Download audio file in Large Hi-Fi format 
Download audio file in Small Lo-Fi format
Closing Music Cat-5 - Burst Limit
Download audio file in Large Hi-Fi format
Download audio file in Small Lo-Fi format
Closing Music Cat-5 - Burst Limit
Abstract: Presenting a Christmas Story and a Geeky Christmas Poem for the season.
So we are all familiar with the move “Christmas Story,” about a kid in the 40’s era who wants to get a BB gun for Christmas. I’m going to tell a true story from my geeky childhood, about the first Christmas when me and a friend asked our respective parents for computers for Christmas. Now Frank Sinatra has been quoted as saying that the guy has to get the girl at the end of a song, and in the movie “Christmas Story,” the kid gets his BB gun. Neither me or my friend get the computer. But I still think this tale says a lot about attitudes the last generation had about computers.
So set the wayback machine, the time is the late seventies or early eighties. I’m a kid in the suburb, and I have a chum who spends time with me in the school’s computer lab and we hang at each other’s cribs.
I knew a little more about computers, as I was in the habit of programming demonstrator TRS-80’s in Radio Shack stores. I would ride my bicycle to either the in-town store or a store two towns away, just for computer time. The retail clerks were kind enough to the kid, but would kick me out should a potential paying customer show. So, yes, I can honestly tell young people that “I used to have to bicycle two towns in the snow for computer time,” because I did.
So, one year me and my friend, we ask our folks for computer for Christmas.
My plan was quickly shot down, here is a conversation from memory that I overheard.
“He want’s a what for Christmas?”
“A computer, Larry.”
“Those room sized things in accounting? He can’t be serious.”
“No, it’s a new thing called a personal computer, made for families, fits on a desk.”
“Marion, why does our son want an accounting machine for Christmas?!”
“I don’t know, Larry, but maybe he learns something for a job in his future.”
“A computer. Jeesh.”
So I kinda knew I was not having my dream of PC ownership fulfilled that year.
My friend did a little better, his father bought him a Texas Instruments programmable calculator. So he opens the box and must have said something along the lines of it not being what he expected, to which his father replied something like the real thing was pricey, so if he proved himself on this, he would think about it in the future.
Well, you gotta love having the gauntlet thrown down before you, right? So, between Christmas and New Years, we sat down and cracked the TI manual. We scratched our head, and figured we would write a program to do factorials. For those who may have forgotten some math over the years, you figure out the factorial of 5 by multiplying 5 by 4 by 3 by 2. So we figure how to decrement counters and do a loop, and we can’t stop the run. And us two kids are like, scratching our heads and thinking “how do we stop it,” and about five or ten minutes later, we just look at each other and say together “we force a divide-by-zero error!”
So, we wrote this program, with this clunky end. It was kinda useless as the calculator had a button for factorials anyway. But we show it too my friends dad, and we’re showing him that we did it, we programmed this thing.
Now, I could end the story here, this is the end of the Christmas part of the story. But it does play out longer, and I have to give you guys the details.
That summer, my friend got an Atari and a BASIC cartridge for it. This was great, we could actually write real programs together, and we did. It was a lot of fun.
A few weeks into the summer, and we were talking to his dad who was saying something about the stock market and picking stocks. We both told him, that he should look into buying stock in this company Microsoft, because they could make computers actually do things. Well, my friend’s father didn’t listen to us because we were just kids, but he could have been a multi millionaire.
’Twas the nocturnal segment of the diurnal period preceding the annual Yuletide celebration, and throughout our place of residence, kinetic activity was not in evidence among the possessors of this potential, including that species of domestic rodent known as Mus musculus. Hosiery was meticulously suspended from the forward edge of the wood burning caloric apparatus, pursuant to our anticipatory pleasure regarding an imminent visitation from an eccentric philanthropist among whose folkloric appellations is the honorific title of St. Nicholas.
The prepubescent siblings, comfortably ensconced in their respective accommodations of repose, were experiencing subconscious visual hallucinations of variegated fruit confections moving rhythmically through their cerebrums. My conjugal partner and I, attired in our nocturnal head coverings, were about to take slumberous advantage of the hibernal darkness when upon the avenaceous exterior portion of the grounds there ascended such a cacophony of dissonance that I felt compelled to arise with alacrity from my place of repose for the purpose of ascertaining the precise source thereof.
Hastening to the casement, I forthwith opened the barriers sealing this fenestration, noting thereupon that the lunar brilliance without, reflected as it was on the surface of a recent crystalline precipitation, might be said to rival that of the solar meridian itself - thus permitting my incredulous optical sensory organs to behold a miniature airborne runnered conveyance drawn by eight diminutive specimens of the genus Rangifer, piloted by a minuscule, aged chauffeur so ebullient and nimble that it became instantly apparent to me that he was indeed our anticipated caller. With his ungulate motive power travelling at what may possibly have been more vertiginous velocity than patriotic alar predators, he vociferated loudly, expelled breath musically through contracted labia, and addressed each of the octet by his or her respective cognomen - "Now Dasher, now Dancer..." et al. - guiding them to the uppermost exterior level of our abode, through which structure I could readily distinguish the concatenations of each of the 32 cloven pedal extremities..
As I retracted my cranium from its erstwhile location, and was performing a 180-degree pivot, our distinguished visitant achieved - with utmost celerity and via a downward leap - entry by way of the smoke passage. He was clad entirely in animal pelts soiled by the ebony residue from oxidations of carboniferous fuels which had accumulated on the walls thereof. His resemblance to a street vendor I attributed largely to the plethora of assorted playthings which he bore dorsally in a commodious cloth receptacle. His orbs were scintillant with reflected luminosity, while his submaxillary dermal indentations gave every evidence of engaging amiability. The capillaries of his malar regions and nasal appurtenance were engorged with blood which suffused the subcutaneous layers, the former approximating the coloration of Albion’s floral emblem, the latter that of the Prunus avium, or sweet cherry. His amusing sub- and supralabials resembled nothing so much as a common loop knot, and their ambient hirsute facial adornment appeared like small, tabular and columnar crystals of frozen water. Clenched firmly between his incisors was a smoking piece whose grey fumes, forming a tenuous ellipse about his occiput, were suggestive of a decorative seasonal circlet of holly. His visage was wider than it was high, and when he waxed audibly mirthful, his corpulent abdominal region undulated in the manner of impectinated fruit syrup in a hemispherical container. He was, in short, neither more nor less than an obese, jocund, multigenarian gnome, the optical perception of whom rendered me visibly frolicsome despite every effort to refrain from so being. By rapidly lowering and then elevating one eyelid and rotating his head slightly to one side, he indicated that trepidation on my part was groundless.
Without utterance and with dispatch, he commenced filling the aforementioned appended hosiery with various of the aforementioned articles of merchandise extracted from his aforementioned previously dorsally transported cloth receptacle. Upon completion of this task, he executed an abrupt about- face, placed a single manual digit in lateral juxtaposition to his olfactory organ, inclined his cranium forward in a gesture of leave-taking, and forthwith effected his egress by renegotiating (in reverse) the smoke passage. He then propelled himself in a short vector onto his conveyance, directed a musical expulsion of air through his contracted oral sphincter to the antlered quadrupeds of burden, and proceeded to soar aloft in a movement hitherto observable chiefly among the seed-bearing portions of a common weed. But I overheard his parting exclamation, audible immediately prior to his vehiculation beyond the limits of visibility: "Ecstatic Yuletide to the planetary constituency, and to that self same assemblage, my sincerest wishes for a salubriously beneficial and gratifyingly pleasurable period between sunset and dawn."