Harvest Moon

I took this shot last night as the full Harvest moon was starting to rise in the sky. I used my Panasonic Lumix FZ1 and used the top of my Escape as a tripod.

My Canon AE-1 is 30 years old today

Back on this date in 1977, I went to Lechmere Sales (my favorite store, RIP) to buy my first SLR. It cost $299.99 with a 50mm f/1.8 lens. I still have it and it's never let me down. I've taken thousands of photos with over the years and and it has served me well. I admit I have not used it much recently, but I plan to put a roll of TMax in it to commemorate this milestone.

B&W chemicals

Today I purchased some B&W chemicals for the first time in over 25 years! I bought TMax developer,indicator stop bath, fixer and hypo clearing agent. I look forward to using them as soon as I get all the other stuff needed to develop film!

It all started 30 years ago today

On September 7, 1977 I used a computer for the first time and wrote my very first program. It was my first day of High School. A friend of mine was taking "Intro to Computers" and wanted to show me what it could do. I didn't have any interest, but he really wanted to show me what he had learned, so I went to the computer room. I don't remember exactly what he showed me, but I do remember my first program:

10 REM THIS IS A PROGRAM
20 PRINT "HELLO"
30 END

When I typed in the command "RUN", this is what I got:

HELLO

I was hooked! I then spent a lot of my time after school learning BASIC on a DEC PDP/8e using a noisy and slow ASR-33 Teletypes. The photo on the top is the ASR-33 Teletype and the other is a similar looking PDP-8/e that my school used. The teletypes only printed in UPPERCASE and at 10 characters per second, which was painfully slow. But I didn't care as I was in nerdvana!

The Complete DX'er, a must have book

I received this book today from Idiom Press (http://www.idiompress.com/) as I've been told it's one of the best books for learning about making DX contacts. The first chapter is wonderful so far and the other chapters look just as good at first glance. Also, much to my surprise, the book is signed by the author! He wrote on the very first page "To Rich AB1HD, 73 & DX! de Bob Locher W9KNI". A very nice touch that I wasn't expecting.