Septembaargh

Good grief, is it September already?

Work-wise, September isn’t quite as busy as August for me, but still very busy – it’s when the majority of our new university students start their courses. Christine’s birthday is also this month, although it’s not a round number this year. Still, we both have the day off work. Meanwhile, our nine-year-old goes back to school after the long summer break.

25 years ago#

This September marks 25 years since I started my A-levels at college. My secondary school didn’t have a sixth form, so instead most of us went to our local college. Indeed, the college was much more local than my secondary school, so I no longer needed a lift to school or to get a bus home.

That summer, I’d been bought my first MP3 player, when such things were still very new – it was a Samsung Yepp YPE-64, which we picked up at the Eurotunnel terminal in Folkestone. The ’64’ referred to the 64 megabytes (yes, megabytes) of flash storage on board, although there was a slot to insert a SmartMedia card to add up to 128 MB additional storage. Data transfer was via a IEEE 1284 Parallel cable – no USB. Still, it was smaller than a MiniDisc player, which at the time was the smallest type of portable music player available, and I remember some classmates marvelling at how small it was.

Other anniversaries#

In terms of other anniversaries, it’s 23 years since I started university, and also 23 years since I switched to Movable Type. Incidentally, TypePad, which was essentially a paid-for hosted version of Movable Type, announced it was closing for good last week. Those who are still using it have until later this month to export their data and move elsewhere. It’s a bit of a sad end to that chapter of blogging, but I guess most people just use WordPress now.

It’s also ten years ago since we bought our first car.

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