, declaring that I now had "Tarsal Tunnel Syndrome" (like Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, but for the foot). He's guessing it's due to all of the edema that I've had over the past months that's been putting pressure on the nerve, and he said an operation may be necessary if it doesn't improve. Joy. Anyway, he froze the area on the left side of my heel and injected a goodly amount of cortisone into it. Made a nerve in my arch burn like hell. I'm going to have to put up with this for a long while. My next appointment isn't until late May, at which point he's probably just going to do another shot if I'm not any better. Any operation he wants to do is going to have a waiting period, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. I feel like I'm on a stinking conveyor belt of problems here. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/tarsal-tunnel-syndrome