Celebrating 26 Years of Winky Smiley Winky!

This is the man who invented the ASCII-based emoticon, on a computer science BBS at Carnegie Mellon 26 years ago!

"the modern emoticon does trace its lineage directly to Fahlman, who says he came up with the idea after reading 'lengthy diatribes' from people on the message board who failed to get the joke or the sarcasm in a particular post -- which is probably what 'given current trends' refers to in his own, now-famous missive. To remedy this, Fahlman suggested using :-) and :-( to distinguish between posts that should be taken humorously and those of a more serious nature."

Here is the September 1982 BBS post where he proposed the smiley emoticon:

19-Sep-82 11:44    Scott E  Fahlman             :-)

From: Scott E  Fahlman 

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways.  Actually, it is probably more economical to mark

things that are NOT jokes, given current trends.  For this, use

:-(

Awesome!

Have Gone Mac, Reportedly Not Going Back

My never-all-that-reliable Dell laptop wheezed its last breath the day before yesterday, and I made a long-delayed trek to the Apple store to acquire more debt, I mean my first Apple since the early '80's. I got a shiny white little MacBook which is currently rocking my world.

Issues I have to sort out: my Epson multipurpose printer/scanner/fax is not Mac compatible. I don't know how to do screen captures. I don't know how to resize pictures with iPhoto or whatever other graphics program I have.

Things I already like - this thing is speedy. It's also tiny and light and doesn't hurt my back when I lug it around in my backpack. It's also super intuitive and much more nicely designed - the power cord is never going to weigh so heavily on the motherboard that the whole thing starts to loosen up (stupid Inspiron), the CD-ROM drive doesn't pop out a fragile and clunky tray that can easily be broken. I have a lot to learn but so far I'm digging this thing.