Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on February 27th, 2018 in IBM PC 
In December 2002 I splurged and bought my first DVD burner: a Sony DRX-500UL. I paid $430 for the external unit, which burned DVDs at a whopping 2X (30 minutes per disc). At the time, a war of formats was brewing between DVD-R (DVD “minus” R) and DVD+R (DVD “plus” R). The Sony was one of the first I found that could burn discs in either format, so even though it was a bit more expensive than some other drives on the market, I was covered no matter which format ultimately prevailed. On March 20, 2003, I made the mistake… (read more)
Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on February 26th, 2018 in Main, Writing 
Late Saturday night, about an hour after midnight, I added two words to the end of the novel I’ve been working on since last October: THE END. My book (working title: “The Human Library”) is by no means finished. In fact, it’s funny how those lines in the sand we set for ourselves constantly move. For the past several months my goal has been to finish writing the book. Now that I’ve hit that goal, I can see it’s only the first of multiple goals. A lot of editing remains, and editing, I’ve learned, means many different things. On the… (read more)
Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on February 22nd, 2018 in MainExactly two weeks ago, I decided I would become a winter Olympian. Since the beginning of the 2018 Winter Olympics, I have been glued to my television. On slow or busy days, I may only manage to squeeze in an hour’s worth of events. Some days — many days — I’ve consumed two hours, three hours, maybe even more. There’s not an event I don’t like. From quirky curling to soaring ski jumping and graceful ice skaters, I watch it all. I spent a couple of hours last week learning the lingo and rules of curling. In snowboarding, I know… (read more)
Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on February 16th, 2018 in Main 
Cheating death by freezing. The power of the Evil Eye. The giants of Easter Island. The legend of Spring-Heeled Jack. Oh, I was quite the interesting second grader to talk to. I couldn’t rattle off a single sports statistic, but I knew all about Bigfoot, fire walking, and how long we have until the sun destroys the earth. (Don’t worry; we’re good for roughly a billion years.) All of these facts I learned from Strange Stories, Amazing Facts, published by Reader’s Digest in 1976. My dad received a copy of this book from a co-worker and for many years I… (read more)
Posted by RobOHara ( @Commodork) on February 5th, 2018 in Main, Work 
Last Tuesday Susan and I were able to have dinner with Susan Wood-Butorac, a person who directly changed the course of both of our lives. In the winter of 1995 I was twenty-two years old. I had been working as a contractor at the FAA for eight months, and had only been married to Susan for four. Beginning that fall, I started travelling all over the country, performing hardware upgrades on workstations and servers. If you really want to date this story, the objective of those trips was to make sure every 386 computer met a “minimum baseline” of 8MB… (read more)
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