New Hucbald Page at MP3.com.au

I have created a new Hucbald page over at mp3.com.au. Like a lot of these kinds of sites, it has a lot of amateurish content - and there are the usual kinds of suspects trying to monopolize the place with gazillions of uploads - but the feature that got me to spend the time - several hours yesterday - to create the page and upload twenty-seven tracks plus artwork is the album download function. Instead of going to my .Mac downloads page and downloading the tracks from Fossils one at a time, you can now download the entire album with a single click, go get a cup of coffee, and you'll have it.



With the HQ album art, you'll also see the artwork on your more recent vintage iPod or iPhone when you play the tracks. In the case of the iPhone, the CD cover will show up in your browse window when you scroll through your albums.

As an aside, I find it interesting how I've gradually developed facility with computers over the years, despite not really trying to. There aren't a whole lot of HTML issues I can't figure out anymore, and I've bookmarked some sources that I can use as reference, should I need them. Since I graduated from high school in 1976, I missed the whole "computers in the classroom" era entirely.

Here's what Apple was selling in July of 1976, while I was going from bong-hit to bong-hit enjoying the summer between high school and college:



Nice, huh? 8K bytes of RAM! What would you do with all that memory? Ah yes, it "attaches directly to" the venerable, old "ASCII encoded keyboard." "16-pin 4K RAM chips"(!) were so high tech and cutting edge then. And, what did the future hold back in those days? Why, "[32K bytes on-board RAM!!]" is what.

Oooooo! "A fast [1 kilobaud] cassette interface" - presumably, to keep you from getting stuck with one of those slow cassette interfaces. Best of all? "Apple Basic is Free!"

BASIC was developed at Dartmouth, as were the Synclavier, and Synclavier II. So, the OS for the Synclavier was programmed in XPL-4, which was nothing more than an extended form of BASIC. So, I was actually - finally - exposed to basic by 1984. I also had a Commodore 64 at the time, so that was really the beginning of the "computer age" for me (Not withstanding that I had a required course in computer programming in college in 1978: It was FORTRAN 4 "with WATFOR and WATFIV, which we, naturally, called "Whatfor and Whatif." We used punch cards and an old mainframe!).

I didn't get my first real PC until I was a doctoral candidate at UNT in 1993: It was a Windows 3.1 machine, and I got it to run the Encore music printing program, and that was pretty much it. Well, there was the old Battle Chess program (Which I figured out how to beat on every difficulty level). When Apple came out with the Newton 110, I got one of those, loved it, and so I got an old, monochrome display Powerbook running Mac OS 7. It's been All Apple All the Time for me ever since: G4 Cube, iceBook, tiBook, and now a Mac Mini.

I've come a long way with this computer stuff.



At various points I've been into bow hunting, black powder hunting, bird hunting (shotguns), and regular long arm hunting, but I never considered falconry... until just now. She's not wearing a falconer's glove and the bird's talons are digging deeply into her forearm. I wanted to get that, but if I cropped any lower, it would expose too much of her, ahem, "tender parts." It's a great photo though.