... Don't take this as an offensive, but you kinda look like my grandmother (mother's side). XD

I don't especially think I'm going prematurely gray. When I was on the committee of Equicon/Filmcon `75, I kept saying, "This is going to age me 10 years," meaning I was sure the experience was aging me due to stress. So here I am at 55 looking 65 or so.

It doesn't help that I took extra stressy jobs since then, stressy enough that I'm sporting a pacemaker already, while my mom, a 2-time Cancer survivor, still doesn't have one. Of course, her hair is nearly shock white whereas it once was black. She dyes it nowadays, and mine still has a bit of tint, believe it or not...

I used to need coke bottle glasses until I had Lasek (sic) surgery. Now I just need reading glasses, again like an old man, to be able to read computer screens or play with the 3DS...

I'm on the flip side of age, and to me it's a number but as well you have to live through more and more BS to earn the high score. And believe me it was not a party living prior to having no Internet, no wireless data connections everywhere you went, no wireless phone services accessible from your car, restaurants, etc., no auction sites to list or purchase goods (you HAD to use swap meets and pawn brokers), on and on... then if you get so many decades old, you get closer to major wars that make this Middle East crap look trivial.

Dude, premature or not, you wear your age with grace. besides, the say youth is in the eyes and the heart, so I don't plan to go much past 12, even at 32. XD

I don't see much other than a lot of tossed out calendars with all the BS events that went along with them between the me of my high school days and now.

Just that my back, lungs, and feet are definitely the worse for wear.

But my eyesight, especially without glasses, is better. Surgery fixed that, at least.

We seem to have the same mindset on age then.

... Uhmm... ok?

I rant; just my thing.

Nice hair :)

Thank you fuzzy

Don't worry man. It could always be worse. Plus I've seen a lot worse out on the street.

You better Trek yourself before you wreck yourself!! :-P

I was only like 9 y/o when the series was starting out, but my parents let me stay up late to watch it. Science Fiction on TV. It had "Science" in its name, so it must be educational, right?

I loved the show right off, and like most young, intelligent, and awkward kids of my generation, it was quite easy to identify with Mr. Spock, so he became a favorite character and a role model of sorts. Unfortunate, as living as if bottling up your emotions and keeping a Poker Face all the time is good for you... oh, nooo...

I first picked up on the series with the original cast movies (on RCA Selectavision video disk no less), then progressed to TNG as a kid, then back to the TOS and up to DS9 and Voyager.

My job with RDI Video Systems, inventors of the Dragon's Lair arcade game, was to code for a home console entertainment system that was to be centered around that Selectavision unit. When RCA (the letters stand for Real Crappy Apparatus according to at least one source I know), yes RCA announced they were discontinuing production of the unit, we were basically sunk. It meant for us we had to retool around the Pioneer Laserdisc player which was easily 2x as expensive, wrecking our price point. Changing our projected console price from about $300 to over $700. Maybe you can get away with a $700 nextgen console today (just barely), but back then, it was absolutely ludicrous. This was 1980's dollars, which adjusting for inflation... d'oh there's some Internet calculator for that somewhere.

$1,577.52 apparently, according to a consumer price index calculator, and assuming we could sell Halcyon at $700 retail in 1984.

The venture capitalists saw the writing on the wall when they heard that retail price estimate, too. Shortly after the Selectavision failure, a lot of people up and quit, lots more got downsized, and I was one of the hangers-on... I took a headhunter's job offer just 3 weeks prior to the Sheriff locking the doors of the establishment for insufficient payroll funds. Or maybe months. Time flies when you're having fun?

TNG was on part during my employment at NTN Communications, where I had swing shift work, and then some years as well I was in Las Vegas and worked late hours during its televising, and had to program a VCR to record it. I'd not always have time to review the tapes, so would have a tape with like a month worth of shows or more sometimes and have a marathon viewing session, seeing the tape capacity (8 hours?) of shows...

Even so, there were times when TV BS would delay/interrupt broadcasts and regularly scheduled programming so standard "record for 60 minutes starting at this specific time of day on this specific channel" type VCR roboticism just doesn't work. TiVo is lots nicer, being it receives program schedules from the Internet, knowing of changes and interruptions sometimes (not pre-emptions most of the time, ) and records by the actual SHOW and not so robotically. If its start time floats because of scheduled changes, it often adjusts for that automatically which means I usually have a lot of shows waiting for me that really are the actual correct shows and not some mistake recording made from that channel from that time slot.

But I digress. The 7 year run of TNG was during times in Nevada and California, both times when I did not have face time with TV sets during the broadcast times of these programs. Voyager and DS9, ditto (save for DS9 I was totally in Nevada iirc, between Las Vegas and Reno residences).

For Enterprise, I believe I made it back to California and was living in the Bay Area, working for high-tech companies in the Silicon Valley. I really had no time for anything other than work. What one vacation I took was to Las Vegas, and at the Hilton was where I saw one of the earliest episodes of Enterprise (Tucker gets pregnant). It was at Quark's Grill and Bar, a themed restaurant inside "The Experience," an attraction that has since completed its 10-year mission at the hotel.

So how's that for a ramble?

It's all actually quite fascinating. I'm sorry you missed out on so much great Trek, but not much past TNG was really all that memorable. I have a hard time imagining a home console working around a CED, considering they were more or less a phonograph that used capacitance to produce video.. so weird...

I had to take a crash course in the technology when I came on board, for I was to take over the video control portion of the unit (we had a warehouse with 400 or so of them, then he unloaded them or managed to get his creditor(s) to repo them). Oh, I am implying Mr. RD of RDI - Rick Dyer, and it's Rick Dyer Industries, not Incorporated. And I wrote the public Wikipedia entries for "Halcyon (console)" as well as "Thayer's Quest" and added a little content here and there to pages for "Dragon's Lair" (Arcade game) and "Space Ace" (ditto). I think I'm "Zoransis" on the Wikipedia. I never see much feedback/questioning, so I am unsure I have the damn thing/notifications set up right tbh.

Yes, they encoded the video signal on vinyl just like music. And it's basically just like how an FM radio signal is modulated. A sapphire needle (quite flat, actually, very slightly "V" shaped tbh) simply is pushed or dragged across (yes, DJ scratch style) the grooves (there is just 1 helical groove as usual) of the record to the approximate position desired (they can find where they need to be to plus or minus one groove, which is one frame on a random access or CAV disc, but I think they didn't encode in CAV hardly ever if at all iirc, so it's all scrunched together tighter on outside tracks than inside because there's more inches of vinyl because the perimeter is larger outside than inside). On a movie disc therefore, this means quite a sloppy landing on the outside tracks, minutes of content skipped by just one groove.

When the needle stops moving, the tracks all have a SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineering) code that is HH:MM:SS:FF, where you might not know what the FF part is, well it is a number from 00 to 29, which is a frame number. There are 30 frames in a television picture, interleaved in halves due to the 60 hertz raster scanning frequency. So a television often has what is called a "field" or an odd and even raster half scan of the frame. This is all part of how the frame is encoded over the radio frequency. And I assume part and parcel how it was encoded somehow IN ANALOG on the vinyl.

This means like all vinyl recordings, IT WEARS OUT as you play it each and every time. And especially as you start seeking forward and back, freeze frame, slow-mo, etc. It starts carving up the platter like a turkey on Thanksgiving.

OF COURSE the engineers who designed this system knew this! Same as the people who made VHS knew the oxides would start shredding off the tapes in a decade or less (and the whole technology find its way into landfills in about the same amount of years)... But they were small-minded, like so many businesses in the 70s and 80s, looking for fast bucks NOW, never mind how hard you were screwing the customer in the long run, raping the landfills, polluting the air and water with the toxic chemicals it took to make the products (not to mention dispose of the wrecked/useless recordings)... Nope, just make cheap crap and sell it.

The Laserdisc was lots more durable. Meant to be rugged, the discs sealed in mylar, and you could get archival discs made from glass and gold if you really wanted something to not decay for several decades... pity the machine capable of reading it would decay and stop working lots sooner. But what can you do when the effort to miniaturize physical media keeps moving forward? In another 20-30 years, I reckon your "thumb drive" may be some petabytes-on-a-keychain that is probably a square centimeter of crystalline substance with ultraviolet lasers that read the media. The protective casing and mechanical delivery/carriage/plug-in/interface system is going to be lots bigger than the actual media itself.

I still have a fairly good memory of taking home this shoebox-sized hard drive that was 20mb. Yeah, not much more storage space than one of my jpgs. Something like 4 platters in it, too. At least 4" or maybe 6" diameter, you could see inside - smoked plastic enclosure. It connected via special interface to an Apple][ and would emulate so many equivalent 5.25" diskettes. There was some way in software to access each disk on the hard drive in BASIC, like LOAD #14,4 or something like that, and the appropriate diskette would mount from the hard drive letting you at that piece of storage, and you went from there. Heaven forbid having contiguous access across the whole 20mb of it should you wish to create a USEFUL database~!

Of course, like Jeff Bridges' character said in Tron, "There's no problems, only solutions." So as a programmer, you take obstacles like that and make solutions to work around it and turn something like that shoebox into something useful. And in 1980's money, that thing cost about $200, or close to what the Apple][ cost by itself. $772.77 is the CPI calculator translation of $200 from 1977 to today.

Now there's a love affair that I sorely miss. The Apple][ sure was a fun toy while it lasted. 1977-1984, basically. When the IBM PC came out on the scene things did start to decline rapidly however, so a little earlier than that we had trouble brewing. I got one of the very early releases of the IBM PC for San Diego, and wrote reviews of new hardware and software for the Softalk for the IBM PC magazine as a fairly regular columnist (under the name Richard Alan Kaapke).

1984 was the year the Macintosh came on the scene, challenging the foothold of the IBM PC, basically. And I had to have one. The windowed OS just blew me away. It was a new love affair with Apple all over again. If Softalk (or anyone) was still actively soliciting manuscripts from me, they'd have gotten enthusiastic response from me. Especially if it meant I got to try out fresh, new hardware and software sent to me free of charge for review and free return (or even possible free to keep!). Nope. The Softalk guy basically went through his gameshow fortune, and nobody else was going to pick up the magazine's expenses.

Hardware wars, indeed. You'll laugh! You'll cry! You'll kiss your bank account good bye!

I actually read all of that, and found the beginning and middle about the CED most fascinating. My brother still owns a functioning Selectavision videodisc player and discs. Sometimes he breaks out his copies of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek II and plays them just for kicks. Oh how it all comes full-circle.

I must implore your brother to READ THE BOOK on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, as it was written by Gene Roddenberry and has been critically reviewed highly well by peers in the SF community as a very good novel. What happened with the screen play is an extremely long story - cut short, the expenses put into special effects shots were so spendy that the movie company didn't want any of them edited down, so we got a film where we end up staring doe-eyed at SFX for half the film.

There are 2~3 biographies about Gene Roddenberry (authorized and not; some not specifically about him and him alone) that will touch on the making of his Star Trek films, so details about his movies are quite well known to me and still fresh in my mind. And as well the man is another hero of mine, a person I would have liked to emulate (and knowing more about him, 'emulation' wouldn't be too difficult).

I did of course not have the physical size or bearing this man had, nor did I live at a time where I could've served in the military during WWII, flown for the Army Air Corps, later flown for Pan Am, later served the Los Angeles Police Dept., and then finally deciding I could write television episodes better than what I was watching. No, I'd have been 4-F applying for the service, and flunk the physical if not also psychological parts of the Police exams...

There are certain opportunities and life paths that open for you based on your physical prowess and capacities. When you are more frail and fragile, it's a sorry fact of life that you don't always have all these same goals within as easy a reach if at all. Becoming President or a big time producer can be quite a pipe dream.

We've already had our FDR and (?Bing failed finding me a recognizable name of a disabled movie/music/Hollywood producer). It seems not many repeats of these sorts of success stories get to happen, that just once you have a token example, then you return to mainstream...

Star Trek II is fully awesome, though of course it is almost nothing of Gene Roddenberry's creation. It is a script they bought, sort of a knee-jerk response at the success of Star Wars. It kills off Spock (something Nimoy wanted), only at the very end of production changing it to give a vague possibility to resurrect the character, because there were a set of terms under which Nimoy WOULD return to the film... (If he got to direct Star Trek III, for one thing... Approve the script for another, I forget what other conditions - I believe at least another was to be paid equal scale with Shatner, probably more being Director.)

I've not read Nimoy's biographies; only Shatner's, and only as written by Shatner. And Bill jokes about Leonard quite a bit, and on various subjects. Money does get jibed about often enough to stick against the walls of by brain like so much old gruel. Gruel jokes? Anyway. Same jokes Shatner makes about himself and not-humorous comments on this topic made about Bill, so there you have it. "Money Makes the World Go Around" showtune now plays in my head. Anyway... Right... Bad to type stream of consciousness like this... Because it makes the thinking process stop because the brain says, "Hey, stop looking at me! I'm thinking here! Give me some privacy, will yas! Sheesh!" And it pulls the curtain and goes back to pulling the levers and pushing the buttons and pulling the chains on the nervous system and other controls it may have access to. I could swear there were some fake signs taped in place, batman-style over the console there... DAMNIT!

OK then, as I was going to say, Nimoy's Spock character was a childhood role-model. Obviously, one does confuse a character with an actor. Happens a lot, which they hate because this type casting follows them in their personal lives such that Nimoy wrote a book quite early on (1970s) called I am Not Spock. This book served to not piss off the Star Trek fan, but humanize the man, showing that having emotional depth is a quality we all should embrace, and be proud of, being members of the Human race, and that he had a poet's soul, and to prove that, published a number of his poems in that book along with other bits of philosophy and other flighty, emotional, illogical ramblings. It came out in hardcover and I think was $12 or so - time for the consumer price index calculator to translate from 1977 dollars again: $46.37

The volume was only 150 pages or so. Light reading, deep thoughts.

Much later he did publish a volume owning the character however, "I am Spock," more of a Star Trek memoir, much thicker, $25 or so and in 1990's dollars: $44.79

I guess ol' Lenny likes to get half a C-Note from us most every time he puts a book out there. LLAP is where some of Spocko's Lenny's current goods (photography books, Live Long and Prosper salute shirts, etc.) are sold. Things are pricy there, but please read carefully about where proceeds actually go to benefit before starting up on any grousing.

In case you've never heard, Lenny is a consummate photographer, especially in B&W. He's had NYC gallery showings, the whole 9 yards.

[ShopLLAP] sorry, my bad. Official Leonard Nimoy Online Shop. $29 shirt e.g., $75 if autographed; longsleeve or short; $9 DVD coming back in stock soon with Lenny playing a plaintiff in a trial vs. a Holocaust denial organization.

Just as an example (at Star Trek conventions), Bill Shatner's autograph is $100 ea... and you have to pay extra (otherwise supply on your own recognizance) the media to be autographed (the book, DVD, what have you - just one, not a huge pile of things).

Oh man. If I had the money to go rummaging through that shop... I'm also fascinated by how much you know about Trek history and lore. From music, to electronics, games, sci-fi, round-and-round you take me. You are so much more than a pleasingly proportioned Iksar, and I'm really glad to have befriended you. I mean this when I say your interactions prove to be some of the most stimulating on this site, although not for more shallow furs among us.

Thank you very much. I'm actually lonely in the exact way where I am getting a need fulfilled being appreciated for speaking (spewing) my mental garbage truckload of (ahem) 'useful' information about Star Trek, gaming, computers, and my other opinions and philosophies.

It is difficult if not impossible to discover the whys and wherefores of the fondness for the very muscular, by males in particular. We have our own opinions and there tend to not be THAT many groups of thought (at least that are counted). To say it's simply a gay thing is incorrect, and to say it's a bear thing or some other subculture of a gay community, pshaw that won't work as splitting hairs doesn't work as there are straight body builders who admire the muscle quite a lot, appreciate the form just not in an erotic way.

It's fully erotic and arousing to me, bigger moreso to even hyper. I must admit that it usually are the heavyweight, dedicated trainer types who get furtive glances from me in restaurants (usually because they are there with girlfriends in tow and I don't want to be caught ogling). Not that there are these many occurrences in this town, not that there are that many guys big enough to get my attention!

Unk is a wish fulfillment for me. I'd like to be on the receiving end of that attention. I exercise, and just getting to aerobic level for 5 minutes is too much for me, so count me out for getting ginormous! You can't always get what you want...

Yeah, my interests are pretty much in line with yours, so no need to repeat or paraphrase them. Not to come across as forward, but I like your character enough to be seen in a picture with him ,SFW or SNFW. I usually go 50% epic stuff and 50% naughty. I've been into comedy pics lately, so we'll see how many of those I can talk people into getting. lol!!

I enjoy a sense of humor, and I like being inclusive of unregistered FA visitors. This means comedy or otherwise SFW and epic pics are great. Where all that is showing is just a lot of testosterone and the baby making hardware is kept judiciously concealed... I'm even fine defining Unk as a lizard that also can body sheath his junk (though that has yet to ever have been drawn or suggested).

I have not seen and/or done it all, so positions beyond the vanilla are unknown to me, so I even needed to have things like reverse cowgirl explained to me I fully dig how Reptile did you and think could do us great, probably too. naturally would work well, there's 3 I know like my character pretty well and/or yours too.

Well, as for clean pictures, I too am a bit more open in who I will be seen with. With NSFW pictures, strictly friends and people like yourself that come across as pleasant and reasonable. I won't be seen in the nude or doing anything lustful with someone that might make me regret it later, lol.

Position-wise, I'm pretty vanilla myself, and just often describe what I want. I know nothing of position "names" and such. I like your choice of artists, and agree. Particularly . I still haven't quite gotten a firm grasp on artists capable of capturing my style best. Most of what you see now is me taking a shot in the dark, outside of gifts. Regardless of what the nature of the encounter may be, I think Unk and Varanis would look awesome, so at some point this would be awesome to pursue.

You got mail

Now so do you!!! *makes AOL ding*

Very classy hoody, also nice~ Ye dun look bad at all silverscale! ^.^ Try to smile!

Thank you, and I might more often if not for how it cracks my face... superglue just doesn't work!

Mmm, you have a nice sense of a old man. And have a good looking. :D

Thank you big dragon

Give me that hoodie! I want that hoodie! But in red!

Yes, I think the other colors are red and blue. $39 ea iirc.

Wow so that's what you look like. There this thing where I tend to imagine what a user looks like. I don't know if you tend to do it but I do.

Yeah, I'd work at looking more like Unk, but I only promise to start that once I grow scales and a tail.

Ha XD

Smile...

ow...
Damnit, my head popped off my neck now what am I gonna do!?

Thank you. Maybe I should get my mom to print some on glossy paper for autographs. We already have a silver sharpie somewhere...

Looking good there dude, I've been trying to find some Star Trek shirts/hoodies where I live but with no luck, haha

Yeah, cool threads need mail order lots of the time.

Thank you. I think I need more product

Dare I say, a fatherly and elderly reptile of the fandom? (saying this out of positive respects, hehe :} ) ~^.=.^~

Well not elderly yet, but I did get the requisite hardware installed early. I am an early adopter of technology, after all... just thought it wouldn't include THAT!

*hugs you* Heh, don't worry. :3

Star Trek fan, awesome My dad was always a big fan too!

Dear I say, you do look somewhat close to my dads age (65), but then again, my dad look pretty good for his age, so what do I know lol.

Indeed. I am 55 and the color's going out of my hair in this image. Having lost a lot of weight this past year (100#) definitely makes my skin look extra wrinkly/foldy.

Yeah, losing a great deal of weight will do that :) I'm making an effort not to let my own weight get out of control, I don't drink soda anymore, and now only drink flavored seltzer water, teas, and coffee, all unsweetened XD after a while they taste pretty damn good lol as well as not eating as much of course. Being over weight seems to cause alot of pain in my leg joints, and just makes it harder to move around >.<

That it had for me, or did... my past tense grammar escapes me sometimes. The weight loss comes after Bariatric surgery (intestinal bypass, [Roux-En-Y] type). This surgery (post op) requires dietary changes including no more starches, sugars, significantly reduced fat intake, elimination of carbonated drinks, no breads, no alcohol, and the need for lactaid pills since I became lactose intolerant as a typical result of the procedure.

Naturally, I still partake of a bit of tortilla, bread, pasta, potato, cheese, etc., despite what digestive upset it causes ([dumping syndrome]) basically because it's a matter of choice between culinary and visceral taste vs. physical discomforts. Tough decision sometimes.

Ah, thats understandable. Tough decision indeed, I tend to seriously over do it when it comes to pasta XD I once ate way to much wheat pasta, and couldn't eat again for 3 days, ugh!