Modern Vespa

The individual was playing at a Nature Park somewhere inland.

He had a generic look - long hair, beard, denim max, no personality.

His belief that his Lord had put him there so it was all part of a plan.

I think I walked off.

Update -https://www.floridastateparks.org/parks-and-trails/myakka-river-state-park

5 megapixel cameras aren't real

In the words of Lawrence Fishburne, What is real ?

Not in 1987, anyway.

And then Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly walk in and ask if they can sit in.

Considering the timing, I'd say "astronomical."

I'm pretty sure that's the same one I saw.

Thanks for the pic... now I have something to back me up when I tell the story.

It's located right about....HERE...(extreme southwestern corner of the state)

Yup... we were headed for a campground in Custer State Park. Very close by.

I'm visiting some friends in Texas and a while ago, the moon completely blocked out the sun! Damnedest thing I've ever seen! A bat even flew by, thinking it was time to get up. I gotta tell you, that was some world-class weird shit.

Dang! It was like we had forest fires or something. Sister and BIL driving through Illinois and it was bumper to bumper traffic headed south this morning, freeway signs telling people not to stop on the shoulder to watch the eclipse. Some church was offering parking for $20 a car.

Well, if a church does the surge pricing thing, it must be OK.

My wife spent most of last night watching the news which was watching lots of people watching the total eclipse.

She watched them all the way from Mexico to Vermont.

She said to me that it was fascinating because it gave her a glimpse of what it would be like if there was no sun in the sky.

"no, that would be night time" got me a slap round the head!

I did find out that the last time Indianapolis had a total solar eclipse was back in the 13th century, so it wasn't a totally wasted evening.

I'm so glad that I live alone.

I think it's OK for churches to cash in on heavenly events.

As a comedian once said, "It's kind of like that time you saw your Mom naked ... no real harm done, no long lasting effects, but you'll never forget the experience."

Having grown up on a farm where we used electric fencing I can say I've never forgotten the experience.

Likewise. If you haven't caught the wire between your shoulder blades ducking under a fence, you haven't lived.

We were "up north" somewhere in Wisconsin, ran across a cow/steer fenced in a small enclosure in the middle of a National Forest with no other buildins around (yeah, I have questions too). There was an electric fence, and one of my friends grabbed it, convulsing with the current and told me to grab his hand. No thanks.

It wasn't today, it was yesterday, but it's still pretty weird.

Oh my God, who sat on it ?

I'm wondering if anyone else besides me thinks that it's not actually the Tesla Abomination that is the intended subject of this photo.

Floppy Disc Repair.........

I had the same thought, they must be overwhelmed with business. Maybe they diversified and repair fax machines as well.

It always bothered me those little ones were called floppy. The 8 inch and 5¼-inch were floppy.

I know, right?

The sign pulled me in and then The Thing photobombed my shot to enhance the weirdness. Subsequent research has revealed that it's actually a cocktail lounge. This is in Austin, TX.

Do they have electricity in Texas ?

You rode all the way from CA to TX to get your floppy disks repaired?

They must be good!

In a drawer. In my lab. Right now.

I like the disembodied hand at the bottom.

I thought it was the DeLorean pickup truck.

What's Elon going to do next to raise money?

What a brilliant question.

Only one flop in the picture then.

Can't have disks without labels. Man, I remember setting up my StyleWriter 2400 to actually print my floppy labels. I had the coolest floppy disks of all my friends.

I guess that says a lot more about me than it does my friends, doesn't it?

I still have a box of labels for Betamax video cassettes.

Hey, you never know!

In other news, my first computer used cassette tapes to store data.

Likewise - and I remember VERA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Electronic_Recording_Apparatus

A friend's Dad worked for the BBC Research Dept, so I got to see it in action. Rather scary...

Later, when I was working for the BBC myself, the last surviving version came to my place of work before going off to some museum. https://www.vtoldboys.com/vera.htm

This was mine. With the cassette recorder. I think my Dad still has the interface cord.

Parsec was a great game. I learned its flavor of TI Basic on it.

I cut my teeth on a TRS-80 Model III with a cassette tape recorder.

EDIT: Being a Model III, it also had dual floppy drives. But for some reason we had a tape recorder, too -- I think to get older programs from a TRS-80 Model I that was also in the computer lab, disused.

My first was a simple Timex unit, with cassette backup, and a whole 2K of memory. It used a TV for the monitor. Programming was done in Basic on a membrane keyboard - quite clunky!

My first was a Tandy Radio Shack Color Computer (affectionately known as a CoCo).

16Kb RAM. Cassette tape drive. Connected to a color TV. Programs (apps) came on plug-in cartridges.

I was amazed with what I could do on it: word processing, spreadsheet, my business accounts, a printed newsletter, and composing music.

When I was an elementary school teacher in the late 80s the school's computer and math lab was using these.

They switched over to Apple II computers in the late eighties and I grabbed up six TRS-80s for my fifth-grade classroom. These, along with the Apple IIc that every fifth-grade classroom in California had been given by Apple, made my classroom probably among the best computer-equipped classes anywhere at that time.

They had floppy disk drives and a variety of educational programs which I let the kids just play with learn from on their own. When they had difficulty, they could call on one of the other students who had been designated as "computer tutors" to help them.

It made for a quietly chaotic classroom with a lot of learning going on.

This was my last year as a teacher and I was lucky to have my best class last.

In line with the topic of this thread, I'll bet the other teachers thought of my style of teaching as "weird shit" and the principal never did understand what I was doing - only that the kids were happy and learning and parents wanted their kids in my class. I talked with the kids, not at them, and actually listened to what they had to say.

I had the cluster of intellectually gifted kids in the class at their parents' demand request, but also the lowest-achieving kids that had been "gifted" to me by their previous teachers.

I also did a lot of music and a social-emotional learning circle called the Aware Program.