Return of Memoryfest - Day 13 & 14/31

[bironic]

Lost our internet connection last night and this morning. Always annoying, but at least this time I didn't have a critical project to upload for work. Two memories tonight to catch up.

13. Middle School

The World Wide Web started to become really popular when I was in middle school. Being in the technology field, my dad was the first to learn about it, and he showed the rest of us what could be done: research, email, surfing, etc. One of the earliest memories I have of using the Internet is sitting at my mom's computer with this new and wonderful Netscape browser offering access to an unfathomable amount of information. I typed the names of all the stores I could think of into the address bar to see if they had websites. Once one came up, there wasn't much to do but think of another. And when I started to run out of ideas, which didn't take long, I sat there and thought, Well, now what? Already there was this compulsion to keep going, to stay online, even when I couldn't think of what to do.


14. Elementary School

Our third-grade class was having a spelling lesson—"'I' before 'e' except after 'c,'" homonyms and homophones, that sort of thing. That day's lesson must have been about irregular spellings, because one of the words we were learning was "stomach." The reason I remember this at all is that a friend of mine sitting across the room was talking when she shouldn't have been, and our teacher reprimanded her for it. A. protested that she'd been paying attention. Our teacher asked her to please pronounce the word on the page. A. promptly said, with great confidence, "sto-MOSH."

WTF

Comments

[thewlisian-afer.livejournal.com]

13. I don't recall ever learning about the world wide web... We had a forty-minute computer class in school once or twice a week in elementary school, but there was no internet connection. We just learned word processing and played Oregon Trail and stuff like that.

I was in fourth grade when we got a computer at home. Daddy set up some parental controls and I was allowed to poke around as I pleased. It didn't take long for me to run into my first internet creep. Since I was only nine years old, when people asked me my age I would ask, "How old do you think I am?" My answer to whatever they said was always, "Nice guess." That way I wasn't lying outright but I wasn't actually answering their question either, they just thought I was. (People have always guessed that I'm 5-10 years older than my actual age and they still do.) So the person I was chatting with was under the impression that I was 14. We'd met in a teen chat room so I was under the impression that he was, you know, also a kid. After a while of chatting in which I'd revealed my name and the town I live in, it turned out he was actually in his early 30s and wanted to meet up. I told him I had to go and we'd talk later. I blocked him and spent the next several weeks worrying he'd be able to find me with the information I'd given. He never showed up, but after that I began using my middle name as my first name (which I've since given up) and a fake last name (which I haven't) and telling people that I live in Albany, which is actually 30 miles away (which I also still do).

14. When I was in first grade, if we got into trouble in class we had to write our name on the board. Then each time we got into trouble after that we had to put a check by our name. Three checks meant a trip to the principal's office. One day the boy sitting next to me (his name was Bach. How cool is that?) asked me the answer to a question. I shook my head at him to indicate that I wasn't going to tell him and tried to ignore him. But he kept poking me and bothering me. Finally I turned to him and hissed, "Do your own work. And talking is against the rules." The teacher looked up just in time to see me talking. I tried to tell her why I had spoken but it didn't matter. I had to write my name on the board. I used the smallest handwriting possible; you could hardly read it.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

13. Computers have always, always been a part of my life, which isn't so unusual for kids now but was a bit of an anomaly when I was young. We always had at least one at home. There are pictures of my sister and me when we were babies in my dad's lap while he sat at the computer. I learned my alphabet on the computer. Just about everything I've learned about and/or on computers was done at home rather than at school; we had those computer classes in elementary school too, with Oregon Trail and Print Shop card-maker and lessons about the "home keys," and then typing tests in middle school and Internet research lessons in high school, but with the exception of a class I took in BASIC in 10th grade, it was all old news.

For all that, I was fairly conservative about my computer use and never did venture into the later-infamous chat rooms or forums or mailing lists or other areas where you met virtual strangers -- not until just before my LiveJournal days, anyway! -- and so I never dealt with identity or stalker issues. That must have been scary. Your preventive measures make plenty of sense.


14. Oh, man, so unfair! I remember getting into similar trouble in kindergarten once because a boy next to me -- Justin, blond and a troublemaker -- was talking to me and I must have said something back (don't remember what, but it was probably along the lines of what you said, only meeker). The teacher told my parents he was a bad influence, heh.

[thewlisian-afer.livejournal.com]

Aw, now I miss my nephew. His name is Justin, and he's blond and a troublemaker. ♥

I'm not sure exactly when it changed, but I was pretty much first year Hermione Granger when I was very young. I was bossy and a know-it-all and painfully rule-oriented. Oh, how the times do change. XD If I hadn't been so damn nasty and hissed at the kid, I probably wouldn't have been caught. Murmuring is a lot harder to hear from across the room than hissing is.

[elynittria.livejournal.com]

13. OK, I'm going to show my age a bit here... Computers were definitely not part of my childhood. When my dad purchased a handheld electronic calculator, it was a big deal (and expensive). We kids weren't allowed to play with it, although we sometimes were allowed to check calculations in our homework with it.

I got a kick out of the fact that it used what was termed "Polish reverse logic" for entering equations (instead of putting operators such as + or X between their operands, you had to put them after them, so "2 + 2" was entered as "2 2 +"), both because it was so odd and because our family heritage was Polish.

[daasgrrl.livejournal.com]

OMG! Reverse Polish! A lot of people in our course used Hewlett-Packards like that, but I hated it and never did get the hang of it. Standard scientific calculator, thanks *g*

Yeah, I was going to say that computer experience really shows one's age. I still (vaguely) know how to use DOS commands...

[kabal42.livejournal.com]

Two back for you :-)

On the WWW:
I was first online in 1996 when I tried a Uni study for the first time. (Believe it or not, I was trying to study economics...) It was at that Institute's computer room. It had about 30 computers and a shared connection. Most pages took 5-10 minutes to load and I always read while I was online to spend the minutes between. No matter what I was doing - most regularly doing play-by-email rpg or surfing at random - I hated leaving that room. It was a haven, a place of dreams and imagination and far-away places - and it was the future. That was my distinct impression. (For the record, I was 20 that year :-) )


On words:
Unlike my peers, I was taught English at five because my dad was stationed in the Middle East. Thus, that was a subject I literally did in my sleep. Not so for the rest of my class-mates.
In 7th grade, in English class, we were reading to each other in small groups, helping with pronunciation. I was assigned to Michael, who was a minor bullier. (I divide that class into bullies, minor bullies and the ones who ignored it.)
At one point Michael was reading and he really had a horrible and very Danish pronunciation and had to say 'mother'. He pronounced it MO-ter (which sounded almost exactly like how Danes say motor) and I, in sheer surprise, burst out in laughter.
Later I felt bad, because I had ridiculed him. I, of all people, should know how awful that is. (Another part of me felt it was poetic justice *S*)

[kabal42.livejournal.com]

I had an HP like that in my teens. It was my dad's, but I borrowed it when maths became something calculators was needed for. And I also vaguely remember DOS commands. I should've stuck with learning them!

[mer-duff.livejournal.com]

13. My first exposure to computers was in Grade 7 - though only at a distance. In math, we wrote simple programmes that were taken to the local high school and input and run there. The next day we would find out if we'd done it correctly or have to figure out where we went wrong (I remember finishing the assignments and then spending the remaining days trying to write a programme that would identify prime numbers). I don't think I actually used a computer until I was 16, when I helped my father with the data entry for the school scheduling.

14. We used to have mini spelling bees when I was in Grade 4, which I was always desperate to win, because that was the year my mother taught me (and the year my parents separated, so I was seeking attention in the way I knew best). I remember that "mountain" was my nemesis. For some reason, I always spelled it "mountian" - or at least it seemed that way.

[synn.livejournal.com]

Here you go:

http://synn.livejournal.com/202366.html

It's friends-locked for little reason and has nothing to do with either of your memories.

[musicisbelievng.livejournal.com]

My earliest internet memory was looking up the weather in Bermuda and seeing that they had a "live" webcam at the top of a lighthouse to see it yourself. We stared at it for hours, even though I think it only updated once.