FOND OF ANIMFONTS

At work I have no choice but work with Windows computers but at home I mostly compute with my MacBook Pro.  At one time years ago I actually got things done on an Amiga computer, or on various Amiga computers as I did go through a few of them over the few years.  It was fun and useful for a while but at the time when most people would easily get on the Internet to surf the web, with everything needed included on 3.5" floppy disks or CDs, all free, the Amiga platform would require so much more additional work.  You would have to buy the dialer, some TCP/IP stack, the web browser, the email client, argh, too much work.  I went Windows for a while, with its clunky Windows 95 and all, then went Mac, with a Wall Street Powerbook.

One thing I miss greatly, and not able to reproduce on Windows or Mac platform, animated text like the ones shown below.  They are made with the use of animfonts (animated fonts).  Based on a blog post of mine back in 2005 (http://www.qaptainqwerty.com/2005/11/amiga-forever.html ) I created some animated GIF (animgif or GIF for short), possibly on a Packard-Bell PC running Windows 95, via the Amiga Forever emulator software.  When I went over to the Mac platform, no more Amiga Forever.  Cloanto developed Amiga Forever only for the huge Windows market.  Sure Amiga Forever is based on the publicly available UAE (Ubiquitous Amiga Emulator) software but I don't have the time or willingness to muck around with Unix codes and such to make these things work on the Mac.  Every few months or years I would Google "Mac UAE" and probably tried to make MaxUAE work but failed.  Most recently I tried FS-UAE and that effort too got nowhere.  Luckily, while looking for ROM files on an Amiga Forever 2010 disc, to feed to FS-UAE, I came across E-UAE, some Amiga emulation software for the Mac, again based on UAE.  After a few hours of tweaking and configuring, I finally have the ability to generate animated text again.  Only twelve years since 2005!  Maybe someday I'll share my experience jumping through hoops to make E-UAE to run on my Mac.  In the mean time, enjoy the messages below.

HAPPY NEW

"HAPPY NEW..."  Well, it's that time of the year.  You know what word should come next, but it was not supposed to be this way.

I am a morning runner but this morning when I woke up at 5:15 I had a stuffy nose.  Maybe it was because I didn't sleep early enough last night.  It was possible that had I went ahead with the regular morning run, the stuffy nose would get worse and I would be sniffing the rest of the day and be miserable.  So I went back to sleep until 8:30ish.  No more stuffy nose, the whole day.

In the afternoon I had some "me" time for a run.  A longish run, somewhere far away from my immediate neighborhood.  But I also wanted to "draw" something for the Runner's World Holiday Streak.  It's been a while since I did any gwriting and the recent news articles about Simon Beck and his snow art got me itchy.  What better phrase to write around this time of the year than "Happy New Year"?

It turned out I could only write "Happy New". The first possible hurdle was that my Garmin was low on battery.  When I was done with "Happy" there was two bars of power left.  I pressed on anyway and when "New" was done there was another bar left.  Still, I started the run when the sun was out, when "w" was done it was dark and colder.  That's the thing with running pre-dawn.  As the run spans into hours, the sun comes up, it's warmer, you feel energized by the new day.  Not so with afternoon or evening run.  It gets dark and depressing just when you start to get tired.  Still, I could have pressed on and write "Year" but then I have a scheduled run with a friend tomorrow, some 15 miles covering part of Brooklyn and Queens.  Fuhgeddaboutit!  Even though I could finish "Happy New Year" today, I will be too exhausted Sunday morning for the 15-mile run.  Most likely I won't have a job in 2014, I'll spell the whole three-word phrase some time early in the year then.

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/420903491