Nostalgia

I stand, despite

September 27, 2016

I stand loving America, aware that I often fall short of what that love should mean. When I say I love America I mean I love certain shared values and founding ideals like the rule of law and equality before it, liberty, and self-determination, and what people have done to achieve them. I love the values as lofty as the right to speak and worship and as humble as the right to raise a family and work and live as I see fit. I love it knowing that these ideals are more aspirational than descriptive, more a to-do list than a resume. They are what Lincoln called “unfinished work” and “the great task remaining before us.”

~ Ken White from, https://popehat.com/2016/08/30/i-stand-despite/

I happen to be that sort of middle-aged-softie who is deeply moved by our National Anthem.

…but, when I stand for the National Anthem, I do not judge those who do NOT stand (even if they are in the row behind me talking loudly). I love America all the more for its ensuring their right to a freedom of expression; An America where they should never be forced to declare their adoration for the State as a precursor to watching some random sporting event.

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25 years ago

April 12, 2016

25 years ago, on a Friday night, Tracy and I went on our first date.

There’s a wonderful, socially ackward story about me chickening out of the original plan, then a late-evening missed phone call, and an eventual midnight movie. If you ask us nicely, we’ll tell you our conflicting versions of the story. There even a bit of debate about the exact movie we saw; We’re pretty sure it was Silence of the Lambs. (Yes, we opted for a midnight showing for our first date. I’ll let that settle in for a few moments.) On the other hand, the movie might possibly have been a spectacularly horrible movie titled Warlock, which no one has ever heard of. So sometimes we tell the story with it being Silence of the Lambs and sometimes it’s Warlock. Long ago, I think we used to argue about this when we told the story… now, I can’t even remember which of us argued for which movie.

I digress.

Tracy is awesome, and I love her very much! We are still in love. …but, this isn’t a ‘Happy Anniversary!’ card addressed to Tracy.

I firmly believe that there’s no single perfect person for me. I am not a “special snowflake”. And if – as the old saying goes – Tracy “is one-in-a-million,” then she’s one of about 8,000 perfect people for me alive at this very moment.

What makes me special in some ways is the same thing that makes her special in some ways: We have both invested a large portion of our lives in each other. We’ve both spent 25 years working each on our own selves, and have continued sharing the improved versions with each other. The “institution” of marriage doesn’t magically make our relationship special; I, and she, made the relationship special by working on it.

25 years ago I was a totally different person. I was (just simply by definition) on some path through life. There was absolutely no way I could have selected the perfect person for me. I didn’t know myself. I didn’t know my future. I didn’t know how my path would evolve. How could I possibly pick someone who was compatible then, and would grow and change to remain compatible for 25 years.

In one sense, I was extremely lucky to find someone who turned out to be able to adapt and grow in some sort of way that somehow remained compatible with my ever-changing general insanity. But in another much more important sense, we both have spent huge amounts of time talking, arguing, discussing and growing together. So today, it’s not that the luck we had years ago was special or unique – because “humans meet” happens constantly every day – it’s that we somehow stood by that bit of common, every-day luck and worked on it for 25 years.

People change. People age. People get sick and die. Life moves ever forward. The love at age 20 is nothing like the love at age 40, or – as far as I can tell at this point – the love at age 80. (eg, Old Love.)

What matters most to me is that I continue to honestly work on who I am. Only by doing that work do I continue to be worthy of a relationship such as we’ve created so far.

Here’s to another 50 years! Huzzah!!

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1979 Cruising Permit

February 28, 2015

In 1979, my mom and dad, and their friends the Hollisters, started a long-time tradition of chartering bare-boat sailboats in the Caribbean.

As I’ve been working my way through things I kept from the house, I recently got to scanning this cruising permit which my father had always kept framed on the wall near his work bench.

To all whom these presents may come
greetings
know all men that by
the powers vested in me by the Government
of the Virgin Islands
Bruce Constantine
Master of the Vessel Kona Kai
with his gallant crew of 4
is entitled peacefully to cruise and enjoy
the waters, beaches and reefs
of these blessed islands
from the 18 day of Nov 1979
to the 25 day of Nov 1979

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What’s lost as handwriting fades

January 21, 2015

Cursive or not, the benefits of writing by hand extend beyond childhood. For adults, typing may be a fast and efficient alternative to longhand, but that very efficiency may diminish our ability to process new information. Not only do we learn letters better when we commit them to memory through writing, memory and learning ability in general may benefit.

~ Maria Konnikova from, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/science/whats-lost-as-handwriting-fades.html

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How To Live on 24 Hours a Day

December 11, 2014

(Part 9 of 72 in series, My Journey)

As you look back on the year that has just past, do you feel as though you spent another 12 months merely existing instead of truly living? Do you often go to bed at night with an anxious, sinking feeling that you wasted away another precious day of your limited time here on earth? One of my all-time favorite old books addressed this very concern better than anything else I’ve ever read.

~ Brett McKay from, http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/01/02/how-to-live-on-24-hours-a-day/

slip:4uaoho3.

104 years old, still readable, and totally apropos of our lives today.

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Cat Island to Miami

May 13, 2014

Way back in 1980, my dad arranged to help a friend (a navy buddy if I recall correctly) named Drew move his yacht from Cat Island (in the Bahamas) to Miami.

It was as much a vacation for us, as it was us helping Drew and his wife move their boat. We took a commercial flight to Nassau and spent a day or two there. From Nassau, we took this little charter plane to Cat Island… which is just a spit of sand with nothing on it other than a tiny “runway”. From there we sailed the 200+ miles to Miami.

To make the “crossing”, my dad and Drew had to stay up in shifts sailing through the night. Although it does take some attention to detail to navigate, the real concern is that the area is thick with commercial shipping and the “rule of gross tonnage” suggests it is unwise to assert right-of-way (any sailing vessel has the legal right-of-way over any powered vessel.) So we prudently dodged enormous ships who couldn’t see us (visually) and probably didn’t care even if they did notice us on radar (via Drew’s radar reflector.) Anyway.

Do I remember anything in particular? Absolutely. I remember staying up all night, on the open sea, in the pitch black. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face… nothing but star-light. And the stars… The constellations looked to fall out of the sky onto your head.

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Also, people didn’t know to click on images

April 6, 2014

I distinctly remember:

  1. When inlining of images happened; The first time it was possible to put an image directly INTO the page. And JPEGs man. JPEGs where coooooooooool.
  2. Also, tables. Today, everyone loves to whine about how bad it is to use tables to layout pages. NOT having tables was much, much worse.
  3. And image-maps; The idea that WHERE exactly you clicked on an image, could take you to different content. I won’t even get into what we had to do to make it work… (but it involved: convex polygon mathematics, C code, a compiler, and a DEC Alpha work station.)
  4. …and we had to TELL people, “A lot of images in Skew are links… Click at will!” when we started e-publishing a magazine in December 1994.

So yeah, back in the day we had Mosaic. Then these guys hit it out of the park with:

Navigator was the way millions of people around the world were introduced to the web. Many web technologies and standards, such as as SSL, Java, Javascript, open APIs and support for online media, were innovations that Navigator made mainstream.

~ Brian McCullough from, http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/04/on-the-20th-anniversary-an-oral-history-of-netscapes-founding/

slip:4uieoe1.

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Throwback Thursday: 1973 Hot Cycle

March 20, 2014

1973 brought some sick new styling for the Hot Cycle line! Christmas morning, age two… man, it was all down hill from there.

I have some sweet memories of that Hot Cycle; Cruisin’ for chicks, hangin’ with my homies, and smashing out four front teeth in a 3 Hot Cycles pile-up into a railroad-tie retaining wall… I blame the Hot Cycle’s brakes, by which I mean: Complete lack of brakes. (Unless you count the ability to run over your own legs as brakes.)

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