19-Oct-2023 ::
Sag Calculator - Jordan B please contact me asap
Attention: Jordan B, Project Manager at V****d Construction of Alberta, Canada,
please
contact me
with an external email address - different to your company's email.
I am sending you numerous emails and getting no replies or acknowledgements back - a
sure sign that you aren't receiving my emails and that your company's email servers
are blocking my emails again.
Please also re-contact your company's IT department and ensure my email address and web site are re-added to white lists and remain on these lists so that we can communicate effectively.
10-Sep-2023 ::
Can you spot the "issue" in my FireFox screen shot
Today I was running out of disk space. Time to remove or archive unwanted files.
Among other things, I decided it was time to
clear my browser history in FireFox ... and was shocked by what I saw:
.
Can you spot the "issue" ?
Hint: "17 BILLION GB of disk space."
17,179,869,185 GB
= 17,179,869 TB
= 17,179 PB
= 17 EB = a LOT of disk space !!
Looks like the FireFox devs / Mozilla Team need to do a little extension work on their units / conversions.
To help / contribte to Firefox and make the product even better,
I submitted a bug report here:
15-Apr-2023 ::
AI / ChatGPT VS Introductory Programming Java Exam - first year course
Record and upload a new YouTube exploring and evaluating how AI / ChatGPT goes when answering questions
from an introductory first year university level Java programming course sample exam paper.
I walk through and rate the answers ChatGPT gives.
As always, a table of contents is provided in the video description so you can jump straight to items of interest.
Conclusion / SPOILER:
ChatGPT will allow someone with ZERO programming knowledge to get a High Distinction / 85%+ on the sample exam paper in this video.
If you allow your students to answer exam questions electronically, then you'd better make sure the machine they are doing it on is clean, has NO AI's / ChatGPT's installed, and has zero internet / network access.
What does this mean for the future of education ?
Post your comments below the Youtube video.
05-Apr-2023 ::
Life Moments: Winning a Prestigious Teaching Award - What the #%@& did he just say to me ????
During my time as a university teacher (lecturer, tutor, marker, course coordinator), I won 3 awards:
Student's Choice Award
Dean's Award for Excellence in Learning and Teaching
Vice Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Learning and Teaching
In 2012, I won the 3rd award - the Vice Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Learning and Teaching.
This was a very prestigious award. I was extremely happy to win the award. So thrilled !!!
But when presented with the award, the Vice Chancellor said something to me that shocked the
hell out of me and was completely unexpected, and that I will never forget.
You can watch a short clip of the entire award here (03:03):
Can you guess what the Vice Chancellor said to me that shocked me so much ?
I did my best NOT to react to what he said during the presentation.
Post your guess in the comments (below the Youtube video).
23-Oct-2022 ::
Sag Calculator on Tablets and Sag Calculator feedback
To date, all versions of Sag Calculator have been x86 Windows executables.
Sag Calculator runs fine on every x86 and x64 version of Windows from Windows 95 to Windows 11.
This inclues Windows (x86 / x64) tablets, such as
Microsoft Surface Pro,
ASUS Transformer, etc.
I have personally run / tested Sag Calculator on a
Microsoft Surface Pro
- with and without the clip-on keyboard - in laptop mode and in touch screen tablet mode - and it works great.
And I received feedback from one of Sag Calculator's users back in 2015 that Sag Calculator works great on an
ASUS Transformer:
"Also, if someone is wondering about a portable tablet that runs your program I found the ASUS transformer that runs both windows(new and old) works very well for sagging in the field. Hope everything is well. Thanks"
(Source: Email dated Tuesday, 10 February 2015, 4:42 pm AEST)
It's always nice to get emails from people who use / appreciate my software.
And I recently received some lovely
Sag Calculator
feedback:
"Been using your program for almost 10 years now and it is greatly appreciated. ... Thank you for blessing us lineman with your wonderful tool to make sagging safer and easier. You are appreciated."
(Source: Email dated Sunday, 16 October 2022 at 12:23 pm AEST)
To protect privacy, the names of people and companies are *not* included.
The current version of Sag Calculator will not work with these files directly.
i.e. the Context Sensitive "Help" button currently requires the WinHlp help file to be installed
with the appropriate support software (see Step 3 of your installation instructions).
These Help files are for Sag Calculator v3.5 -
which is technically for the version before the currently released version (v3.6) -
however no significant changes were made to the help file between these versions,
apart from an update
in the Program Development History section to say what has changed for v3.6.
I had to rush to provide these HELP files, so provided what I already had available.
The next version of Sag Calculator will support HTML help format -
no more need for WinHlp support software.
Specially for Jack H.
09-Apr-2022 ::
Sag Calculator feedback
Received some lovely
Sag Calculator
feedback this morning:
"My name is .... I am a superintendent of transmission for ... (USA). I have been using your overhead sag calculator for many years and absolutely love it. My boss ... is the one who purchased this program from you and we have used it ever sense."
(Source: Email dated 9 April 2022, 03:29 AM)
To protect privacy, the names of people and companies are *not* included.
28-Nov-2021 ::
George Harrison: "Do you want me to go with you ?"
Been watching some George Harrison interviews (and music) .... While My Guitar Gently Weeps, My Sweet Lord, tribute videos, .... awesome songs, and an incredibly down to earth bloke, seeking answers to the BIG questions in life.
In one interview, Ringo Starr tells the story of seeing George Harrison for the last time. George was terribly ill and in the hospital in Switzerland, bedridden, dying from cancer. Ringo said to George:
"You know I love you, but I`ve got to go to Boston. My Daughter`s having surgery for a brain tumor."
George replied:
"Do you want me to go with you?"
There was no way that George was in any condition to leave his bed, and he certainly
could not leave hospital, but he was willing to do anything for his friend, Ringo.
Humble, thoughtful, and always ready to put other people`s needs ahead of his own.
What a fucking top bloke !!!
Numerous small changes: add notes about checking my web page,
remove Training Videos (they are now FREE),
update my web site URL at the bottom of the form, and so on.
But the main change is that I will no longer be accepting Credit Card payments
from today onwards.
The acceptable payment methods are now only:
Direct Deposit into my bank account, and,
PayPal
Why no more Credit Cards ?
There have been way too many issues with Credit Card payments over the last few years.
People pay for Sag Calculator with their credit card and ignore or forget what I tell them in the Registration Confirmation Email
and the Payment Receipt -
namely, that their credit card payment will appear on their statement under the name of my family business, because I process and declare my Sag Calculator payments using my
family business credit card facilities.
But too many people have been forgettting about this, and when they get their credit card statement, they dispute the transaction. This requires constant vigilance on my part (because the timescales for disputes are very short)
and they cause a mountain of work on my behalf to respond to the dispute and
reassure my trigger happy bank that the transaction is valid.
Over the last few years, I have had to fight / respond to Sag Calculator credit card disputes 4-5 or more times every year. This is totally inacceptable.
They only occur because people don't read or don't remember what I tell them in the Registration Confirmation Email
and the Payment Receipt.
The other issue with Credit Cards is that my family business is being sold.
As far as I can know, the only way for me to continue to be able to accept / process credit card transactions is to pay $40 per month ($480 per year)
to have my own credit card merchant terminal.
This is more than Sag Calculator's sales, so does not make any sense.
19-Nov-2021 ::
Mooses Valley YouTube Channel - 100,000 VIEWS over 11.5 years !!!
In my latest video, I celebrate reaching
100,000+ YouTube Views during the
11.5 year
history of my YouTube channel,
and take a trip down memory lane and quickly run though the videos that make up my channel,
and discuss the highs and lows of working to produce useful, educational content in today's world.
Milestones:
100,000+ Views
11.5 years
253 public videos
410 subscribers
415 comments (excl SPAM)
All done in my own time, at my expense
1,240 Likes (94.6%)
71 Dislikes ( 5.4%)
Click this link to open YouTube in a new browser tab and watch the video there:
27-Oct-2021 ::
Move Old Updates and Update Sag Calculator's Trial version Registration Form
Move all web page updates prior to Oct-2020 (older than 1 year)
from this main page to the
Prior Updates
section of my web page.
Also update the ancient Registration Form that comes with the Trial version of
Overhead Cable Sag Calculator. This contained woefully out of date contact information, web links, etc. The Registration Form that comes with the Trial version
now simply refers you to download the Registration Form available here:
Registration: How, Why, Pricing, etc
This fixes the "out of date Registration Form" issue for the Trial version of Sag Calculator that I host here on my web site.
Special thanks to Leonard for bringing this issue to my attention.
However, the trouble is that the Trial version of Sag Calculator is hosted on many other web sites across the internet - and these web site are not under my control and have never been under my control. Various people have just copied the Sag Calculator trial version ZIP file and hosted it on their web site without telling or asking me or giving me anyway to contact them if things need updating.
So I cannot update Registration Form that they contain.
20-Sep-2021 ::
Numberphile and my submission to the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences® (OEIS®)
I really enjoy watching these videos and writing my own code to explore / solve the problems.
If the problems or their solutions are particularly interesting or fun,
my source code often ends up in one of my private or public GitHub Repos:
https://github.com/MooseValley
If anyone is interested, one of my favourite Numberphile videos is:
which featured Dr Neil Sloane's enthusiastic, whispering walkthrough of an
interesting chess related number sequence based on a Knight's moves on a large chess board.
(The Knight becomes trapped after 2,016 moves, on square number 2,084 !)
Dr Neil Sloane also founded and runs the
On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences® (OEIS®)https://oeis.org/,
which, is an repository / database of 100,000's of integer sequences.
I have recently started trying to submit sequences to this repository.
My first 2 submissions failed because they were already in the OEIS.
However, my 3rd submission is currently being reviewed for acceptance. Pretty exciting !
The OEIS has a soft limit of 3 submissions, so I am going to work hard to try and find some really unusual sequences over the coming months and submit those (if they aren't in the database already).
Anyway, if you are interested in problem solving, prime numbers, random numbers, Pi, E, encrytion, compression, Artificial Intelligence (AI), maze solving algorithms, chess, poker, card games, graphs, charts, and many other related topics, I encourage you to check out:
Numberphile (https://www.youtube.com/user/numberphile/videos)
and
Computerphile (https://www.youtube.com/user/computerphile/videos)
YouTube channels.
21-Aug-2021 ::
150 Java programming tutorial videos and my new Java, JavaFX, NetBeans, SceneBuilder Tutorial Series
There are now 150 Java programming tutorial videos in my
Java Software Development YouTube Channel:
These videos took 100's of hours of work to create.
And I'm regularly adding more ...
Over the last 2 days, I have been very busy creating, recording, editing, uploading a series of tutorial videos that
should be very useful for anyone who has basic (or better)
programming experience in Java and wants to come up to speed on
JavaFX, NetBeans, and SceneBuilder.
You can access a list of the Tutorial Videos and a
list of my Github Repos containing the source code here:
and have updated all of my Sag Calculator web pages to use these new GitHub links
instead of the MediaFire links.
What is the problem with MediaFire ??
None for me. I run FireFox web browser with uBlock, No-Script, and other security add-ons / enhancements,
so I've never had a problem with MediaFire. I click the download link on my web page, MediaFire opens and I click the big "Download" button,
and the download occurs instantly. So, I have never had a problem with my MediaFire experiences.
However, occasionally people email me (like this morning) and tell me that MediaFire does not work like that for them.
They get pop-ups, ads, offers to download special MediaFire installers, etc.
And it is for these reasons - for the people who visit my web page and use my software - that I am moving away from MediaFire.
Why did I use MediaFire ??
Until recently,
I was forced to use MediaFire for my ZIP downloads, because
the web hosts I was using did not allow the upload of ZIP, RAR, 7z, MPG, MP4, WMV, AVI, etc files.
Also, MediaFire maintains a download counter for each file,
so I could easily see which of my software titles and versions of each were the most popular.
MediaFire has also been around for ages and always seemed very reliable to me.
But now my web site is permanently on GitHub, which allows all of my files ...
sure wish I had moved to GitHub years ago ...
Will probably move all of my other MediFire downloads to Github soon ...
i.e. all of the download ZIP files for each of my applications.
Going to be a lot of work updating / checking links ...
29-Jul-2021 ::
Moose's Software Valley 25th Anniversary - 29-Jul-1996 to 29-Jul-2021
On 29-Jul-1996, my web page, then called "Moose's $5 Shareware and Emulation Valley"
went live. It was my first "proper" web page (more than some simple HTML and images).
I LOVE developing software. At this time, I was a full-time professional freelance
computer analyst programmer, but I hadn't done much HTML or any Delphi or
published any of my own software as shareware (try before you buy, trialware, donationware)
before. Almost all of the software I had created and worked on was for clients and employers,
running on powerful computers locked deep inside the buildings of large companies.
Suddenly, the time was right, the stars had aligned, and I had a strong yearning to
create my own WEB page, learn HTML and Delphi, and write some programs purely for
the sheer joy of being creative and the challenge of bending the computer to my will !
And publish my software as shareware to try and cover the costs of running my PC
and hosting a web page, and maybe make a little money on the side.
It's hardly surprising that
I had tons of ideas (and still do !) for a wide range of novel and innovative
software projects that had been percolating around in my head for many years,
I had pages of notebooks full of ideas and designs, and now was the time to
finally turn them into reality.
And, I was (and still am !) also very interested in emulation - where some
clever software could effectively turn your PC (or Mac, etc) into an
coin-op arcade machine, an Apple ][, a ZX Spectrum, a Commodore 64,
or may others. These emulators were exploding onto the scene at this time,
and my web page also contained these as they were released and a other emulation news.
DASCade (Dave Spicer's Arcade) and the Cinematronics Emulator
were 2 of the coin-op arcade machine that had already been out for a couple of years,
and more were coming. MAME (Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator)
was still a few years away from it's first release (in 1999, if I recall correctly).
So I was coiled like a spring, and put everything into my web page and developing
my new software projects - working 60-100+ hours per week.
Most of my software would be released as $5 Shareware - where people
could download and use my software for free, and, if they choose, they
could pay me $5 if they liked my software, wanted to unlock features that
might have only been available to those who had paid $5, and/or wanted to
support further development. This was a really insane idea at the time,
because almost all other shareware was $20 or more. $5 was a crazy low price.
No-one was selling software or shareware for $5.
My hope was that at $5, no-one would bother pirating / cracking my software,
and no-one would dare risk downloading and using cracked copies of my software
(which might contain nasty surprises, put there by the crackers and pirates)
to unlock features that were otherwise only available to those who had paid $5.
And for a while there, this was true. My software became very popular
and started selling like hot cakes almost immediately after my web page went live.
Things were off to a great start ...
But success brings problems. Pretty soon, cracked versions of my software
were all over the internet. I remember doing a search for "CPU Monitor Crack"
in the late 1990's, and found more than 6,500 pirated / cracked copies
of my "CPU Monitor" software on the internet. Clearly, some people were prepared to download
and use cracked copies of software (perhaps containing nasty surprises
left by the crackers, thereby putting their computers at risk) even just
to save $5 lousy dollars.
All of my programs were developed using the "80 / 20 principle",
which says that 80% of the work can be done with 20% of the effort,
and that the last 20% of work takes 80% of the effort.
I developed programs and released them onto my web page
to see if people were interested, see if anyone used them or
gave me some nice feedback.
If people liked / used my programs, I would work on them to make them better,
add features, make them prettier, and so on.
So, my more polished programs (the ones where I have invested a
great deal of extra effort for a comparatively small result) are the
programs that people have supported and registered / paid for,
and/or the ones I regularly use.
My software won many awards and much of my software has been featured
on the companion CD's for many magazine and even some books -
see the text files that accompany my programs for brief details,
where they are known. People would often email me and ask "can we
include your software on our magazine CD", and I would say "YES".
But, far more often, people would just download and include my software
on their magazine CDs without asking, and this was perfectly OK
with me as well (as long as the everything was intact and the ZIP file
included my readme text file).
Some of my software, especially
Solar System Simulator
and Robot Simulator,
were used at my University's Open Days, where I worked as a lecturer and tutor.
Indeed, my one of my primary aims for teaching computer science at university
was to encourage students to learn to love developing software and
exploring technology as much as I do, and to inspire students to
become a "life long learner", like me.
Needless to say, I had a lot of fun creating and developing my software -
now well over 100 applications, games, utilities -
and seeing my ideas finally become a reality.
My software has not made me rich or famous -
but it was never ever about getting rich or becoming famous.
Over the years, many 100's of people have emailed me and thanked me for my software,
and this has been wonderful and greatly appreciated.
Within the first 10 years, my web site had well over 500,000 visitors,
and that is without page counters for almost half of that time,
and with faulty or non-functional page counters a lot of the remaining time.
There aren't many software titles where an application (let alone the same executable !!)
works across
generations of Windows (Windows 95, 98, NT, ME, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, etc),
across generations of computer hardware, and
across generations of monitors (640x480 --> 4K+).
Very happy to say that all of my software does this.
My web page is now just a quiet backwater, in distant corner of the
internet where few people visit.
The days of lone software developers releasing software directly onto
their web pages are pretty well gone.
It's all about App Stores and similar non-sense nowadays.
Anyway, my web page will always be my "HAPPY PLACE" on the internet.
When I visit the
Main Page
and/or click
Prior Updates
and scroll down and read for hours and reminisce about happier times,
when the sun shone a little less harshly and the breeze was not quite so cold.
Will my web page still be around in another 10 years ?
Sure, why not.
As long as I'm still alive and not too senile, my web page will keep going.
I'll always love developing software, and I've still got a ton of ideas for interesting,
new, unique software that does not exist anywhere outside of my head ...
so I'm not hanging up my debugger and dev tools anytime soon.
And any software I create, that others might find useful, then I will release it here -
almost certainly for FREE, like 99+% of my existing software.
If someone else finds my software useful, then that's great.
Here are some screen shots of my web page to show its evolution over time:
frames => no frames,
animated GIFs everywhere => few animated GIFs,
menus, colour changes, etc.
Note: you can click on the images to open a full sized version if a new tab.
If you would like to see and explore my web site from the past,
I have included links to a bunch of my web site snapshots below.
Some are missing images, some are incomplete, and some are for web sites
that were purely mirrors to my main web site.
e.g. in the earliest days of Moose's Software Valley, my main web host was Rocknet,
but I had web site mirrors with Tripod, Geocites, XOOM,
and various other web hosts, just incase one or more web site hosts closed down
without warning (something that happened quite a lot back then and still happens today).
Date
Web Host
Original URL (no longer working)
Archive.org Snapshot Web Link
28-Jan-1999
Tripod (mirror of Rocknet)
http://members.tripod.com/~Mooseface
Oblotteration
is a simple game - my clone of a game called Flood It.
Changes for v1.1f:
In addition to clicking the the colour buttons at the bottom of the screen,
you can now also click any coloured rectangles in the game grid to change
the top left square (and all horizontally and vertically adjoining
squares with the same colour) to the selected colour.
For anyone who may be interested, here's the
VirusTotal Virus Scan report
which gives this software a 100% clean bill of health against all 58 virus and malware scanners (as I fully expected).
To download the program or see screen shots or view the readme file for more information, see the
Oblotteration (Game)
section of my web page.
Hope someone (in addition to me) enjoys playing this cool game ...
12-Jun-2021 ::
More Bad Software Fixes:
FireFox v89
I have been using computers since the very early 1980's, and have used tons
of software that was "hard to use" and not "user friendly" over the years.
Software was "hard to use" and not "user friendly" back then because the
machines were so primitive. When you've got 48 KB of RAM for everything
including the OS, the application, and the data, you can only do so much.
But some software - even today - seems to go out of its way to
frustrate and annoy users.
Microsoft Windows
is a prime candidate here for so many reasons,
one of which for removing WinHLP support
(the help file format Windows used for 25+ years and which
would add a paltry 1 MB to the total install size of Windows,
which on my laptop tips the scales at 26 GB !).
In addition, for users like me who still value WinHLP support,
and go out of my way to install it on modern Windows,
Windows routinely and automatically deletes the WinHLP support
I specifically installed - without notifying or asking me -
when major updates are installed.
Every few months, I have to reinstall WinHLP support on my machines.
There are many other frustrations with Windows - like why Windows Explorer has
to keep changing and messing with my default view all the damned time.
Shame on you Microsoft ! Shame !
The latest software to really frustrate and annoy me is
Firefox v89.
For me, Firefox has become very crash prone lately,
crashing multiple times per day. This is very frustrating.
But Firefox v89
takes this frustration to another level,
because it adds extra spacing between tabs, menus, and bookmarks,
and does not provide a simple way to reset it back to how
it was in all prior versions of Firefox. Bookmarks menus that used to fit neatly on a screen, now extend way beyond the bounds of the screen.
Shame on you Mozilla ! Shame !
Anyway, to restore the menu, bookmark, and tab spacing in
Firefox v89:
In Firefox type this in the address bar:
about:config
-> click Accept Risk and Continue
search for:
browser.compactmode.show - double click it until is says "true".
search
browser.proton.enabled - double click it until is says "false".
search
browser.proton.contextmenus.enabled - double click it until is says "false".
(This last option fixes the huge spaces between Bookmarks in the Bookmarks menu)
Right click on Title bar
-> Customize Toolbar
-> right at the bottom (middle), click the Density combobox and select
"Compact (not supported)".
Your tabs and bookmarks, spacing, etc will be back to normal.
Hopefully other people out there will find this useful.
FireFox users almost certainly will.
8-Jun-2021 ::
Email sent to ALL Sag Calculator Licensed Users - 221 unique email addresses
To ensure everyone knows about
Sag Calculator's 20th Anniversary
and associated video,
I have just emailed ALL of Sag Calculator's Licensed Users (221 email addresses):
----- Forwarded message -----
From: Moose OMalley
To: Moose
BCC: <221 unique email addresses>
Sent: Tuesday, 8 June 2021, 2:18:05 pm AEST
Subject: Sag Calculator news - 25th anniversary, Free Training Videos, etc
See my web page for details:
https://rebrand.ly/MoosesSoftware
Have a nice day. :)
Mike "Moose" OMalley
____________________________________________________
Moose's Software Valley - Established July, 1996.
* Email: Moose_Software _AT_ yahoo.com.au
* WEB Site: https://rebrand.ly/MoosesSoftware
* Reddit Forum: https://www.reddit.com/r/MoosesSoftware/
* LBRY Channel #1 MoosesValley: https://lbry.tv/@MoosesValley:0
* LBRY Channel #2 LBRY_Tutor_Helper: https://lbry.tv/@LBRY_Tutor_Helper:e
* YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/MoosesValley/playlists
* GitHub Projects: https://github.com/MooseValley?tab=repositories
___________________________________________________
Already I can see that the results aren't terrific.
So far, 40 of the 221 (18.1%) of the emails bounced because the email addresses are no longer valid
or because the company servers reject emails from external sources.
Perfectly understandable ... some of these email addresses were used over 10 years ago,
and companies are becoming increasingly paranoid about external emails (and rightly so).
If anyone tries to pay for these on any future purchases (Registration Forms),
then the training videos will not be charged.
Special thanks once again to my 311 licensed users !
UPDATE Tue, 08-Jun-2021, 01:39 PM: Change all training videos to PUBLIC on YouTube, and use the latest YouTube embed code in my web page to make sure the videos embed correctly. Update the YouTube-DL download commands to include all 5 videos.
12-May-2021 ::
Mother's Day - These Are The Mother's Days Of Our Lives - Music Film Clip
Featuring 2 lovely mothers, a bunch of beautiful doggies, and 2 sons, enjoying a delicious lunch in the park for Mother's Day. Photos and silent video clips with music overlay.
Special thanks to Freddie Mercury and Queen for a great song. (One of my favorite songs of all time).
Song / Music:
Queen, These Are The Days Of Our Lives (1991).
Used without permission - of course. How on Earth would an Average Joe like me ever get permission to use this song ??? Impossible !
My video has a copyright strike - of course - and I am more than happy to give any money my video generates to Queen.
RIP Freddie
29-Apr-2021 ::
Thought for today: Don't let IDIOTS talk you out of doing what YOU want to do !
I've made lots of mistakes in my life ...
but this was one of the doozies:
When I was finishing university (1986),
I had a good amount of savings built up
because I had worked on a farm for several years
(2 years part-time and 1 year full-time) before going to Uni,
and also because I worked as a barman (up to 40 hours per week)
while studying at university. By the time I finished Uni,
I had over $10,000 AUD in my bank account,
which was getting around 10% interest or so on term deposits.
At this time, you could buy a nice house in inner-Brisbane for $45,000,
so my $10K was really significant savings !! Easily enough for a big deposit on a house.
(Today that same house would be $1.8 million).
But at this time, back in mid-1986,
Microsoft
(MSFT)
had just gone public and I was excited about this and
was right on the verge of
putting all of my money into Microsoft stock ...
but all of my friends at Uni - all Computer Science majors -
sneered and laughed at me for this "crazy" idea.
They took the piss out of me for months about this ...
and from then on, whenever someone had a really crazy idea or did something really stupid, they'd be like
"Oh well, at least you didn't bet the farm on a company like Microsoft, hey Moose ???".
If I had done it - if I had put my $10,000 into Microsoft stock -
the shares would now be worth over
$25 million (excluding dividends, etc).
This is pretty shocking, I had never taken the share price history which included stock splits and done the calculations before today.
I thought the total would be maybe $500K ... not $25 million !!
Oh boy !
Yep, I still kick myself about this often ...
Yes, I'm an idiot. But my friends are much bigger idiots.
I'm an idiot because I let even bigger idiots talk me out of something that
I knew was a golden opportunity. I could see the massive potential ...
But they could not see it.
They were completely clueless about how big Microsoft was going to become.
If they were History or English Literature or whatever majors, this would be excusable. But they were all Computer Science majors ... they all had IBM-PC clones at home, they had all been using MS-DOS for several years, they had used Microsoft's software and compilers for several years, and they had seen / used Microsoft Windows 1 ... But they could not see the big picture or how personal computers and software were going to grow.
These are the same guys who started calling me "Moose" as well ...
(because I looked like Moose from the Archie comic books).
Anyway ... special "thanks" to Tom S, John P, Rowan, and others for keeping me poor.
(I am soooo tempted to give your full names here so everyone knows who you are).
And I'd bet $1 MILLION that if I confronted these guys about this today,
they would suddenly have selective amnesia and would have very conveniently forgotten all about this !
With "friends" like these, who needs enemies ...
A similar thing happened when I really started looking into
Bitcoin in early 2010 (about a year after it started) ...
but that's a story for another time ... different guys, but just as idiotic ...
29-Apr-2021 ::
#APPriLE - 2 x APPriLE videos to celebrate Apple Month
Recently created and released these 2 #APPriLE videos onto YouTube:
Apple 2 - Running Apple 2 Emulators and Games on Modern Windows PCs - Getting Started - #APPriLE,
https://youtu.be/wi8BV8-GKfA
25-Mar-2021 ::
Launch APPriLE and comMAYdore Retro Computing Tags
I love Marchintosh and DOSember for celebrating and highlighting Macintosh and PC/DOS computers and software. In the video below, I propose special months for Apple 1/2/GS and Commodore 64/Pet/Vic-20 computers: APPriLE and comMAYdore. What do you think ?
Support this idea by publishing content - videos, reviews, articles, blog posts using the appropriate tags: APPriLE and/or comMAYdore.
Long live the Apple and related computers ][ !
Long live the Commodore 64 and related computers !
24-Jan-2021 ::
Have I Been Owned ? / Have I Been Pwned ? (v0.004f)
and link to this YouTube video in the
Nixie Clock
section of my web page.
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sag calculator, overhead cable sag calculator,
Windows, Linux, shareware, freeware, free software, free program, utilities, utility, value, bargain, deal, software, freeware, Raspberry Pi, Raspbian, Mac, DOS, MS-DOS, MSDOS
Moose's Software Valley, Mooses Software Valley, Moose Software Valley, Moose OMalleys Software Valley, Moose OMalley's Software Valley, Moose O'Malleys Software Valley, Moose O'Malley's Software Valley,
Mike Moose O'Malley, Mike Moose OMalley, Michael Moose O'Malley, Michael Moose OMalley, Moose OMalley
 - 17 Billion GB of disk space - LMFAO - with About dialog.png)
Been watching some George Harrison interviews (and music) .... While My Guitar Gently Weeps, My Sweet Lord, tribute videos, .... awesome songs, and an incredibly down to earth bloke, seeking answers to the BIG questions in life.
If anyone is interested, one of my favourite Numberphile videos is:
I have recently started trying to submit sequences to this repository.
My first 2 submissions failed because they were already in the OEIS.
However, my 3rd submission is currently being reviewed for acceptance. Pretty exciting !
There are now 150 Java programming tutorial videos in my
Java Software Development YouTube Channel:
So far there are 8 parts to the
JavaFX, NetBeans, and SceneBuilder
tutorial series, but I will
probably add more in the future ...
I have now moved the downloads for
Sag Calculator's Registration Form
and the
Trial Version of Sag Calculator
from MediaFire to my GitHub:
On 29-Jul-1996, my web page, then called "Moose's $5 Shareware and Emulation Valley"
went live. It was my first "proper" web page (more than some simple HTML and images).
Thanks to the
 - web browser.png)
Upload a new version of
to my
Here are the BLOOPERS I made when making the
