Hello "TheInnerJamie"!

You can find my new account at that name, just go to and check it out. That's where the stories will be. Lots of you have said that you like the stories so I hope to see you gimme just as much love on my own!

Plllleeeease?

I will soon open a new deviantArt account. Why? That way I can have one for writings.

Yes, I will add my stories, and will be writing new ones simply for the purposes of having them at dA. Expect lots of good stuff!

When one talks about greatest things, there's a certain amount of reverence involved. Greatest films, greatest world leaders, whatever. In those instances it's very seldom the ultimate example that's considered the greatest. For example, I very much doubt that anybody would believe that Prime Minister Brown of England is a greater leader than Sir Winston Churchill.

For that reason, I'd like to share my own unique, very different view of Greatest Tech through history. You'll be surprised, I think, to learn what a real geek thinks and likes. It'll be hard to find the latest things, and I'll explain why as we go through the list.

I'll be doing this in several installments over the coming weeks as I'm able to find and review different classes of software. The unfortunate truth is that many applications, games, computers, and peripherals simply either aren't available to me, or no longer exist at all. If there's anything that you remember from the good old days, please, leave a comment and tell me about it. I'll do my best to look it up and find out as much as possible about it!

The bulk of my information comes from years of geekery and love of retrocomputing. The rest comes from Wikipedia and Nathan Lineback's Toasty Technology Page ( [link] )

Are we ready? Let's go!

Greatest Desktop Operating System: Mac OS 8.5 - 9.2.2 (1998-2001)

Yep. I'm naming the final revisions of the classic Macintosh System Software as the greatest desktop OS ever. You'll never run FarCry on it. It can't play Adobe Flash. iTunes Music Store is a pipe dream. So, why in the world do I still use this dinosaur of a system as my main and preferred OS?

It's fast. It's sleek. It gets out of my way. Most of all... no Internet crap.

Ten years ago, the Internet was great. It was a tool for finding information, communicating with your friends, and overall, a great addition to a personal computer. Now the thing is the absolute worst example of bloat on Earth. Social media, cloud apps, Flash, video sites. Augh! Please, let it all crash! I've had it up to my eyeballs with social networking, that much I can certainly tell you. I think the next time I hear about Facebook as though it matters as much as say... General Motors... I'm going to puke. General Motors was worth saving. They employ easily a million people, and produce a billion dollars worth of product a year.

Facebook exists because of gullible venture capitalists who like to shove cash into a money pit. Same goes for Twitter. These wastes of time clog bandwidth and mindshare for what to do on the Web. Now it's hard to find telephones that don't have Myspace or some other junk built in. Why exactly do I need to update my Facebook status when all I want to do is call Jack?

Well, suffice to say that in 1998 when Mac OS 8.5 was released, there was no such thing as the social web. No Google Apps. None of it! You ran programs on a computer to make things. Maybe you use Word 5.1 for your word processing, Aldus Pagemaker for desktop publishing, and Corel Draw! for your graphics. Maybe you're a WordPerfect devotee? Who knows? All those things and more were what you used a computer for back then. Mac OS 8.5 was your go-to guy to run software.

Never as finnicky as Windows 98, the 8.x series of Mac OS brought modern features to the platform, giving stability and speed to the beautiful foundation of System 7. When the software was incremented to OS 8.5, it became a masterpiece. Right-click menus, memory protection, performance increases. Most of all, usability.

Mac OS 8.5 went the opposite direction from Windows 98 in usability. Wheras Windows offered detailed, well-thought-out methods of organizing your programs and documents, OS 8.5 continued the time-honored Macintosh way: The Spacial Desktop.

In the Macintosh Finder, every object goes exactly where you put it. Sure you can turn on a grid or auto-arrange, but then who knows what'll happen? Change the items in a window and they'll move. With a spacial model, they never do. They go where you tell them to go and never move. The interface didn't give you a Start Menu. Instead, you had any number of options to run things. Drop aliases in the Apple Menu, or on the desktop. You could leave programs in their folders and just navigate to them to run them. Whatever. Do it your way!

For simplicity, stability, speed, and lack of Internetcentricy, I throw my lot in with the final major iteration of the classic Mac OS. Releases 8.5 through 9.2.2. The ultimate desktop OS.

1st Runner Up: Windows 98
2nd Runner Up: Be OS
3rd Runner Up: IBM OS/2 3.0

Greatest Desktop Computer: Commodore Amiga (1985-1994)

When talking about the heyday of desktop computing, one name appears early and stays through the mid 1990s. Commodore. Entering the fray in the late 1970s with the PET, and then in the early 80s with the beloved VIC20 and Commodore 64, they carved a niche for low-cost, popular computers that was immovable for close to a decade.

Wasn't enough for Commodore. Especially since 1985 was a very bad year for them. Their former executive, the inscrutable Jack Tramiel, had instigated the Personal Computer War of the early 1980s, a price war between Commodore, Atari, TI, and most other home computer makers. Only Apple seemed to be above the all-out business combat.

By the time it was over, TI had withdrawn from the home computer market, and the conditions helped to bring about the Video Game Crash of 1983. Tramiel's personal motto was "Business is war." Unfortunately for his company, he didn't care about collateral damage. Commodore's coffers were empty and the company which had scant years before introduced the VIC-20 and C64 was now desperate to find its next cash cow.

Enter Amiga Corporation. Their prototype for a high-powered multimedia workstation, codenamed Lorraine, caught Commodore's eye. They snapped up the fledgeling company and railroaded the project to completion. Fall of 1985 saw the release of the Amiga 1000. It was marketed poorly by Commodore, as their business department barely understood what they had. It was pitched to the public as more of the same, a much less capable computer, rather than a direct competitor to the Macintosh 512 and Atari ST.

Amiga was built around the same 16/32-bit Motorola 68000 CPU as the Apple Macintosh and Atari ST, but added to it a number of custom, purpose-built chips. Designed by famed computer-architect Jay Miner, the Amiga chipset was built around three custom NMOS ICs, all fabricated by Commodore's in-house MOS Technology division.

Agnus was a high-speed memory bus controller that allowed Amiga access to RAM much more efficiently than other mainboard designs of the day, thus allowing for the computer's famous implementation of preemptive multitasking a decade before Windows 95 would make it commercially successful, and a full sixteen years before it would be a reality for Apple's users.

Denise, a purpose-built video processor was capable of driving Amiga's display at up to 640x200 progressive-scan or 640x400 interlaced. Denise supported a display up of to 32 colors from a palette of 4,096. Nothing to laugh at in 1985. By comparison, Windows would be limited to 8 colors until 1990. Macintosh System 4 introduced color support with the Macintosh II in 1987, allowing 256.

Finally, Paula was the other half of the A/V equation. Paula provided 4 hardware-mixed 8-bit audio channels, with any sample rate from 20Hz to 29kHz.

In addition to the powerful hardware, Amiga delivered a software experience that would not be equalled until the late 1990s. The main user interface, called Workbench, was based loosely on the same desktop metaphor behind the Macintosh Finder and Windows 95 Explorer, but its behind-the-scenes features were far richer. Workbench's core, AmigaOS, supported preemptive multitasking with full memory protection thanks to the Agnus chip. These multitasking capabilities, combined with the Denise chip's ability to "genlock", allowing it to receive and drive NTSC or PAL video, led to the development of products such as Video Toaster by NewTek, which revolutionized video production in the early 1990s. The earliest applications let TV news and weather improve their graphics nearly overnight to the quality that we expect from national broadcast even today.

Amiga, despite its power, flexibility, and overall awesomeness, never made it past the mid 1990s as a commercially viable product. Commodore went bankrupt in 1994 and the Amiga was sold to Escom, and has since changed hands numerous times.

It's doubtful that Amiga will ever return to prominence, but it still lives on to this day. AmigaOS is currently in the 4.x series, and hardware to run it can still be purchased or built.

1st Runner Up: Apple Macintosh Quadra 840AV
2nd Runner Up: Atari ST
3rd Runner Up: IBM PS/2 Model 25

So ends part one. Next time I'll hit word processors and spreadsheets. Oooh. Exciting!

I'm so weird these days.

It's kinda funny how getting in touch with a repressed girly side will make you realize you don't enjoy things you should. It's crazy how being unabashedly feminine will really cause you to want to be normal.

I'm going to be doing something I've never done in my entire life, and it's something that sounds so backwards. You'd think that going girly would make one like football less, but it's not true. Watching people play a game sounds incredibly enjoyable. Watching it with my girlfriend sounds even better

I want to have more fun, just let go and do things that will make me smile, but it wasn't always like this. For a about a year leading up to my epiphany (when I let myself admit that I'm an emotional, feminine, temperamental girly guy) I turned to the bottle too much. Never the constantly-drunk alcoholic thing... just an inability to meter myself. I'd never get "feeling good." I'd go past it and stay juiced longer than my g/f. The really annoying part is that I'd be consistently drinking half a fifth of drink at once! Yikes!

Well, that set a really annoying precedent, understandably. Now I'd much rather find a way to make myself meter myself. I want to do it on my own, rather than making her treat me like a child

So, this is a question for all of you who like your drinks, and revel in the pleasure of moderation! What are your tricks for getting enough, getting tipsy and chatty, without getting DRUNK? I'd really like to know so that I can enjoy drinking with my g/f again.

Heads up, though: "Just stop drinking completely" type comments are unwelcome.

Why?

I saw this at Toys 'R' Us today and now I feel like crying. Is Captain Kirk suddenly Captain Kiroku? Who knows. I didn't feel like finding out. Personally, this feels dirty to me. Star Trek has a very strong American cultural identity, and has a connection to the old epics of Northern Europe in its storytelling. There are many, many parallels between it and European mythology in some places, and then the main bulk of it comes from "Horatio Hornblower".

Add to that, Star Trek was meant to be positive, optimistic. It's about overcoming the obstacles that stand in the way of all people, not just some over-powered hero character.

But most of all it feels dirty because... it does. That's really the only reason I need to not like this. The truth is I don't have to explain it to you, you don't deserve an explanation. If you're able to pick a reason out of all this, then good.

If not... too bad.

So, that said...

The artwork in it I guess isn't bad. The Enterprise is well-drawn. The equipment is well-done. The people leave quite a bit to be desired. The cover art is lovely, honestly. Very well-done caricatures of the actors. Inside is a different story. The characters lack detail, or even cues that set them apart. Bones looked like Captain Kirk. And since nobody bothered to color it, a lot is lost. 1960s Star Trek and color are inseparable. Trying to render TOS in nothing more than pencil feels like a hollow attempt. Uhura looked like she was 12, the Klingons looked like mustachioed women, and I swear that the Admiral in it was just some generic background character from like... Tenchi Muyo!

It looks like storyboards, really.

Some things that did look really nice... The Klingon bridge reminded me of the USS Kelvin in the new movie. Rugged and strong without simply being a re-use of the 1990s TNG sets. Thank you guys at least for not making it be more of that blandness.

The titles... okay, they actually annoy me. When I think of Star Trek titles I think of things like, "The Doomsday Machine", "City on the Edge of Forever" and "The Wrath of Khan". But "Kakan ni Shinkou" is in a different language.

I could go on all day about how annoying it is that when our entertainment goes to Japan it'll be translated to Japanese, but when their stuff gets brought over here it'll be left in their tongue. I could go on all day, but I won't. I'll simply say that peeves me.

So, the titles... because they're left needlessly in a different language, I have no idea what the story is, or even any clues at all as to what the devil this is. Why couldn't the title get translated? Laziness?

Who knows.

Anyway... I know that you want me to give it a chance, try it out, but I won't. Why should I bother when there's already so many more interesting things? IDW Publishing has been running excellent Trek comics for several years. They have things I like... such as color, recognizable characters, and titles I can read.

Star Trek manga?

Please go away.