About 10REM.net
This is information about Pete Brown's site and blog. For bio
information about Pete, see the bio page.
In 2009 I finalized the long search for a new domain name. My
old domain name, irritatedvowel.com, was growing old. Despite its
amusing history, it was annoying to spell, was too long, and, to
use the words my manager at Microsoft had for it: "Dude, that's
gross".
My blog had a Commodore 64 theme going, so I turned to the C64
for inspiration. I wanted a short domain name that would be easy to
spell (yes, I own tenrem.net too) and would tie into the overall
site theme. I figured C64 and programming, how could I go wrong?
(Yes, that's a C128 in the photo. I started on the C64 in 7th
grade, but didn't get a computer of my own until 10th grade. That
lovely baby is what my parents got me that year for Christmas -
with the works!)
Even back in the 80s we all knew that good programs started with
a comment. If you programmed in BASIC, the comment would look
something like this:
10 REM PETE'S SUPER COOL DEMO
20 REM WRITTEN 10/19/1984
30 REM ----------------------
40 POKE 53280,0:POKE 53281,0
50 REM HA HA!
60 SYS 64738
(Bonus points if you know what the program does)
Hence, 10rem.net was born. I liked the C64 tie in, as well as
the slightly-intended consequence of it looking like "lorem" (as in
lorem ipsum), something I use a lot when mocking up sites and
applications.
10rem.net is hosted on Umbraco CMS, an open-source ASP.NET-based
content management system. I've customized the templates and xslt
and added some user controls and other bits. As to the core, other
than some optimizations to the blog engine, it's pretty much all
stock code.
Thanks to the great community at the Umbraco community
site for helping me with some of the tricker xslt and
optimizations.
About My Blog
The name of this blog (POKE 53280,0) comes from the old
Commodore 64 BASIC command to set the border of the screen black.
This was usually followed by "POKE 53281,0" which did the same for
the main part of the screen. The Commodore 64 was the first
computer that really captured my interest because you do animate
things in color, and create your own character sets. The level of
expression you had was very high for computers of the time. Of
course, my phone has a higher res screen than that computer had
(and tons more memory and processing power), but I'll always
remember that computer as the one that captured my interest back in
7th grade.
I used to host my website and blog on separate platforms (the
site was all custom code, the blog was community server) on the
same server, so my blog had the luxury of having a separate name.
Now that I've migrated everything over, I've kept the name both
because I like it, and because I think it brings back great
memories for those of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s.
Interested in learning about me? Visit my bio
page