Media and Things

Good luck finding a new computer with a floppy disk drive these days.  I can remember when the floppy was the end-all, be-all of storage.  My first computer was a Commodore 64 , which I received as a Christmas gift in 1984.  It was basically a keyboard that attached to an old television set my parents threw away.  I still think it was a way to get me out of their way for awhile, since it was all set up in the basement.  Yep, there I was - in the basement.  With the old 1970s orange couch, a table with an old 15 inch color set attached to my C-64.  On the other side of the basement was another TV hooked up to the Intellivision .  Oh yeah... Anyway, the C-64 had no permanent storage of any kind.  A person would have to type in BASIC code from a program book (or experiment with it on their own) and just hope there were no typos and that the damn thing worked when you were finished.  If if didn't, that usually meant hunting for a bit of mi...

I'm old enough and I've thought about it enough... Anyone who has visited my office at work - and anyone who has visited my Fortress of Solitude at home - knows that I have a lot of books.  A lot of books.  I have a good 8-foot tall bookcase at home that is completely stuffed and two bookcases about the same size that are almost stuffed at work.  I think at one point I had over 300 books at home - Last summer I did some paring down at home and I think I'm somewhere around 200 or so now.  Combine that with the unknown number in my office and I probably have enough books for the rest of my life.  If you really want to get kooky, combine all of those books with all of the journals and photocopied articles from journals and book chapters... man, I probably have enough for two lifetimes. Well, I'm tired of it.  I've decided that I am going to take the minimalist route and start really cleaning it all out.  And by "really cleaning it all out", I mean d...

Don't ask me how it happened, but I've been pulled into spending my spring break in Mobile, Alabama , supervising/advising/chaperoning the SU chapter of Habitat for Humanity for the 2010 Collegiate Challenge or some such thing.  Its cool with me - I guess I'm filling at the last minute so the students can go on the trip.  Apparently all I'll have to do is be on site while everyone is working on building stuff.  That's ok - I'm pretty bad with a hammer and saw anyway.  I'm not griping or anything - what's getting me is that this happened kind of quickly and I'm still trying to wrap my head around it.  I'm glad to be helping out and I hope I can do some good.  But for right now I'm still waiting on some detailed info to help... ah... seal ah the deal ah   View Directions to mobile, al in a larger map I'm driving myself down while the others will fend for themselves.  I'll try to keep updates rolling here as time goes by.  I'm...

The Invincible Iron Man, Vol. 2 - World's Most Wanted, Book 1 I guess if you're going to start off, then you might as well start easy.  This is a book I've read several times already and for some reason it keeps getting better - I see or find something new practically every time I read the book (I won't say how many times I've read it, but lets just leave it at "several"). This sort-of-latest IM tale takes place after Tony Stark undergoes the Extremis process (an excellent mini-series, BTW), the attacks by Ezekiel Stane on Stark Industries (a very good storyline, but kind of awkward in parts if you ask me), and after the Skrull invasion .  I haven't had the chance to read the Invasion storyline yet, but from what I gather, during the invasion the Skrulls unleashes some kind of virus that basically made every piece of Stark technology malfunction.  This in turn led to chaos & confusion, as well as a void which the nefarious Norman Osborn fille...

Gonna try it again - no promises this time.