As if I haven’t been reminiscing enough lately, I happened to dig up an old backup cd I hard burned four years ago. I was a freshman in college, and had, up until that point, kept every single file that had ever been on my computer for the past, oh, 6 years or so, together because back then, files just weren’t that big. Anyway, I burned a cd with all those happy (and some otherwise) memories, and pulled it out today. I found just about every version of my early website archived there (images intact, as opposed to my previous find), and many other walks down memory lane. John and Colin will remember my UTILS directory, and up, it was all there in full glory. I’m so glad I found this. Anyway, I’d like to bring you a copy of a poem written as a freshman up at UF.
Generations
Sunshine beats against the house on the lake,
but the shade inside ignores it.
In the comforting darkness a boy speaks
and then listens to his aged grandmother
whose lined face bears more years than her age.
Looking out over the still lake,
the child wonders at the lull in speech
and is startled as the conversation
is reborn as his grandmother
tells him of the good old days.
A fish leaps from the middle of the lake
shouting as it flies, I am yet alive,
and then it glides below, hidden again,
silence settling over the lake.
Still talking, the grandmother feels her age.
Eyes closed, he sees words fly over the lake
and settle on the opposite shore
where she reconstructs what now cannot be:
vegetable gardens and long-lasting marriages,
love notes in envelopes with stamps so aged.
No ripples mar the surface of the lake,
and the past once again fades away
as the grandmother returns to silence,
leaving the boy to dream of what he
and the world will be like, when he is her age.
That utils directory kicked ass. I’m not sure how useful those things are anymore, but back in the day they were a veritable DOS Swiss Army knife.
Left by John on August 30th, 2003
The most amazing thing is that most of the demo scene files STILL RUN! On XP. Or rather, they run again, since most of them wouldn’t run on 98-2k. I was blown away when I tried them. Jaime was less than impressed, but I tried explaining how impressive it was to code a 3d starscape with background music all while rippling, scrolling text flies by, all in less than 4000bytes.
Left by Jordan on August 30th, 2003
You should put them up on some webspace somewhere so we can be impressed.
And I used to have a ‘UTILS’ type disk. It contained all the goodies, like the full set of 6.22 commands, XTree Gold and Partition Magic.
The black disk of fear it was named. Oh, we were so young.. lol
Left by TheMole on August 31st, 2003
Why is that women are so often less than impressed by so many impressive things? Actually, I think the better question would be… why do I keep trying to understand women?
Left by David on August 31st, 2003