Sunday, March 21, 2010

Career Counselor

After working a variety of jobs and majoring in a degree that I belatedly decided I didn't like, I feel I've finally found the perfect career: technical writer. It has just the right levels of independence, innovation, creativity, and variety.

But that doesn't mean I'm not open to other possibilities! While taking a break from animation (!) and with a cat permanently embedded on my lap, I decided to try..."Career Counselor" by Melvyn Lebowitz.


How can you not trust your future to a 1982 program written in BASIC for an 8-bit computer? Regarding the animated title screen, you'll note that the little pink woman in the dress goes to work in an office building after leaving school, while the naked blue man (presumably cold) works in a factory. He's also waving "Goodbye forever, until my job goes overseas!"

Anyway, which jobs did "Career Counselor" pick for me?
  • EDITOR
  • HISTORIAN
  • HORTICULTURIST
  • POLITICAL SCIENTIST
  • PROSE WRITER
  • SOIL CONSERVATIONIST
  • TECHNICAL WRITER
Besides its insistence that I spend more of my time with plants, the suggestions are surprisingly good, though apparently I'm overpaid because the TECHNICAL WRITER's earning level is "24,000-29,999." This is notably higher than the earning level of either the PROSE WRITER or the SOIL CONSERVATIONIST, though the former's employment outlook is strangely "Good-Excellent." I guess things were different in 1982.

Maybe, as a hobby, I will start conserving soil.

2 comments:

Gary said...

How interesting! Looks like fun.

Speaking of useful 8-bit programs, I have been looking for a modern version of "Mind Mirror" which ran on (don't laugh) Commodore 64 and other contemporaries in its era.

This was a program developed with Dr. Timothy Leary, and helped you analyze yourself and others. I remmeber that it created something called "Mind Maps." It may have once been marketed by Electronic Arts, but I'm not certain.

Maybe Dr. Leary and good ol' Mel knew what they were doing - even in an 8-bit era!

If you know about "Mind Mirror," please speak up. Now to find out who has a 5.25" diskette drive...

Adam Thornton said...

Good memory, Gary! Like you said, it was produced by Electronic Arts, and by a strange coincidence I was just reading about it in an old "Compute!" magazine.

Here's some information:

http://www.timothylearyarchives.org/mind-mirror/

And you can download it from a few different places. Who needs a 5.25" disk drive...join the age of the Emulator!

I'm going to try it on "psdosbox," a PC emulator.