I am amazed at how he recalls events, issues, incidents etc. with such detail decades after they happened. I can’t seem to remember things well that happened 6 months ago.
Does anyone have a system they use to help with such rich recollection?
I mean, I can't remember what I had for dinner 6 months ago, but if I snuck into a presentation and anyone famous was announced as the surprise guest, I think I would remember that! I would assume most people do not recall everything with this much detail, just the (ha) memorable things.
I wonder if he tells these stories to people outside of the blog.
There are a few events in my life that merit the story being told to people; friends at the pub, during conversations with colleagues at lunch, etc, because they're amusing or unbelievable or whatever.
After a while, you may not remember the event so much, but you do remember the story.
Myself and a friend treated ourselves to a bunch of Marylin Manson shows early in 1997 because we were into that. Sometimes, we'd have assigned seats. Once or twice, we elected to sit on the balcony by ourselves and watch everything from afar. One time, in Harrisburg, I wanted to be in the pit but I did not have a ticket for that.
I decided I was going to sneak onto the floor anyway.
So I positioned myself to be ready for the lights to drop as the opener, Rasputina, finished up and I hopped over the bar and tried to disappear into the crowd on the floor below.
It didn't work. I was instantly spotlighted by a man with a flashlight. Someone else grabbed my shoulder and corrected me by indicating rather forcefully that my intended destination was not the mosh pit, but was instead the entrance gate at the back of the arena.
They didn't kick me out, but once we got back to that quieter area I was informed that since I didn't have a ticket to be in the pit, then I was definitely not going to be in the pit. I was further made aware that I would not be trying this kind of thing again.
So I sauntered back to the assigned seat that I started from and watched the show from there, where some usher became increasingly livid at the despondent teenagers who were smoking cigarettes at a rock show in the 1990s (but who was apparently powerless to do anything about it).
The show was good. I'd seen it before, and I would also see it again.
---
That was almost 30 years ago. Certainly, some aspects have been lost to time.
Was it Harrisburg? Maybe it was Pittsburgh. It probably wasn't Wheeling -- that show was differently-memorable because I had Gideon's bible in my pocket and people were getting arrested for throwing snowballs at the Christians who were holding a vigil across the street, with candles, as they prayed for our souls. It might have been Wheeling anyway.
And the usher? I definitely remember issues between smokers and an usher. But maybe that guy was at a show somewhere in Ohio instead.
Did I make my move during Rasputina, or maybe it was some other opener? Was Rasputina even at that show? (Maybe it was unrelated to the opening act?)
I do know that I hopped over a barrier and immediately got sent to the back, and that's the important part of the story that I wanted to convey. The rest is just context.
And the trick is to just fill in enough believable details about that context that the story works. (It's even easier if you believe those details yourself.)
Huh, now I remember a 90's or early 00's watch that has data, and the way to upload data onto it was by running a special Windows program that would flicker an area of the screen black and white. You'd point the face of your watch to it and the flickering had data encoded onto it.
Timex DataLink. I had the Ironman Triathlon branded model of those, used the hell out of it in high school.
The screen flickering trick also only worked on CRTs under Windows 3.1/9x, so if you had a laptop, any other system with a LCD, or were running NT you had to get a special dongle that hooked up to your serial port and would blink a LED that you had to hold in line with the watch's sensor.
Supported in MS Schedule+ 7.0 included with Office 95.
Very magical to hold your watch up to the CRT monitor, see the monitor go black and flash a bunch of white lines for a few seconds and then look at your wrist to view the downloaded info.
But it was only letters and numbers so the routine got old fast.
Could be a bit finicky to get a successful transfer as well.
I used one for a few years. It was a pretty neat thing for its time.
IIRC it didn't work with a CRT using MS operating systems after Windows 2000 due to driver changes or something.
But Timex also a sold little single-LED blinkenbox that plugged into an RS-232 port that would do the trick. That was intended for computers with LCD screens like laptops, but it worked with later operating systems too.
I don't know if it's the same technology, but I had a microcontroller toy as a little kid where you'd 1) write the programs on your computer (or in my case, type them in from the tutorial book, without actually comprehending any of it) and then 2) transfer the compiled program to the device itself via (IIRC) this little puck-shaped thing with a blinking red light. It was pretty cool, I wonder if I still have it stashed away anywhere.
I mostly remember infrared transfers in the context of beaming contacts between PalmPilots. It was pretty fast for that, and actually, much more reliable than modern AirDrop.
Hey, I played with that when I was approximately 8 years old! Also: wireless printing via infrared, instead of those huge parallel printer cables.
Does anyone have a system they use to help with such rich recollection?
There are a few events in my life that merit the story being told to people; friends at the pub, during conversations with colleagues at lunch, etc, because they're amusing or unbelievable or whatever.
After a while, you may not remember the event so much, but you do remember the story.
And if you wrote a blog, these would be the events you would write about. You obviously won't write a blog post about events you don't remember.
It is selection bias, it is not indicative of the ability of Raymond Chen to remember all little details.
I decided I was going to sneak onto the floor anyway.
So I positioned myself to be ready for the lights to drop as the opener, Rasputina, finished up and I hopped over the bar and tried to disappear into the crowd on the floor below.
It didn't work. I was instantly spotlighted by a man with a flashlight. Someone else grabbed my shoulder and corrected me by indicating rather forcefully that my intended destination was not the mosh pit, but was instead the entrance gate at the back of the arena.
They didn't kick me out, but once we got back to that quieter area I was informed that since I didn't have a ticket to be in the pit, then I was definitely not going to be in the pit. I was further made aware that I would not be trying this kind of thing again.
So I sauntered back to the assigned seat that I started from and watched the show from there, where some usher became increasingly livid at the despondent teenagers who were smoking cigarettes at a rock show in the 1990s (but who was apparently powerless to do anything about it).
The show was good. I'd seen it before, and I would also see it again.
---
That was almost 30 years ago. Certainly, some aspects have been lost to time.
Was it Harrisburg? Maybe it was Pittsburgh. It probably wasn't Wheeling -- that show was differently-memorable because I had Gideon's bible in my pocket and people were getting arrested for throwing snowballs at the Christians who were holding a vigil across the street, with candles, as they prayed for our souls. It might have been Wheeling anyway.
And the usher? I definitely remember issues between smokers and an usher. But maybe that guy was at a show somewhere in Ohio instead.
Did I make my move during Rasputina, or maybe it was some other opener? Was Rasputina even at that show? (Maybe it was unrelated to the opening act?)
I do know that I hopped over a barrier and immediately got sent to the back, and that's the important part of the story that I wanted to convey. The rest is just context.
And the trick is to just fill in enough believable details about that context that the story works. (It's even easier if you believe those details yourself.)
Oh hell yes I do. Dog slow but at least it worked decently well, something I can't say about Bluetooth.
Since it's 2026, googling brings me nothing... had to ask Gemini: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCHHzw4s5W4
The screen flickering trick also only worked on CRTs under Windows 3.1/9x, so if you had a laptop, any other system with a LCD, or were running NT you had to get a special dongle that hooked up to your serial port and would blink a LED that you had to hold in line with the watch's sensor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Datalink
Very magical to hold your watch up to the CRT monitor, see the monitor go black and flash a bunch of white lines for a few seconds and then look at your wrist to view the downloaded info.
But it was only letters and numbers so the routine got old fast.
Could be a bit finicky to get a successful transfer as well.
And transfer bandwidth was pretty low.
IIRC it didn't work with a CRT using MS operating systems after Windows 2000 due to driver changes or something.
But Timex also a sold little single-LED blinkenbox that plugged into an RS-232 port that would do the trick. That was intended for computers with LCD screens like laptops, but it worked with later operating systems too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8ig2UPjOXQ
... The DSI e-BRAIN is also fully working in timex_datalink_client, which amuses me so: https://github.com/synthead/timex_datalink_client/issues/111
There's still nothing comparable :(