Newsflash: Feeling of Power

I didn't think I'd do it this soon, but yesterday I published my first book on kindle!

We are talking here about my book Keter Malchut that I've published in Hebrew in 2007.

It contains five science fiction and fantasy stories in an Israeli setting.

This book is my first effort in publishing, so there are many things that I'd do differently today, but hey it's only 2.99$!

Mainly I wanted to see how this whole 'Publishing to kindle, and selling electrons to (potentially) the entire world' works.

I guess I will find out pretty soon.

Here is the link to the Kindle book.

Here is the link to my Author page.

I also made a Createspace Print on Demand book today - Wow, busy day!

Feel free to share this information, of course!

Techunix Ruled!

Googling Techunix I found out that different people may mean different things when using it, so for the purposes of this blog post, I mean the Unix Server that used to do Pine mail at the Technion institute of technology.
For long spells of time I thought it was the coolest mail server ever! I mean I was a student for the longest time, and I had free mail! Cool!
Then I stopped being a student, the year was 2000 or so, and I thought they would let me keep my mail forever, but no!
I had to get mail from my ISP. I had to pay for it, and where was that cool thing of accessing your mail from everywhere?
Then along came Gmail with its 1GB of free space. I was ecstatic. This was not only mail, it was also a backup of all my files!
I begged my friends and finally got an invite in 2004. Immediately I invited anyone who asked for an invite.
I took me several months to switch all my mail to Gmail, but from 2005 - I never looked back!

Back in 2000 I really loved Ask Jeeves!

When I started using the internet graphically, in late 1995, I loved Yahoo.

I loved the whole 'browsing down a file system' experience. It reminded me of going to the library, and this library was growing every day!

Then Altavista came along, and it was really cool! it found what I wanted... mostly.

After that it started to clutter with other search engines, and I knew what I had to do: ask Jeeves!

"Jeeves" was the name of the "gentleman's personal gentleman", or valet, fetching answers to any question asked. This character, based on Jeeves, Bertie Wooster's fictional valet from the works of P. G. Wodehouse, was really good at finding answers on the World Wide Web, because it brought answers from five different search engines and you could pick your favorite.

I really don't remember why I finally switched to Google, But I think there were three major reasons:

• Google Image search,
• Google was waaay better in Hebrew,
• At one point or another the Ask people stopped showing other search engines, and focused on their own engine. pity.

The Problem With Microsoft

In the past few weeks I have been trying to make the case that as far as I'm concerned, Apple may have had many 'great' products, but Microsoft had even more.

While some of the software I've reviewed here (more like reminisced about) was indeed made by Microsoft, other software just ran on a Microsoft platform.

I don't think that this is an important distinction. If you can make a great software platform (like Windows used to be), and other people build great software on it, you deserve at least some of the credit for that.

So why did it all stop working?

• First of all, I'm not sure it stopped working, could be just that I got tired of paying for software, when there are free substitutes (both in the free speech and free beer sense), that are as good or better (IMHO).
• Second, I think that the old software base, and the need to be loyal to it, just dragged the company for too long, and now it may be too late.
• Third, I think ESR makes a good point - closed software tends to become buggy and bulky with time.

It's a shame really, but I think we won't see much good software from Microsoft any more...

Once I thought Internet Explorer 4 Was The Coolest Browser Ever!

The year was 1998, and I was working for a medical software company (not sure I can say what it was, and it sure sounds much cooler when it's a secret).

I was sitting in front of the computer something like eight hours a day, and since I had no girlfriend at the time, I went back home and browsed some more...

Once I even heard of something called an MP3 file. Supposedly, if you could download such a file, it would give you be a three minute song, with only 4 megs (as opposed to something like 40 megs for a 'regular' audio file).

Can't say I found that many at the time, but the idea was way cool!

Where did I get this idea? From the Economist web site!

How did I browse it? With IE 4!

Plus IE4 had Channels! Way Cool!

In 2004 I switched to Firefox, in 2008 I switched to Chrome. Never looked back.

Wait, actually I DID look back several weeks ago at IE 10. I'm staying with chrome!

I know this is the 'old' chrome picture, but I liked it better...

Once I Thought Starcraft Was the Best Game Ever

I think it was January 1998. I went to the store, I saw a copy of Starcraft, and I bought it right away. 

I may have even read about it something on the web. Something along the lines of: 'The game was finally released after a ridiculously long wait'. I had no idea what they were talking about. I didn't wait for it, and I've never played any Blizzard games (like Warcraft) before it.

The honest truth is that to the present day I (almost) haven't played any other Blizzard games besides Starcraft I.

But Starcraft I was a cool game. I pretended to be sick one Sunday (here Sunday is a work day) just so I could finish all of the original missions. I was something like 28 YO at the time...

I bought it for my 10 YO cousin. Heck I even played a little on battle net. and of course I bought and played Brood war...

But I never even thought of buying Starcraft II. It's too expensive, and maybe I'm getting to old for it.

In the past few weeks me and my almost 7 YO son are busy playing Kingdom Rush.

Once I thought With Visual Basic I Could Program Anything

Truth of the matter: the first Visual Basic I tried was not a version I bought, though I can't for the life of me remember if I had a demo version on one of the disks I did buy (such as office 97), or I downloaded a free version from the web, or I downloaded an illegal version.

Come to think of it, I think it came on one of the disks, and I think it was before web times, and I'm pretty sure I did not try it on my computer, but rather on my girlfriend's computer. Sometime in 1993, or 1994.

I tried to create a simple adventure game. Something that would display some text and a picture, and then move you to some other 'place' also with a text and a picture, depending on what you clicked.

In other words, something that is easy to do today with HTML only...

I was so impressed with VB back then! I could do all of these things, and let's face it, the interface was amazing!

today, there is nothing that can match the simplicity and the elegance it had back then, including, sadly, the newer versions of VB.

that left me seriously hoping that Dart would evolve nicely...

Once I Thought Excel Was a Great Tool

I taught Math or something like Computer Literacy to children several times, in several different schools, to different ages.

For several years I thought that Excel was a great tool for doing that.

I mean, isn't it Great?  you put '1' in Square A2 (you need A1 for the title)

then you put =a2+1 in A3. Then you copy all the way down to A41, and there you have the numbers from 1 to 40, right there...

Then you do them multiplied by 10 in column B, Squared in column C, and Cubed (divided by 10) in column D. Then you do a graph...

So much math. All of it done by the students themselves. takes so little time.

And you can also do Pascal's triangle...

No wonder I thought excel was a great tool.

But this little graph you see above?

I made it with Google Documents.

Why?

For starters, I didn't have to pay for the software...

Once I thought I could rule the world with auto summarize

Let me say this right from the start: Microsoft Word 97 was a REALLY good word processor. I might even say, the best word processor I have ever used, though Google docs starts to come close.

You could put pictures right into your documents, and it didn't even crash your computer. There were tons of fonts...

And also,  Word 97 was the first (and last) Microsoft word processor I had a legal copy of. There were even more cool Hebrew fonts on the CD itself, if you only knew where to look, and I looked all over the CD.

Then there was auto summarize. It highlighted the important 20 percent in your document. I was really impressed with that. I thought it could be used to create a machine that would pass the Turing test...

Maybe I was a little too enthusiastic on that account, but still, it was a heck of a good deal. It only cost me something like 30$ on the computer store (gone since then) at the Hebrew university, up on Mount Scopus.

Little Big Adventure

So, like I said two weeks ago, in the fall of 1995 I moved back to Haifa, and got myself a Pentium 90.
I was starting my graduate studies in Economics, but that only started in late October, and I moved in mid September. Also, it took me some time to find jobs to fill the free time I had from my scheduled studies.
That means I had a lot of free time on my hands, and most of it went to playing Little Big Adventure. It was a cool adventure game, all in 3D, and very difficult.
You are the hero of the game, and you begin imprisoned in an asylum. since you can't save your progress until the end of a chapter (or something like that) I had to play the first chapter something like fifty times!
I still remember the line: 'A prisoner has escaped! Sound the Alarm!' as if it was yesterday.
I'm sad to say (Maybe I should be happy to say it?) that I never finished that game. It was too difficult, and soon my work schedule, and my studies schedule started filling up.
It was a good game though. I still wonder how it ends.

PS, I also never figured out why the elephant...

Newsflash: Winning the Amichai prize

Sometime in 2008 my friend Pavel from Ashan Hazman (Note, link in Hebrew, it's a really cool bookshop + Pub + Bar + Rock concert place in Beer Sheva), told me that the poet Mois Benarroch was trying for years to publish a poetry book, but no publisher wanted to take it.

I said I'd be glad to do it. I like the guy's poetry, and I thought that it was turned down by other publishers for spurious reasons.

Like anything else in publishing, it took a longer time than we thought, and it ended up costing more money (though compared to the two books I published just before that, it was relatively cheap).

We ended up publishing it in late 2010, the cover designed by yours truly (I did not do the painting, and I think the cover design is pretty awful...)

We never sold too many copies, but never mind, the guy deserved to be published.

Then earlier this week it was announced officially that the book won the Yehuda Amichai prize for poetry in 2012. I was ecstatic. this one will go down in history. Though I have to wander if that also means it's going to sell better...

PS. just to show you that this did not go to my head, I promise to go back to windows 95 games next week. (Al, sorry for the delay, I hope you understand...)

Windows 95

In September 1995 I moved back to Haifa after my BA studies at the Hebrew university. At the time I also split with my girlfriend after we have been together for something like seven years on and off. This meant that I had way too much time on my hands, which is always a dangerous thing.

So one of the things I did with my time was get a computer. It was really expansive compared to today's computers, and (something like 2000$), but it was also really powerful. I was a Pentium 90 MHz!

At first I only had windows 3.1 (my alert readers know how I had it...), but then pretty soon I 'obtained' windows 95.

What wonderful software did I run on it?

For that, dear readers, you will have to wait until the next week.

Word for Windows

When I told you about doing the booklets for Noam, I was not telling the whole truth. The whole truth is that we had to print out all of the booklets on a windows computer before we could do the graphic design in Kibbutz Hannaton.

So we had everything in Word for windows 2.0 the Hebrew version (back in the day they had to make a Hebrew version for every word processor, apparently now they don't, at least not for Microsoft word...)

It was a terrible piece of software. It got stuck even on very small files, and our files were not so small (though we did split every booklet to at least four files, which meant we had something like 24 files to print). for some reason, even though the files were only something like 20 pages each, it would not print more than about five at a time...

We did it all on Friday, and just finished in time for Shabbat...

That was 1994.

As these things go, we had to do a complete rewrite of the booklets by 1995, and print them out again. This time it was really easy. Everyone (the writers, the designers, me, the printers...) had Hebrew Word for Windows 5.0 (I'm not saying they were all legal copies...)

But we had no problems at all. We could do nifty graphic design (Columns, pictures...) and we could print 20 page files no problem.

That's when we finally switched to Windows, and didn't have to go to Kibbutz Hannaton to print...

Windows 3.1

Back in 1993, Israel has started the Oslo peace process with the Palestinians, and me and my girlfriend moved to a new apartment. These were heady exciting days...

1993 was second year university (the Hebrew University in Jerusalem) for both of us, and during the first year we both lived in the dorms, she with a friend (female), and me with five roommates (all male). This was also fun, but second year we wanted to really try being a couple. 

I hope I won't sound really weird by saying that one of the advantages was that we had her computer. I can only justify this by saying we needed a computer for our studies (me sort of, she really), and that we both worked on it for our jobs (informal Jewish education, we sort of worked together).

Anyway, in the 1990s Israel was known as the one diskette country. That meant the Microsoft for example sold one copy of each piece of software. I just 'obtained' a copy of Microsoft windows 3.1 (from the office we worked in...) and installed it on our (hers really) computer.

What can I say. It was a good operating system. You can see for yourselves in the picture above...

King's Quest V - Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder

The Wikipedia Article about this game says that is came out in November 1990. Dunno about that. All I can say is that my girlfriend had it on her DOS computer at her home, when I was in the IDF, and later in Kibbutz Hannaton.

That means we played it over weekends and holidays (though not on Shabbat...). I think she got it for me for my 21st birthday, so late 1991. I'm pretty sure we finished it almost exactly a year later, just the day before Yom Kippur 1992.

So back in the day we were devoted to point and click adventure games, and also it was so much harder to find the answers to the riddles. I do remember that we did have some way to find the answers, especially to the end part, where you have to turn to all sorts of animals. I just can't, for the life of me, remember how we had that, because there was no internet at the time.

It had cost 120 NIS at the time, which is something like 40$ today, not bad for a year of entertainment...