Last update: 2008-01-11 by
Dennette@WiZ-WORX.com
<Who is this "Dennette" person?>
Between Xmas and New Year's Day, I got a telephone call from Rebecca, the daughter of Beth, my first wife, offspring of her next marriage after we broke up in 1974.
A few days later, I got an email from her younger half-sister, Jesy, from another marriage (I understand that she's on her 4th husband now), with the URL of her MySpace page ... she'd even posted copies of some of my photos of her mother from over 30 years ago. I sent a brief reply, but after a few days, I decided to send this Very Long reply, explaining what I've been doing for the past 30 years (i.e., life after her mother.)
All of this happened during a 60 hour manic episode without any sleep, so I also did some updates to my own MySpace page, the first in over a year since I created it, with beau coup links to Wikipedia for my favorite films, books, TV shows, and heroes. :-)
Hello, Jesy ...
I wasn't going to contact you again, but then something happened and I started looking back on my life ... something that I try not to do very often.
A publisher asked my permission to cite my web page at http://www.waterholes.com/~dennette/1996/hopper/bug.htm about "The First Computer Bug!" ... I told them that it was just a copy I made of an email message by someone else back in 1981, that other people have posted the same message on the 'Net, and that its accuracy is questionable and erroneous, but that doesn't seem to matter.
Anywho, I started surfing my own pages and doing some housekeeping, and I revisited the two published articles that I have on-line ... did some cleanups of http://www.wiz-worx.com/resume/porting.htm ... that's something that I did 20 years ago, during my second marriage ... then I tweaked http://www.wiz-worx.com/resume/byte8010.htm ... that was my first published article in a technical journal, back in 1980, when people still hand soldered their own PC components and wrote their own software in binary code ... long before the dinosaurs, back before things grew backbones and learned to crawl out of the water ... I tell people, "You've heard of Jurassic Computing? Well, I'm pre-Cambrian, which makes me older than dirt."
So, when I look back at where I've been, and where I could have been ... I see that I've had it a lot better than most, but not nearly as well as some ... well enough, I guess ... I got what I settled for.
When I got laid off 15 years ago from a $52,000 a year job and started contracting at $2,000 a week (plus travel and lodging), I guess that's when I peaked ... I was living in a cottage on a lake in New England, and then I had my stroke ... but even that turned out to be a Good Thing, because it drove me to set up my first Web server on a home-brew PC in my living room with a dedicated phone line and a 28.8K acoustic modem ... yeah, I was making my living using Bleeding Edge technology, surfing ahead of the curve ... exploiting my international reputation in a field nobody knows exists ... "I'm world famous in Japan!"
But today, any high school kid can do it on a hand-me-down PC for half the phone bill and DSL connection speeds ... so my computer skills are worth less than dirt ... just like my photography skills ... I mean, when is the last time you knew anyone who really knew their way around a darkroom, let alone someone who worked in Kodak's Research labs over thirty years ago on the process that's now used in do-it-yourself printer kiosks/terminals in corner drugstores ... I remember the days when *ALL* pictures were developed and printed in Rochester, NY, but now any high school graduate can learn to run one of the automated processors ... who needs a guy who knows how to make dye transfer prints when Kodak no longer manufactures the materials for making them?
Yeah, I saw that day coming in 1975, when I sold my darkroom equipment and bought my first 8-bit single board computer, when 4-banger digital calculators still cost over $100, and people still paid over $100 for slide rules ... I forget when I saw the notice that the closed down the dye transfer division, but about ten years ago (while I was still on the lake) I found a website with all of the formulae and instructions for making the emulsion, the paper coating, and the dyes ... though I'd be more likely to try my hand at Daguerreotypes for sale to Civil War re-enactment nerds in their uniforms.
In 1978 I was in the first phase of Life After Photography & Beth: The Earliest Computer Days ... three years earlier, in 1975 http://www.waterholes.com/~dennette/photography/joni/750506.htm I had crossed a threshold, and would never again think of your mother as the One Who Got Away, but as one of the contributors to *why* that one got away ... her story begins with http://www.waterholes.com/~dennette/1974/740214.htm ... but that's not important now.
What's important is that I've skipped past the 30 year mark to the 40 year mark, to a time from before I met your mother, to a time before even my handwritten journals ... to a time when I decided to settle for less than I was capable of ... when I decided not to accept an appointment to a service academy ... with Pop's connections, I could have gone to either West Point or Annapolis, but I had given up on being an astronaut because of institutional racism in the early 1960s, when I participated in sit-ins at segregated lunch counters on the way hone from elementary school ... and I didn't want to have to react to the Eight Unholy Words, "The release of nuclear weapons has been authorized," because I thought that a career on "boomers" in Hyman Rickover's nuclear Navy (the tip of the trident) was my only alternative if I chose a military life.
To be a Cold Warrior was a Truly Awesome responsibility, especially for someone as closely connected to the Cuban Missile Crisis as I was as it happened when I was 12 years old (through my father, who spent it sequestered in The Pentagon) ... I had studied nuclear theory during the summers while in elementary school, and made a model of a Lafayette class Poseidon missile boat ... did you know that President Jimmy Carter wasn't just a peanut farmer? ... he has a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School ... his thesis was on portable reactors for submarines and aircraft carriers.
I still thought that I had the cajones to catch a wire with a tail-hook on a carrier deck in the rain at night, and I knew I didn't have the Right Stuff to be a Navy Seal (although I could have been a sniper), but I allowed myself to think that I could actually have my finger on the The Button, to be an officer on board the fourth largest nuclear power in the world, able to hit over a dozen targets from thousands of miles away, each with the throw-weight of several thousand times the Hiroshima blast ... and it was a responsibility I chose to avoid.
When I got laid off 15 years ago, I could have gotten a job at Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque, NM or at General Dynamics Electric Boat in Groton, CT ... but I didn't want to be involved with the nuclear weapons industry (Sandia), and I didn't want to help build nuclear ballistic missile submarines (Electric Boat) ... it turns out that it was a Good Choice after all, since the Cold War ended around that time. :-)
So, I stopped staying ahead of the curve, and I'm letting my life wash away as I wait to die ... I have a sign over my front door, the last thing I see each time I leave my crib ... "Nece Sine Pecunia" ... that's Latin for "Die broke!" (literally, "Die without money") ... the idea is to use it all up while you can ... this is *NOT* the same as dying in debt ... leave nothing behind except your shadow and your name.
OTOH, I'll be leaving behind an eclectic pile of krap that I've collected over my life ... a 300 year old star map, a 500 million year old trilobite fossil, a chunk of the Berlin Wall ... three English translations of the Qur'an ... two copies of Sir Richard Burton's translation of the "Kama Sutra" (one illustrated with 14th century Hindu pornography) ... the first 15 volumes of the B&W manga version of "Fullmetal Alchemist", a $150 investment so far ... a hardbound trade paperback of Alan Moore's "Watchmen" with a leather slip case, last seen on eBay for around $150 ... "A collectible is only worth what you can get for it." ... that's one of those Ferengi Rules of Acquisition (I forget which number) "... and a Partridge Family CD!"
Download "AstroClock: A Recreational Computing Project" http://www.waterholes.com/~dennette/2007/2007-11-26.htm ... that's my real-time astronomical ephemeris ... the perfect example of what has taken the place of photography in my life since 1975 ... when I thought of where I'd like to be 30 years in the future, where I am now is pretty much what I would have been happy with, except for my kidneys only being at 30% efficiency.
What you're seeing with this message is the manic side of my Bi-Polar, something that wasn't diagnosed until after I had my stroke ... I suffer from Schizoaffective Disorder, which sometimes manifests as borderline Dissociative Identity Disorder ... in simple English, that means that my Manic-Depression can manifest itself in a Jekyll and Hyde kind of way ... sometimes my Evil Twin overpowers me, and I can't always keep them away from the keyboard ... today Bad Denny feels a need to "vent to a stranger", and you happen to be convenient ... sorry about that.
Hmmm ... haven't swapped emails with my second wife since the cat died five years ago, and New Year's Day would have been our 25th wedding anniversary, so maybe I'll ping her before my mood swings again ... she hasn't heard that I defaulted on a three-quarter of a million dollar mortgage, and that I tell my creditors that Hell is gonna re-thaw *AFTER* it freezes over before they get any payments from me, because I'm living on $400 a month in SSI disability and $70 in Food Stamps that I share with my disabled, invalid sister.
</Flame Off!>
Have a better one! -=Dennette=-
P.S. - I assume that Beth will read this, and maybe the pages that are linked ... perhaps you could print them for her.
* Mr. Dennette A. Harrod, Jr. <Dennette@WiZ-WORX.com>
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Last update: 2008-01-11 by
Dennette@WiZ-WORX.com
<Who is this "Dennette"
person?>