I’ve seen so many of these clocks at antique stores, estate sales and such with with IBM plaques on them with someone’s name. Apparently IBM used to gift these to employees for 25 years of service or something to that effect. Given the cost and the potential longevity of the clocks it’s quite a statement for a loyalty gift.
It wasn't just IBM, it was a standard long-service/retirement gift for US corporate execs, to the point where I think a significant percentage of Jaeger-Lecoultre's income at the time would have been from shipping Atmos clocks to the US. The leftovers are all over eBay as the descendants sell them off, you can tell them apart by either the engraved plaque on them or the two screw holes where the plaque used to be. However they're also quite a risky buy, they'll never have been maintained and probably dumped on a garage shelf for several decades so can be in pretty poor condition. As a result your USD200 eBay find could end up costing USD1500-2000 to be shipped back to Jaeger-Lecoultre and rebuilt. If anyone's thinking of buying one, ping me in a reply, but a general suggestion is to get the service record and history of how it was stored before buying. You'll pay several times as much as the found-in-granddads-attic ones but you also won't have to pay to get them shipped to Switzerland for a rebuild.
Incidentally, if you want an interesting pre-Atmos model, look up the Beverly Clock. It's been running since 1864 and was built in somewhere that would have been jungle-like bush a few years earlier given that New Zealand was barely settled at the time, it's older than the institution that houses it.
When I was in highschool I started writing a game in Qbasic. Along the way, I wanted it to have a console (like Quake) where you could enter commands and modify the game as you were running it. This lead me to create a scripting engine in Qbasic, and long story short, I’ve been on a yak shaving epic quest now for almost 30 years now. No game, but I have a hybrid C / Lua game engine/general purpose application platform. Still tinkering and still no end in sight. I’m having fun though!
I couldn't figure out the 3D math for quake, or write a fast texture mapper, so I stuck to working on things like Doom level editors.
But, I loved the quake console so I made a similar thing for my editor, basically just a hot key that swung it down and I could change a few hard-coded variables and added some commands like loading/saving files.
Thanks to the flexibility that Quake console provided, we were able to set up a three computer null-modem cable network using an additional serial port card on one computer, and play Quake multiplayer like that. We’d felt like we’d hacked the planet at the time.
We did that too, except it was for playing OMF2097, because sharing a keyboard sucked (and we'd always fight over who'd get to use the right side of the keyboard, which was obviously the best side in those days).
I've been using quake-style terminals for... pretty much as long as I've been using terminals so about 15 years now and I can never go back. Sometimes I open a new terminal window to e.g. run my application but I always forget it exists.
I like electronic music production and mixing, and at some point embarked on the quests of writing a DAW (for which I wrote my own state library too) and a dj application. The DJ application I started this year, the daw has been going on for 5 years now.
I think it's helped me at work. Even though I don't have a job with anything related to music or audio, getting in the weeds of building a complex app like this has a way of teaching you all sorts of things. But even if it weren't, it's fun! When work is stressing, for some reason I find coding something completely unrelated, fun and fully my own de-stressing too.
I find you working 30 years on this game engine/application platform very cool and admirable! I hope this or some other project of mine accompanies me for that long.
This is a great thing, because along the way one learns tons of stuff, that other not so interested/involved people never learn. It is a means of becoming a more capable developer/engineer.
I don’t know if it was just me but I had bad luck with my holy pandas from them. I build 3 different boards using them and they all started having issues within a few months of use. Double bboounce, and keys nt htting. This was several years ago mind you, so maybe they eventually did get the quirks worked out, but by then I’d gotten over the custom board hobby.
I consume a probably unhealthy amount of YouTube and have for years now. I’ve had Premium since the beginning (still only paying $7.99 a month). At least there’s studies that show directed consumption that I do when I manually search and find stuff to watch is less harmful than the idle scrolling for shorts that you get on TikTok and YouTube shorts.
Not really fair to compare the two geographic regions. Nobody wants to live on the streets in Dallas or Houston. It’s way too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. That said, living in Dallas I have seen the odd tent city pop up under some freeway overpasses but they don’t stick around very long so I guess the city does do something about it.
When growing up watching Americas Funniest Home Videos my brother and I would run to the kitchen phone to press 1, 2, or 3 to ‘vote’ for our favorite finalist.
I have slight nerve issues that make precise double tap gestures difficult. One of the reasons I switched to an iPhone is the accessibility features are quite good and let me work around the issues I have more easily. Given how many older people I see who have the same issue I have but worse, I can imagine this is a very common problem for a lot of people.
All the PHP jobs I saw while job searching required Laravel experience. Despite having 19 years experience with PHP and other frameworks, I was out of the running for those jobs.
https://youtu.be/kmCMkD1vv0E?si=RqGhqIC-EHVhXnDI&t=145