{"id":780,"date":"2010-06-25T16:27:25","date_gmt":"2010-06-25T20:27:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.timeoff.org\/rick\/?p=780"},"modified":"2010-06-25T16:29:55","modified_gmt":"2010-06-25T20:29:55","slug":"a-year-ago-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.timeoff.org\/rick\/2010\/06\/25\/a-year-ago-today\/","title":{"rendered":"A Year Ago Today"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s all over the news. Today’s the one-year anniversary of the death of Michael Jackson<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I remember the day like it was yesterday. I was in Wildwood, NJ<\/a>, enjoying some downtime with the family. Wildwood has a seriously long boardwalk, a couple of miles, and we like to walk it when we’re in town.<\/p>\n

We were walking the boardwalk when the news hit. Before we reached the end you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting someone hawking t-shirts featuring the news.<\/p>\n

Marketing. It’s an amazing beast.<\/p>\n

And all you heard about for an unbelievably long time was Michael Jackson. Could have been a nuclear war and you wouldn’t have heard about that<\/em>, the way everyone went on and on about the dead pop star. Shit, I think they’re still<\/em> arguing about whatever’s left of his assets.<\/p>\n

I take you back to January 1985. Volume 1, Number 1, Issue 1 of NutWorks, “The Inter-Net Virtual Magazine for Those Who Teeter on the Precipice of Insanity”.<\/p>\n

\n

Boot It<\/p>\n

You’re processing some words when your keyboard goes dead,
\nTen pages in the buffer, should have gone to bed,
\nThe system just crashed, but don’t lose your head,
\nJust BOOT IT, just BOOT IT.<\/p>\n

Better think fast, better do what you can,
\nRead the manual or call your system man,
\nDon’t want to fall behind in the race with Japan,
\nSo BOOT IT,<\/p>\n

Get the system manager to
\nBOOT IT, BOOT IT,
\nEven though you’d rather shoot it.
\nDon’t be upset, it’s only some glitch.
\nAll that you do is flip a little switch.
\nBOOT IT, BOOT IT,
\nGet right down and restitute it.
\nDon’t get excited, all is not lost.
\nCP\/M, UNIX or MS\/DOS
\nJust BOOT IT, boot it, boot it, boot it…<\/p>\n

You gotta have your printout for the meeting at two,
\nThe system says your jobs at the head of the queue,
\nRight then the thing dies but you know what to do,
\nBOOT IT.<\/p>\n

You always get so worried when the system runs slow,
\nAnd when it finally crashes, man you feel so low,
\nBut computers make mistakes (they’re only human you know)
\nSo BOOT IT,<\/p>\n

Call the local guru to
\nBOOT IT, BOOT IT,
\nGo ahead re-institute it.
\nIf you’re not lucky, get the book off the shelf,
\nBut if you are, it’ll do it itself.
\nBOOT IT, BOOT IT,
\nThen go find the guy who screwed it!
\nOperating systems are built to bounce back,
\nWhether it’s a Cray or a Radio Shack.<\/p>\n

BOOT IT! BOOT IT!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, okay, maybe it ain’t the best<\/em> song parody you’ve ever seen. But NutWorks – and other virtual publications of the day – are certainly the early Internet ancestors that gave rise to the countless time-sucks you find on the Web today.<\/p>\n

Like this blog. Now get back to work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s all over the news. Today’s the one-year anniversary of the death of Michael Jackson. I remember the day like it was yesterday. I was in Wildwood, NJ, enjoying some downtime with the family. Wildwood has a seriously long boardwalk, a couple of miles, and we like to walk it when we’re in town. We … Continue reading A Year Ago Today<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[71,72],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.timeoff.org\/rick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.timeoff.org\/rick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.timeoff.org\/rick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.timeoff.org\/rick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.timeoff.org\/rick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.timeoff.org\/rick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.timeoff.org\/rick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.timeoff.org\/rick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.timeoff.org\/rick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}