Another friend’s story about an insurance person’s raised-eyebrow “oooooKAY!” comment reminded me of a classic insurance-person story from my swingin’ bachelor pad days. I used to live in a second-story apartment in downtown Fort Smith, in a building around a hundred years old that also housed a bar called Old Town. Even back then I had what looked like a really elaborate setup, but the truth is, circa 1995, is was really mostly stereo equipment. I had a mixer that I used to do legendarily strange mix tapes with, and a video monitor so I could watch stuff via my VCR (yeah, yeah, I know) without having to be tied to my main TV (the same 19″ Zenith that my brother took to college, and the same one I keep hauling to events like OVGE). Most of the stuff in that immediate area didn’t have jack crap to do with my (even for this time) embarrassingly underpowered XT PC. But it was all packed into such a small space that you could be forgiven for thinking it was all one great big computer.
Assuming you didn’t know a single thing about computers, that is.
Also built into my computer setup was a nifty little lighting rig, which you can see in the photo above. On the right hand side of the screen, right beneath the two monitors (one monochrome amber CGA monitor, one plain old video monitor), you see something green that looks like exposed circuit boards…because they are, in fact, exposed circuit boards that have nothing to do with anything that’s actually plugged in. They stood up by themselves in that hutch, covering up a fluorescent light tube under the monitors. I could also switch off that fluorescent light and switch on a bunch of Christmas chase lights which I wrapped around a metal rack that was intended for VHS tapes. That would result in something like this:
…except smoother and a bit more relaxing. (If you’re not seeing it animate, click here.) There was something amusingly low-tech, 1970s-BBC-sci-fi-prop about this setup, and I loved it dearly. I’d really only fire up the fluorescent light when I needed a bunch of light; most of the time I kept the chase lights going just because they looked cool. And if I had company coming over? Oh yeah. Chase lights on. Because how cool was that?
Another neat thing about this cavernous apartment of mine was that there was a large walk-in closet that had its own electrical outlets. At the time, I still had quite a collection of Apple II computers (and compatibles) and green screen monitors. I don’t quite know why either – two of the computers and one of the monitors had been mine for many years, and the rest had been given to me by people who actually stepped up to PCs on schedule. I kept these computers on a steel shelf in the closet, plugged on; the monitors stood on top of my bookshelves in the room to which the closet was adjacent, and I’d fire up suitably techie-looking stuff on these screens, just for giggles really. Or sometimes I’d run the attract mode loops for old Apple II games like Lode Runner or Taxman. So the computers would be tucked away in the closet, while four or five green monitors would be sitting there… displaying… something… from somewhere.
Enter the insurance agent. He had to look the place over and give me a quote on renter’s insurance.
As per usual, I had all of this crap fired up and running. You know, there’s probably come cautionary tale about why in the world I felt the need to convince any and all passers-by into thinking that I lived in the Batcave, even a tongue-in-cheek low-budget version of it (at this point, I was probably keeping all of that stuff around just in case Jump Cut City leapt up and came back to life); I think the answer to this is that I was in my early 20s and was enjoying the hell out of my slightly dungeon-like apartment. Everyone else thought I had a dandy bachelor pad going there, but I converted it into quasi-gothic-geek-chic, thus ensuring that I never, ever got even one iota of action while I lived there (until July ’97, at which point I moved the whole setup – hidden Apple computers and all – to Green Bay).
Like the building, the insurance adjuster was also around a century old. He came in, looked at the kitchen and bedroom and bathroom and living room…and then came to the computer corner, lights a-flashing, monitors a-glowing (with, as I recall, the attract mode loop to Apple II Donkey Kong), and I could see he was trying to work out where all the wiring was. (As it happened, the cables for the Apple monitors could be tucked away neatly between the carpet and the baseboard without damaging cables, carpet or baseboard.)
His expression grew more worried as he looked around. Finally he looked at me and pointed at… well… everything. “Is all of this… one… big computer?”
I still wonder how sky-high my insurance quote would’ve gone if I hadn’t started explaining it to him at that point.
Where are they now: the circuit boards are still with me – as a matter of fact, a high-resolution scan of these circuit boards forms the background artwork both on-screen and on the package for the Phosphor Dot Fossils DVDs. I still have all of the slightly-translucent giant circuit boards – they’re waiting to be turned back into some kind of cool display, somewhere, someday. Maybe at OVGE. Maybe if I find a new string of chase lights – after a number of the bulb holders gave up the ghost, I finally retired my trusty, over-a-decade-old string of Christmas chase lights a year or three ago. They served me well: they blinked until they were blinkered. I gave away the desk and the just-the-right-height hutch/monitor stand right before leaving Wisconsin. As for me, I still live – and get no action – in a room that looks like it’s one… big… computer. (And this time, it’s a heckuva lot closer to being reality than it was back in ’95.)… Read more
Remember 
Most anyone who’s seen me in person in the past seven or eight years knows that I carry around with me, nearly everywhere, a slightly dated handheld PC that weighs in somewhere between the size of a modern netbook and what they used to call a “palmtop.” The NEC MobilePro, long out of production, was way, way the hell ahead of its time: it was a netbook, 5+ years before the concept of the netbook caught on with, if not the general public, then the general geek populace. It can get on the web via wi-fi with few problems. It has Word, Excel and Powerpoint on it, so I can write articles for my site while I’m away from my desktop, I can keep my inventory spreadsheets of my game collection on it, and so on. It reads PDFs, so I recently made it a bit of a personal crusade to figure out how to get it to play nice with my home LAN so it could access the huge number of ebooks I have on my home server. The MobilePros, at least the later ones, are touchscreen devices. You can use a stylus (provided with the unit), but you can also tap it with your fingers. I usually use my fingers, because how cool is that? To complete my journey to the dork side, I had a custom “DON’T PANIC” sticker made up for the “cover” (i.e. the reverse side of the flatscreen); admit it, if you had a portable device with a tiny screen that you could look stuff up on, you would do this too and you know it. The little machine has become something of a trademark of mine. …