Twenty years of web design

I do not usually talk about my work but as the 6th of November 2015 marks my 20th anniversary of entering the world of work i shall make an exception and maybe drone on with a few war stories.

Having graduated in the Summer of 1995 with a degree in Software Engineering i naturally was aiming for a career in computing though i had little idea doing what. I was successful in my second interview after graduation and started work at a company called Third Wave. My new boss had recently been to the US and seen the demos of Netscape 2.0 which, it was hoped, would bring the new (and hardly used compared to today) world wide web to the masses. He also heard about the promising new technologies like SSH which would enable secure commerce over the internet, e-commerce in other words. I was hired to produce websites for a new off-shoot company called Tw2, specifically websites that could sell stuff...

Now this was all new to me to be honest, i hadn't even seen a graphic web page at that point. I had been using the internet since 1991 at uni but this was with telnet, ftp and the likes. I had "surfed" in text-mode using lynx and had done some basic html but not actually seen a proper webpage. Still that didn't matter i've never been one to worry about that kind of thing! On my first day in my new job i went online (dial-up natch) and had a look around. These were the early days of the web still, especially in terms of e-commerce. Amazon's website had only started up a few months before. An internet search (what search engine i used i cannot remember, this was years before Google) indicated that i needed to do some CGI programming and Perl. I hadn't heard of either before.

I also needed a web server, though we did not have any web space at the time. I ran OS/2 Warp on my PC at home and knew that could run a web server so i installed OS/2 on my work PC, downloaded a Perl implementation and started work. I was to create an e-commerce website for a large retailer called Software Warehouse. We were aiming to go live in early 1996 but first of all we had to prove the concept to the heads of the major software houses and suppliers at a presentation in a London hotel in December. Yes next month!

I was given a data dump of the stock database, a huge mass of text (text dump from SQL Server i believe) and my first job was to develop a CGI search for that data. This was not a simple process especially as i was having to learn Perl at the same time though luckily as i found out Perl is excellent for handling text files. With few resources online (and limited dial-up access anyway - i had to dual boot the PC into Windows to go online to look for stuff then reboot into OS/2 to implement what i had found!) i once had to resort to going to Waterstones one lunchtime and looking up how to do something in a book on Perl!

However progress was steady and as December approached the website was taking shape (albeit all running on my PC). My boss Ross was a great designer, and a rabid Steve Jobs and Apple fan (the man had a working Lisa in my office - i'm sure my later conversion to Mac-dom is largely thanks to him). His design for the Software Warehouse website was based on NeXT's site though went further. Our site was not just a digital brochure, visitors could search a database, could add things to a basket and then go and purchase them. This seems so common place now but in late 1995 it was genuinely cutting edge.

It was now time for the demonstration, where Ross would demonstrate my website (running on my PC still) to some of the heads of the British computing industry (heads of Adobe UK, Corel et cetera). I was there just in case anything went wrong... but no it all went smoothly and everyone seemed suitably impressed (or at least not too appalled). Now all that was left to do was actually implement the site on a proper server, installing the horror that was Netscape Commerce Server to handle the secure connections, and building a back-end for order management. But that was for 1996. This blog post is about my first few months at work as a web developer.

These days i am an e-learning developer, creating online courses for a distance learning college. I haven't really touched e-commerce (apart from as a user) since my Tw2 days (which lasted until the company went bust in 2001) but that's fine. I was there at the start, the Software Warehouse e-commerce site was one of the first in the UK, and i'm proud to have had to build everything from scratch. But life moves on and the stuff i do these days, especially involving responsive design for mobile learning, makes me proud too.

How one minor decision can affect the rest of your life

Lets talk about teeth, as i'm English i have bad teeth (natch) and indeed lost my fourth on Monday. Considering the state my teeth were in in my late teens thats actually something of a miracle. However this sorry state of dental affairs could be largely down to a decision i made in my mid-teens.

At around 15 and with already poor teeth i was checked by a dentist visiting the school and given a letter to give to my parents telling them i should go to the dentist. Unfortunately the trauma of my previous dental visits (when i was 7 or 8) were still with me and i threw the letter away. Hence my teeth were allowed to get worse until an abyss finally forced me to go to the dentist when i was at university. Then i found that the horrors of fillings actually were not so bad because my mouth was a bit bigger than when i was 8...

But one simple decision so many years ago has probably caused me over 25 years of trouble (and a fair bit of cost too). It could be that if i had gone to the dentist as a teenager i wouldn't have lost the teeth that i have and my mouth would be in rather better shape. We'll never know of course.

But that is something i found interesting. Often people talk about major decisions and events that can have dramatic effects on the future course of history but minor decisions can have significant ramifications too. I remember at college i arranged to meet a fellow student at the weekend, unfortunately there was a mix-up and we didn't meet. I was pretty annoyed but decided to give him a second chance. A quarter of a century later he's still my best friend who i speak to every day.

Its because of how small decisions, forks and changes can have dramatic changes that the genre of "what if history" is entertaining but highly problematic. In some ways i think predicting the effect of small changes on a history time line is more difficult than major changes.

A level result day

A level result day (a.k.a. girls being photographed jumping in the air day), and on this day i always remember when i got my results. This was back in 1990 which was about 5 ice ages ago in the early Holocene. I turned up at my awful 6th form college (since closed down) to confirm what i already expected that i had failed my Maths and Physics A levels. I got U and N respectively.

More importantly however was my Computer Studies A Level. I needed an E to get into Birmingham Polytechnic to start a HND in Computer Science, in the end i got a D and my polytechnic/university career began at the end of the next month. In hindsight i could have got straight onto a degree course if i had gone through clearing but i always prefer to stick to plan A and that was to do the HND first then do a degree, and 5 years later i had achieved both.

Midlands Today filmed a report from my college though i was not asked by the reporter (David Davies in fact in his pre-FA days) about my results probably because i was not blonde or female. However it probably would have been a bit embarrassing to tell the nation (or the West Midlands at least) how my results read D U N. Incidentally one of my friends got E N D which was mildly amusing.

That was 23 years ago, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge. 18 years working in web development and a second academic career with the Open University. Actually thinking about it i should have chosen history for my A levels all of those years ago, i probably would have got to university to study history back in 1990. I could have my own Channel 5 or BBC4 TV career by now...

Flightradar24

A couple of weeks ago i installed an app on my iPad that had changed my life... Well a little bit anyway, its the Flightradar24 app which allows you to track flights and find information out about them. I live under one of the flightpaths for Birmingham Airport and so get a lot of aircraft flying overhead. Others fly (at a higher altitude) bound for the likes of Heathrow, Charles de Gaulle and ...er... Southend.

The information gleaned from the app has helped me recognise whats flying overhead. When i was younger i was a huge plane spotter and could tell every type apart, its harder in the modern era where the basic template of a metal tube with an engine under each wing has been used for the majority of airliners these days. However thanks to the app i am starting to tell my 757s apart from my A321s...

The variety of what flies overhead surprised me a bit actually. I knew there were a lot of 737s and A320s but the number of 757s was a surprise, plus the odd A310 and 777. High up has been even more of a surprise, i often assumed the faint specks that fly high overhead were all big transatlantic jets but although i have seen a few 747s and an A380 many of the specks are smaller planes flying from the likes of Edinburgh and Shannon to airports in the South.

Great app anyway, i always have it open if i've got the iPad in the garden. Its just a shame not every plane shows up on it. You can see some photographs i've taken of planes flying over my house over the years here.

Easyjet 737

The endless heat

Britain continues to swelter under the Summer heatwave.

Actually i don't mind the heat that much but the continuous heat wave which now looks like it will continue into August is getting a bit much. The problem with my house is it takes a long time to heat up but when it does... boy it gets hot! Thus the house is pretty much sweltering and short of investing money i don't have in air conditioners there probably isn't a great deal i can do...

It could be worse, i could be in an office i suppose. However the heat isn't making my study very easy but i have started bringing together my research ready to begin writing the first chapter of my dissertation at the weekend.

I was trying to think back to the last heatwave, the one in the late 70s is often mentioned though i was very young at the time of it and do not remember anything about it apart from perhaps the odd vague memory (which might be media constructs anyway).

All things must end

The Summer solstice is the longest day, and 5 years ago it truly was the longest of all days when my Dad died. This year i decided i wanted to do something a bit special to mark the anniversary. As he was 72 when he died i decided to say a prayer to him each day for the 72 days up until the 21st of June. And so i did, i wrote a note of what the prayer was about and stuck it on a photo frame holding pictures of us both to avoid me repeating myself.

One thing i didn't do until quite late on was write the day's date on the note, which in hindsight was something i should have done from the start! If i missed a day (for example being in London) then i caught up as soon as possible but sometimes there was a bit of confusion as to what note was for when and so required a bit of counting on a calendar. Anyway we got there in the end...

Afterwards i burned the 72 notes in a candle. The flames taking away the memories to another place perhaps. What were the prayers? Well mostly just talking to him about events in the past, i believe in the spirit world and many realms, he can hear me i am sure as i always feel he is with me still, in my heart.

Surprising how well post-it notes burn!

Original toy?

Dinky toys can be very valuable these days though i suspect my beat-up Police Mini would not be worth a great deal. Sentimentally it is worth a lot though, i've had it pretty much all of my life. My Nan bought it for me when i was a baby so was one of my original toys. I must have hammered it when i was a toddler because i can only ever remember the car in this condition! I found it in a drawer recently and decided it would be better to have it on display.

The regeneration of Shard End

The first place i ever lived (i.e. home from the hospital) was Shard End in Eastern Birmingham, which is where my Mum grew up and where my Nan lived. It was my second home too as i was growing up, visiting my Nan's at least once a week. Since she died in the early 1990s i have not visited the area very often though in May 2010 i took the following photographs.

Everything was derelict and ready for demolition. Today i went there again and was surprised at the new buildings. Although i knew the roads around the church well it seemed totally different now that the old buildings have gone and new build is ongoing.

Shard End Library was very important to be as i was growing up, i visited every week and read so many science fiction books from there. In 2010 that had been boarded up too but now has been replaced by a funky new building. I didn't have time to check if the new library has any books too but you never know...

Old...

New...

York (1) : National Railway Museum

We've just come back a very enjoyable holiday in York. I have been there once before, but i was very young (maybe 9 or 10?) and do not remember anything about it apart from the vaguest memory of being on a train. I have a photo still of me at York station.

So it was high time i returned to York, this time hopefully remembering something about the place afterwards, and if not at least i could take plenty of photos. Of course the highlight of the trip was a visit to the National Railway Museum. When i was there i felt like i was 10 again.

Seeing 87001 in particular was brilliant. When i was a schoolboy i used to go trainspotting to Stechford station mostly, the express trains from New St to Euston blasting through at speed, hauled mostly by Class 86s and 87s like 87001. Ah the memories, of being buffeted by air and deafened. Happy times.

Unfortunately 87001 was immobile at the museum but i could still imagine it roaring through Stechford at the head of an express. You can see all of my photos here.

Movie serial fun

Years ago the Christmas TV schedules were a lot more innovative and fun (of course by law everything in the past was better than it is today, except for equal rights for women and internet speeds of course, everything else nowadays is rubbish) and usually the BBC showed something like Flash Gordon (as in the 1930s movie serial) every morning in the run-up to Christmas. Not nowadays of course, basically the same pap is shown as is the rest of the year. It just shows a lack of imagination and edge by the schedulers. What would you rather see in the morning? Homes Under The Hammer or Buster Crabbe battling a man in a rubber monster suit?

Well i do have the latter on DVD... so i have begun watching the serial, an episode a day, in the run up to Christmas. Watching the evil Emperor Ming, rooms full of crackling electrical equipment and men in unconvincing armour puts me in the Christmas mood unlike anything else!

Happily a number of other serials are in the public domain and are available to download off the internet so i might just do that over the break...

"What can you see Flash?"
"Rip Off Britain? What's that all about?"

Pine cones and craft

I was out collecting pine cones and needles this morning. This isn't something i normally do on a Sunday morning but i am feeling like i should be doing some proactive creative things this Yule and not settling back to just eat endless mince pies and watching bad TV. Last year i created some candles and a nativity scene, this year i have decided to take some inspiration from this website on Yule crafts. What i am going to make yet is undecided but i thought i'd get some raw materials anyway.

The pine trees are on a corner of Spring Lane Playing Fields which is near where i live and was the playing fields of my Primary School (i guess the school don't use the fields anymore as its too dangerous?) I wonder how big these trees were when we used to go on nature trails and the like on the field back in the early 1980s? Were they even around then?

Tanya

Earlier i cleaned up the mesmerising painting that is at the top of my stairs, a print by J.H. Lynch called Tanya apparently according to this website on the artist. J.H. Lynch was a British artist who sold thousands of prints of exotic looking ladies in the 1960s and beyond. These paintings might be considered kitsch these days (usually by hipster idiots) but i think they have a real feeling and soul about them.

My Tanya was passed down to me from my Grandmother who had the painting in the hall of her house ever since the print had been bought sometime in the late 60s and i always loved this painting. After my Nan passed away i just had to have Tanya (no one else wanted her anyway) and she has been in my house for the last 10 years. I can see her as i open my bedroom door so she is usually the first person i see every day, and what a lovely sight she truly is!

Compact Discs

Listening to Billy Joel's "52nd Street" album on CD earlier made me think about the early days of compact discs. Why Billy Joel? Well this was the first album to be released on CD in Japan on October 1st 1982, though interestingly the first commercial album to be manufactured on CD was ABBA's "the visitors". Of course CDs are still ubiquitous nowadays even in the age of the mp3 and other digital only formats. I buy dozens of CDs a year (at last count 52) still and have hundreds in my house (maybe over a thousand by now, never actually counted them all, maybe i should). Added to that are dozens of CD-Rs and data CDs, though these are becoming more scarce now as people store in the cloud or use USB keys.

My Dad bought a CD player in about 1988 (Matsushita i think), and i got my own a couple of years later when i got a stereo for my 18th birthday, yay!) The first CD i ever bought was Waylon Jennings' "Hangin' tough" which i still have got and it still plays perfectly after 23 years. I still bought vinyl mostly though for years afterwards, vinyl was a lot cheaper for a start. I also bought mostly 7" singles in the early 1990s as i discovered indie pop. In about 1998 i had to throw all my vinyl away though which was a shame, but i was engaged and my future wife needed somewhere to store her stuff in my bedroom (as it wasn't until a few months after we got married until we got our own place). Now i shudder at the loss of all those Sarah singles and other C86 rarities, especially as i probably didn't need to throw them away (and we got divorced eventually anyway!)

As more and more people consume music digitally the CD is becoming a rarer beast, like vinyl it will survive but will become more of a niche. Although i do get music digitally (iTunes, Amazon and free stuff) and play most of my stuff on my Mac in iTunes i do prefer having a physical artefact to look at and fondle (oo-er). I'm not happy with my music collection being one hard disk crash away from oblivion but we'll see just how convenient and secure these cloud services like iCloud turn out to be.

Locked out

Yesterday my Mum told me about how she forgot to close the inner door on her house when she went out and it swung wide open... luckily the outer door was locked. It reminded me of when i was a kid and i got locked out with the doors in a similar arrangement. Back then the outer door had a Yale lock and it slammed behind me because of an unfortunate gust of wind before i had remembered to lock the inner door... and get my key!

So i was locked out with the inner door unlocked and slightly open (though not too noticeable from the street). My Mum wasn't due to be home from work for hours so what to do? Well of course i did what every normal 13 year old would do in that situation and went train spotting. I used to go to Stetchford railway station a lot in those days and watch the express trains blast out of New Street heading for London Euston (and occasionally you'd get the odd freight train, saw a Class 58 once!)

I had just enough bus fare to get there (well to be honest i was a little short for the return leg) though i had nothing to write the numbers down on me so had to remember the names of the locomotives that went past. I'm sure i forgot a couple. I suppose this was good memory training in hindsight.

After a couple of hours of having Class 86s and 87s blast past me at 100mph i went home to time to meet my Mum. She let me back in the house and that is the end of story. Since then though i've always been paranoid about being locked out and haven't been so again...

Micro Life (9) : Apple iMac

Working at a web design agency exposed me, for the first time, to Macintoshes. At first i thought they were rather aloof and strange with their big monitors and tendency to crash all the time but then i started to get used to the Apple way and found it was good. A friend showed me, on his 7200, how to stop thinking the Windows way and to think the Mac way with drag and drop and other amazing GUI thrills. I was hooked and it was time to buy my own Mac.

I did already have an old SE by then but i couldn't do much with that. The thing about Macs of course is that they are a bit more expensive than PCs and as i was probably only on about 14K at the time buying a new Mac, new monitor and all the other paraphernalia was a bit daunting. But then Apple introduced the iMac which was an all-in-one computer with monitor and networking already built in. So i bought one.

This was the original iMac of course, PowerPC equipped and running at a speedy 233Mhz. I think it ran Mac OS 8.1 out of the box though 8.5 came fairly quickly afterwards. For the next few years it gave me trouble free  computing, though was short of grunt for the move to OSX (i did experiment with OpenBSD at one stage) though did serve OK as a web server even if it took about an ice age to boot up.

I upgraded to a faster iMac in the early 2000s though i have kept this original iMac to the current day. It hasn't been turned on for a while though and is kept under my desk, so i end up accidentally kicking it several times a day.

The Micro-Life series will end at this point but to conclude this iMac was superseded by a 350Mhz dark blue iMac (which my ex-wife made off with), then i returned to the dark side for some reason and bought a Dell PC (which i still have) and finally a couple of years ago returned to the fold and bought my current Macbook. Over the last decade i have also bought or been given dozens of old Macs and other old computers, many i still have and you can see them here.

My current Macbook has a Dual Core processor running at 2.1GHz and 2GB of RAM, my first computer the ZX-80 has a Z80 processor running at 3.5MHz and 1KB of RAM. So there has been a bit of progress over the last 30 years.

The end of a teletext era

The West Midlands digital TV switchover has begun, i had to retune my Freeview box this morning over breakfast (by the time the muesli was ready to eat it was done). BBC2 has apparently gone from analogue already, in two weeks the switchover will be completed and analogue TV will be gone for good. Not that that bothers me so much as analogue TV looks dreadful on a widescreen TV, what does bother me is the loss of Ceefax.

There is a digital teletext available but compared to old Ceefax its rubbish. Although i tend to only read the letters page on p145 these days i've always loved teletext as an information retrieval system. When i was a kid (talking primary school here) we couldn't afford a TV with teletext, it was one of those amazing luxuries only the rich cool kids could have. Luckily one of my friends' (who in hindsight was neither rich or cool) parents did have a teletext TV and, as we were a load of plane spotters back then, we used to look at the flight departures from Heathrow page with an awe that is usually only reserved for the presence of a deity.

If you did not have a suitably equipped TV however there was a way for people to still get Ceefax. The BBC would display "Pages from Ceefax", a collection of pages running on normal TV and accompanied by a stirring selection from the testcard music archive. This helped me develop speed reading skills as the viewer had no control over the display of pages and had to read them before the BBC decided to move onto the next page.

Sometime in the 80s we did get a teletext TV of our own and now we were in control! We could read news, sport, TV listings when we chose. This was the start of my very own information revolution, well over a decade before the web. It is amazing how it is taken for granted now but viewdata truly was an amazing system and its a shame the UK did not develop it to the extent as some European countries did (there was Prestel of course but we didn't).

I loved viewdata so much i actually created my own viewdata system running on an RM 380Z for my GCSE Computer Studies final project. My system displayed train times (i was a train spotter by then natch).

The great thing about teletext systems like Ceefax is that once you remember a small amount of information, i.e. key page numbers, then its a very fast and flexible way of viewing information. I will likely remember the important index page numbers like 101 (news) and 340 (cricket) for the rest of my life. Digital teletext relies on having to navigate menus to get to information that you can jump to immediately in an analogue system. So its much slower and the available information much less... that is progress i guess.

Its not all over, the first app i bought for my iPad was a teletext viewer so i will be able to read Italian and Singaporian teletext at least for the near future. London will keep analogue TV until next year so next time i'm visiting my sister in E6 i'll have to see if i can get a final Ceefax fix...

Micro Life (8) : Tulip 486DX-100

Now we are in the PC age in my weekly recounting of my past computers there might be a sense this Micro Life series is getting a bit boring now? But stay with me as there is a twist soon. Last time i wrote about my lovely Unisys 386 that introduced me to the world of GUIs, 32 bit computing and even CD-ROMs! However by the time i had graduated i needed a more powerful computer and finally had a salary so could buy one. So i went down to Morgan Computers again.

I ended up with a 486 by Tulip Computers. Another nice solid box, though not my first choice actually. I first took home a no-brand PC box which had a faster specification however this lasted precisely 22 minutes before it conked out. I was offered another one but didn't like the rather flimsy system to be honest so got the Tulip instead. This had a 100MHz 486DX processor, i think the hard drive was 500MB and 8MB of RAM.

For the next couple of years it gave me trouble free computing. The monitor did blow up at one stage though so i bought a hernia-inducing 17" monitor instead. It was fine... but i was now working at a web design agency full of funky Mac boys. It was time to switch...

Micro Life (8b) : Macintosh SE

To be honest the story does get a bit complicated now, as i had money at last i was able to have more than one computer at a time. I'll just stick to my main computer in this series but i think the first "incidental" computer is worth a mention. I bought a Mac SE from Cash Converters for 50 quid, as you do! There wasn't a great deal i could do with this ancient Mac especially when i discovered there was a flaw with the floppy drive which meant, while it could read floppies it formatted itself, these floppies were unreadable in any other Mac. So my first Mac was an island... well until i got my hands on some more old Macs later on and installed a Localtalk bridge on a Mac IIci so i could access floppies on the SE over the network.

Micro Life (7) : Unisys 386SX-33

After a couple of laptops (or 1 laptop and 1 beast in the PPC) i decided to forget portability and get a "proper" PC so i could do some programming and the like on it. Morgan Computers was my destination again (my first 4 computers came from there) and i bought a nice little Unisys PC. It was a small compact little box which had solidity to it (which makes me think it was surplus stock from a government order). Inside was a 386SX-33 microprocessor (yes we were going 32 bit!) and 4MB of RAM. It was also my first computer with a built in hard drive, a massive 80MB! It came with an Apple RGB monitor (Morgan tended to mix and match what was available).

This was however my second choice, i had intended to go to Morgan to get an IBM PS/1 but they had sold out of that, this Unisys system had a better specification though so its an ill-wind.

For the next few years this little workhorse served me well and i upgraded the hardware a few times. The RAM was doubled to 8MB and i got an external CD-ROM drive. This enabled me to install OS/2 Warp. It didn't exactly run fast but it did run OK and was interesting to play with. I also bought my first modem (2400 baud natch) for some telnet and ftp fun (this was pre-public web of course).

The computer served me until i graduated from university but then i needed something more powerful and by then had a job so i could actually pay for something, but that is a story for next time.

Micro Life (6) : Zenith minisPORT

My first proper computer (as opposed to my Dad's) the Amstrad PPC512 had been a disappointment but i soon sold it and got a proper laptop, or so i thought at the time. I headed down to Morgan Computer again and bought a Zenith minisPORT, a nice little XT notebook. Unlike the PPC512 this did actually seem portable.

It had a backlit CGA display, MS-DOS loaded from a ROM, a RAM disk and a built in floppy disk drive. What more could i want? Actually there was a problem, the disk drive used the unusual 2" floppy disk format though it came with an external 3.5" drive. Unfortunately getting a hold of 2" disks was difficult, and when you could find them they were very expensive. I had to resort to using the external drive which of course meant the laptop was not quite as portable as i'd like. It's power pack was also rather large which you needed as the battery life wasn't that great. So i did not take it to class to show off.

There wasn't a great deal i did with it apart from some word processing and soon i needed a more powerful PC but the Zenith was a nice little machine which i still possess. I have no idea if it still works though, maybe i should try it one of these days.

Micro Life (5) : Amstrad PPC512DD

As a student at Birmingham Polytechnic i now had money (you see back in the past we actually got paid to be students and got all of our course fees paid!) and of course i wanted my own computer after using and abusing my Dad's computers up until now. I saw an advert for Morgan Computers where they were selling Amstrad PPC512DD portable computers with a free external monitor. I fancied the idea of having a laptop as a rich guy on my course had one. So i went along and bought it...

If you are not familiar with the PPC512 then it was an unusual portable computer. It had a full-size proper keyboard (so was fairly big) though had a small black & white (and non-backlit) LCD screen. This was rather hard to see anything though so i tended to use the Sinclair black & white monitor instead (until it overheated which was usually by the time the PPC had booted). It had twin 3.5" floppy disc drives and not a great deal else. It was not what you would call a laptop though to be fair it was not a heavy computer.

I can't remember a great deal about the PPC to be honest because i sold it within a couple of months. I only lost about 20 quid on it, selling it to a fellow student, he didn't come back to me for a refund so i assume he got some good use out of it! I wanted a proper laptop and that is where i thought i was going next...