Currently Reading List

[Tomspy77]

What are you currently reading?

I have not had much time for reading, but I am slowly working my way through the Doctor Who book Love & War, and also have recently read quite a lot of self help books about quitting smoking cigarettes.

I also have been going through a decade old A+ testing guide I bought for fifty cents at a library book sale to learn more about my PC, as I am thinking of getting into computers perhaps for a living.

[sherlew (Ret)]

That would be a great idea. Just understanding your PC is a great bonus by itself.

I would advise getting an updated book, though, because computers have changed quite a bit in the last ten years. The old A+ test guide will give you some good basics, though.

I've been looking at my old test guides, then looking at the newer generations of computers online and can't believe that they're making 1 gig motherboards now. They've also improved the circuitry between peripherals and the cpu, too, giving them a fast serial connection. It really makes my old PC look like a doorstop.

Just finished listening to "The Loop" by Joe Coomer on audio. It's about a 30 year old man who's been working the third shift (used to be called the graveyard shift) as a courtesy patrol person on that bit of freeway around Ft. Worth Texas call the Loop. He drives round the Loop helping stranded motorists, assisting at accident scenes and clearing debris from the roadway. One morning a parrot shows up on his doorstep and he finds himself thinking about the meaning of life, as well as trying to find the parrot's previous owners. His search for these people becomes rather interesting, as does his relationship with a young woman who has a temporary job at the local library. She travels the country, working at various libraries and mends their books. Ft. Worth is just another stop at first, then she finds herself intrigued by the main character.

My favorite bit is about one of the parrot's previous owners who was a fighter pilot in WW II. He'd bought the parrot to help him feel less homesick. Then he'd taught the bird to say "I'm and eagle" and brushed some white shoe polish on it's head. It actually helped the moral of his fellow pilots and actually got him a promotion. The bird continued to say "I'm an eagle" to the bemusement of his subsequent owners.

It's a wonderful story, well written, though very much for adults.

[Tomspy77]

Yeah, I'm just using the older book for the basic stuff, it might even be easier to look through that before a current one, as a sort of primer. The library had some old books on PC's, including a book on the Basic computer language, which I remember using on an Atari 800 in the eighties lol.

[sherlew (Ret)]

It's amazing what libraries will hang onto, though these are interesting in a historical sense. Actually, I think that Basic is still being taught today, though I'm sure it's more sophisticated.

[Tomspy77]

My fault there, Basic is indeed still being used it was the first stuff Microsoft put out (Their version anyway...), I should have wrote the Logo computer language which I also used on the same old machine. It is the one where you tell the little 'turtle' to go right or left so many spaces....
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_programming_language

[sherlew (Ret)]

Sounds fun.