{"id":3624,"date":"2012-11-05T00:01:17","date_gmt":"2012-11-05T07:01:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=3624"},"modified":"2012-11-04T10:34:52","modified_gmt":"2012-11-04T17:34:52","slug":"felix-the-mouse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=3624","title":{"rendered":"Felix the Mouse"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Figure 1. An actual Felix mouse.<\/p><\/div>\n

Reader Sean, or “Commander Hurricane,” recently emailed me a photo that brought back some memories.
\n
\nIt’s Felix the mouse, the wonderful, wonderful mouse.<\/em><\/p>\n

I first met Felix back in 1992. Back then, the editorial staff of PC Computing<\/em> magazine was trying to woo me. They wanted me to come on board as a writer. I was thrilled.<\/p>\n

Back in the early 1990s, I was writing more magazine articles than books. I probably wrote two or three articles a month for various computer magazines. I also had a month computer humor column in Compute!<\/em> magazine.<\/p>\n

PC Computing<\/em> magazine was one of the major computer magazines back in the early 1990s. Yes, people actually read magazines back then. I subscribed to 5 or 6 of them: PC Computing<\/em>, PC Magazine<\/em> (which was the Big Dog), Compute!<\/em>, Dr. Dobb’s Journal<\/em>, BYTE<\/em>, INFOWorld<\/em>, MacWorld<\/em>, and so on. Those were the days.<\/p>\n

Of course, these days they give away all that stuff people once paid for. Stupid writers giving away their stuff free on the Internet . . .<\/p>\n

Landing a regular gig at a magazine was something I strived for. Having such a gig at PC Computing<\/em> would have been a dream. So when the PC Computing<\/em> Editor-in-Chief flew up to Seattle to meet me, I was floored.<\/p>\n

Then they flew me down to the San Francisco bay area to have meetings with staff and such. But by then I wasn’t as thrilled. That’s because they kept asking me what I’d want to do for them. I’d say, “Have a monthly column.” Then they’d come back and say, “Yeah, but what would you like to do for us?”<\/p>\n

It was confusing. Maybe I’m remembering it wrong, but that’s the way I remember it: They wanted me to come onboard, but they never revealed what it was they really wanted. It was like they wanted me to say something, some magic word that I was supposed to know, but I never came up with the right word. So the whole thing just kind of fizzled.<\/p>\n

I do remember writing articles for them, one article in particular was a survey of all the strange and wonderful types of computer mice available in 1992. The magazine had manufactures send me about a dozen mice. I wrote an article, which you can read here<\/a>, though PC Computing<\/em> never published it.<\/p>\n

It was common for me to receive PC hardware in the mail for review back then. I was sent dozens of keyboards, various software packages, and so on. I had to examine, write, and submit articles all the time. It was fun — most of the time: I did the math on how much time it would take to install and evaluate 10 different graphics cards. Even at $1000 the time I put in wouldn’t be worth it.<\/p>\n

In the end, I never did end up working as a writer for PC Computing<\/em>. My name did appear in the masthead one issue. That was cool. And the picture of Felix the Mouse brought all that back. Good times. Fun memories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reader Sean, or “Commander Hurricane,” recently emailed me a photo that brought back some memories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3624"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3624\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3644,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3624\/revisions\/3644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}