badmojo wrote:

Have you tried Wordpress lately? It's a beautiful thing if you want a website up fast and cheap, and that looks good and is well supported. The amount of quality plug-ins make most customisations a snap but you can still get down and dirty if you need to. What's not to like?

Full control and completely knowing of the code and it's not pure ASP.NET C# with MS-SQL.
As I explained. My education is in this technology, not PHP and My-SQL.

Yeah... People are free to code whatever they like, and I just stick to what I know best and are comfortable with.

philscomputerlab wrote:

Yes it comes and goes in waves 😀

Indeed.

I have a lot of hobbies, and I'm always "realizing" that one of them is dumb and I should do the other. So after a few days or weeks of modern gaming, or camping/outdoors stuff, or car stuff, or retro gaming, I rotate back to another one.

Think its always been a way to escape back to "when things were simple" My father got a slot car set in his 40's. I remember granddad reliving the "good old days"

SquallStrife wrote:

I'm starting to think that my nostalgia bug might be a symptom of some horrible deep-seated dissatisfaction and depression issues.

You too?

Perhaps I've gotten my fill of retro-computing, I don't know.
What frustrates me about IT is none of this knowledge is additive and I
essentially have to re-learn everything every 5 years. And I find myself
going to look for some utility that existed 2 versions of windows ago,
or is now hidden in a different location.

My fear is that I'm actually quite sick of computers and all their attendant problems.

AidanExamineer wrote:

philscomputerlab wrote:

Yes it comes and goes in waves 😀

Indeed.

I have a lot of hobbies, and I'm always "realizing" that one of them is dumb and I should do the other. So after a few days or weeks of modern gaming, or camping/outdoors stuff, or car stuff, or retro gaming, I rotate back to another one.

This is PRECISELY what I find myself doing too! 😁

The key when it comes to not getting bored with computers is to work with something else!

When I was in "the business" I often felt that I did not want to see a computer when I got home, now when I work in a different field thats not the case at all 😀. I still find new computers lackluster though as I like to tinker, changing CPU multiplier and setting a video cards "power envelope" to 120% sadly doesn't do it for me. I still love my EVGA SR-2 system as its the total opposite, making two CPUs play nicely at the edge of stability with endless tweaking settings is my understanding of a fun time!

When it comes to retro stuff its not only nostalgia for me, its more about the challenge. My first PC was an IBM 386SX but now I'm having a blast tinkering with a 286 system. For me its just as fun if not even more so to muck about with hardware I never tested before. I have no other goal with my tinkering than to see what will happen if I do this or that.

I like playing old and new games but I spend perhaps 10% of the time playing and 90% of the time messing with the hardware. I used to play World of Warcraft in hardcore guilds from the release until 2010, during that time I played a lot, but only WoW 😜. I doubt another game will beat the rush of being the first guild on the server and sometimes one of the first in Europe to clear a new raid instance. Gaming has not really been the same for me after WoW.

ncmark wrote:

I think you have the ultimate nostalgia machine - that commodore 64!
I have looked at them on Ebay but so far have not been able to talk myself into it....

You should! Then you can bask in their glory. It's like the first spring day, your 18th birthday, graduation and Christmas all at once!

sf78 wrote:

You should! Then you can bask in their glory. It's like the first spring day, your 18th birthday, graduation and Christmas all at once!

I agree, even the blue glow of the ready prompt brings a smile to my dial - best enjoyed on CRT of course:

I 100% agree on, that one of the key features for not getting sick by computers. Is not to work with them on a daily basis.
When I assembled those 12 to 14 (sometimes 16 to 18) Athlon 2400+ machines, running memtest and finishing everything off by testing if they could do an oem WinXP installation with drivers and running 3D-Mark99/02 PLUS repairing 2 to 3 machines and doing all phone-support during one 7 hour workday.
And doing it every monday to friday every week for like 3 years. Well.... Then you are bound to get sick of computers for at least 8 years after you got sacked. And sacked, not because you are at fault, yet because the owner of the company feels he need to cut in wages. (I was replaced by an 17 year old)
And yeah... They get paid aprox 1/2 of what an adult worker makes. In short... He sacked the only one who could do servers and special stuff in his company, and replaced it with someone who was an gamer. He knew nothing, and had to be tought by the other 17 year old, wich I have trained to my level.
I was actually the first person to build a computer, using an Asus K8N-SLI board in the entire country of Denmark. And the only one he trusted in doing water cooling and yeah... Special stuff, like raid controllers. Did a build, using an Adaptech PCI PATA raid controller, that used standard PC-133 Ram as Cache or something like that.

Today I simply DO NOT repair other machines than my own and my woman's machine. Don't have the energy, nor the desire for doing friends and family's machines. Other than helping someone do an samba server for a personal NAS.

brostenen wrote:

I 100% agree on, that one of the key features for not getting sick by computers. Is not to work with them on a daily basis. When […]
Show full quote

I 100% agree on, that one of the key features for not getting sick by computers. Is not to work with them on a daily basis.
When I assembled those 12 to 14 (sometimes 16 to 18) Athlon 2400+ machines, running memtest and finishing everything off by testing if they could do an oem WinXP installation with drivers and running 3D-Mark99/02 PLUS repairing 2 to 3 machines and doing all phone-support during one 7 hour workday.
And doing it every monday to friday every week for like 3 years. Well.... Then you are bound to get sick of computers for at least 8 years after you got sacked. And sacked, not because you are at fault, yet because the owner of the company feels he need to cut in wages. (I was replaced by an 17 year old)
And yeah... They get paid aprox 1/2 of what an adult worker makes. In short... He sacked the only one who could do servers and special stuff in his company, and replaced it with someone who was an gamer. He knew nothing, and had to be tought by the other 17 year old, wich I have trained to my level.
I was actually the first person to build a computer, using an Asus K8N-SLI board in the entire country of Denmark. And the only one he trusted in doing water cooling and yeah... Special stuff, like raid controllers. Did a build, using an Adaptech PCI PATA raid controller, that used standard PC-133 Ram as Cache or something like that.

Today I simply DO NOT repair other machines than my own and my woman's machine. Don't have the energy, nor the desire for doing friends and family's machines. Other than helping someone do an samba server for a personal NAS.

Same for me. Back in 01 i was working at a computer store for 3 years, first it was fun, but eventually, i didn't liked it to sit behind a computer when i came home.
After i made a carreer move into a different profession, i had the urge again to play with computers.
I also hate to fix other peoples computers now. Now if i need some software, i just buy it, since i don't like to spent hours on hours to get stuff working.

I became a computer science teacher last year and, in the process, realised how shallow my knowledge of computers was. I had no idea about the electronics behind it all, the fetch-decode-execute cycle, what cache RAM does, the difference between the various buses and CPU generations etc. And now I know programming, I have built my own logic circuits from components and I cannot read enough information about computers. I have become obsessed with the workings and history of computers and am losing sleep on a regular basis because there aren't enough hours in the day to do all the things i want to do. This is after working as a professional tech for 15 years. I quit working with computers because I hated them.

I'm more interested in computers now, when I am furthest from them, than when I was closest to them.

snorg wrote:

You too? […]
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SquallStrife wrote:

I'm starting to think that my nostalgia bug might be a symptom of some horrible deep-seated dissatisfaction and depression issues.

You too?

Perhaps I've gotten my fill of retro-computing, I don't know.
What frustrates me about IT is none of this knowledge is additive and I
essentially have to re-learn everything every 5 years. And I find myself
going to look for some utility that existed 2 versions of windows ago,
or is now hidden in a different location.

My fear is that I'm actually quite sick of computers and all their attendant problems.

I work in IT as well, but the frustrating part for me is that as much work as I put into being good at what I do, most technicians skate by with the bare minimum.

Also Enterprise IT is pretty repetitive. I find it whets my appetite for computer-stuff, but doesn't fully satisfy. So I do the really fun stuff (cool network, DAS/NAS, media server stuff etc) at home.

Nostalgia comes and goes. I was into 80s music for a while and almost bought an old IROC Z to rebuild but they were so crappy I just couldn't do it. I drive a 2013 Corvette so the bar is high.
I have been flying an old airplane for two years and the airplane ownership and training hobby got a bit old so I picked up retro computing. Specifically I am learning assembly language 8088 and Tandy 1000 graphics in order to make a trixter like demo some day or a really good game demo that pushes the limits of the hardware,which is a Tandy 1000 HX and TL.
I just bought an Amiga 600 and will probably make my library cross platform as well.