Carisa H-K, Author at Tales from Digital Deliria by Carisa H-K.

Merlin’s Down and Other Adventures (Or Nonsense?)

Carisa H-K on November 4, 2020

Merlin crouched on the closet floor atop worn, tan carpeting. Wires climbed up the wall like vines around him, and along the surrounding floor. The closet door, stripped earlier from its hinges, sat propped against a nearby wall… as if impossible to contain the supreme entity within.

Merlin sat grinding on problems that mortal humans could not solve.

Merlin could not sweat. His fan ran constantly. Another fan blew on him from outside the closet, to little cooling avail.

A nearby window illuminated part of Merlin’s complex wiring, adding more heat.

The light revealed Merlin’s power, but also his ramshackle. His fan kicked up to highest gear and then a signal (or lack thereof?) jolted through the wires on the floor…

“Merlin’s Down!” a voice shouts, like the beginning of a desperate war.

As the mighty warrior falls, the destructive wave begins. Zapping through the wires and each and every computer connected to Merlin.

Programmer #2, the next closest to Merlin, shouts the words again: “Merlin’s Down!”

Down the line, others scramble to save their work.

Then, all too quick… too quick to save… the 3^rd and 4^th employees holler: “Merlin’s Down!”

Coders 5 & 6 simply groan.

The 7th & 8^th, designers who were last in the line, shout with glee: “Alright! – I saved before it went down again!”

They made it in time… this time.

It all happened in a 12 x 12 foot room. A bull pen of computers and sweaty employees crammed into an unlikely place. Where everyone baked and seared and spat out frustration in the Texas summer heat like sizzling pork belly on a cookie sheet.

Merlin… an all-powerful wizard.

Merlin… also an overheating file server at a digital startup in an apartment.

Why give such a grand name to this rickety computer, that kept crashing every 20-30 minutes? One that was assembled manually on a college student budget with parts from Fry’s Electronics? One that fell victim to its own heat, the heat of the other computers in the work room, the heat of the sweaty programmers, and an AC that could not keep up with the rest of the heat encroaching from the outside?

A misnomer. Or an ironic strive toward our loftier goals.

Such was startup life, a website “sweat” shop (literally) that operated out of a musty family room. The working environment was utter nonsense. Who would stay in a place such as this?

A bunch of young people. Of entrepreneurs just in there “figuring it out”. We were the ones to approach if you needed a website.

And unfortunately for us, websites were low value at that time. Something that warranted an extremely limited investment, where no amount of sales technique could coax otherwise. “I pay only $400 for my brochure, so why would I pay any more for my brochureware website?”

But some of our clients – the ones with an early greater vision of ecommerce and web applications – they paid the bills.

However, Accounts Receivable was slacking that first summer. When all we had was Merlin, a file server in a hot closet. It held all our wares… our product… our websites.

Life was only about pushing forward for another day at our late ‘90s startup. And once Merlin was back up, the scrappy website coding and designing could continue.

The lesson learned? Keep going. Save early. SAVE OFTEN.

As always, I hope you enjoyed this and it brightened your day.

Please share your memories below if your career was born at a scrappy digital startup too!

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Ode to Ye Olde Windows

Carisa H-K on October 21, 2020

We could bloviate here about the impact of Windows on the world. How it brought computing to the masses. And how its friendly user interface changed society forever.

But no. This tale is decidedly less lofty.

Let’s talk about when Windows was FUN.

Wait, really?… was there a time when Windows was not considered a crusty old stalwart of the corporate world? When it was not an OS simply trying to keep up with the Apple “cool factor”?

Yes, there was a time… Let’s dig deep… to the little remembered but most hilariously fun thing about Windows 98. I’m going out on a limb here… could it have been the most significant thing about it?…

Think back to your late 90’s office space. What did you hear? The sound of a fax machine. A coffee maker perking. Phones ringing. Folks chatting.

What else? Suddenly, piercing through the white noise and seizing your consciousness:

“Uh oh!”

“Bean.”

“Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries!”

“Get away from her, you bitch!”

“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

Why yes… our computers were talking to us, in the language and words that we picked for them.

Then, the laughs and conversation ensued among colleagues. “Oh, you liked that movie too!”, followed by endless more Monty Python citations as the web coding and designing continued.

The Language We Wanted to Hear

We, the early Windows punks, figured out how to change the system and event sounds in the computer to whatever we wanted.

An endless array of short .wav files awaited us on the internet: tiny clips that were quick to download as internet speeds improved. TV shows, sound effects, lines from movies, sitcoms, songs, heck: even R2-D2’s beeps – these were all fair game to customize our system sounds.

With a few clicks, you could turn an ordinary “crash” into the sound of HAL rebuking Dave from the movie 2001. Frustrated when you lost all your work? – Never, with your entertaining sounds.

And we crashed A LOT. So why not make it a joy?

Humanizing the Machine

All of these custom sounds humanized the machine, and transformed it into a whole new interactive entertainment vehicle. One that fostered camaraderie and demanded attention from whomever was close enough to hear it. It wasn’t hard: with our chunky attached speakers, we could make those computers spew lines all day long like a loud, Hollywood mogul.

Imagine 8 sweaty programmers sweltering in a too-hot summer office, Windows machines chirping words, phrases and sounds all around. Over the course of the day, sounds changing as fast as we could download. Laughter forming in waves across the bull pen, as distractions abound. Off we’d go, talking about our favorite scenes from TV shows and movie memories… anything to make your coworker laugh.

If you had a favorite movie, you could even customize your entire system to focus on the sounds and sights of that film. Theme packs of downloadable custom wallpapers and sounds turned your machine into a fun extension of the movie experience. One day, you might feature one movie. And the next day, another. This material was pervasive — part of any major film promotion at the time!

It was just one of many ways to personalize your workspace, much like a framed photo on your desk. (But how in the heck did we have the time to fiddle with this stuff back then?? That leads us to…)

Why Did This Trend Die?

On one hand, the soundscape created an often-hilarious work environment. On the other, the distraction was absurd. Especially as your coworkers installed longer and longer clips to play when the system reminded them to “save” their file before closing. No, I don’t want to hear that five-minute long scene from Star Trek while I’m trying to work, ok?? Enough already!!

So at some point, system sounds just lost their luster, got annoying, and went away. Such that there are almost no system sounds at all on our devices today.

Oh, but what a fun treat while it lasted! 🙂

What happened when I booted my Win 98 machine for the first time since roughly 2011? Did my scavenger hunt reveal any custom system sounds still intact? Watch the video to find out!

As always, I hope you enjoyed this and it brightened your day.

Please “like” if you did, share, and post your comments.

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Morning at a Digital Startup (It’s Not What You Expected)

Carisa H-K on October 14, 2020

The carport offered shady relief for my classy Cutlass Supreme. The Texas heat would otherwise transform my ride into an oven. Between the T-Tops and black paint, I had already lost one cassette to “summer melt”: Fleetwood Mac’s Greatest Hits.

It was the summer of my first job as a newly-minted college graduate. After locking the car door, I fiddled for another key. This would let me into our “office” before anyone else arrived.

This was an important role. Opening up shop was a responsibility I was used to after working at a video store years earlier. And now, I could apply this skill to the coolest of jobs: a startup digital agency.

I unlocked the door, employees went in, and websites came out.

But this was no gleaming, prestigious office downtown. Our digs were not “sexy” in the least. But the scrappy notion of starting a “tech shop in an apartment” was the stuff of lore and excitement for us. It was “morning” in more ways than one at our digital startup. We were going to make a big mark… building the early internet and changing the entire world in the process.

But today, unlocking the door and passing through the apartment threshold, you had to first get past the wall of musty odor. The old stucco exterior must’ve seeped the outdoors in. In the darkened space, my desk was crammed near the front door. Another desk sat opposite, in what should’ve been the dining room. A tiny, barrel-shaped kitchen lay ahead, and what would become our “production room” was at the back.

My boss, an ADHD poster child, would be in various states of distracted readiness upon my arrival. From time to time a bathrobe was seen, but shorts and t-shirts were the casual norm. Often, a smoothie blender whirred away. Thankfully I never arrived so early that he was still brushing his teeth. Today he was nowhere to be found.

Instead, something more than the cramped quarters, musty smell and casual boss caught my attention. There was something strange in the middle of the carpeted floor: a red can of RAID bug spray, with its overturned cap next to it.

Why is that there?, I thought. I’d never seen anything like this out-of-place anomaly before. Pondering that, I quietly went about my morning routine.

Days started with decidedly non-digital activities, like watering the plants. To be honest, it was my favorite part of the day: retrieving a watering can from the kitchen and pulling the plants outside for a good drink. If I didn’t do this first thing in the morning, the busy day took over and plants were ignored.

Taking a moment to stand in the balmy sun, letting the water drain onto the concrete step before bringing the plants back in, was pure refreshment. And a welcome respite for my nose, otherwise perpetually twitching with pent-up apartment mold sneezes.

Some days were so slammed that I forgot the plants outside. Realizing my folly later in the day, I would rush to collect them. By then, the wet dirt dried to a desert and leaves drooped in the baking sun.

Today I did my job properly and brought them back into the apartment. Still no sign of my boss, I turned my attention to the RAID can again. Befuddled, I thought it would at least make sense to put the cap and can away before others arrived. Innocently I approached and scooped up the cap. To my horror, there was a gigantic roach under there! I staggered back, expecting it to lurch at me. Thankfully, it stayed on its back, unmoving, legs folded up into the air.

Suddenly I could imagine the scene the night before… the chaos that lead to this critter being trapped and ushered to its death, and the post-battle exhaustion that left the evidence behind.

With this, I learned one of my greatest life lessons (especially for living in the South). If you have a can with a cap… keep that cap. They come in handy as bug trappers. Spray the bug, follow as it runs, and trap him under the cap. Scoop him up later with the cap to dispose. No squish, no mess, very little chase.

Not the first lesson you’d expect from the cool digital startup world, but one of the best.

And certainly not the last. The ring of incoming client calls jolted my thoughts and my workday began.

Please “like” if you did, share, and post your comments.

As always, I hope you enjoyed this and it brightened your day.

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Grandma’s Reaction to My First Job (and Other Digital Startup Woes)

Carisa H-K on October 9, 2020

The morning sun flickered across the gleaming Texas skyscrapers, sprinkling glitter across my eyes. Highway momentum marked the start of a milestone day. The customary humidity of early summer hung in the air, hinting at the heat to come.

I was off to my official first day of work as a young professional — and a newly minted graduate of a prestigious school. Granted, my selection of a Creative major was not the most obvious bankable choice. However, I was lucky enough to snag a full time position after working part time at the same company through my final years at university.

The hire was immediate. I had no celebratory break to take a breath and explore my freedom after achieving the degree. Rather, the job started so soon that my Grandmother and Father were still in town after attending my graduation.

On this day, they and my Mother decided to mark the occasion by driving me to my first day at work.

Granted, I had been to work many times before during my part-time work pre-graduation. So to me it seemed more of a continuation than a milestone. However, on this day my parents beamed from the front seat with excited pride to drive me… as if it was as thrilling as my first day at Kindergarten. I was a little embarrassed.

On we flew through the balmy air, as I gave directions from the back seat. Next to me, my Grandmother marveled out of the window at the light flickering off the high-rises. She looked on with similar anticipation to see my first place of real work. After years of encouraging me that I had the power to do anything I wanted with my life… to achieve more than she ever had opportunity to do as a woman in rural America… this was momentous.

We swept through the sparkling downtown and kept moving. With each turn, business districts turned into tree-lined lanes. Next, we passed warehouses and aging gas stations. Those then turned into a dense residential apartment district in the cheaper side of town.

Pulling into one of the lots, we were greeted by lines of car ports, and a run-down, low-ceilinged apartment built with 1970’s flair (or lack thereof).

“This is it!”, I announced cheerfully. But I noticed the smile drain from my Grandmother’s face.

Wrinkled lips pursed slightly. She blurted, “Is this it?”, mirroring my words with an incredulous tinge. Meanwhile, craning to see whether the building was any taller than 2 stories.

Ok, this place clearly was not the high-rise, gleaming office building she had envisioned. This wasn’t a proper office at all. I was going to work at someone’s apartment??

This was not her expectation. Her disappointment, and nearly dismay, was apparent. I saw her worry rise, as if wondering whether this was even a safe place for me. Immediately I was self-conscious, though my parents still had smiling pride on their faces. Just to have a full-time job immediately after graduation — well, this was a feat not many could claim.

But for Grandma… how could she possibly understand that I was entering the forefront of digital? That this environment… the proverbial “technology start up in an apartment”… was the way so many thought leaders started their empires and soon built their fortunes?

That was sexy. And I was going to do the same. But it went beyond that… we were going to CHANGE THE WORLD through the internet. We, the web builders, had visions of how the internet would become more than rainbow bars and patterned backgrounds… how we and it would change society itself. For better, no less.

This was the 90s. The new world of the digital startup had begun. We were on the threshold of greatness!

But this place… it was not sexy. AT ALL. From the tile roof and burnt orange stucco walls, to the streaky mold stains near the foundation, and the leaning car ports to protect against the Texas-sized hail. Not sexy enough for Grandma.

But yet I swallowed my awkward pride and left the car to head to my adventure. And with a wave over my shoulder, that was it… the beginning of my Digital Deliria. A world of hot summers and floundering file servers, to scooters whizzing ‘round concrete floors, and in-office zen gardens. A burgeoning existence my Grandmother would never live to understand.

Please “like” if you did, share, and post your comments.

As always, I hope you enjoyed this and it brightened your day.

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Tech Killed My Attention Span! (Help is Here.)

Carisa H-K on October 1, 2020

Do you have personal goals? Like, maybe reading more? Technology may just be working against you. Pay attention to this for 4 mins and you might just learn what’s blocking you.

Digital Deliria is here to provide a nostalgic, fun reflection of our digital age. It’s also here to illuminate how technology is changing our brains in ways we don’t yet understand. A colleague just shared a stunning article that has insights into this.

30 Seconds

By this point in the article, you are probably fading away. Why is that?

It may take roughly ~4 minutes to get the fulfillment of reading. To earn a useful takeaway. To gain a sense of community, or know something more deeply. Or simply enjoy a good feeling, if nothing else.

But why can’t we pay attention for more than 30 seconds?

According to a former Google employee, the tech industry has turned our attention into an economy. The fight for our attention means more competing content, and thus the creation of smaller and smaller bits of content.

It’s not a surprise then, that the “byte sized” goodness provided online has conditioned us to have a limited attention span (~30 seconds).

Why Read On?

I’m with you. I spent my free time consuming tiny bits of social media for years, like a goldfish in a vast sea.

Until I changed my mind. I reset my goals and rechanneled that wasted time into writing and creating this website.

This site’s goal? — simply to brighten your day.

Another very real goal — to reclaim our attention spans. For me: reclaim mental focus, diligence and perseverance for more than 30 seconds by writing. For you: help regain your attention span by reading for more than 30 seconds.

Now you know… now you’re in it with me. Welcome to the Big Experiment.

How Can We Regain Our Attention & Focus?

It’s a bargain — if you read, I’ll write, and we’ll both get some our attention span back as a result.

Once a week, for 4 minutes, read a story. On this site or anywhere else – just select something to READ. Consider it an exercise for your attention muscle.

Will you take on the challenge? Does it go to far to say, it might help save your minds?

Will We Win?

For now, web stats show that we lost the battle.

But every week is a new opportunity on this site, with every new bit of content posted here. Maybe then, we’ll win the war?

Write on… Read on…

And be sure to watch the video on this page (“The Attention Economy”). If you do, you’ll see how the technology giants are changing our behavior to their advantage. Time to push back and accomplish what we want in our lives! 🙂

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Belly Up to The Rainbow Bar (and no, they don’t serve alcohol)

Carisa H-K on September 24, 2020

Dorm life. For most, it began with a rowdy party. For me, it began with an Ethernet card.

Picture move-in day: sweat dripping from my upswept hair. Innumerable, laden trips up the stairs to my third story dorm room. AC failing as August heat sears Texas.

As early evening arrived, box contents found their way to drawers and closets. But the work was not yet done.

A happy-go-lucky face arrived at my door, with a hearty knock and welcome: “Hi! Do you have your Ethernet set up yet?”

“Uh, no… but I do have the card,” I replied.

“Here, let me help you then!”

My new neighbor Taylor and his buddy from down the hall whisked in the room. With ear-to-ear smiles, they proceeded to slap that Ethernet card into my computer like it was nothing. My father, a studious caretaker of technology in my childhood home, watched in anxious near-horror as the Aptiva’s metal cover was stripped off and tossed aside. In short order, techie innards were manipulated by adept hands. And in minutes, with Ethernet card in tow, the machine booted.

And there we were… my first taste of lightning-fast internet speeds.

WOOOOOOOOO!

It felt like a holler from the mountaintop, as your roller coaster car slipped off the peak. This was the way the Internet SHOULD be! Nothing like the AOL dial-up tortoise at home.

This was University Ethernet. But surfing ‘till my heart’s content was still in the years to come.

World “Wild” Web

The early web was a wild, untamed, and non-uniform landscape. Unlike AOL’s user-friendly gateway into the Internet experience, here you could choose your own search engines and find yourself in a diverse pile of unfiltered junk and treasure.

Yes, search engines (plural). In this bygone era, no fewer than ~10 options graced your mouse… each with its own advantages. Yahoo worked well to deliver neatly categorized results. Ask Jeeves delivered fairly helpful answers to search terms phrased as questions.

But to be quite honest… there really were too many options. I challenge anyone to really identify the differentiating characteristics of Altavista, Magellan, Lycos and HotBot, for example. (Post a comment if you can enlighten me.)

What was really wonderful about a world without Google?: the ability to use multiple search engines with multiple different results, to really find what you’re looking for. And arguably, find unbiased, unfiltered, and unmanipulated results.

What Was the Early Internet Like?

But what really did you find online, in the earliest days? Well, the World Wide Web was very different than what we have today.

Imagine… strolling along the foggy Thames, or poking around a foggy San Francisco wharf, yet having a root planted on the grey, cratered moon.

This was the feeling of the endless sea of patterned grey found on the internet, with text more or less visible on top of it. Foggy, bleak, evocative of another planet entirely – rooted in the limitation of connection speeds. The only variation?: some grey had dots, and some grey resembled slate. But, still grey. (For an example of this, see image at the top of this page.)

In fairness, sometimes you’d find a black background. Or maybe a yellow parchment — as if the web developer thought it made good sense to make the web look like a Dead Sea scroll. And if your day was really exciting, you’d come across a ridiculous eye-frying bright green. But somehow grey was the most common “look and feel” for the early web. And plain white? – not snazzy enough.

Why must my website background look like it was found in an Egyptian tomb?

The point was, that you could infinitely “panel” your site using one small, textured-looking block. Adding some “presence” while still allowing the lean-and-mean site to load FAST. (Most of us still had dial-up, remember?) But the result was like poorly installed flooring: you started to see endless repeating patterns. Scroll too fast, and a dizzy nausea started to sweep your brain.

What about pictures? Well, there were not many. Those that existed had a “pointillist” feel, where pixel variety was manipulated down to fewer colors to load faster.

The Queen of Early “Interwebs” Design

In short: the effervescent and ever-present Rainbow Bar.

When you saw your first one, it was like a glorious sun piercing through the grey landscape. Some pulsed with animated color. Others were just… static rainbows. A Rainbow Bar was just that… an image of a rainbow, but in a straight, flat line.

But why? In the Rainbow Bar age, navigation was not a thing. So Rainbow Bars served as an ever-useful page separator, adding a visual “break” between one type of infinitely scrolling content and another.

And no: in 1997, the Rainbow Bar was not an LGBTQ statement. It was just something “cool looking” that loaded fast. One of many ways to bring pizzazz to your site. Add a Dancing Baby, and you had it made.

A Career Begins

Bellying up to The Rainbow Bar is where it all began for me, and maybe you too. Specifically, the unmet market need for user experience design drove an entire generation of college grads to careers in the web. We, soon-to-be designers and developers, would spend YEARS working on it… until we “arrived” at the friendly websites we have today.

It all started small, taking my old school creativity (including life drawing, no less), and designing web graphics. We tackled shockingly “new” concepts like “navigation” and the earliest of “banner ads”. (Yes! – those pesky things started back then.) Bridging from art to design to digital, this was heady and exciting stuff. And an unlikely, yet natural, career path for a Creator.

It just happened: All on that old Aptiva, in that tiny dorm room, thanks to my old pal and his Ethernet card.

As always, I hope you enjoyed this and it brightened your day.

Please “like” if you did, share, and post your comments!

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When Computers Talked: The Dawn of AOL

Carisa H-K on September 16, 2020

The Digital Deliria began with the sound of computers talking. A call and response song as natural and old as time. Like two birds echoing from corresponding hilltops to make a connection.

The digital bird speech sounded aggressive to human ears, yet somehow irresistible to listen:

Beep, boap, beep, boap, beep, beep, beep (The Call)

Zinnnnnggggg pulse, pulse, ahhhhhhhh (The Response)

Guuuurrrgle zing (The cooing bird, pleased to receive the response)

Zong, Zwerg, ZWERG! (The excitement builds to…)

SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH……

White noise. A static, where the call and response joins to one connection. Where noise is actually signal. Computers finally in coitus.

Then, the world opened up. The pixel wind of the Information Superhighway began blowing back your hair. It was all new, and it was called the Internet.

Once you fostered computer coitus, you too were one with the web. At once unfamiliar, yet so sublime. Something within the white noise signal clicked subconsciously in our brains – that unlike a uselessly garbled TV channel, this static instead meant delivery of something much more. Infinite information and connectedness.

And just like that, a whole generation was hooked.

How Did It Start?

Venture back with the sounds of dial-up.

In a word: AOL. America Online… a world where “always on” was not “always so”. The ability to check email or text messages immediately at all times of day? Never. This stuff required patience.

Patience began by following the curly, stretched telephone cord from the kitchen to the bedroom. That’s where you’d find the person to boot off the phone line.

Alas: it was only when humans were cooperative, that the internet connection process could begin. Was there an hour-long phone conversation to finish first? – you betcha. (Conversations! What a concept.)

But once the phone boot-off feat was accomplished… we could enjoy the dial-up screech and crackle.

Why Were We Hooked?

In short, a crafty user experience that created Pavlov’s dog-like responses in its users.

For example, “You’ve got mail!” might well translate to “Someone loves and is thinking about you!”.

The mails you received back then were mostly forwarded chains of random jokes. But so what? People “shared” crap via email before they “shared” crap on Facebook. But it was their crap, and our crap, and it was crap among friends – so it had great value.

Then there were the chat messages (aka “AIM” – AOL Instant Messenger). This was the dawn of LOL’s, BRB’s and emoticons, before text messages existed. As soon as you were on the Superhighway, welcoming “bing bing bings” from friends in the digital woodwork greeted you.

With every bing, you got happier and happier to not talk to people by phone anymore. Fast, fast, zippity, zippity, energy, energy – that was the feeling of early chat rooms and instant messages. An addicting recognition, as folks saw their friends come online and proceeded to message them immediately. Ghosting was not a thing.

You had GREAT friends if they sent you ASCII texts or emails: mind-blowing full pictures concocted solely from keyboard characters. But man, it was hard to get them to come through without skewing in odd ways during copy-paste! Why was it that your goofiest friends always sent you the cock-eyed ones, giving you pause to ask: “What the heck was that”?

We, the Pavlov’s dogs, were oh-so-rewarded by these new sounds and sights – all from the comfort of our pressboard desks and vinyl chairs. Many things in AOL were the precursors to the addictive social media “like”. It made us Digital Delirious!

The excitement and motion of “journeying out” felt tangible on the Information Superhighway. (Jeez, where do we ever hear that term anymore these days? OK, let’s put it to bed here and now.) But despite this unstoppable sense of forward momentum, the Internet was oh-so-SLOW. The only thing that held us back from a full-on addiction?: the cursed dial-up speeds!

That and sleepy time. Tired from our evening web adventures, we had to disconnect.

When you went offline, there was no parting farewell of digital bird speech. Just a friendly “Goodbye” ‘till next time.

But once that initial connection was made, we’d soon never go offline again.

As always, I hope you enjoyed this and it brightened your day.

Please share if you did, to help brighten someone else’s! And, we’d love to hear your AOL memories – please post your comments!

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Walkman, My Childhood Friend

Carisa H-K on September 9, 2020

Growing up, I often immersed myself in nature and human/social experiences. But my technology of choice — and distraction — was the Walkman.

Often nature coincided with the technology, on long summer vacation road trips. What music would you consume while gazing at big sky country in Montana? For me, it was something as vast musically as that sky.

However in terms of human/social experiences, the Walkman stood as a welcome, isolating barrier. A place where my Grandmother’s Tennessean drawl of local deaths from DuPont Chemical Cancers was substituted with the sweet, sweet thunder of “In the Air Tonight” drums.

Understandable then, that the yellow lump stayed hitched to my side. And the yellow ears, a fixture on my head. It’s apt to describe using a lyric from one oft-listened song at that time: Walkman was an “aural contraceptive aborting pregnant conversation”.

So, How Did This Walkman Thing Work?

Today, your entire music catalogue is available on one power-gobbling device. The Walkman had only one thing in common with today’s technology: an insatiable power hunger.

Step 1 was preparing a small, plastic tote bag that held all the gear. A bag emblazoned with lively 80’s-style rainbows and music notes.

Old vestige found on a dusty shelf somewhere in my house.

Most notably, extra batteries filled the bag. Vacations took about 10 AA’s. Rechargeable batteries never worked as well – quickly jettisoned in favor of fresh Eveready’s.

The tapes, and music, would slow down to bizarre levels as batteries wore out. The hairs would start standing up on your neck, as if you were listening to Ozzy backwards, expecting to hear “666” somewhere.

But when it got unbearably slow, the fix was easy: just pop in new batteries and you’re back in business. (That’s one advantage over today’s technology, where anxiety takes over when you’re down to 10% with no plug-in in sight.)

Step 2 was dealing with the amazing portable multitude of cassette tapes. On long road trips, 2 full padded carrying cases accompanied me. Prior to music, I brought 5-7 paperbacks to pass the time. However the Walkman offered a mercy of poetic entertainment, replacing carsick reading as endless cornfields zipped past my window.

Walkman’s Significance

Walkman was the start of what would forever remain an intensely personal and private experience for me: the consumption of music.

I listened to things most “normal” people would not. (Consider the challenging and evocative Kate Bush album “The Dreaming”.)

Things that in public settings, friends would “turn off” and replace with Paula Abdul or the like. (I kid you not – this did happen when I played a prog rock deep cut at a gathering with my 7^th grade friends. Clearly, Paula was much more suitable to pre-teen girl tastes. Bad on me: I was just too oblivious to really understand and serve the musical needs of others back then!)

So I learned to close down, keeping my Private Walkman Secret World to myself. Allowing it to speak to me directly… a profound conversation between artist and interpreter.

Not to say that I don’t enjoy “normal” music. It’s wonderful fun now to create a party playlist that lifts and elevates a crowd.

But the transcendental still lurks and inspires on my periphery.

The early technology of Walkman translated to musical solitude and reverie. I only see now that text, social media and endless other tech distractions just continued the trend of communication and relationship dilution (and sometimes destruction).

Destroy for some, but for me — blocking out the world with Walkman ends happily. I was not to know or even imagine this as a youngster, but if not for music, I would never have met my husband. Arguably the greatest relationship of my life.

So maybe my Walkman journey “was meant to be”. Or perhaps I just took my yellow ears off long enough to find him!

As always, I hope you enjoyed this and it brightened your day.

Please share if it did! And post your comments: did you have a similar musical experience, as fostered by early technology? And was Walkman just one more step toward the forthcoming Digital Deliria?

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Odyssey, Colecovision and Atari (and That’s About It)

Carisa H-K on September 1, 2020

Pushing the tiny circular knob harder and harder to the right, left, up or down was an irresistible impulse. A pure instinct. An unstoppable obsession. Was it unreasonable then to expect the screen to actually respond to the force of approximately 2 elephants emanating from our pint-sized fingerstips? That the corkscrew wire, bridging from the console to the TV, would somehow convey my urgency? That indeed the character, gun or bullet would move farther and faster as a result of my pressure?

Apparently not.

Thus began the intense disconnect between my mind and the technological reality of these new things called “video games”.

Not only that, but aspects of play simply defied childhood logic. For example, imagine the shape of a thumbtack, with a flat top and an angular edge. Next, blow it up to 5 times its size and place it atop a big rectangular box with a keypad including numbers 0-9. (Note: What these numbers where for, who knows. They were never used.) Then, make this whole disjointed menagerie the means for tiny kids’ fingers to actually play the game.

Such was the Colecovision “joystick”.

A “joystick” bringing joy is a misnomer to the highest degree. Soon the angular edge of the large thumbtack knob made a painful red indent in the side of your thumb. Next, your palm (having maintained a vice grip on the harsh plastic rectangle) started to burn, then throb, then cramp.

Why was this the case?: Extended periods of time in high states of nervousness, and lack of synchronization between your rapid-firing synapses and game responsiveness.

Getting Hooked on Video Games

How then do we become hooked on video games for a lifetime, such that the current culture finds gaming and related virtual escapism perhaps more compelling than reality today?

Well, I didn’t. To me, game play was extremely frustrating and anxiety-inducing. Take a game like “Venture”, for example. To have the monster ghost come at you through the walls, accompanied by its utterly petrifying sound, while you are bound by those same walls and stuck purely because of a lack of joystick responsiveness… it was a horror relived in my nightmares.

Or a game like Carnival, where you tense up as soon as you hear the quacks of ducks coming down to eat all of your bullets, thanks again to the ridiculous controller… it turns an otherwise pleasant game into a duck-infested anger-generator.

“Play” like this felt more like “obsessive insanity” to me. Where winning was the result of super-human hand strength, mental perseverance, luck, or some combination thereof.

So, though my life continued through the Nintendo and Sega eras and beyond, my video gaming days generally ended in the Atari era. To this day, Centipede and Pac-Man are the only two games where I can put other players to shame.

But it was not without some formative memories.

Video Game Memories

The graphics on the box were cooler than the game.

Consider my very first experience with video games, on the fully digital version of Odyssey. A close family friend and his wife had purchased this state-of-the-art game console, and set it up in his small apartment in the Chicagoland area. One wintry evening, I was allowed to play the game.

I remember little about the game itself, other than the graphics were the coolest thing ever seen. (Colored dots on a screen went a long way back then.) What I remember most is being absorbed heavily until I heard some sort of sound behind me. Perhaps it was a laugh? Whatever it was, it pierced my attention enough to whip my head around to see my parents seated on the living room couch with their friends.

With my probing gaze, suddenly the mood changed. An embarrassed look crossed over my parent’s faces. A moment later, perhaps something in their hands was hastily hidden between the overstuffed brown couch cushions. My parent’s friends just grinned like Cheshire cats.

What were these responsible adults doing, I wondered? I was about to pop up off the shag carpet and find out, when I was told dismissively to “go back to playing your game now”. Clearly, this was for adults only, and the secrets were not for me to know.

Resigned, I went back to the game but not without a distinct sense of exclusion. Soon, I was further blanketed by the isolating action of playing the game – an isolation both self-selected (in that I chose to continue playing) and forced (because I felt no choice to do anything else).

This was the first time, but not the last, that I felt isolated by technology.

On the flipside, I have joyous memories of playing videogames with my fun-loving Uncles. One Uncle had Atari (set up in a kitchen, of all things, again in a Chicagoland area apartment). He had a wild west shooting game called “Outlaw”. Oh, how we laughed when a guttural “oohph” came out of the pixelated cowboys as they were shot and subsequently fell on their butts. Or perhaps these were sound effects added by my Uncle for more hilarity… I can’t remember which!

My other Uncle had “Time Pilot”, a Colecovision game. The graphics by that time had advanced, and we loved flying different historical-looking planes around obstacles like zeppelins. I felt so at-home: this tiny girl sitting on the floor next to her vibrant, broad-shouldered Uncle… learning from his deft plane maneuvers and eagerly awaiting my two-player chance.

These games have fond connotations for me of relationships and experiences, much in the same way that you associate a sweet song with a person and place.

In short, I am of the video game generation and fun was aplenty. Yet, I still jettisoned myself away, as if my space ship broke out of its fixed frame in Galaga and flew off into deep space.

Why? — My anxiety-inducing early experiences with the technology. It is interesting now how games and virtual environments hold such strong cultural significance with current generations. (Think: what would make you get a tattoo of one game character, or name your second child after another one, except for utter obsession… or at minimum, huge enjoyment of gaming?)

This video game excommunicado thinks escapism and a sense of “not growing up” holds sway here. Or, maybe the young’uns just got better joysticks!

As always, I hope you enjoyed this and it brightened your day.

Please “like” if you did, share, and post your comments.

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Coding the Universe – and Other Lofty Goals

Carisa H-K on August 26, 2020

Getting out of our normal classroom and into the hallway normally meant “tornado drill”. Heads crouched to the dust-bunnied wall, hands clasped overhead.

But this was no such day in the Midwest. Today, we were buzzing, anticipating our first day in the coveted computer lab. Access would be limited to once a week, given the entire elementary school shared this one room of computers. So we were eager for our chance!

Soon we filed from the hall into the cold room, to behold rows and rows of Apple 2e’s: black screens, green type, encased in greyish-tan bodies. In bins near the door, I saw soft-covered orange workbooks with big words: “Computer Literacy”.

First reaction?… looks oddly sterile and boring to me. Yet inexplicably, many of my fellow classmates were very intrigued by this public-school system’s offering. Well, it beat the hollering of our normal teacher in her classroom, anyway.

We sat 2 kids to a terminal, and got our first lesson about floppy disks. (These sacred things that were kept on high shelves out of the reach of grubby hands.)

Right away, I was anxious. Perhaps it was the sheer number of times we were warned not to touch that part of the 8-inch floppy that was the dark black disk. It stared at us with an inky eye, as if willing us to poke it. This eye was the maker or beaker of computing success. Children: Don’t ruin the disks, for the love of God! Over and over.

Soon we got our first project: write a program to tell the computer to print a picture.

The first step was to design a picture, using graph paper to map out the position of dots. With this, we could program the positions so that the computer would know what to print where.

With my paper in hand, I began to see what others were designing. Many, many smiley faces. A cloud here and there, perhaps. But what was I going to create?

I WAS GOING TO CREATE THE UNIVERSE!

So off I went, dotting-in stars and nebula and a central galaxy that was sure to impress. I loved astronomy, after all. So this would go up on my cork board next to my “earthrise” poster, for sure.

All these dots took a lot of time. Other kids had started to type their programs into the computer already.

By the time I started typing my program, their first pictures were rolling off the printer.

Sure enough, there was the smiley face… but with an oblong head and lopsided grin like your drunk Uncle who just came home from the local tavern. Clearly you could see what was wrong.

Assured that I would do better, I started typing. At this point the printer was rolling off picture after picture. Seeing this, I started to sweat and my typing became feverish to catch up. Type, type, save to the floppy… now most of the class is finished… I’m still typing and typing… Line – Print – Coordinates, Line – Print – Coordinates… endlessly. Nervously. Kids start leaving the room, their projects all done. Black screen now full of glowing green lines. Anxiety fully taking over. It was like writing lines on the chalkboard with acute embarrassment. And soon I was left alone, with the teacher… waiting on me.

To be sure, this was an advanced project for this second grader who had no desire or aptitude for computers at all.

325 lines of code later… I was ready to print my universe.

I hovered over the printer with the teacher, in eager anticipation of the output. Finally, the paper spat out, we turned it over, and …

Well… I had stars, but none were in the right places.

What was to be a glowing galaxy with impressive arms spiraling outward and a concentration of stars at its center, looked like a simple smattering of dots across the white page.

After a semi-baffled moment, the teacher asked: “Is that what you meant it to look like?”

I paused. Hmmm. Well, it did have stars. It did still look like a universe. So I said, “Uh… yeah?”

“Good!,” the teacher said with relief, finally free to release me from her classroom and get on with her lunch, for goodness sake.

In smarty-pants hindsight today, maybe I could say only God could put the stars in their rightful places on that horrible Apple 2e, and in the sky itself!

But my clear lesson learned was: I could design things, but I just could not make technology execute it for me.

So how on God’s green earth (erm… universe) did I get to where I am today, working in technology and living the digital life after a first tech experience like that? It was a highly unlikely start.

Sheer determination, it seems. The moral of the story?: Don’t be afraid to take on the BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal). And even when you get into a project without knowing in advance that you actually picked a BHAG, and it turns out to be way over your head — don’t give up! Keep going at it, even though you’re stressed to the hilt and on the razor’s edge of failure. Keep working. You might end up with something totally unique… never done before or since! And others will be hard pressed to find fault in that.

Or at least, they’ll think the result was what you intended!

We want to hear from you — what were your first experiences with technology? Please post your comments below.

As always, I hope you enjoyed this and it brightened your day.

Please share if it did, to help brighten someone else’s!

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What the Heck is Digital Deliria?

Carisa H-K on August 21, 2020

With so much content online, to consume our time day-in-and-day-out, why in the world do we need this website?

Well, it dawns on me no one is really talking about our shared experience of growing up in an increasingly digital world. I mean, I looked! I sought out this information and found nothing of real note. (If I missed something interesting, please comment!)

But from what I can tell, people are just not talking about how digital – something once new and undiscovered – is now transforming into a digital history. A nostalgic pixel quilt of the careers, people and technology that comprises our digital existence.

A Digital History

So I decided to venture back. Reveling in the nostalgia of our first technology experiences. Revisiting the wild and often hysterical days of working at a hot digital ad agency. Building the first websites. Remembering the pitfalls and successes of young entrepreneurs like me, with a wide open and fresh playing field of the internet, just out there “figuring it out”. I’m thinking back to rainbow bars and beveled button days here! And, across nearly 25 years of experience in this business.

So, I’m starting this site. The Tales From Digital Deliria are ready… no, itching!.. to be told. It’s time to let them out of their cage! 🙂

So What is Digital Deliria?

It is:

Stories from the heady days of the dawn of the internet (and its builders, like me). They’re challenging, sometimes bittersweet, and often hilarious! (Office zen gardens, ping pong tables, and crazy clients, anyone?)
Facing the reality that the internet never became the enlightening utopia we thought we were building. (So let’s indulge in a little nostalgic reminiscing about the time before this dawned on us, OK? Yeah, we did have youthful dreams about changing the world for the better back then. And just maybe, the dreams are still within our reach?…)
Trying to figure out how all this digital is affecting our brains… our existence! (In other words: the “deliria”, that I hasten to guess, digital literally causes.) Let’s explore how our collective technology experience shapes the mind, the brain, and thought processes in ways we don’t yet understand but are likely significant. e.g. Think about this the next time you see a kid in a stroller with head buried in their iPad.

Please stay tuned here for more. And “like” if you did, share, post your comments, or give me your feedback. Would like to hear your stories of living in the Digital Deliria too!

As always, I hope you enjoyed this and it brightened your day.

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