I have been messing around with computers since about 1982. That was the year the Marine Corps got digitized in it’s maintenance records, and being the MIMMS clerk for the Communications Platoon (along with being the parts guy, and a line company operator, and the Comm Chief’s driver…) I got to make the weekly trek down to S-1 with the disks under one arm. Yes, the disks were large enough to carry under your arm. They were about the size of dinner plates. Huge, really. And they only carried about 256k of stuff on them.

Anyway – I’ve been doing this for a while.

During the late eighties, I was involved in the running of several Bulletin Boards (BBS) while I was living in California. One of the highlights of running a BBS was providing “door” games for your callers. One of the best, in my opinion, was TradeWars, from martech software.

Now comes the blast from the past: The game is still out there. Not as popular as it once was, since everyone is doing the ‘net these days instead of telneting or dialing up their favorite BBS, but it’s still there. I have found a place that has a couple of games going, and I’ve been fooling around on there. you have to telnet “cavebbs.homeip.net 23” (without the quotes) to get there. It’s called the Cave BBS, run by Red Wolf. Registration is free, the board is text-based, and if you have the same memories I do the only thing missing is the handshaking of two modems at the blazing fast speed of 300 bpm.

If you remember the game, pop on in. If you are interested in learning the game, I’m sure I can help out with tips and advice.

If all this is Greek to you, then move along you young whippersnapper you – there’s nothing to see here.

Thank you for stopping by, God bless you all, listen to The O Word on BlogTalkRadio, Wear Red on Fridays, and support Warriors for Innocence!

May the joy of the Resurrection be with you this morning.

He is risen! Risen indeed!

I just figured out why I was up, and not able to sleep. I believe the Lord wanted me to know this. I mentioned in the comment about my failings – since this was not posted until after I had gone through my “new entry” blogs for the day, and since I don’t get on the net on Wednesdays, by the time Thursday rolled around it was no longer a “new entry” – and thus my FAILING to check on every blog in my blogroll every day, whether it has a new entry or not.

Mea culpa

Thank you for stopping by, God bless you all, Wear Red on Fridays, and support Warriors for Innocence!

Got this from my cousin, via e-mail:

About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:

“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:

“1. From bondage to spiritual faith;

“2. From spiritual faith to great courage;

“3. From courage to liberty;

“4. From liberty to abundance;

“5. From abundance to complacency;

“6. From complacency to apathy;

“7. From apathy to dependence;

“8. From dependence back into bondage”

Professor Joseph Olson of Hemline University School of Law, St. Paul, Minnesota, points out some interesting facts concerning the 2000 Presidential election:

Number of States won by:
Gore: 19
Bush: 29

Square miles of land won by:
Gore: 580,000
Bush: 2,427,000

Population of counties won by:
Gore: 127 million
Bush: 143 million

Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by:
Gore: 13.2
Bush: 2.1

Professor Olson adds: “In aggregate, the map of the territory Bush won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of this great country. Gore’s territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government welfare…” Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the ‘complacency and apathy’ phase of Professor Tyler’s definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation’s population already having reached the ‘governmental dependency’ phase.

If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal invaders called illegal and they vote, then we can say goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years.

DemocRATs (and RINOs) have a tendency to throw money at a problem until it goes away (which it never does, since we all know that money acts as a fertilizer and causes more people with the same problem to spring up, seemingly overnight). Does that make you think that perhaps Olson and, earlier, Tyler, were being real live prophets?

Thank you for stopping by, God bless you all, Wear Red on Fridays, and support Warriors for Innocence!

So much travel, so little time – and I am SO glad I was jotting notes and whatnot as I went along.

Monday, January 14, 2008:
The Flight from Phoenix to Denver was my favorite kind – uneventful. There was turbulence on the climb, and again on the descent. I think I know why they call a paperless voucher and “e-ticket.”

Unfortunately, my cousin in Denver was unable to come out to visit with me at the airport. Prayers and well-wishes for Bev would be welcome and appreciated.

Denver International is a very nice airport – at least concourse A is. I didn’t wander about too much. Without needing to leave to meet my cousin, I wanted to avoid a second security check if possible.

Osama Bin Laden is probably chuckling up a storm over what he has managed to incur on the traveling public. Very clever.

I know that I jotted lots of notes for this trip. I just can’t remember where they are. Really, I had some insightful comments to make, and droll observations.

Huh. I wonder what happened to them.

Anyway – left Tampa Tuesday afternoon, about 1500 hours, and drove for a while. I’m not as young as I used to be, so I ended up roosting in Tallahassee in a Motel 6 at about 1830 hours. Next morning (Wednesday), I was on the road at 0730, in a rain that lasted until I was well into Texas on I-20. Yes, that was over 800 miles of driving in the rain. I honestly can’t think of anything more frustrating, nerve-wracking, and stressful than driving in the rain. With snow and ice, the idiots slide off the road and you don’t have to deal with them. With rain, everyone thinks they can drive in the rain. Never mind that they haven’t changed their wipers in ages, and can’t see more than twenty feet in front of them – they will tell you they are the safest drivers out there.

I arrived at GG’s house Wednesday evening about 1930 hours – a bit later than planned, but still early enough to have a nice dinner with her. After a restful night’s sleep, and a delicious home-cooked breakfast, I was again on the road by 0730. I took a break about the Midland-Odessa area, filled up and ate a quick bite while talking to TMBWitW on the phone. Then I was back and cracking – I hit Phoenix about 2200 hours, and put my head on my own pillow by 2230.

In Tampa, I had rented a mid-size car. They offered me a Toyota Prius for an additional $10.99 a day, and I jumped at the offer. The savings in fuel alone would more than offset the daily charge, I figured – and I was right. Over the 2,340 miles I drove from Monday evening to Thursday night, I averaged 42.8 miles per gallon. Oddly enough, I would get better mileage in the cities, where traffic was stop-and-go, than on the open road, but I figured that was because on the open road I was using the little gas engine more than the electric motor. Once I set the cruise control on the Prius, it would stick that speed up hill and down dale. I took advantage of drafting traffic – the bigger the draft, the further back I would be able to reap the benefit – and posted some odd numbers at times. One time, for about 15 minutes, drafting a big rig that I was v e r r r r y slowly catching up to, I was getting about 75-80 mpg at 80 miles per hour. This was in west Texas, on I-10, where the speed limit is 80.

During the drive back, I chatted here and there with some blogfriends, and promised Jenn that I would call in on Thursday evening and talk with her during her Jenn’s Jungle BlogTalkRadio show. Naturally, come time to call in, I was on the one stretch of Interstate Highway that has no cell service whatsoever – I-10, between El Paso and Tucson. Well, except for a blip near Savoy, that I used to call and leave a message for TMBWitW so she wouldn’t worry about me. I did, however, manage to call in to Political Pistachio Thursday evening, and participated in that chat for a while.

When I find my other notes, I will post more about this trip. I’ll also put up more pictures, although most of the pictures are shot through the windshield at speed and are of random points on the freeways, along with the obligatory stateline crossings.

Thank you for stopping by, God bless you all, Wear Red on Fridays, and support Warriors for Innocence!

I’ve been awake for the last two hours – for whatever reason, I woke up at 0339 and I could not, for the life of me, go back to sleep.

So, I came in to the computer room/office, and started messing around here.

Then, MEG woke up about an hour ago, and she couldn’t go back to sleep. So we sat here together, my little girl and I, and poked around the ‘net a little bit. Read the comics over at Comics.com, stuck our nose into a few of the new entries on the blogroll (Hey, Loon, you OK? I missed you for the time you were gone. Good to see you back, and I hope every thing’s OK!) and then we went outside and got the Sunday paper.

Then, I found out why MEG wasn’t sleeping. Her dinner landed on my socks. Turns out that if she doesn’t thoroughly chew her green beans, they don’t agree with her. At this stage, they don’t agree with me either.

Just to let you know – I will be out of touch while I am on the road. I don’t own a laptop, and the stops are going to be few and far between. Turns out not a lot of you (OK, none of you to the east of me) want to have a visitor. That’s fine by me. I’ll just make better time overall.

Yesterday (Saturday) was spent finishing the entertainment center. Somebody forgot to take pictures as he went along, and right now the project is sitting in the trailer, ready to be delivered and installed. Of course, that’s not going to happen until I get back from my trip, but when it does happen, I will post the final result here.

Update – got a photo of it, inside the trailer:
This doesn’t really do it justice – so don’t look at it. Wait for the install pics.

Two more jobs are lined up for when I get back, too. I’ll be hanging some doors at the ongoing project and a referral customer is looking for a corner china cabinet. That should be a good one. I’m looking forward to that.

It’s getting time to start stirring around, so I’m going to sign off now. I will be lurking some of the blogtalk shows while driving (nothing more American than talking on the phone while driving, right? don’t worry, I’ll be using a hands-free device) so you might here me in the background on Political Pistachio, My Point, and/or Jenn’s Jungle.

Thank you for stopping by, God bless you all, Wear Red on Fridays, and support Warriors for Innocence!