I am supposed to be the White Rabbit from the Wonderland books (which I adored as a kid), but I couldn’t resist tossing in a pair of goggles on the hat. C’mon, can you blame me?
I’m disappointed that you can’t see the shiny golden watch chain in the picture, but trust me, that’s the best part! *geeks out*
Really though, since I have no money the costume was made from thrift shop items and various other things that I already had laying around so overall I’m satisfied.
Since I have a lot of crap going on in my life right now, I decided it would be a good time to cheer myself up by visiting a place in my hometown called the “American Computer Museum”. Somehow I’d never actually gone there before, which is sort of shocking when you consider the types of things I saw there:
Old phones!
Old switchboard!
There is no way this thing isn’t a Tricorder.
Replica of the Antikythera mechanism; this looked so much cooler in real life than it does in the picture.
This is a calculator.
And so is this, and I want both of them so I can figure out how they work.
Arithmometer, aka mechanical calculator. Did I mention that I want this also?
Actual letter written by Ada Lovelace, I may have possibly fangirled over this for about ten minutes. (Directly underneath was a first edition copy of Charles Babbage’s autobiography, complete with technical drawings of the difference engine– cue similar fangirling.)
I decided that the time was right to present the most ridiculous picture of me ever taken. This, my friends, is the Pike-o-graph. Eh? Eh?
This watch went to the moon. I now find myself endlessly curious about the effects of low gravity on the movement. *mental note to look into this later*
This thing was full of blinking lights and made clickety-clackety noises if you got close to it. I have decided that I must have one. (You know, like I decided with basically everything else in this museum.)
A room full of computers, including at least a couple Commodore 64s. <3 The big red cabinet in the corner is Computer Space, the first commercially sold video game.
ENIAC…
UNIVAC…
8 megabytes of storage on this baby! Never mind the fact that it’s like twice as big as me. Seriously, you can see my reflection.
There was so much stuff here; it was fantastic. Also I bought a book called “The Victorian Internet”. With a title like that, you just can’t go wrong.
Ten days ago or so, the battery on my wristwatch died. Rather than buy a new one, I decided it was time to do something I’d wanted to do for a long time: namely, I decided it was time to graduate from a cheapy Wal-Mart watch to a nice real one.
For the uninitiated (aka sane people who aren’t watch geeks like me yet), most watches these days are battery-powered by way of electrical pulses sent through a quartz crystal. This makes for a watch that is very highly accurate, but the downside is that opening up the back to look inside is pretty disappointing because it is made of so few parts. Clearly this would not do for someone like me who is enamored with the beauty of real mechanical action. So it was that I went online, discovered a very nice watch for a very nice price, and ordered it.
And waited…
and waited…
and waited…
And finally the UPS Truck arrived today when I was in the middle of eating lunch. I had the biggest ever smile on my face when I was opening the box and was met with the most beautiful object I’ve ever laid eyes on:
This is a real mechanical watch– it was painstakingly made the same way they’ve made ’em for hundreds of years. It will never require batteries, and it winds itself via a rotor that spins when I move my arm. It is not quite as accurate as a modern quartz watch, and I’ll probably have to adjust the time when it ends up a few minutes slow each week, but to me that is a small price to pay for the Epic Factor.
And for being able to gaze lovingly at little tiny moving pieces anytime I check the time ^_^
It is also gigantic. Here it is compared to the Wal-Mart watch that served me well for the past few years:
It’s heavy and sits a bit awkwardly on my scrawny wrists (which are already small to begin with because I’m a girl) and it’s a good half an inch thick– at the least. But holy cogs, it’s beautiful. No matter how much respect I have for your utilitarian quartz watch for being accurate and being a pretty awesome technical achievement in its own right– you really can’t beat having the whirring heartbeat of a real mechanical wonder on your arm.
(And the back is see-through. How cool is that?)
Because sometimes, the cake actually isn’t a lie.
(Portal: Free to download until May 24. Now for Mac also. And I got it working, albeit reluctantly, on Linux/Wine. So you have no excuse!)