REAL-TIME 1
~ESHER.FIL~
"Don't throw your cigarette butts in the urinals. It makes 
them soggy and difficult to light." 

Tom Sharpe, "Wilt on High"

 THE FINISHING OF "ST NEWS" VOLUME 9 ISSUE 2 
 (the text is an ACC / DBA co-production) 
      edited by Richard Karsmakers
    re-edited for D.B.A. mag by Slimer

Friday, July 22nd 1994

 11:36

The birthday of Jason Becker, guitar talent 
extraordinaire suffering from the lethal A.L.S. Lou 
Gehrig Syndrome nerve disorder. When it rains it pours. 
When I woke up this morning people on the radio told me 
today the temperature would be as much as 30ø Celsius. 
Please understand me well - if there's a bit of wind and I 
can sit on the balcony all day with a cold beer, some 
liquorice and a good book (or two) to read, I don't mind 
too much. However, today is the last day prior to The 
Finishing of ST NEWS Volume 9 Issue 2. 

I still have one more article to write - the 
introduction to my "Book Reviews" - and this morning my 
Falcon space bar went on the fritz. A good thing I still 
have my MEGA ST, which I have now moved next to the 
Falcon. It was going to be used tomorrow anyway, for the 
purpose of this real-time article, but it's useful now 
already. Listening to disc 2 of the AC/DC "Live" set, 
quite excellent though not my own, while trying 
desperately to adjust, in sortof real-time too, to the 
MEGA ST keyboard (which is a QWERTZ one, German, as 
opposed to my UK Falcon keyboard). It types pretty 
brilliantly, though. I just called Jurek Ceglarek, customer 
support supervisor of Atari Benelux, and asked him what 
could be done about my Falcon keyboard problems. He 
immediately offered to send me a few switches that 
could easily be used to replace the busted space bar one, 
which might even find themselves in my mailbox tomorrow 
morning. Here's hoping...

Tomorrow Alexander "Bonus" de Vries and Sietse "Slimer" 
Postma of Disk Busters Association (DBA) will arrive at my 
place to witness The Finishing. As a matter of fact, with 
their aid I plan to build in a "Falcon internal speaker is 
on/off; do you want it to remain so, or change it?" 
option. Slimer told me Bonus is their coder, and their 
magazine has said option.

The main problem at the moment is Jeff Minter. For the last 
five days I've been calling him throughout the day to 
check if he's home. I am trying to get an interview with 
him into this ST NEWS, and if I can get hold of him by, 
say, 1 PM, I can still get it to work. He can do the 
interview replies, send it to me by email and I can fetch 
the stuff from my email account at around 4 PM. That way 
I can get it in. But I am afraid Jeff is still in the 
States, where he was supposed to spend five days at Atari 
Corporation involving the "Virtual Light Machine" to be 
built into the Jaguar CD ROM. He told me, about two weeks 
ago, he'd be back early this week and might get some 
chances at doing the interview provided Atari hadn't given 
him another near-impossible assignment. He should have been 
home now. I still have some hopes going. I will continue 
calling him about every hour until about 2 PM I think.
If he's still not home by then, the interview will simply 
have to be postponed to the next issue (i.e. the one in 
which you're reading this real-time effort).


Tomorrow you shall be sufficiently acquainted with the 
process of The Finishing, something involving "Pack Ice", 
"Disturb", "1st Word Plus" and "GfA Basic", as well as 
(hopefully) some Plantiac, Muier Schipper Bitter, and a 
load of drinknuts.

I hope tomorrow and the day after will be cool. I suppose 
they will be. I am already looking forward to The Finishing 
of ST NEWS Volume 9 Issue 3, because that shall be done 
with none other than Chris Holland of "Maggie" located at 
my abode. For now, I think I would first like to acquaint 
you with my current surroundings.

In the back room there are two desks put together like an 
"L" with the top of the "L" facing north. The vertical part 
of the "L" has the Falcon, with the chair of its potential 
operator on the east (to the right of the "L"). The MEGA ST 
that I'm using now is located on the horizontal bit, with 
the chair located to the south (below the "L"). A wall 
stretching north-east is located directly against the left 
of the vertical part of the "L". On that wall are posters 
of Yngwie Malmsteen and Jason Becker, an Australia Wildlife 
Calendar currently displaying an Australian Sea Lion, and a 
postcard kind of thing with "42" on it.

The curtains are partly drawn to keep out the heat. All 
available windows are thrown open to let in some precious 
bits of breeze, but it's not to sufficient avail. Miranda is 
now cleaning the small room (not the smallest though) where 
the two guests will be able to put themselves to sleep. It 
should be pretty comfortable, at least a lot better than at 
the average computer coding conference I would hazard to 
say.

I think I'll go and have a lot at what the postman has 
brought (if he's been already, that is).

 Richard

 12:34

I just called Jeff's home address again, to no avail. So I 
called the Llamasoft office itself (in Tadley) and asked how
things were going. Well, as it turned out, Jeff had been 
back in the UK from last Monday on, and he had come back 
from the US with pleurisy, a rather painful infection of 
the lungs. So it was pretty obvious that he wasn't going to 
be able to get the interview replies over to me by 4 PM 
Dutch time, although he wasn't present at the moment to 
confirm that. So the interview will be postponed to the 
next issue. A bit of a shame, of course, but at least that 
will make sure the next issue (i.e. the one you're reading 
now) will already be interesting by default. The health of 
the person who is almost single-handedly responsible for 
the huge Jaguar success is far more important than anything 
else. I regretted having bothered him so much over recent 
months but, hey, ST NEWS will be around for another issue I 
should guess.

 Richard

 Saturday, July 23rd 1994

 09:33

 I just got out of bed and showered. Today, the weather 
forecast service announced smugly, Dutch weather could be 
classified as a "heat wave". I am not happy with it.

I still have lots of work to do. Yesterday afternoon, as I 
did my usual pre-ST NEWS email session, I found in my 
mailbox a concert report by Karl-Anders 0ygard - a Roskilde 
Festival article! I still have to do the layout of that 
(which is a bit of a bastard as he used very wide tables to 
list the artists playing on each day, whereas ST NEWS is 
limited to 65 columns).I'll just have to get it over with. 
If everything goes according to plan, the two DBA dudes 
should have left about half an hour ago. I think they'll 
take 2 or 2.5 hours to get here.
 
All windows in the house are wide open. It's quite windy 
inside now. I also switched on my industrial strength fan. 
A small pic of James Hetfield on the wall does not seem to 
like it much, fluttering and flapping berzerkedly, but I 
do.

 Richard

 10:42

I finished editing Karl-Anders' article. All this is done 
on the same MEGA ST as the writing of this real-time 
article because editing an entire article is too strenuous 
with a busted space bar. Stuff that still needs to be done: 
The introduction to my book reviews, the adding of a quote 
to the Roskilde festival article, and possibly some more 
depending on what will drop in the mail today. Hopefully I 
will be able to fix the Falcon later today too. The 
soundtrack at the moment is the debut album of the Stray 
Cats. I saw "Grease" on TV a few days ago and ever since 
that experience I wanted to get the Stray Cats in my CD 
player some time. It is already getting slightly warm here. 
I hate this weather. Blast it!

 Richard

 11:14

The soundtrack has changed to Pan-Thy-Monium's excellent 
"Dawn of Dreams". I am still writing the introduction to 
the book reviews. I have had something not unlike writer's 
block for a few weeks as far as this story was concerned, 
but things are now developing sortof naturally.
Pan-Thy-Monium kick ass!

 Richard

 12:01

They probably missed a junction somewhere, I guess. The 
heat in this room is slowly increasing, and the 
introductory story is going great. It's a horror story and 
I think it might be pretty scary. The soundtrack had 
changed to an even more ass-kicking band, with Napalm 
Death's "Fear Emptiness Despair". I think I'd better get my 
dose of metal now, for the DBA guys might be into hip hop 
(bwaargh!) for all I know.

 Richard

 12:50

The introductory story is finished, the mailman has not 
brought anything interesting (no keyboard switches, no 
additional articles I had sortof expected from John 
"ex-STEN" Weller), and the weird Frisian folk have still 
not enabled my welcoming them. Off to the Falcon where I 
have some miscellaneous small things to do. Considering the 
fact that we had agreed for them be on my doorstep between 
11 and 12 I suppose you could say they are too late.

 Richard

 13:28

I am afraid they have arrived: Alexander and Sietse, also 
known respectively (though not respectfully) as Bonus and 
Slimer of "DBA Magazine". It is getting increasingly warm 
so I think there won't be a lot of writing done today. Maybe 
this evening or something.

 Richard

 13:30

Yeah, we're here and I'm searching for the keys on this 
German keyboard. Well, I'm going to leave you now and in 
the capable hands of Bonus (because it's too hot to type 
more)...

 Slim Slimer of the DBA

 13:37

They asked me to write something so I will do so. That 
being me, Bonus, the driver of the team. Boy, it was really 
hot in the car. The water temperature meter almost reached 
boiling level. At one instance we had a quick stop at a 
city map of Utrecht and the car wouldn't start anymore. But 
after a quick hit with a hammer on the starting engine it 
brought us where we are now, at Richard's place. The view 
from here is great...

 Bonus

 13:49

Well, we (Alexander, Moi and Richard) are watching the 
packing of ST NEWS (and editing). How exciting...

 Slimer

 14:53 

 Real-time report:

Bonus is sitting behind his Falcon playing around with 
it. Richard is building an internal on/off routine in the ST 
NEWS source code. This doesn't happen without some troubles 
and bugs - well you can't have it all at once. Well it 
seems that it works now...I'm typing behind this Mega 2 ST 
with da' strange keyboard while listening to ZZ Top's 
"Eliminator" (which is more to Bonus' liking). After these 
lines of text it is now 15:12 (pretty fast huh)...

 Slimer
 
 15:21

Bonus' Falcon has been installed some time ago, quite a few 
small bits of stuff have been added to the ST NEWS 
articles. I have also added code to allow for the Falcon 
internal speaker to be switched on/off. It's getting 
increasingly warm. This might have been caused in part by 
Bonus, who has taken off his sneakers. But the presence of 
3 computers, one stereo tower and two blowers (that just 
sortof move the hot air around) won't help I suppose. ST 
NEWS is pretty much near-finished. I just ran "DiSTurb" 
again. This is a special utility written by Stefan quite a 
few years ago, enabling the computer to take over most of 
the mind-killing business that has to be done when 
finishing ST NEWS. By pressing F1 all documents were 
copied from their word processing directory to a special 
buffer directory where they were compressed (packed) about 
50% off. Pressing F2 transforms these packed files into one 
large "articles" file ready for use with ST NEWS, now some 
754801 bytes in size and containing slightly more than a 
massive 1.5 Mb of articles when uncompressed. Bonus' Falcon 
is copying. How come computer freaks gathering always 
contains a lot of copying? Phone...

 Richard
 
 15:34

So now I have some time again to type something. Well, what 
shall I type? Something about Pinkeltje... No, that's 
something you can only find in a "DBA Magazine" (lucky 
you). Now my Falcon is copying some small files for Slimer 
and after that I can code (?) again. So maybe I'll be back 
somewhat later today...

 Bonus

 15:58

What a surprise...Kai Holst, one of the New Nutties and 
programmer of the "Antidote" shareware virus killer, just 
called. After getting a wet ear from connecting the phone 
with it for a prolonged time in this heat, having talked to 
him for something like half an hour, he had informed me of 
some bugs in the "UVK" and some suggestions for ST NEWS 
that had, thank god (that I don't believe in at all)already 
all been implemented. I am sweaty. The DBA chaps are 
listening to sound modules (MODs). I am going to see if I 
can get some of 'em that seem especially worth while. They 
appear to have made about three MOD disks filled with music 
ripped from some Falcon demos and normally not available 
separately.

 Richard

 16:05

We're going to turn off all systems, allowing them to cool 
off a bit and eat some vanilla ice cream on the balcony. 
With chocolate droolings on top.

 Richard

 17:36

Back from outside. We spent most of the time sitting on the 
balcony. After having finished the ice cream we merely sat 
sighing deeply, with the other guys gazing at one of my 
opposite neighbours (a rather OK female that discretion 
forbids me to reveal more about). We have in the mean time 
ordered pizza. In about 25 minutes I suppose they will 
arrive.

 Richard
~MINT.PAL~
END OF PART 1