This is your moon on drugs.

Last Saturday we saw the Harmony Sweepstakes Midwest Regional competition. Highly recommended! Last night we discovered that their web site has video clips from the 2000 Finals. Check out the first song from The Exboyfriends.

Proof that dog owners end up looking like their owners. And the company sells power kites and buggies!

Our current listening favorite is Radio Paradise. An eclectic mix of music, all done by one DJ and his wife. Does this guy ever sleep?? One of the nice pieces of their site is the listener's bulletin board. The postings aren't just about music; JrzyTmata noted the eagle cam is showing nesting eagles in Kent, Washington.

Remembering PLATO IV — www.thinkofit.com/plato/dwplato.htm. Ah, memories of multi-day programming marathons at Indiana University-Purdue University at Ft. Wayne. I worked on a bulletin board program called "Pad", and would come to school Monday morning and work on it pretty solid until Wednesday evening, when I'd have a date with my girlfriend. Then I'd be back Thursday morning for another session until Friday evening. PLATO went down every day at 6AM for maintenance, so that's when I slept. Occasionally I would just fall asleep on the keyboard when the system was shutdown, waking up with square keycap indentations in my cheek. I lived on Mountain Dew, KFC chicken livers, and Camel filter cigarettes. Until then I'd only programmed in Fortran 2 and IBM 1620 assembler, and had never done a "real" software product. I learned a lot about data structures and their use, as well as user interface design and online system maintenance, with some public relations work (and advertising!) thrown in.

Pad was only in existence for a year or so. It faded away in part because I flunked out of college (too much time programming and not enough time in my electrical engineering classes), but mostly because the systems staff created PLATO Notes which was much more capable and easier on the system resources. It's gratifying to see that Pad is still remembered, if only in passing.

Oh, the angst of it. Actually, I'm jealous - I remember being on the periphery of bands like this.