Jim

Yeah, it ....es me off. Not so much because I want the money back. I don't need it. It ....es me off because it's being used to pay for lawyers and continue what I perceive to be a pattern of deception that I don't want to be connected to. The biggest mistake we made was being *followers*. I will *never* join another group that doesn't have a mechanism by which the rank-and-file can't confront or dislodge the leadership when abuse becomes apparent. Caulk it up to youth and education.

I don't know if he was a bully or control freak, but in my decidedly unchristian opinion he was an unmitigated prick. I remember ROA '74, the first time I saw him working a crowd, thinking "what an unmitigated prick". Later I found out I wasn't the only one that thought that. The week that it was announced that he was the heir to the throne was the last week I attended twig.

Most excellent. This speaks highly of both your son and you.

Galen, Keep an eye on that rear shaft-drive assembly. My neighbor let his run out of grease and it seized while he was going 70 on the freeway. He said half the fun was staying on it until it stopped and the other half was getting it out of the fast lane with the rear wheel seized.

Nothing you could have done different. It wasn't just a screwed-up evening and dinner, it was a rite of passage. Your son had to feel the hurt and pain to learn. You had to do what you had to do as a father. I've been there as a son and I've been there as a father. We all want the best for our kids.

I believe I'm a serious contender. BOOKS - Read dozens of Issac Asimov's fiction and non-fiction. Read all of Melville's, Conrad's and Niven's books. Most of Philip K. Dick's books. Read "Soul of a New Machine" four times. I'm mentioned by name in "Foundations of the Stereoscopy Cinema". I've published a couple magazine articles. I own a book on computer design written in 1953. MOVIES - Blade Runner, Rollerball (the original) and Fantastic Planet are my all-time favorites. Enjoy Mad Max, looking forward to "The Revenge of the Sith". 'PUTERS - I've been working on them since 1970. I have a working DEC PDP 8/L minicomputer in the garage. I have Timex Sinclair, a KIM 1, a BYT-8, a PDP 11/34,and a HP minicomputer. I also have an HP 25 and 55 calculator, TI 30,58C, and 57 calculators, a Compucorp 324G and a Curta mechanical calculator. I have several slide rules and several drafting sets. I have 3 Tivo's, 2 of which are hacked so that I can program them at work or get a shell prompt when I telnet into them. MUSIC - Begins and ends with JS Bach. In the last year I've attended live concerts of his Mass in B minor, Cantatas BVW 4, 61, 131 and 182 and four of his concertos. I can sing along in latin to many parts of the Mass. I loved his instrumental stuff for years, but am now compulsed by his church music. PETS - I've always had twitchy little dogs around. I love their intensity. My present dog is 14 years old. He doesn't have much twitchyness left and I'll probably not replace him when he dies. I've also bred tropical fish, parakeets and gekos and kept lovebirds. WORK - I have my own company that builds single-board computers. I've designed single-board computers that have flown on low-earth orbit satellites and in the International Space Station. Code I have written is running on 20,000+ computers around the world. I read Slashdot several times a day when I should be working. I have 2 high-speed internet connections to my house. I can call a modem and whistle a carrier tone to make it "connect". MODE OF TRANSPORTATION - I drive a Subaru Outback and my wife drives a Subaru WRX. I do *all* the maintanance on both of them. I also ride a 1964 Honda S90 motorcycle I've restored from a pile of junk. TRAVEL - Out of high school I joined the Army and spent a year in West Germany fixing tactical nuclear weapons. In the 80's, I spent 6 months in Tokyo working on electron beam lithography machines. I've worked on computers throughout the US. Cameras - I love cameras. I have about 20 still cameras, including a Hasselblad 500 C/M with 80mm, 120mm and 250mm lenses, a Nikon F, and a Honeywell Pentax Spotmatic. They all work. I also collect "minicams" These are the small, shoulder held television cameras of the 80's. I have nearly every one that was made, including the very first, an Ikegami HL-33. I also have a decent darkroom setup and I've done nice black and white and Cibachrome work. My latest love is the Nikon D70 digital camera I bought for work. HOBBIES - I have a decent metalworking shop in the garage that includes a metal lathe and a vertical mill. I look forward to buying a TIG welder soon. PROGENY - My most important and successful project is my daughter. She's an intense 18-year old that has a burning passion for botany and cellular biology. I bought her a fine old Swiss microscope a couple weeks ago on ebay.

And a big thanks to you Andrea and your tribe. Without you, a lot of us men would be in serious trouble today.

No. If you have a kid, you will end up throwing things of theirs away.

Ditto.

I can't assign gender to this behavior. Growing up, it was my dad that couldn't stand clutter and unused stuff accumulating. Currently, I tend to accumulate a little more than my wife, but we both have our limits and we have rules as to how much and where our clutter can be. We visited a couple that we worked with many years ago and we were amazed at their house. They had stuff *everywhere*, mostly books and magazines, boxes, all sorts of stuff. It was all piled up waist-high with narrow paths to get around all the stuff. I'm currently working though one of those "change of life" things where I'm trying to convince myself that if I need something I should just buy it instead of hoarding everything that I might someday need. I'm also trying to convince myself that it's time to start writing books instead of reading and saving them.

Exactly! I couldn't get the phrase out of my head and I couldn't really understand whether I believed it or I was brainwashed. That's why I thought it would be an interesting poll.

Is the Bible the revealed Word and Will of God?

Hammer, Buy a sack of hard corn and give them a handful per day. Try weaning them off walnuts by gradually increasing the corn/walnut ratio. The hard corn should be real cheap at a feed store and they should be happy with it. I have friends that feed it to ground squirrels and they love it.

I stopped at a yard sale yesterday and was looking though a box of LP's. Simon and Garfunkel, Cat Stevens, Switched on Bach, I mentioned to the guy running the sale that these records looked just like the ones I had when I was in high school. He said "They were my grandmother's"

And am I supposed to read your mind to know that you've fixed the link as I posted :)-->

Are we supposed to read your mind to find the link :)-->

I thought the dining room in the basement of the BRC had kind of a funny smell to it. Nothing like the farmer spreading manure on his field across the road though.

VPW announced it at ROA '80 or '81. It stuck in my mind because I had traveled with the flight services people and I knew and liked them a lot. I felt their loss and went to them about it after the evening meeting.

I'm glad I didn't have a mouthful of coffee when I read that...

Likewise, Elmer's glue is substituted for milk in splashy macrophotography work.

A modern locomotive weighs 200,000 lbs and costs upwards of $2,000,000. Light travels about a foot in 1 nanosecond. Decafe coffee doesn't cost any more than regular because the removed caffeine is sold for a profit to soft drink makers. Maxwell predicted and modeled radio waves about a century before they were "discovered" A male parakeet wraps it's wings around the female while mating. Martin Luther suffered greatly from constipation. J.S. Bach had a total of 20 children from 2 wives. Only ten survived early childhood. Pope John Paul I was only a Pope for 33 days before he died. There is the remains of a naturally occuring nuclear reactor in Gabon, Africa. It ran out of fuel 2 billion years ago. Bill Gates' first company was Traf-O-Data and built equipment to count cars. His second company was Micro-Soft, later changed to Microsoft. IBM spend 100 man-years developing an operating system and then threw it away. Bach's greatest work, the Mass in B minor, was never performed in it's entirety during his lifetime. Japan celebrates the Emperor's Birthday and Constitution Day in the same week. Boeing test pilot Tex Johnson did a 360 degree barrel roll in the prototype 707 over a crowd of 200,000 people. That's it for now. I'll probably have more for tomorrow.

No, that's the ground rule we established years ago concerning such questions.

"Don't ask a question you might not want to hear the answer to"

Not Guilty. I do my own laundry, and share the rest of the stuff. I do the front lawn and keep the cars maintained, she does the back yard and keeps the clothes maintained. Works for us.

Billy Graham - I could care less. At least the Catholics have good church music.