WordPress Strikes a Sour Chord

This afternoon I received a message from Google, informing me that some of my blog posts had been flagged for linking to known sites containing malware. Whenever Google contacts you with news of this nature, you are forced to react, quickly, before they remove you from their global directory. After scouring both my own site and the site I was linking to I could find no hints of malware or debauchery. Since the links weren’t crucial to the blog entries and so I went ahead and removed them. In the process of this, well, process, WordPress got confused and decided… (read more)

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An Old Drive Bites the Bits

In December 2002 I splurged and bought my first DVD burner: a Sony DRX-500UL. I paid $430 for the external unit, which burned DVDs at a whopping 2X (30 minutes per disc). At the time, a war of formats was brewing between DVD-R (DVD “minus” R) and DVD+R (DVD “plus” R). The Sony was one of the first I found that could burn discs in either format, so even though it was a bit more expensive than some other drives on the market, I was covered no matter which format ultimately prevailed. On March 20, 2003, I made the mistake… (read more)

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A Novel Milestone is Met

Late Saturday night, about an hour after midnight, I added two words to the end of the novel I’ve been working on since last October: THE END. My book (working title: “The Human Library”) is by no means finished. In fact, it’s funny how those lines in the sand we set for ourselves constantly move. For the past several months my goal has been to finish writing the book. Now that I’ve hit that goal, I can see it’s only the first of multiple goals. A lot of editing remains, and editing, I’ve learned, means many different things. On the… (read more)

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Winter Olympic Dreams

Exactly two weeks ago, I decided I would become a winter Olympian. Since the beginning of the 2018 Winter Olympics, I have been glued to my television. On slow or busy days, I may only manage to squeeze in an hour’s worth of events. Some days — many days — I’ve consumed two hours, three hours, maybe even more. There’s not an event I don’t like. From quirky curling to soaring ski jumping and graceful ice skaters, I watch it all. I spent a couple of hours last week learning the lingo and rules of curling. In snowboarding, I know… (read more)

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Reader’s Digest Mysteries: Strange Stories Amazing Facts, and More

Cheating death by freezing. The power of the Evil Eye. The giants of Easter Island. The legend of Spring-Heeled Jack. Oh, I was quite the interesting second grader to talk to. I couldn’t rattle off a single sports statistic, but I knew all about Bigfoot, fire walking, and how long we have until the sun destroys the earth. (Don’t worry; we’re good for roughly a billion years.) All of these facts I learned from Strange Stories, Amazing Facts, published by Reader’s Digest in 1976. My dad received a copy of this book from a co-worker and for many years I… (read more)

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Dinner and Memories

Last Tuesday Susan and I were able to have dinner with Susan Wood-Butorac, a person who directly changed the course of both of our lives. In the winter of 1995 I was twenty-two years old. I had been working as a contractor at the FAA for eight months, and had only been married to Susan for four. Beginning that fall, I started travelling all over the country, performing hardware upgrades on workstations and servers. If you really want to date this story, the objective of those trips was to make sure every 386 computer met a “minimum baseline” of 8MB… (read more)

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Toys ‘Were’ Us

I was four-years-old when I met Darth Vader. My memory of the event is foggy, but I remember it was dark so it must have been either early or late. It was cold. We — my mom and I — stood outside in the Toys ‘R’ Us parking lot waiting for the advertised celebrities to greet us. First was Spider-man, followed by the Hulk, but the one I remember most vividly was Darth Vader. For all I know, whoever wore that black costume, helmet, and cape that day was just some teenager who worked at the store, but to me,… (read more)

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Cheater Spacer Shelves

During this week’s furlough, I decided to tackle a few projects around the house that I’ve been putting off for far too long. One of those projects involved creating a pair of “spacer shelves” for our upstairs entertainment center. The built-in entertainment in our upstairs den is really nice, but the shelves are way too tall. Take a look at the shelves to the right of the television in the (terrible) picture above. Each shelf is almost 18″ apart; probably great for displaying photographs or trophies, but terrible for things like DVDs. Here you can see some of my Blu-ray… (read more)

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Furlough, Can You Go

For the second time in five years, Susan and I have been furloughed. What that means is, until a budget is passed by congress, all non-essential federal employees — that’s us — are prohibited from working and will not get paid until the furlough is over. We can’t even volunteer to work for free. The first question everybody asks is, “yeah, but don’t you get back pay?” The answer is, “probably.” It’s not guaranteed, but historically, I don’t think it’s never not happened. That being said, our back pay will arrive on the first full paycheck following the furlough. The… (read more)

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Sickness and Updates

I started feeling under the weather right after New Year’s. By Friday of that week — the fifth, right? — I felt so awful I ended up staying home from work. I felt a little better that weekend before it really hit me. I broke down and saw a doctor last Friday. The nurse I saw was sure I had the flu, but the doctor said my results were negative. Regardless, I ended up with three prescriptions (two pills and a nose spray) and have gone through three bottles of cough syrup over the past two weeks. The doctor told… (read more)

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