Susan, the kids and I spent spring break driving northeast and seeing awesome things! The weekend before last we drove to Louisville, Kentucky. There we visited the Louisville Slugger Factory Tour, the Topps Card Museum (inside the Louisville Slugger Factory), the Churchill Downs Museum and Tour, and the Big Four Pedestrian Bridge. From Louisville we headed to Washington DC. While in DC we visited the Smithsonian American History Museum, National History Museum, Air and Space Museum, and National Archives. We also visited the Spy Museum and took a side road trip to Pennsylvania to visit the Stoogeum, the official Three… (read more)

Here’s the last entry in my “getting things to work in a DOS machine running in VMWare Player” series: how to get a DOS machine running inside VMWare Player to recognize a USB flash drive. Before starting, here’s a quick DOS refresher: natively, DOS will not read FAT32 drive partitions, and FAT16 partitions (also simply known as FAT) had a 2 GB partition limit size. If you plan on reading/writing to a USB stick and/or external hard drive, you’ll need to make sure that it meets the above requirements (FAT16 and less than 2 GB in size). I was able… (read more)

Recently a fellow writer told me he was considering self-publishing his next book because he was “tired of all the crap that goes along with writing that’s not writing.” Specifically, he told me he just wanted to wear his “writing hat” for a while. I had bad news for my friend. Self-publishing requires wearing a lot more hats than just your “writing” one. The minute you’re done with your writer’s hat you’ll be putting on your editing hat. Editing your own writing (I mean really editing it) is hard — too hard for most people, in fact. Oh, fixing spelling… (read more)

Metadata is defined as “a set of data that describes and gives information about other data.” Most people associate metadata with digital photos. When you take a picture with your iPhone for example, a lot of additional information is saved along with your photo. EXIF metadata includes the settings of your camera, like the shutter speed, whether or not you used a flash, and the focal length. GPS metadata includes the latitude, longitude, and altitude of where you took the picture. TIFF metadata stores information about the make and model of your camera, the picture’s original resolution, and any software… (read more)

We spent most of the past weekend indoors, snowed in. A wintery storm delivered snow on the roads and piled ice on top of that. It wasn’t an end-of-the-world snowpocalypse by any stretch, but the roads were slick and we decided to listen to the news and stay at home off the roads as much as possible. Susan came up with the idea of having a movie-making competition between the four of us. She came up with this idea around 10am and declared a 2pm cut off time. After the video were done we decided to post them on Facebook… (read more)

The first tie I can remember wearing was an all black tie. I got it because I needed to wear a black tie under my red robe for my senior picture. The photographer tied it for me around my neck because I didn’t know how. I don’t remember ever seeing that tie again. Come to think of it, perhaps I borrowed it. The first tie I remember buying was this God awful cranberry colored tie that matched these God awful cranberry-colored pants I owned. I wore this tie and these pants with both white and black button down shirts and… (read more)

I believe it was Andy who first discovered that a small plastic container of jelly could be launched into one of the hanging plants above our booth by placing one on the edge of a spoon handle and pounding the other end with one’s fist. The first few shots were wild, with little plastic tubs of strawberry, grape, peach and apricot jelly landing on top of the buffet bar and in other vacant booths. Jeff was the first to master the trajectory, consistently landing jelly after jelly in the potted plant across the aisle from us. We were eighteen, nineteen,… (read more)

“Nobody just dies in the winter,” Mrs. Joyce Thionnet, my eighth grade English teacher once told me. “When an author talks about winter it’s a metaphor for death. The trees are dead. Snow is still and silent. Death is cold.” “But what if the person in the story just happened to die in the winter? Like, coincidentally?” I asked. “There are no coincidences in fiction,” she said. “In fiction, winter equals death. Period.” — “I put a shovel in the back of the truck in case you guys hit snow on the way to Chicago,” Susan said Thursday night. Forcasters… (read more)

My grandma’s house in Chicago has an enclosed front porch. There’s a swing out there, a few chairs, sometimes a table or two. I’ve sat on that porch, I’ve eaten on that porch, and I’ve slept on that porch. In 1987 by buddy Jeff rode along with my family on our annual Chicago vacation. That’s us outside the Museum of Science and Industry. I’m on the left, Jeff’s on the right. My cousins Brandy and Paula are down front and my sister Linda’s on the right. That’s my Uncle Joe behind the pole. I don’t remember who took the picture.… (read more)

By 1979 our family was already on our third video game console. We owned a standalone Pong system in 1977, sold it for a Magnavox Odyssey 2 in 1978, and upgraded to an Atari 2600 in 1979. Grandma O’Hara visited Oklahoma the spring of 1979 as well. At least I think that was the year. I specifically remember sitting down in our living room floor with her and watching The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe during (I think) that same visit. According to Wikipedia, that animated film first aired on April 1st, 1979. Of course it’s possible that we… (read more)