My boss had a thing for nice looking, presentable documents. He loved printing up reports and handing them out to his clients. He felt it really made them feel that they were being taken care of, and that it increased their trust in him.

I really can’t say one way or the other if he was right. All I know is that it seemed like there was an endless demand for binding, and that I hated using that machine.

It was ancient. It stood in the corner of the room like an evil overseer, it’s ugly beige metal frame dirty and scratched. It had a long handle for punching the holes in the papers. I would have to push down on that handle with all of my strength to get it to punch through. Sometimes it would get stuck in the middle and I would have to jump up and down to get it to finish. And then I would have to press on the second lever and watch the wire spine slowly bend into an O shape and close on the pages.

When I think back to college, I have a lot of fond memories. But when I think about that afternoon job, I am haunted by the memory of that binder machine.

A classical guitar neck is generally wider than a folk string guitar. When starting out, most people have an easier time transitioning from a wider neck to a more narrow neck than they do vice versa. As such it is usually a good idea to start out learning the guitar on a classical guitar, and then transitioning to a folk guitar once you are more experienced. That is not to say that you cannot move from folk to classical, only that the experience of others indicates it is easier.

Although having a wide guitar neck is recommended, it can cause some early difficulties for inexperienced hands. The real challenge is that a wider neck requires you to stretch your hand farther to reach the right strings. Once you get past the initial awkwardness, particularly if you don\’t know any different, the wide neck becomes natural and allows you to play smaller width necks with ease.

The term modern classical guitar is sometimes used to distinguish this style of guitar from older more \”classical\” guitar types. It is sometimes referred to as the Spanish guitar, or the nylon string guitar, and is quite distinguishable by its shape and sound. The nylon threads, typical of this style of instrument also ease the beginning guitarist into the feel of the strings on their fingers. It takes time to establish the proper calluses on the finger tips to allow for pain-free playing.

Then, for some reason in high school, I though that wearing glasses would be cool for some reason.  As I look back at my high school year books though, I can’t imagine what made me think that.  I sure didn’t look all that cool, at least not from the look of those glasses I choose to wear on picture day.  I’m sure they were the only pair I had at the time, and I know that very few people actually look cook in their high school year books, but whoa!  I obviously had a lot to learn about fashion from those days.

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.

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.

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.

For the longest time, I got the strange notion, that I would like to sail.  I’m pretty sure it had something to do with listening to much too much Jimmy Buffett music, but that’s another story.  Being the bookworm that I am, I thought the first thing I should do was to read as much information I could about the ancient art of sailing.  I made a trip to the library and got all kinds of sailing books and checked them out.  I poured over them for hours.  Upon completion, I was pretty sure I understood the basics about how to sail a boat.  One of the things I discovered, was that this was one of those things you could only go so far with before you needed to get your hands dirty.

Well, that opportunity would present itself soon enough.  Upon pouring through the local classified paper, I read an ad for a little 13 foot Snark sailboat for sale.  And it was only about $200.  I made a phone call, and drove out to the gentleman’s house.  As it turned out, he had won the boat in a draw from a local pet store.  PetSmart I believe.  The boat was constructed of high density Styrofoam, and come with one sail.  I purchased a life jacket and a canoe oar (in case the wind dies), and some tie downs from the local Canadian Tire store.  With the car upside down on the roof of my Saturn, I drove out to a small man made lake in town called Fanshawe Lake.

I launched the boat, paddled a little off shore, and spent the next few hours trying to figure out why the boat refused to respond to my every command.  Just as I was about to head home, I realized that my rudder had two settings.  The first setting had it lifted out of the water, and the second setting had it in the water.  Needless to say, I had bee trying to sail around for hours with my rudder out of the water.  Anyone who has tried to steer a rudderless boat, can understand how difficult that can be.  I lowered the rudder into the water, and all of a sudden everything worked.  The experienced of being powered and moving around this small lake completely under wind power and my own skill was remarkable, astonishing, spectacular and life changing.  10 years later I still get a kick out of it.