Category: Uncategorized

April 29, 1974 was a good day for me. A lot has happened in the days in between then and now. I’ll spare you the details. Unless of course you were there for any of those days in between and you remember them all on your own. If so, feel free to celebrate with me by sharing your favorite. Or keep it to yourself. Your call.

I have said it before and I will say it again here. If some Beyonder with the power came to me and said “Sign here and I can guarantee you will have exactly 40 more years to live, but only 40. What’s more, you can go back and live your 40 years from any point in your past forward.” My answers would be (1) ‘Where do I sign’ and (2) ‘I will start my next 40 years starting today, thank you very much’. Thing is, the last 40 have been just about as good as I could have hoped for. In fact, better. Still, I am way more excited about the next four decades than those past at this point in my life. No Beyonders have come calling, but just the same, here’s to the next 40!

Owen

I had a dream last month that I was back in college. In this dream I was hanging out with Jason Poenitske, my roommate for most of my college career at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green. In the dream, I was having trouble finding our room. Once I did, Jason already had things setup. He had two small tube televisions setup, one mounted on a stand hanging from the wall in a corner over his bed, and a bigger tube set shared more with the room. I came into the room, assessed it, and said to Jason that all I’d need was my desk.

I’m not exactly sure which desk I was referring to. The desk I work on now is much bigger than the room; much bigger than the ones I had in any of the dorm rooms we lived in, be that Barnes-Campbell, or what was then named the New Coed Dorm. However, I also didn’t have all of the computer equipment I have now. No work laptop. No Mac. No monitors. No Printer. Not really even a phone, much less a cell phone. I did have a stereo boom-box with a cd player and a dozen or so CDs. Besides the small stereo boom-box, our room’s tech amounted to Jason’s small television, an original Nintendo game console, and two alarm clocks. In the dream I made the comment that there was a really big difference between technology back then, when we graduated, he in 1996 and me in 1997, as opposed to now. Not even flat screens.

I guess my dream was about how much different life is in 2013. How technology has changed life in certain ways. How little we needed back then as opposed to what we think we can’t live without now. A few days ago my wife and I were talking about how little television either of us watched when we were in school. I remember watching maybe a few hours of tv a week, tops. Most of that was probably Star Trek, Golf, or music videos back when MTV actually played music videos.

Now that I think about it, that scenario is a lot like when we go on vacation. We put our gadgets in the room safe until we’re ready to leave and we never turn on the tv. The most high tech devices we see all week would probably be a blender and a paperback book.

Owen

I looked at my Flickr account the other day and ran across this piece that I put together and posted August 3, 2010. As of today it has 10,058 views. A few people have requested to use it for one reason or another. Others have just gone ahead without asking. I’m pretty flattered either way.

Owen

In a not so recent post I described how I secure my data from disaster. I thought it might be fun to show you how I have all of this setup.

All of my data is stored on external drives because the internal drive on my Mac Mini is just way too small (and for reasons described in the previous post). The setup involves the two identical 1TB pictured.

The first I’ve named G-DRIVE A and the second G-DRIVE B. The A is primary drive because it is where the live copy of my data is stored which is backed up on the B using Time Machine. Sexy, no?