1999 My sister had a little hamster.
At least the hamster was small in the beginning. It grew bigger and bigger, and soon it was as large as... well... a hand. My hand.
Its name was Homik (or "Chomik", as my friends tended to call it), and it resided in my room in I/O in a thing called Habitrail. This was a constellation of the cage and an armada of plumbing tubes attached to the door through which Homik could rush to and fro.
Could, because after having explored the loop twice, Homik decided to cram it full of food so she couldn't get through any more. She also lived in the tubes most of the time.
Sadly, after a short but in our opinion good life Homik passed away.

That's the story.

Being in K-Town most of the week, I decided to have a hamster myself. I didn't want to have the all the hassle twice; I wanted to program it. And that would have been

VH1

(Virtual Hamster 1). Would, because after I had implemented the framework for the hamster, it somehow grew so modular and flexible that it outflexed my brains and I gave up.

(At first, I had thought that a hamster isn't so difficult to fake - it has only three states:
  • eating,
  • sleeping,
  • running in its wheel.
These expanded, however, and soon I had a notion of an user-programmable state machine, an user-programmable environment, an user-programmable sensor and actor array, an user-programmable graphic representation, and many more user-programmable aspects. I couldn't program all of these. Or I ceased to want to do so.)

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