Happy Birthday!
Sorry to hear about your birthday money, I hope you’ll still get to have nice day in spite of it!

“The planet Arrakis, known as Dune”

My very first experience with a sound card was watching the Dune 2 intro on my dad’s friend’s computer. I was so amazed, I just sat in awe as that intro movie played.
On the drive home I tried to remember if what I heard was real, and I just couldn’t imagine it. When I tried to recall what I saw and heard, I could only imagine hearing that tinny internal speaker making bleeps and bloops instead of the actual sounds. It just seemed so unreal at the time that I could not recall what I had heard only a few hours earlier :)

On a side note, I don’t think any studio in the nineties made as memorable tunes and sounds as Westwood did. There was always something enchanting about them. Dune 2, the Kyrandia games, they all had excellent music that really played into the strengths of what was available back then.
Of course I’m talking with pink tinted nostalgia goggles, but still… good memories :)

Yes, I remember these! Countdown And Tex Murphy: The Martian Memorandum come to mind. I remember being amazed at the sounds suddenly coming out of our internal computer speaker. It even had something close to speech!
The manual also came with some info on making the sound even better using some alligator clips, but that went waaaay over my little head at the time :)

I crochet little animals for friends and family.
Unasked, most of the time :)

When I was a kid our family went on vacation to the US. Everyone kept asking if I was Dutch, which I thought was German (Deutsch).
So I kept correcting them, saying I was Netherlandish :)

Worrying what other people think of me.
I know I shouldn’t care, but it’s hard not to.

“Political ideologies, an introduction” by Andrew Heywood, is available for free online.

It was required reading for my history study in uni about ten years ago. This seems to be a newer edition. It’s quite a read, but it covers a lot of isms in a generally unbiased manner.

No, I’m sorry. I wish I could help but I’m a bit out of my depth with this one. You might try a local career counselor, but that really depends on where you live and who’s available.

I wish you the best of luck though, I hope you’ll find what you’re looking for.

My first computer was our family’s 286 Wang pc. I used it mainly to play Sierra games. It’s how I learned a lot of my first English words.
I got my first cellphone, a Sony-Ericsson, around 2003 and only because my brother gave it to me. I was a staunch hater of cellphones but too Dutch to pass up on a free thing :)

Writing, it allowed for knowledge to travel across vast distances. And for that knowledge to remain available and accurate for far longer than any oral tradition would be capable of.

You might like Shadows of Doubt. It’s a procedural generated detective game where you have to solve murders. The entire city is generated, every npc has their own routine and you can pretty much go anywhere. There’s sneaking, hacking, talking, etc.

It’s still in early access, but it’s already a lot of fun.

No, I got a permanent contract for a well paying job in the public sector. The job security is great and there’s a solid pension plan.
It’s what my partner likes to call an “iron rice bowl” :)

Maybe not as fancy as the others, but I really like the little pink jeep. It’s boxy and cute.

Oof, I wouldn’t know about that. I was purely talking from personal experience. I don’t have a good picture of the job market in total, let alone in whichever country you live. If you want to get into the data-related IT fields (data analist, data engineer, business intelligence specialist, etc.) then SQL and data modeling skills are a must-have. But it’s just a small part of a much bigger discipline.

If possible, find some professional career counseling. Someone with better knowledge of the job market where you live might give you some good advice on which steps to take first.

For the better :)
I haven’t been active in online communities for over ten years. It’s been fun to contribute with comments and posts and I feel like I’m finding my voice again.

I’m still waiting for my $1000 from Bill Gates for passing on his e-mail :(

To my eternal shame, that really happened. I was young, gullible and stupid…
I guess there are worse ways to learn not to be so trusting.

Well it kind of is, isn’t it?
At least, I like to pretend it is :)

My work is similar to that of a librarian, except the library I work with is invisible and can contain more books and scrolls than any normal library ever could.
My invisible library has information about all kinds of things, the weather, the money earned and spend, and other things that are important for merchants, scholars and leaders to know.

It is my job to make sure the information arrives and is stored properly in this library. Also I have to make it easy for others to find and retrieve the information they need from this library.

Learn SQL and data modelling. The Data Warehouse Toolkit by Ralph Kimball is a good introduction to data warehouses and dimensional modelling. It’s not a universal model for data warehouses, but the core concepts remain the same among different implementations. This should give you a good basic understanding of the basic concepts of data warehousing.

I know Reddit isn’t exactly popular here, but their business intelligence community is quite active. It might be a good place to lurk and gain some insights.

Best of luck! :)

Oh wow, that takes me back… This game actually got me into reading the book. I played so much of this when I was little, I loved the story and the characters.
When I saw the movie in the rental store I got really excited. I didn’t even know there was more to Dune than the game. I asked my parents if we could rent it but my dad told me (rather gruffly) to go and read the book instead.
I was so annoyed at the time, but looking back I have to admit he did the right thing :)