Hmmm...., perhaps I should start with where I'm coming from. Fort Worth, Texas is where I have lived for the past nine years. I was born in Saint Louis, Missouri in 1959 and lived there until I moved with my mother, sisters, and stepfather to Dallas in 1973. We moved to Ft. Worth the next year and I joined the Air Force in 1977. I was stationed at Hahn AB, Germany for my first tour, this is where I met my wife of 21 years, Ee. We PCS'd to Reese AFB in Lubbock, TX. in '79, and our son Jaa was born there in '80. In '81 I separated and moved back to Ft. Worth to start my life as a civilian. I reenlisted three months later! We moved back to Reese where our daughter Em was born in'82 and stayed put until '83 when we were sent to Bitburg AB, Germany. After a 4 year tour there we were assigned to George AFB, California, where our last child, En, was born in '88. I separated again in '92 under the SSB program and moved back to Fort Worth where we'll probably stay, at least until we win the Lotto or my stocks go through the roof!
Of course now that I have started this, I have no idea what else I want to say, But I will, believe me!!!
06/23/01 0118 hrs. - Coolness! I'm sitting here watching Led Zeppelin's "The Song Remains The Same" and remembered back when I saw them in concert during their Physical Graffiti Tour at the Tarrant County Convention Center in '75-'76???. Man, too many lost brain cells since then. Some dude was being chased down the aisle by a cop, and when he got to the front of the stage, he threw a bunch of pills on the stage and bolted across a row of seats and up the other aisle. Robert Plant picked them up and said 'Wow, look at all the 'ludes he had'.
I don't know if they caught the kid or if they went backstage to confiscate the drugs. Hell, it coulda' been staged. Funny, the things you remember, I'm not sure who I went with, but, I think it was my first girlfriend. Funny, the things you don't remember too.
07/06/01 2325 hrs. - Well, here I am again. I just finished talking with a friend of mine from the old days at George. It never ceases to amaze me what we find to talk about when we get together. From Blackadder and Monty Python to the tax cut, Washington (the state) to England, from cats to Miami Vice, our kids to our parents, and probably a hundred other subjects in the space of an hour or so. It's really great to have people that you can ramble on with and catch up with at the same time. There are a lot of people I've worked with and known that I would love to catch up with. Hell, I can't think of anyone I wouldn't want to hear from, so feel free to say howdy. If it hadn't been for Nomadwag's suggestion to play chess together on Yahoo, I probably wouldn't have looked at what all they offer. I wouldn't have met up with some of my old buds or the people I've met through the clubs and sites I now peruse frequently.
All hail the pioneers of this grand technology we now refer to as the Internet. I am truly flabbergasted when I think of my start in this thang we call a computer. I started out with a Commodore 64 in '88, it had an external disk drive and a joystick. I used it to play games exclusively. In '90, after much soul searching and a handy credit application from Sears I bought a Packard-Bell 386/20 for about $3,000. It had the most games available for it, and boy did I play the hell out of Chuck Yeager's Air Combat. Oh yeah, it also had Lotusworks installed, and a modem (2400 baud of course).
A friend of ours had a TRaSh-80 (good old Radio Shack) and had been dialing up to other people's computers and downloading games and graphics and sending messages to other users all over through Fidonet. This provided me with my first glimpse of a BBS, kinda like a cross between a local web and the peer to peer system Napster uses. This was IT(pun intended)! I could actually type up documents and proofread them before printing them out. I could set up a spreadsheet. I could connect with a BBS and play a game against someone 20 or 200 miles away. They were only text based games, but they were still a lot of fun to play. I could send messages to people I didn't even know that were on the same BBS and eventually I could send them outside the BBS through FIDONET and other message services.
I was pretty much hooked from that point on. I picked up a generic Pentium/200 w/ 16Mb RAM and a 14,4 modem in '95. this is what I am using to type this. I have since upgraded to a 56,6 and 94Mb RAM (2x16 & 2x32) and an ATI All-In-Wonder, although I would like a new 'puter, this one does everything I need, just a few milliseconds slower. I still play games, but now I spend much more of my time browsing the net and updating these pages. Okay, I reckon that's enough ramblin' fer now. Later taters!
09/11/01 'Nuff said!
12/13/02 Well, I'm still here. I just haven't had much to say.
01/08/05 You would think I'd say something by now. You'd think....
07/26/06 Well, well! Finally, I can update the site, for some reason I couldn't get Yahoo's Pagebuilder to load on my New (almost a year ago) HP. I've left my position with Broadwing, I won't (and probably can't) comment on why I left but I'm happy with my decision and look forward to exploring the creative side of my mind.
I've been an amateur photographer since I joined the Air Force in 1977 and purchased a Minolta 110 camera to document my time in Germany. I moved up to a Minolta X-370 35mm SLR when I (we) returned to Germany for my tour at Bitburg. The pictures on my Deci page and in my Bitburg and George Groups were taken with it. I sold it in '94 and didn't really do much photographically (if that word isn't already in use, I claim copyright, so there, Stephen Colbert) until I bought a Pentax Optio 550 in 2003(?.)
I started getting the bug again as I downloaded the pictures to my PC. Digital is so much more practical than film, I can send photos virtually anywhere in the world within seconds, I can manipulate them and post them on the net where they have the potential to be viewed by 1 or 1,000,000 people. I dropped the 550 one day and it stopped working, I never did get used to the wrist strap or the lack of a grip on the right side. I picked up a Nikon Coolpix 3200 as a quality cheap replacement. It has worked surprisingly well for me, considering it's relatively low resolution.
I ve spent a lot of time photographing the local flora and fauna, and intend to find a career path in photography. To that end I recently joined the Photographic Society of America and plan to enroll in classes at a local college for the fall semester. I have also purchased a Canon Digital Rebel XT, this probably won't work for many aspects of the professional market, but my hope is that it will provide me with a solid platform for my further education.
