Sometimes you just cannot make these things up! Either that, or "The Algorithms" pervading our lives these days are getting much better at juxtapositioning contrasting but related things together. Anyway, I digress. Tonight's impromptu post is inspired by the following 2 snippets that popped up across my various feeds this evening:
1) Local newspaper had an article saying that a *third* building at my former High School had just been deemed "quake prone" - with all three buildings having been built either shortly before my time there, or during my time there, and all having been places I'd spent a bit of time in.
2) An old clip of Bill Gates giving a demo of Visual Basic back in 1991
It's funny how these things go sometimes, isn't it...
1) Local newspaper had an article saying that a *third* building at my former High School had just been deemed "quake prone"
This was apparently according to a new national building standard that has seen loads of stuff around the country that was previously fine to now be < 34% of the new NBS, and hence need to be deemed "quake prone", and unfit for human occupation.
I mean, fair enough, we saw with the CTV and PGC buildings in the Feb22 quake how getting this wrong *does* cost lives - including I must add, the Mum of a classmate from Primary School. So, yes, we really shouldn't be mucking around too much when issues of quake safety come into play, especially in a region that history has proven has a nasty habit of destructive seismic activity.
Anyway, what really shocked me the most was this throwaway line buried in the article: That, "the demolition of blocks I and J were underway".
WHAT THE...????!!!!!
I know that I read the equally shocking news a few months ago (IIRC from just before Easter) saying that these two buildings had suddenly been deemed quake prone (< 34% NBS). But to hear that they're gone from that to silently just bowling them without much further fanfare is really shocking TBH! Why? Well, those two blocks were brand new when I was a student there (as was this building they'd just declared quake prone today):
1) "I" block opened a few years before I started (i.e. I remember touring it on Open Night). Had both classes + exams there too. Oh, and it had the only "good" toilets.
2) "J" block - Had 2 classes there, and also sat a bunch of NCEA exams there too. Oh, and we were some of the first cohort of students to have our classes moved in there mid-way through the year
3) Admin block - Yeah, I remember that being built! Surprised the library is not affected given it is attached + same age
Then again, what is the demolition of 2-3 blocks from a wider campus, when they've completely razed + redeveloped the grounds of both my Primary + Intermediate schools as well already!
Yes, you read that right. The school grounds that I thought one day I'd get to send my own kids to and be able to say that I went to those very same schools - yeah, nah! Impossible now! Apart from their names (and even there, they've adopted Maori names too, with those Maori names coming first - like WTF is up with that?! I don't mind things having Maori names, given that it is an official language of this country, but forcing the matter and making the primary / first name shown?! Too much, too fast... don't be so greedy! Anyway, I digress again...)
I was quite stunned walking on to the grounds just a few weeks ago what a transformation the rebuilds have been. Having spent the past year or so driving past every day on the way to work and seeing increasing signs of progress / changes, I'd been curious for a while what had been going on in there!
As an aside: An interesting feature of my commute to work these days is that my usual route takes me past all the schools I've been to - all the way from Kindergarten, Primary, Intermediate (well, sorta - it's frontage is on a side road, but is co-located with the Primary School, and I do pass by both Primary School and the side road), High School, and University.
What's really cool though, is that, especially in the beginning, every day at work saw me needing to bring to the fore absolutely *everything* that I've learned so far, and then some... All of which makes my morning commutes to work even more poetic and special
Anyway, back to my initial reactions of seeing the new (combined) campus. I can't say they were all positive, but I also can't say there were all negative either:
1) Woah! It's a completely different world now, with few recognisable landmarks anymore
2) Wow, these kids are lucky to have brand new everything
3) Am sad that the places I knew + loved no longer exist in this world anymore (esp. RIP "Room 1" 😭)
4) These new-style classrooms are very different to the ones we used to have, with many having a mix of semi-circular rings of desks around a whiteboard + big screen (on wheels), along with a bunch of other interesting-shaped breakout seating.
It feels more like a "daycare / social-club for kids" than school 😜
5) With them now effectively co-locating Primary + Intermediate kids on a shared campus, this raises interesting issues.
(i.e. To a primary aged kid, intermediate kids look *BIG*, and also rather scary)
It used to be that they were always "on other the other side of the massive field, beyond the tree-line", so you didn't stray down there, and they didn't stray over past the back row of buildings on that side either, so things were good.
But now... hmm... maybe that's what all those security fences with kid-proof locks were for 😅
All in all, it was quite pleasant surprise, though still tinged with sadness that the schools grounds as I knew them were all but gone - erased from the world forever. And thus that is how it is with the announcements from my High School that they were demolishing the I and J blocks - two buildings that I do have fond memories of...
Given all that we've lost here in Christchurch following the destructive quakes in 2010 / 2011 (and for years beyond that in the form of terrifying random aftershocks), maybe I should really have gotten over this long ago. I mean, pretty much most of place I grew up in now no-longer exists (or does so in unrecognisable ways). For someone who hates changes, and didn't want to move away elsewhere, this was (and still is) a rather bitter pill to swallow... but to see even more remnants now also gradually get chipped away at - yeah, that's something else again...
(Also, as I like to observe - I once considered becoming an architect, as it seemed like a good fit / fun occupation to be able to define "grand spaces that we then get to live our lives in"... yeah, I also remember also giving up on that as it seemed "highly unlikely that there's going to be much scope locally to do any such work (* oh how wrong I was!!!), but also after realising that most "real" architects here only at most design "houses for rich people, or extensions on existing properties - quite a long way away from my dreams of doing big showcase-y public buildings like Concert Halls, airports, and the like...)
In contrast, this "transient medium" upon which I've spent so much of my life (and continue to these days) has to date proven to be a better way of preserving elements of my former life "as they were". Nothing quite shows that than the second sort of links I'll include here:
2) Visual Basic - And Bill Gate's 1991 demo
This leads very nicely into the second part of today's post,, which addresses a bunch of links and so forth discussing Visual Basic / VB6 - i.e. the IDE + Programming language that started my 2 decade-long journey, going from a hobbyist kid tinkering around trying to make simple RSI-giving games and/or dabbling in animation (using the technology developed to power Clippy)First up - the think that sparked this rabbit hole tonight: A clip from 1991 showing Bill Gates giving a demo of Visual Basic (for Win 3.1)
As much as I do deride form editors these days (and for many very valid reasons), you do have to say that - for very specific use cases, the approach MS espouse in this video is quite objectively quite an improvement (for the average / lay person coming across this for the first time and just wanting to add a quick feature to the tools they're using)
VB6 Emulator in the Browser
This of course comes hot on the heels of an even better link I came across the previous night:
"Visual Basic 6 rebuilt in C# – complete with form designer and IDE in browser"
https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/
My Reaction:
OMG! That brings back so many memories! 😍
Especially on the back of the Windows 7 web-styling project I linked to a few days ago - https://khang-nd.github.io/7.css/ - (which was itself based on some Windows XP / Windows 95/98/Classic themes)
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