A long long time ago, In a galaxy far far away...there was Blinkenlights

TASK B


Next I moved on to Towel.blinkenlights.nl and Wow! The amount of fandom/freetime and skill involved in that is pretty mind boggling, definitely a different use of Telnet to what I expected. Reminded me of the old racing games I used to play on my Casio Scientific/Graphic calculator in high school when I was bored during class. They too also consisted of ASCII characters, but were nowhere near as elaborate as that.

Blinkenlights and the old Casio games both do however share the same maverick spirit as the first person to figure out that 5318008 spells BOOBIES upside down on a calculator, thus turning a perfectly functional and useful tool into something much more amusing and giggle-worthy.




As impressive as it was, I could only put up with a couple of scenes before moving on. Not a big a fan of Star Wars, and the lack of speech and sound effects made it a bit boring for my Xbox/Playstation conditioned mind. Shameful, I know.

Telnet

OK, so much for following my own advice. Did these tasks a while ago and typed them up on Word but haven't updated this space in a loooong time. I could make excuses, some valid, and some far fetched, depending on your stance on Extraterrestials, avocados, dodgy modems and Space/Time continuum but going to change that as of today and this week will post all the previous work and finally focus on this blog the way it deserves.


TASK A


First task at hand was to get stuck into Telnet and get into the Deakin Library catalogue.

I followed the Telnet install instructions for Vista found here and it was fairly straight forward. Telnet popped up and reminded me of the old MS Dos prompts that I used to have to use in order to install video games way back when.

I tried to type in the Library.deakin.edu.au command but just got back an error message. Upon further inspection of the vista help site, I typed in the ? symbol and an options menu popped up. I browsed the options available and took a stab at O = connect to host as it seemed the logical option. Luckily that seemed to be the correct guess and after typing Library.deakin.edu.au I was sent to the Deakin Library search menu.

From then on it was very straight forward, and I managed to get the search results emailed to my Curtin email account without any problem.

Reflections :
The whole process was fairly simple, Telnet seems to be a very simple application that is useful for tasks that don’t require fancy graphics, and installing it was no problem but it took me a couple of minutes of random command prompting to figure out how to bring the main options menu up. There was a certain sense of nostalgia and dread having to use the old black windowed command prompt, as it had been years since I last needed to use that kind of thing, and apart from installing games, I only ever used it if there was something wrong with my PC.

5 tips for new bloggers

OK, this is actually my first ever blog but I have a large number of blogs which I like to read on daily basis so I'll just try and point out the good qualities that make me go back to them.

1. Keep the design nice and simple.

2. Try and update on a regular basis.

3. Don't make the posts too long, sometimes good content can be overlooked if the reader does not feel like trawling through twenty seven paragraphs.

4.Provide links to relevant (or not so relevant) external sources that may be of interest ( that's how I've stumbled across most of my favourite websites)

5. Be creative and enjoy it, everyone loves a laugh.