Sometime late in 1975 I sat down at a strange device that had appeared in our science room in my outstate Minnesota high school: a teletype. One of the older students showed me how to connect to a service called TIES, and play a game called “Lunar Lander.” Only six years after the first moon landing, the objective of Lunar Lander was to safely ( Read more... )

Man. Had fun tonight, but these days everything is leavened by the awareness that I need to get my paper done. Tonight I went straight from work to a meeting, and straight from the meeting to a dinner for a friend, and got home after 10:00 p.m. Then of course I have stayed up another hour reading e-mail and Facebook. But MAN, the way the days ( Read more... )

What the...? Okay, so I know the days start getting shorter after June 21st, and certainly now we're quite a ways from that date. Still, it seems like tonight the sun realized that it had been staying late at work, and decided to head home early. It's not even 9:00 p.m. and it's already pitch black outside! Wasn't it just yesterday that it was ( Read more... )

Time is a monosyllabic fiend. It just sits there, "Tic" "Tic" "Tic" advancing into the future at a notoriously steady pace. Supposedly you can slow him down by accelerating to great speed, or speed him up by soaring off into space, but most people can't take advantage of such tricks, and the most anyone who CAN do these things has accomplished is ( Read more... )

Well that was my forty-seventh year. I've had worse. I've had better. On the downside was the work situation, which was rather uneven. On the upside I must be getting older, because as annoying and briefly upsetting as my three job-losses in the past year have been, still they did not permanently sap my confidence like they might have a decade ( Read more... )

Okay, I think I missed a day, but I was on vacation, so I'm not going to cop to it. Anyway, I got another letter printed in the Star Tribune, so that can serve as yesterday's blog entry.

Today has been fun, although bumpy and uneven.

First I had a terrible nightmare that was very simple in its execution, making it all the worse. My friend L ( Read more... )

So we're off on a sudden vacation, having left the TR-277 terminator robot in our living room with a loaded shotgun and a taser so don't get any ideas. Or maybe our friend Lorelei is house sitting. Now you're thinking twice.

We looked at the schedule and realized that we're loaning our car to our friends for the next two weekends and then it's ( Read more... )

Something that really ticks me off about being an adoptee is the cavalier and hackneyed fashion in which adoption stories are presented. The latest culprit is Time Magazine with the same old story of adoptive reunions being facilitated by the Latest New Thing. In the 80's it might have been "modems," and in the 90's "the Internet." Replace with ( Read more... )

I make a lot of mistakes. There are all sorts of memories that make me wince. But the flip side of that is that I sometimes do things right, and I deserve as much credit for my grace-steps as I do for my mis-steps.

Nineteen years ago I did something right. Well, okay, the "did" part is kinda thin. And it was more like nineteen years seven or ( Read more... )

Yeah, another big delay again. See prior excuse-riddled apology posts.

So what's new? Well since my last post I got a new job, and then ten weeks later I lost the new job for very confusing and at the time upsetting reasons.

However I've since gotten ANOTHER new job, which appears to be considerably better than the last job, so hopefully it's ( Read more... )