About

So what is there to say about all of this? It’s a blog. About me? Well, that’s a bit more involved.

I’ve been around computers almost my entire life. I grew up around IBM mainframes, learned to program in ANSI 68 COBOL (punch-cards, believe it or not) and got into PCs in the late 1970s. I’ve been messing around with PCs ever since. I’m very well-versed in Microsoft OSs (been through the whole gammut from QDOS to the second beta of Vista) and am least comfortable in Linux/UNIX. I don’t consider myself to be an expert by any long stretch of the imagination, but I know more than the average bear and don’t mind sharing the tips and tricks that I have picked up over the years.

We’ll see how many actually manage to make it up into the blog.

Since I’ve thrown in some posts on non-computer related topics, I guess I should also confess to being a Liberal Arts major. My degree is in History, with minors in Political Science, Education and Paralegal Studies (that one didn’t transfer when I did, but I finished it). I have somewhere between 210 and 225 college hours scattered out over so many different disciplines that I think the Dean got tired of it and declared me “graduated” just to make me stop changing majors. I’ve never gone on to do graduate work simply because you have to focus on a single field of study and there isn’t anything aside from law that could hold my academic interest for more than a couple of semesters. You might think it’s a flaky way of approaching things, but it’s my education and I’ll study what I damn well please for as long as it pleases me.

As for the musical end of things, I studied classical piano for about 10 years. I did the band-thing in school, playing the clarinet and bass clarinet in the school’s Concert Band, but along the way I learned to play almost all of the woodwinds (at least to beginning band level), percussion, guitar and bass guitar. I got interested in other things and completely dropped musical performance by age 22 or 23 and haven’t touched an instrument in almost 30 years. Probably the worst mistake that I ever made, but there it is. I keep promising myself that I’ll get back into it, but it never seems to materialize. Anyone in the market for a slightly used violin and a couple of clarinets? (JOKE - they aren’t for sale, so don’t email me about it)