Stargardt Disease

From Wikipedia: “Stargardt disease, or fundus flavimaculatus, is an inherited form of juvenile macular degeneration that causes progressive vision loss usually to the point of legal blindness. The onset of symptoms usually appears between the ages of six and thirty years old (average of about 16–18 years). Several genes are associated with the disorder. Symptoms typically develop by twenty years of age, and include wavy vision, blind spots, blurriness, impaired color vision, and difficulty adapting to dim lighting. The long-term prognosis for patients with Stargardt disease is widely variable although the majority of people will progress to legal blindness. Stargardt… (read more)

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No Doubt, a Coincidence

My brain attaches keywords and tags to all the stories and anecdotes floating around in my brain. Some stories have multiple tags while others only have one and are pretty specific and only come up once in a great while. I only have one story about the band No Doubt, and this is it. In the late fall/early winter of 1995, I went on a work trip to Minneapolis, Minnesota. The hotel my co-workers and I stayed at was across the street from the Mall of America, the largest mall in the United States. Travelling for work was still a… (read more)

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49 Down, 1 To Go

After almost 2,900 miles behind us over the past week, I was able to add Iowa, North Dakota, and Wisconsin to the states I’ve seen. For those keeping track, that makes 49 of the 50 states (we’re doing Hawaii later this year). I’ll be posting some pictures and stories of some of the more interesting things we saw over the next few days, but if you want a sneak peek at a few pictures check out my List of States I’ve visited. Along with the ones I already mentioned, I also added updates to Kansas and Minnesota. Great to see… (read more)

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Greetings from the Futuro, Earthlings!

I am writing today’s blog post from inside a UFO (although technically the “U” in UFO stands for “unidentified” and this structure has most certainly been identified). Our latest road trip began with one goal in mind: mark off the three remaining contiguous states I hadn’t previously visited (North Dakota, Iowa, and Wisconsin). I’ll get Hawaii (my 50th and last state) at the end of this year. We had originally planned to visit Wisconsin last year. In this article I wrote for the Retroist about Futuro Homes I recalled that there was one, the PodUpNorth, that had been converted into… (read more)

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Great Movie Stunts: Raiders of the Lost Ark

Back in 2007 I wrote a blog post about a VHS tape I made as a kid. The tape was labeled “MAKING OF MOVIES TAPE” and had five television specials on it: SPFX: The Empire Strikes Back, Great Movie Stunts: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Monsters, The Making of Superman: The Movie, and (part of) Classic Creatures: Return of the Jedi. Each of these specials originally aired on television, which is how I recorded them. I’ve transferred most of the specials over to the computer, but for some reason that Raiders of the… (read more)

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Ten Games You Should Try To Beat

A friend of mine recently asked me to name five games I would recommend playing all the way through from beginning to end. There are tons of modern games (The Last of Us, Halo, Portal) that have great story lines, but I wanted to go somewhat old school with my list. I also couldn’t possibly limit myself to just five, so instead here are ten games I recommend modern gamers go back and play through from beginning to end. Note that this is different than my list of games that will always stick with me; the games on this post… (read more)

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Macular De What?

“You are definitely the most interesting person I’ve seen all day.” A fun phrase to hear in some situations, an eye exam at the Dean McGee Eye Institute not being one of them. After three hours of tests, scans, and evaluations, the optometrist weakly smiled at me and said, “I wish I had better news for you.” I wish he did, too. First, he told me I had Horner’s Syndrome. I already knew that, and it’s not a big deal. Horner’s Syndrome is caused by damage to a group of nerves and has a few major symptoms. The dead giveaway… (read more)

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Fixing Neveah

Last weekend, Morgan’s Girl Scout Troop received their Bronze Award. Their are eight girls in Morgan’s troop. At the end of the ceremony, Susan asked me to take a picture of the girls with their certificates. Unfortunately, that is not the photo I took. After getting all of the girls together I snapped three pictures. This was the best of the three. The girl on the bottom right is Neveah. She had a really rotten day. She arrived to the ceremony late, did not get to walk across the stage, and did not receive her certificate. That sucks. What sucks… (read more)

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Pride

I’m proud of my daughter, Morgan. This weekend, Morgan’s Girl Scout Troop received a Bronze Award, the highest honor a Girl Scout Junior can achieve. To earn a Bronze Award, Girl Scouts must plan and perform a project that improves the community. Morgan’s Girl Scout Troop worked with a local pet shelter to create blankets for the animals and volunteered their time walking dogs at the shelter. It makes me proud when my kids think about people other than themselves. I love that Morgan and her friends worked to make Yukon a little better place to live. I’m also proud… (read more)

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Welcome to MAGIT MANSION

I recently cataloged all of my old Commodore 64 diskettes using DirMaster from Style (highly recommended). While browsing through the list of programs, one title jumped out at me: MAGIT MANSION. That particular title jumped out at me for three reasons: one, because it was located on disk 001 (my very first disk); two, because even though it was located on the front side of the first disk in my collection, somehow I had no memory of ever playing it; and three, somebody didn’t know how to spell MAGGOT. I fired the game up in an emulator and typed RUN.… (read more)

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