It’s always seemed a little strange to me, that people are so fascinated with the concept of time.  I understand the importance of it all, as time is important to keep our lives in order and to coordinate our lives with all the other lives that revolve around us.  Meetings, parties, get togethers, work, and baseball games would all be incredibly difficult to have if we didn’t have the concept of time.  Perhaps, that’s why were so fascinated with all the different ways of keeping track of time.  Most peoples homes will often have a clock or some time keeping device in every room.  Given the fact, that almost everyone wears watches, it does seem a bit overkill to have so many clocks around.  Have you ever noticed, that the one thing in common that almost every electronic gadget has these days, is a clock.  It doesn’t matter, if it’s a cellphone, gps smart phone, net book or laptop, they all have clocks built into them.

I must admit personally, to having a number of watches myself.  I have a workout watch, a dress watch, a casual watch, and even a few fake timepiece watches lying around.  And I don’t consider myself all that obsessed with time.  Of course I don’t have a ton of money for watches, even though I do like the fancier and more expensive brand names.  Too save a few bucks, I’m not above buying a fake Bentley Edition, or Breilting replica to add to my collection.  There’s no point going broke to look good these days, I figure.  And, ever since the advent of digital time keeping, the allure of quality Swiss made watches has gone by the wayside.

But, let’s get back to the original topic, of why time is so important to everyone.  I think it has a lot more to it, then simply getting to your next appointment on time.  It allows us to measure our lives.  Not just where we are, or where we’re going, but where we’ve been.  It’s a way of measuring our lives.  It’s how we keep track of our past accomplishments, and achievements.  We associate certain locations, events and people with a given point in time.  Without that marking of time, how we we remember the sixties, the seventies, or the eighties.  It helps us hold everything together, and try to make sense of our past.  And after all, you all know that old axiom, about those how don’t understand the past are bound to repeat it.  Not that repeating things can be all bad.  I just like to have a little control over the things I choose to do again.

There’s something about living in the past that seems to bother some people more than others.  As with a lot of things in life, moderation is the key here.  I don’t mind living in the past for short durations of time.  As a matter of fact, I think that reminiscing about your early years is a very therapeutic exercise for most people.  I can’t imagine a time when I was daydreaming of my past that didn’t make me feel good at the end of it.  Even if it was a bad experience, we tend to remember those things in such a way as to make them less of a disaster then they may have been at the time.  It’s part of our human make up, to only remember the good times, and block out the painful stuff.  Otherwise, why would women ever have more than on child.  I for one, will always enjoy thinking about the crazy stuff I did as a kid or as a young adult.  The one cool thing about getting older, is that I get to have more memorable experiences to dwell on.

I don’t know exactly what it is, but ever since my first intrepid steps into the world of the internet, I’ve always wanted to be a webmaster. And no, it wasn’t just the fancy title that had the word master in it that intrigued me. I was back in the early 1990’s when I first ventured online, when I was working in the IT department of our local university. We had access to the internet initially using tools like Gopher. Eventually, the first graphical browser I ever used called Mosaic really opened my eyes. The fact that it actually integrated graphics within all the textual information really blew me away. I knew, I had to be more involved with this stuff.

I was one of the first in the department to learn HTML, and a few years after leaving would take my first steps to creating my own website. I always had a fascination with games, so while I worked full time as a PeopleSoft consultant travelling around North America, I spent time creating my first video game, and the website that would promote it. I remember coming up with my first domain name during a team meeting in San Francisco. While everyone else was chattering away endlessly about the problems with our project implementation, I was scribbling down possible domain names.

Having decided on a name, I then needed to buy it, and have it hosted somewhere. One of the big gaming portals I frequented at the time I met someone who was willing to host game developers websites for free. He would even register the domain name for me. That worked great for a while, but eventually he got bored or tired of all the problems and stopped offering the service. So, I thought how tough could it be. I had an old PC at home, so I installed Linux on it, and got my own web-server up and running from home. I used a service called dyn-dns to deal with my constantly changing IP number and I was off to the races.

Eventually, one website grew into several, and I need a more reliable and affordable web hosting solution. I continue to use several paid hosting companies, and am always on the look out for more.   Since buying that first website back in November of 2000, this has been an incredible fun and fruitful experience. I continue to be fascinated by the internet, and all the wonderful services it offers. I can hardly wait to see what the next ten years will bring.

In my early twenties I realized something profound, that no matter what I accomplished in life, I would never be satisfied. I felt this feeling deep in my soul, after years of working in a profession I had dreamed of since a child. I just woke up one day and realized I was dissatisfied with life and had a feeling that I never world be.

I’m not sure if that was when I starting drinking alcoholically, but from that point on alcohol was the most important thing in my life. More important then relationships and most jobs, alcohol determined where I would go and what I would do. I was twenty four the first time an employer told me they were concerned about my drinking. Read the rest of this entry »

5 Reasons You Should Respect Your Elders

Everyone knows that they should respect their elders. It is a cultural rule and it is just good manners. But not everyone does and sometimes people even ask why they should. The five reasons why you should respect your elders will answer this question once and for all.

Your Elders Have Seen A Lot

When you have been alive a long time, you have seen a lot. You know the patterns of life, the ups and downs. Respect your elders because they have knowledge and perspective that can only be gained through experience. They have seen the fruits of their labors and of others’ labors. They know where certain lifestyles and attitudes get you in life and can share this information. Read the rest of this entry »

Few of us think about Winter survival preparedness when it comes to our cars. For most of us, the short commute to the store or to work doesn’t register as dangerous most days. Even when the road conditions turn from bad to worse, we still don’t give much thought to an emergency situation happening.

But facts don’t lie. Triple A says that most Winter driving emergencies happen within 10 miles of your home and most of those are what the Drivers would consider “routine” trips. These routine trips turned into survival situations in a blink of an eye. Just before Christmas Ever, we had a huge snowstorm. A few days later a pickup was found covered up by snow just outside town. Inside was a local man who had frozen to death. Apparently he had went off the road and then the snow plows didn’t notice his white pickup and covered it up as they cleared the roads. Could you survive if your car ran off an embankment or you were stranded in a non-obvious place along the highway? Read the rest of this entry »

I think, everyone remembers that first time they spend a significant amount of time away from home.  I’m not talking about a weekend sleepover at a friends, or even a week at summer camp.  I’m talking about months at a time, thousands of miles away from home.  Mine didn’t occur till rather later in life.  I was 20 and turned 21 during my extended adventure.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I hung around close to home my entire life.  I still hadn’t gone to college yet, so that was soon to come.  As a youngster, I did travel quite a bit through drum corp, but it was an activity that my parents were always involved in, so it never really felt like I was away from home.  Being away from home means more than just leaving the house you physically live in.  What it really means is, leaving your family and friends behind.

That happened for me for the first time in January of 1983.  It was to be my last year of drum corp, and I was travelling to Boston, Massachetutes to join the 27th Lancers.  This was a twelve hour drive from where I lived in Canada, so probably about 700 miles.  So, maybe thousands was an exagerration.  But, I would be there for an incredibly long time.  From January till the end of August.  That’s usually the end of a drum corp season.

Trying to decide which story to tell is a little bit tough here.  Not that there aren’t man, beleive me, there were lots.  When I first moved there, I lived in the suburb of Revere with two other guys and a girl.  We live in a little three story walk-up above some slightly crazy people.  They lady below used to complain constantly about our music and that we were making wierd noises to try and drive her crazy.  Personally I think she was already there.  One day, her son attacked one of my room mates as we made our way down the stairs to go to the laundrymat.  The son even then called the ppolice to report himself.  Craziness was heridatary in that family for sure.

Then there was the time, I was with eight or ten buddies spending a day at Revere beach.  It was jut before summer, and we were getting into the usual young person trouble.  Drinking and smoking on the beach were all fun and games, till a couple of bodies floated up on the beach.  Creepy huh?  One of them lived and one of them died.  Apparently they had been out fishing the night before and fell overboard.  Police and ambulances showed up of course.  Kinda of crazy when your already breaking a number of laws on a public beach.  Not as crazy as the foam coming out of the one guys mouth, which I saw from the crowd. Yeeech!

That’s just a couple of the stories from that eight month adventure.  But the rest will have to wait for another post.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from living all these years, is that it pays to be organized.  And to me, organized means lists.  Yep, as boring as they may sound, if I write things down, I know they will get done.  The other nice thing about having things written down, is that those things don’t bounce around in my head all the time distracting me from the work I need to get done every day.  It’s like your brain can relax a bit, and just do the task at hand.  Try it sometime, it works.  Read the rest of this entry »

I was never a very adventurous kid as I was growing up.  I remember being terrified of my first day of school.  My mother and I went in to register a few weeks before hand, and I remember sitting in the principals office.  He asked my mother for my birth certificate, and I she didn’t have it with her.  He picked up the phone and started dialing.  I remember it vividly, as it was one of those old rotary dial phones, and he had some plastic thing attached to the end of his finger to help with the dialing.

I’m not sure who he was dialing, but I was convinced we were in big trouble.  I think I thought it was some bigger authority.  For weeks after, every time a police car drove by my house I was terrified.  I was only 5 years old.  Even one of my earliest memories of kindergartden was not very good.  I remember doing some assignment, and watching the teacher come around to check everyones work.  I knew I had made a mistake in the assignment, and was terrified that I would be in big trouble once she found out.

Things continue this way.  It’s a wonder I ever managed to survive growing up.  I remember taking swimming lessons, and being petrified to dive into the deep end of the pool.  Either off the diving board, or the side of the pool.  Not sure why, but I was.  I’ve never been much of a thrill seeker, and remember the first time I rented a pair of jet skis.  The guy renting the skis came out after a few minutes, to make sure my jet ski was ok.  Apparently I was going so slow he thought the machine was broken.  It wasn’t.  It was just me.

Somehow though I managed to survive childhood and grow up into a full fledged mostly normal adult.  Married with kids, and a job for a while.  Although my jobs started to become a little more unusual a few years ago.  I took a consulting job in the late nineties, where I travell non stop all over North America as a computer consultant.  None of my friends did anything like this.  Eventually, I quit a full time steady (boring) job at a bank to make a living on the internet.

And a few years prior to that, I bought a sailboat without ever having been on one before in my life.  I had never sailed one, or been on one that someone else sailed.  Well, except for a little dinghy that I puttered around a small lake with.  But, that didn’t stop me from buying a 30 foot hunter sailboat with more controls and lines than I had a clue as to what to do with.

I guess, I grew out of most of those childhood fears in one way or another.  I have since then dove in the pool many times, and even jumped off a 10 meter diving board.  No idea why.  However, I do still get a little nervous when talkin with my kids principal.

I was hooked on computers at a very young age.  Well maybe not as young as the computer genius today get hooked at, but for someone of my generation it was pretty young.  It was a Radio Shack computer.  To be more precise, it was a TRS-80 computer.  Otherwise known affectionately as a trash 80.  Usually by friend that owned one of the few other competing brands at the time, like something from Texas Instruments.  A company which to this day still manages to make a profit manufacturing calculators.

Our TRS-80 came with a keyboard, a monitor, and a cassette tape drive.  At first, I don’t think we had the cassette tape drive, but added it on later when we realized how annoying it was to only type programs into the computer, and then have to do it again every time we turned it off and back on again.  It’s good to be able to save your work.

I learned a few things from that computer that continue to haunt me to this day.  The first thing I learned, was how to write a computer program.  The TRS-80 came with it’s own BASIC instructional booklet, and allowed you to write programs in the BASIC programming language.  This was cool, and I was desperately hooked.

I also learned how to play games on a computer.  Yes, even in the mid seventies you could play computer games.  But what was really cool, was that you could also write your own computer games.  Sure, they were incredibly simple and graphics were totally non existent, but they were games none the less.  I think the first game I wrote was something where you had to guess a number between 1 and 10 and the computer would give you clues.  It used a random number generator to pick the number.

I also learned to play the game backgammon on the TRS80.  It came with one, I didn’t have to write it, and it was pretty cool.  I had never played backgammon before, and learned it exclusively from the computer.  Although for years afterwords, when I tried playing it on a real board in the real world, I never knew how to setup the board.

Still my passion for computer games and making computer games was ignited.  One that continues to this day.  Unfortunately, I was never able to make a career out of it, but I do own several gaming related websites.  With any luck, I’ll make enough off of those to start a gaming company and hire myself as Chief Game Designer Extraordinaire.