Time Cannon

...Full of Grace I think I have started to realize why I'm such a sports fan, especially NFL Football. People with absolutely nothing in common can come together for three hours in front of the TV and high five with each other like they have been lifelong friends. My first memory of being a fan happened on December 28th, 1975. I was eight. That day my grandfather was over watching the big game with my dad and myself. My fathers side of the family was always distant. I really didn't know my dads dad. He wasn't around too much. He didn't take an interest in his own kids, much less his grand kids. But Dallas Cowboys football? There some common ground for you. It was playoff time, and the Cowboys were in Minnesota to face Fran Tarkenton and the Minnesota Vikings. Being an eight point underdog at the freezing Metropolitan Stadium (the friendly indoor confines of the Metrodome were not available for another 7 years) was not a promising situation. The game was a classic defens

Thats how it started. Funny how that phrase shaped what I wanted to do with my life. I didn't know it at the time, but it's easy to see looking back. For those of you unfamiliar with it, thats the opening line of the classic text adventure Zork. Although, when I first adventured into the white house and down into the Great Underground Empire, it had not reached its commecial form and was called Dungeon, floating around the big DEC mainframes. I had a friend in 1979 whose dad worked for DEC. Personal computers were still a year or two away and his dad would bring home a dumb terminal (literally a keyboard and a green screen monitor with a 300 baud modem)to use in the evenings to login from home and work. If there was time when he was done, he would let us get on and show us some of the "games" we could play. Eliza, they Psychic, the Star Trek simulator, the old standby Lunar Lander simulation etc. We would spend HOURS playing the crude games. I was fascinated, I wanted

A Death In The Family Amazing Live (not anymore) Sea Monkeys! Some sort of algea infection has claimed the life of my beloved Sea-Monkey's. This was the longest living batch ever in my long history of raising the little critters. This batch stayed alive almost THREE years. Amazing. No telling how many generations. So, how 'bout a moment of silence please, for those Amazing Live (now dead) Sea Monkeys...

Freedom! And thats all I have to say about that....

Takedown The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick This marks the return of the Audiobook review. With the new jobs added drivetime, I should be able to churn through books a bit faster now. Tsutomo Shimomura one of the nations leading computer security experts had his machine compromised Christmas of 1994. Little did he know, the perpetrator was the infamous Kevin Mitnick, who was at the time, on the run from the FBI and the NSA. Takedown is the story of Tsutomo's detailed steakout and final capture of the nations top computer criminal. This book is almost 10 years old. But I think that is one of the main reasons I enjoyed it. It's always fun to read accounts of the beginnings of the "popular" internet. This books is peppered statements like "we will never have use for hard drives over 4gb" etc, etc. Tsutomos detail used in this book will likely be a huge turnoff for the casual non technical reader, but to those interested in computer security will no doubt

YES!! Local Ecstatic Interviewee "Dear Mr. Bacon, We are please to offer you a position..."

Five Months No new posts in 5 months, I guess my blog frittered away to the last place you want your blog to be when you have your naive high hopes in the beginning that "this blog" will be a hit and visitied daily by millions daily! Oh well. I have a HUGE job interview tomorrow. The recent Real Life (TM) stress (and the major contributor to this blog "fading into 'Bolivia" as Mike Tyson so eloquently said) could be alleviated with the attainment of this job. I really think this could be a watershed moment, one you look back on and can say, "thats where things took a turn for the better". Anyway if anyone for some unknown reason stumbles across this between now and Monday at 10:00 CDT, send out some nice vibe my way, to say I need em is an understatement...