The older I get the more it seems like every cold I catch is the worst cold I’ve ever had. I started feeling like crap last Thursday, just run down and irritable. By Friday evening, I felt like I had “medicine head” (Susan’s term), except I wasn’t taking any. On Saturday, my dad came over to visit from 9am-11am, and that was the longest I was awake all day. I slept off and on throughout the day, falling asleep while watching television and even writing at my desk. Susan swears she didn’t give me nighttime cough medicine, but that’s what… (read more)
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One on the (hundreds of) things other kids made fun of me about was how much I enjoyed doing homework, specifically writing assignments. I loved reading books and writing book reports. I looked forward to writing essays almost as much as going out on the playground. That being said, let me tell you what the worst part about being a writer is. 
One of my dreams as a kid was to grow up and become a spy. In my 20s, I began purchasing and acquiring spy-related devices. (Years later, I went as far as to enroll in a Private Investigator course at my local vo-tech.) Before long I hand a held radio scanner to listen to police chatter and cordless phone conversations, a small FM transmitter (a “bug”), a set of auto lock pick tools, a regular set of lock picks, some binoculars, a small telescope, night vision goggles, and this thing — the Super Ear. This exact same device is marketed… (read more) 
I my mind’s eye I can see his face, but for the life of me, I can’t remember his name. It was tenth grade, back when it was still cool to have sleepovers. I didn’t know at the time that most of my life-long friendships had already been formed, but that didn’t stop me from occasionally meeting new people and trying out new relationships. I met the guy in science class after buying two tapes from him, one cassette (Kiss’s Smashes, Thrashes & Hits) and one VHS (Metallica’s Cliff ‘Em All). A mutual friend of ours told me later the… (read more) 
I ran across this poster yesterday at school. Based on the picture and the ceramic-tiled wall it was taped you, you can probably guess where I saw it. Specifically I was in the Gaylord building at OU, home to the school’s journalism, mass communications, and professional writing students. I cheated on a writing assignment for school once. I was in third grade. Our teacher gave us a week to write and illustrate a limerick. I struggled for several days to come up with a good one, but came up blank every night. The night before our homework was due, I… (read more) One of the things we’ve learned in class is that character names matter. Imagine two princesses, one named Priscilla and the other, Ivana. Chances are, you didn’t imagine identical twins. George Lucas may be the master of obvious names. The lone smuggler’s last name is Solo, and the alien who shows up to collect money from him is Greedo. One particularly nasty enemy is named General Grevious. Luke comes from the Latin word for light, and may be related to Rey (of light) as well. The overweight X-Wing pilot was named Porkins. You get the idea. Here are the character… (read more) A couple of years ago, I fully intended to shut down Review-O-Matic.com. I went as far as to export all 500 reviews from over there, and import them over here in an attempt to “consolidate web stuff.” In retrospect, I never should have done it. It’s two completely different types of content and styles of writing. More isn’t always better, if it’s not a good fit. Also, many of those reviews were written hastily, and do not reflect the quality or style of my current writing. I just finished making sure all of my reviews that were posted here (at… (read more) 
Occasionally I’ll go off on a tangent and start collecting some random sub-collection of Star Wars “things.” Such was the case in the late 1990s, when I began collecting Star Wars masks and helmets. Like most kids, my early Star Wars Halloween costumes consisted of cheap or homemade (or both) costumes combined with plastic masks from the store. I think the year I went as Chewbacca was the only time I ever went as a “good guy” — most of them time, I preferred the Empire. I remember loving this Stormtrooper costume my mom put together for me to death.… (read more) I never was much for group projects at school. Assign me a project and I would dive into it, working on every aspect until everything was perfect. Stick me on a group project however and watch me curl up into a shell. The problem with most group projects is that everybody in the group feels like they are smarter and do better work than everybody else in the group. The best group projects were the ones where I ended up with one or two people who didn’t care about the project at all. I was not one of those kids… (read more) A couple of years ago, I got assigned to a couple of projects at work where I ended up writing a lot of code and scripts. I didn’t know a lot of the commands I needed off the top of my head, so often I wrote what we called pseudo-code before writing real code. Pseudo-code isn’t real code that a computer can understand, but rather a summary of what you want the code to do. For example, if I were quickly sketching out what I needed a script to do, I might write something like “do SQL database query here,”… (read more) |
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