Posted in Internet, Memory on March 12, 2008 | 5 Comments »
Let me start out by saying I don’t want this essay to be doom and gloom. Also let me just remind you about the Yin and Yang nature of the world. Creation also means something gets destroyed. Old folks are always crying about how things aren’t the way they were when they were growing up [...]
Posted in Memory, Science Fiction, Space Travel on January 6, 2008 | 8 Comments »
Have Space Suit-Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein is my all-time favorite book and I’ve read it every few years since I discovered it in 1965. I turned thirteen in late 1964, so discovering Robert A. Heinlein and science fiction during puberty integrated a biological transformation with a sense of wonder. If we could only [...]
Posted in Global Warming, Memory, Science Fiction on April 8, 2007 | 8 Comments »
What would it be like to be a kid today? Is the world scarier now than when I was growing up? Are the children and grandchildren of the baby boomers any smarter than that famous generation that made such a fuss and expected the whole world to watch? The 1960s radicals wanted a revolution, the [...]
Posted in Memory, Science Fiction, Space Travel on March 14, 2007 | No Comments »
Time was 1967 at Miami-Killian Senior High. Sitting at the freak table in the cafeteria during home room, while listening to complex improvised percussions of the black guys at their table pounding out Afro-identity-rhythms with their hands, elbows and feet, I read a small digest pulp magazine called Worlds of Tomorrow. I tried to [...]
Posted in Least Popular, Memory on March 13, 2007 | No Comments »
If you searched the net you can find plenty of writers riled up over The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s The Definitive 200 list of CDs they want you to own. Since I’m a list maker myself, see The Classics of Science Fiction, I like to think about preparing a good list. The Rock [...]
Posted in Memory on January 9, 2007 | No Comments »
Looking at photos is time traveling. They say a picture is worth a thousand words – I think that’s underestimating the value of a photo. I’m the kid in the cowboy hat and my sister is dressed as a cowgirl. I had just turned seven. Before looking at this photo I [...]
Posted in Memory on January 8, 2007 | No Comments »
I’ve started the daunting task of converting our family photos to digital. My wife and I have boxes of photos – our photos, and the photos we’ve inherited from our parents. Plus my wife was an amateur photographer for awhile and she has hundreds more photos that aren’t related to family history. If I converted [...]
Posted in Least Popular, Memory on January 2, 2007 | No Comments »
During the Ozzie and Harriet years, when I was seven and people called me Jimmy, my sister Becky and our best friends Mikey and Patty, would beg old tattered terry cloth towels from our moms and pretend to be George Reeves. We’d tie those old faded pastel rags around our necks, stretch out our arms, [...]
Posted in Memory on December 30, 2006 | No Comments »
Will all your music, audio books, photos, movies, creative writing, diaries, blogs, email, web pages, business records, and other digital files be usuable and available in fifty years? I have a few files that I first created on my Commodore 64 back in the early 1980s converted to text files and saved in My [...]
Posted in Least Popular, Memory on December 30, 2006 | No Comments »
I’ve been developing web pages since Mosaic first rolled out. I ran gopher sites before that. I work at a University in the College of Education and the internet has always been considered a great educational tool. First, before the World Wide Web, it was just email, UseNet and FTP. When home pages and HTML [...]
