Aryntha and Rai came up late last night to “get away from it all” for a day or so. This time, due to the projected time of their arrival, it was decided that we’d do some grilling rather than running off to some restaurant. It was a good decision.

Arythna is a master of the all-pervasive powers of BBQ; a true, old-school, “Knight of the Holy Grill”.

He is able, as he says, to “build a rapport with the food being grilled and get it to tell him when the sauce is just right or that it’s time to be turned over.” We, Rai and I, can’t really argue this point as Aryntha turns out some *really* good “Q” and if his secret is in talking to the chicken breast, well, so be it.

After dinner we retired to the Cannibal Special where they got to see, first hand, the wonders of technology that the “Big Box” stores have brought to our little valley here; namely the insanely bright sodium lights they put all along the highway for the new exit these stores “needed”… The last time Aryntha and Rai were up here we took some pictures of the night sky and all the stars one can see here… Those were probably the last photos of the non light polluted sky up here that we’ll ever get. These new lights illuminate the highway very well… And the hillside, the houses over where I live, the buildings in town… You can proabably see the Walmart exit off of I-70 from space.

Fortunately you can still drive about 10 minutes and be on the other side of a ridge that blocks most of the “corporate glare”, but it’ll never be the same. I give it another 2-3 years before we have sky-scrapers here in the valley as they’re running out of ground to put things on. By this time next year the hillside across the highway will be covered in houses according to the drawings I saw that the developer published the other day. Joy.

Anyways, after four hours of playing “lobster” and reducing ourselves to a fine prune-like state, we called it a night.

Right now I’m waiting for them to rise again so we can figure out what to do with the remainder of the day. Rai brought her art supplies and has been trying to get Aryntha to do some art as well… Who knows, maybe we’ll have a mini “artist jam session” and see what pops up.

Later…

Well, ok, I was wrong… It rained all day.

Today was pretty much a continual thunderstorm and, though the lightning has stopped for a while, it’s still raining as I type. I’m predicting a really good winter this year if we’re getting this kind of water in August.

Of course with all the rain it’s downright chilly outside. I’m boiling a pot of water for a nice cup of Earl Grey and I’ll be sitting down to my new book here in a bit… Fall is my favorite time of the year with its grey skies, cool weather, and that “fall” smell you get (or might not get if you live in a city).

Ok, water is boiling so I’ll sign off now.

I guess while the Valley slept, some time last week we were all moved to Seattle or something… It has been raining up here, on and off, though definitely more on than off, for a week now.

This morning it is showing signs of letting up though: The sun is shining though my window as I type which is always good for improving my outlook on things.

Saturday after work I was going to drive down to Denver to drop off more paperwork to our accountant and spend a day or two with Lyon and Wolf down in Aurora. I got as far east as Vail before the hydroplaning from standing water on the highway and zero visibility from the deluge turned me back. I mean, there was a few times my LSC Lincoln turned into USS Lincoln… It was rough out there.

So I swung by the grocery store, stocked up on a few things to make chili and decided to spend the night at home reading…

Then, as fall has fell up here in the high country, it got *cold* outside. Take away the solar heat from us up here, for even a few days, and you get snow… Really. Saturday night and last night they sanded the highway over Vail Pass and Loveland Pass.

So, as I still have the heat off in the house, I spent Saturday night sitting in front of the fireplace in the living room, supping on fresh chili and finishing my last Dragon Lance novel.

Sunday morning rolled around and, after consulting the local weather channel which consists of standing on the back porch with a cup of coffee examining the clouds and watching what the deer are doing on the golf course, I decided that if I got an early start I could make it to Denver.

By 9am I was on the road, Yes’s “Magnification” blasting and barreling through the overcast, fog-laden drizzle that accompanied me all the way down the mountain as far as Floyd Hill. The peaks were shrouded in wispy clouds that clung to the pine trees like slow moving ghosts and the overall effect was much like a Led Zeppelin album cover, very pretty.

Once you crest Floyd Hill the sun comes out, the rain stops and the temperature shoots back up. Denver was hot, dry and about 90 degrees in the shade… Lovely. I think they’re being punished for something.

So I dropped off the package to the accountant at about 11, did a little running around and stopped by Lyon and Wolf’s place at about noon to take them out for lunch. Ate at Mimi’s again then trekked over to –the- book store, Tattered Cover, and bought the next Dragon Lance novel which, of course, is only available in hardback.

After that we went back to their place in Saudi-Aurora. Wolf and I sat around and talked for a few hours about metaphysical stuff like the puzzle that is the symbol of Baphomet while Lyon, much like his namesake, slept off lunch. Once he was back up and running, Lyon, his daughter, and I went to see “Freddy vs. Jason” which we knew would suck but in it’s ‘suckieness’ would provide much amusement. It did. Wolf isn’t a slasher-flick fan and opted to stay home in the peace and quiet to do some reading.

Following that, as it was 10:30 at night, I headed back up the mountain. Denver was still about 80 degrees and, once again as I crossed the magic Floyd Hill line, it started to rain and the temperature dropped like a rock. The external thermometer in the Lincoln was reading 37 degrees as I crested Loveland Pass last night…

The drive home really sucked. They’ve recently repaved most of I-70 and the new asphalt, once wet, is atrocious. The water sits on it like a thin film of grease, it absorbs your headlights like velvet, and the lines they put on the stuff turns invisible when hit with oncoming headlights. Then you have the downhill sides of the passes… Remember that sand I mentioned back there a ways? Well when they put that stuff down every freak in his big-ass dually pickup becomes a road hazard, shot gunning your car with gravel any time you’re within 50 yards of one… On top of that, as I came down Vail Pass, it turned into a biblical downpour out there and if you’ve never hydroplaned in your car, you will on the downhill side of the pass. The water runs down the highway about as fast as you’re driving and for some reason I haven’t figured out yet, this practically lifts your car off the road… It was a bad ride home.

Well, that’s over and a new day has dawned. I think I’ll go fix some scrambled eggs, bacon and toast as I missed out on dinner last night and lunch is several hours away.

TTFN

Just a quick thought…

Everyone by now has heard about the big blackout on the east coast and eastern Canada. Well, I was just looking over CNN’s web site and something funny struck me:

Last night, while the power was still off and the great city of New York was bathed in inky blackness; darkness akin to a Snake Pliskin movie where roving bands of gun toting thugs rule the city, absolutely nothing happened…

Now wait, this is truly odd.

I figured in the security of the night the town would have been torn down to its foundations and high rise buildings set ablaze. After all, this is New York were talking about here. But no, the people of New York showed genuine “brotherly love” last night as they went to bars lit with candles to drink up the last of the beer, for free, before it got warm and slept out in the streets to look at the stars they so rarely get to see…

Absolutely nothing happened…

Meanwhile, we turn out gaze northward to Ottawa Ontario, a city known for its art and culture, where people sit in city parks and watch the clouds roll slowly by…

Today Ottawa is nearly under martial law and anything not nailed down or flaming has been looted. They’ve declared a state of emergency and are requesting people stay indoors…

I really think the scare of 9/11 has really done something to the psychology of the average New Yorker, and that it is a good change.

I spent Monday afternoon / evening in Denver hanging out with Aryntha and Rai. There were some important papers that needed to be taken to the accountant downtown and I was in the mood for a nice drive, so I made the trip. On the way down I got the idea to engage in one of my hobbies while I was down there: The researching of old phone systems.

Years and years ago AT&T helped win the cold war by creating a nuclear bomb proof long distance telephone network that spanned the North American Continent. They dug a trench clear across America for this coaxial line and put in blast-hardened microwave relay sites all over the US. Well, several of these old Transcontinental Cables run right though Denver and it’s not well documented by the groups I belong to.

So I swung by and picked up Ayntha and Rai, who are both into this telephone infrastructure thing. We were well armed for this adventure with my Olympus c2100-uz camera, Aryntha’s Sony and Canon cameras, 2 GPS units (one with street level mapping and the other for simple lat/lon averaging), three cell phones, and two bags of munchies and drinks.

We headed south to a location near Chatfield reservoir where, years ago, Aryntha and I had found an actual manhole for the old system… Unlike municipal manholes, the old L-Carrier types were about 6 feet across and sealed with odd 5-sided bolts. Our intent wasn’t to enter said manhole, but to just get a few pictures and maybe a GPS fix for posterity… Well, we looked around the area for about a half an hour and it appears that they removed it and the vault it covered. This isn’t completely unbelievable as Denver has “sprawled” about 10 miles south since the last time we were there. Places that used to be nothing but open fields and rocks are now housing developments and strip malls.

Well, with that being a bust we headed north along Kipling (the Transcon route across Denver) to the western suburbs of Denver where the AT&T “longlines” building for the lines should have been. We weren’t successful in finding it either. Later I believe I found the address for it and we’ll search for it next time. Hopefully they haven’t torn it down to put in some 50 family high rise or something.

For our last attempt we headed north again to Broomfield to get some photos of what used to be a huge microwave relay site on the Transcontinental route. Fortunately it’s still there and we were able to get some photos and a GPS fix.

The site is owned by American Tower now (as is most of the old AT&T network) and the plethora of microwave horns has been removed to make space for the plethora of cell antennas.

The Broomfield tower used to be one half of the microwave link to Buckhorn Mountain which then took the call north into Nebraska. I figure with a good telescope you could probably see Buckhorn from Broomfield as both towers sit on mountains that are about 1000’ above a vast, flat plain that fronts the eastern side of the Rockies…

When I was 8-10 years old I remember we would drive by this site on the way to my grandmother’s house in Golden. I’d always question my father about the site and he’d invariably give me another 10 minute lesson in microwave radio or telephone technology. I think he was an old school phreak… He was into radio, telephone, and electronics; all the appropriate hobbies and even worked for Raytheon as a senior electronics engineer, but he never admitted anything “phreaky” to me.

Well, once we were satisfied that we were in possession of some history to preserve we headed downtown so that I could finish my mission with the accountant. We drove though a torrential downpour complete with hail which had me parking on a sidewalk under some trees for a few minutes.

To complete the evening we had dinner over at Mimi’s Café in Aurora.

I spent the night at their place (getting to sleep at about 4am) and headed back up the mountain at about 9am. I rolled into the store at about 11, dealt with everyone and everything that needed to be dealt with, and then left early to head home and get some more sleep.

Thus ended my Tuesday.

Well, I’m off to pack my lunch and open the shop. Catch ya later.

So, here it is, Monday *again*… I never seem to be able to escape this day. It promises to be another dull day at work; fortunately I have the last book of the latest Dragon Lance trilogy to finish.

I was a bit worried in the last book, the second volume of the trilogy, when the authors systematically killed off three quarters of the characters in the last 20 or so pages. Not that I’m horribly “into” the story… I was more worried about the quality of the story in the final book. So far I’m happy to report that they were just making room for some new characters that didn’t get much notice in the first thousand pages or so.

Yesterday I drove down route 131 from Wolcott to Steamboat Springs, about 70 miles though the badlands of Colorado, to get a feel for the setting in a new story I’m working on. That area is beautiful in its desolation: Miles upon miles of nothing but scrub trees, low hills, and endless blue sky. Here’s a few pictures:

Well, I need to draw this to a close, pack my lunch and get over to Avon. See you in the next installment…

I usually play a character who was conceived almost 15 years ago named Raeshlavik. Ravik is really quite an interesting character with reams of back-story created over the years. He’s actually an ancient construct created by unknown forces for an unknown purpose (that’s the public version). He appears, when not in his human guise, to be an immense black unicorn bearing upon his brow not the simple twisted ivory spire commonly attributed to unicorns, but rather a razor sharp four sided spike of blackened crystal.

A long time ago Chaos sought to enter this plane but was thwarted in the fact that it could not manifest itself here. It is an extraplanar force, and while it could cause small effects and create small problems, it was otherwise held in check. This angered Chaos for its enemy, Order, had discovered a way to enlist beings of this plane to its cause and give them the ability to tap its powers to combat the minor evils Chaos created. The most powerful forces Order had were the true unicorns, travelers of the planes, and a select group of humanoids known as Keepers.

In a flash of insight, Ravik was created by Chaos by taking half the essence of a unicorn it had captured named “Flinthorn” and twisting it, corrupting it, mixing it with equal portions of itself. Thusly Chaos had found a way to manifest a small portion of itself in this plane of existence.

Ravik was created to be a simple killing machine; a sort of biological bullet sent to eliminate key personnel deemed to be useful to the forces of Order. After many successful assassinations he was sent after a very powerful force for Order, a Keeper named Billy Rae MacIntosh. This person, much to Ravik’s consternation, just simply couldn’t be killed.

Oh sure, this person died, and usually in the most gruesome ways imaginable, but he also kept getting back up. Well, to make a long story short, this individual eventually befriended Ravik and showed him that he could be much more than a simple automaton.

Ravik, by nature and creation, is still a powerful warrior for the forces of Chaos but he is also in possession of free will unlike the rest. While he’s still “evil”, he has no controller, no strings, and does things his way. Currently he runs a large, multi-national corporation which is a world leader in the production of weapons technologies.

In other news I went to go see S.W.A.T. last night, and while it is an entertaining movie in and of itself, it was a trailer for a new movie that caught my eye. The name of the movie is “The Underworld” I believe and it’s a story about the war between the vampires and the werewolves. Its directed by the guy who did “Blade II”, so don’t expect much, but it’ll most likely be a fun few hours with popcorn and soda.

Well, gotta run.

Looks like I’m getting some new neighbors today. There’s a big moving truck sitting out in front of the empty duplex across the street; more Californians judging by the plates on the two cars sitting in the driveway… Just what we needed…

It’s amazing how few people living in Colorado are from Colorado these days. There was a report I read a few days ago that stated that one quarter of the current population of Denver is either from California or drove though there to get here. The problem, in my opinion, is that they get home sick and thusly are trying to make Colorado more like California…

I’ve been to California many times and have seen the state from north to south. Now, granted, every time I go there it’s for a comic/art convention or I’m rescuing someone from a bad idea and I just don’t have a very good opinion of the place. It’s a dry, arid state full of dry, arid people who all live in little bubbles of self-importance; unknowing and uncaring about the world around them.

Southern California is known for its arrogant people, smog, water conservation, a collapsing tech industry, and overcrowding… I came back to Denver after being gone for 5 years to find it rife with arrogant people, smog, water conservation, a collapsing tech industry, and overcrowding…

Closer to home I was talking with a routine customer at the shop, a Vail police officer, about why I’m not riding my bike to work anymore; its just too damn dangerous these days. He told me that, according to their statistics, the vast majority of minor traffic infractions such as ignoring stop signs, failing to yield, and unsafe passing (basically that unknowing and uncaring thing again) comes from folks with out of state plates. The two most prevalent out-of-state folks up here are from California and Texas.

The Texans have their own brand of problems they bring with them, namely these trucks they drive that are about the size of a small house. I just can’t fathom why someone needs a Ford f-350, dually, long bed, 4 door, 4 wheel drive, 8 mile per gallon, needs two parking spaces to park monstrosity. You read about these folks that are pissed off because people drive SUVs? Well they need to look around and aim their ire at things that need it more like these Texas sized trucks. And Hummers; who thought those were a good idea?

Californians drive Hummer H2’s if they feel the desire to own something that has a prayer of getting them around during the winters up here. Last winter I pulled no less than four H2’s out of ditches and snow banks… In the winter I drive a hopped up 1972 Jeep Wagoneer with a 409ci V8, and I *still* get twice the MPG of an H2.

Then, in my opinion, there is a slightly longer standing problem which are all the beat to hell Toyota Celicas with a big, ill-fitting spoiler on the back, a bad attempt at ground effects and tires that are too narrow for the rims sticking 6 inches out from under the car. These guys deserve their own section of this rant simply because three times a year the trip to Denver goes from 2 hours to 5 hours because one of these rocket scientists tries to drive one of these ‘cars’, in the snow, over Vail pass, and ends up closing one or more lanes for a few hours.

Anyways, as you can see, it would be very easy for me to become horribly xenophobic but fortunately I’m pretty detached and just find it all very humorous. 🙂

…Checking in from the shop…

Today’s Topic: It’s amazing what “big business” can do to a little mountain town…

My shop is in a little Podunk mountain town called Avon. About 5 weeks ago we got a “Big Box” store; Home Depot. Then about 3 weeks ago we got another one; a “Super” Wal-Mart. Combined that’s about 400,000 square feet of average / below average quality merchandise. Both of these being here is pretty amazing as the entire Valley has about 40,000 people in it and half of those are only here seasonally.

That’s roughly 10 square feet of store for each resident between Dillon and Glenwood Springs…

No one is exactly sure why these stores are here now. We’ve all heard it has something to do with some marketing company’s demographics wizards divining that everyone up here drives to Denver on occasion to shop… Yeah, so that means we need a Super Wal-Mart?

The town is suffering something fierce right now. See, it’s impossible to compete with a store the size of three football fields when they get to keep all their sales tax to pay their “rent” and you have to pay $21 a square foot for retail space. Your prices just *have* to be higher to cover your lease.

There was a record amount of shady deals and palm greasing to get these monstrosities in here in the first place. The fight took well over two years as the billionaire developer was run out of Avon and sent to the county, and then came back to Avon. He finally, with the aid of quite a few expensive “experts”, managed to convince the town council (a bunch of backwoods mountain folks) that the gigantic stores would be good for them… So good in fact he convinced them to let him keep his sales tax for the next 20 years. Which, conveniently, should completely cover the loan to build the two stadium sized stores. His grand finale was convincing Eagle-Vail to give up a large portion of their Eagle River water rights for his monsters, for next to nothing.

Far too slick of an operator for the nice, laid back folks up here to deal with.

On top of this the Avon town council was concerned that the mega-stores would generate too much traffic so they decided to build an exit off of I-70 just for them. They did this so that potential customers wouldn’t be inconvenienced by actually driving though Avon… Right now people can drive down I-70 from either direction; pull off directly into the parking lots of Wal-Mart and Home Depot, and then leave much the same way without even knowing the town exists.

A month ago the shop here had about 100-150 people walk though a day. Today we’ve had 6. Last week there was a three day period where we sold one PC game for $20. We’re loosing our shirts right now and due to our lease we have to continue to spend $10,000 a month for floor space till March.

The shopping center we’re sitting in is 50% empty now with several of the remaining stores preparing to move out. Our current plan is to take the losses till March then move the whole operation to Southwest Denver where we can get a really nice 5500 square foot retail space for about $8-$9 a square foot… We’ll be paying half as much for 500 square feet more space in a nicer location.

I’m really not looking forward to moving back down to the loud, stinky, overpopulated environs of Denver, but we all do what we have to do.

The current rumor states that Mr. Billionaire is trying to kill Avon so he can buy it cheap and turn it into another resort for Beaver Creek… Imagine having the money to kill an entire town just so you could buy it and make it how *you* wanted it to be.

Well here we are, another wonderful day in the Valley.

Ever notice how bad things travel in packs? Well Jeff from the store was over here at Château D’Isaster working on the decks for some extra cash and a whole herd of bad things happened…

See, Jeff is getting ready to move to Reno and needed some extra cash for the trip. Larry, the fellow who owns the shop where I work and the house I live in, offered to just give him some cash – which Jeff would be honor-bound to repay even if Larry said it wasn’t required… Well Jeff isn’t sure he’ll be making enough money to repay him later and insisted on doing some maintenance around here and Larry has wanted to stain the wood decks for a while now.

Ok, Jeff is in a bit of a panic with this move and isn’t exactly “all here” if you know what I mean. He’s been forgetting things, loosing things; in general he’s in a bad way. The other players in this story, Larry and his wife, are off in San Jose for a few weeks and so I’ve got the place to myself.

Anyways, yesterday Jeff is up on the third floor finishing the front deck when he steps backwards into the tray of dark brown oil-based stain… In slow motion the tray flips though the air, spraying the white stucco of the house with brown on the third floor and as it lands and spills it’s remaining contents onto the deck. The stain falls though the slats onto the second floor deck, spattering the front of the house with more brown stain.

Jeff freaks out and runs though the house and down the stairs to get to the hose so he can wash the stain off before it dries, and tracks brown oil-based stain across the custom fitted light grey Berber carpet. He notices this right about the time he reaches the middle of the stairs, freaks out again and calls me at the shop…

Well, just after all this happens and I assure Jeff that things will be ok because we’ll just get it cleaned up over the next few days, the home rentals place calls and says they’d like to show the house this morning… See, we rent out the house on occasion during the ski season as we can get around $2000 a night having 7 bedrooms, being walking distance from the Beaver Creek ski resort, and about 5 miles west of Vail. But this time, just to add to Chaos’ humor, someone wants to rent the house now rather than the ski season.

Well, to make a long, agonizing story short, this morning at first light I was out repainting the front of the house with Kilz and the carpet guy is here trying to get the stain out of the carpet. Fortunately he’s having some marginal success at it, thanks be to the carpet cleaner god.

I managed to put the rentals lady off till this afternoon.

For me this is all just another example of no matter if it’s good or bad, it’s always an adventure. 🙂

This morning I’ve decided to work a little on the ecommerce code for the store’s web site and once again the ability of the average user to break things astounds me. I’ve been reading some of the horror stories out there in regards to this and it’s pretty amazing.

Kind of reminds me of a few years ago when I was writing the code for the StickerStation, aka “The World’s Most Advanced Vending Machine” which you’ve probably seen as they are everywhere. We would bring in children to test the interface of the machine, making sure that it was easy enough to understand for children and robust enough to handle a 5 year old. Well we got it to the point that none of our test kids could do anything to the machine other than put in their money and get their pictures when the project manager came in stating, “I don’t know what I did, but it’s hung.”

You probably know this project manager and some of you have probably worked with him. He has many shapes and sizes, many first and last names, but he always manages to advance to his highest level of incompetence. He makes twice your income yet has half your knowledge and does a quarter of the work. He’s usually put there by the board of directors against the better judgment of the dev team… Yep, I knew you’ve worked with him.

Anyways the problem turned out to be static electricity. The leather soled $400 loafers, expensive silk shirts and slacks he wore in combination with the new carpet and his $1000 leather office chair imbued him with about a billion volts of electricity which would shut down the bill validator when he touched the machine. Of course this would only happen when it was unusually dry there in Alexandria Virginia so recreating the problem took about a month.

About six months later we discover that the board of directors put this guy in charge to prep the company for sale. His goal was to ensure that the Generation 3 machines never made it to market thereby violating shareholder agreements and opening the company for acquisition by a rival company in New Hampshire. To the team’s credit we not only got the prototypes done but we got about 100 of them out in the field here in the US and almost as many in Europe. The machine was featured on the 1999 MTV Tour and I have a picture of C3P0 standing next to one for the opening of 1999’s Episode 1 where the machine was a key piece for their marketing. We had acquired image contracts with Warner Brothers, Disney, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, Toys ‘R’ Us… It was a pretty amazing thing.

I guess I should put the key team members here so years from now I’ll remember this and find out what they’re all up to:

William Miller: Design, Front End Programming, and Interface
Scott Ogden: Design, Systems Engineering, and Acquisitions
Ken McCleaft: Design, Systems Engineering, Back End Programming, Telemetry, and Blue Screen Algorithms
Ronnie Jones: Art, Art and More Art

There were several other people involved, of course, but the above were the ones who put in the sleepless nights, long hours, plane flights, endless arguments with the project manager, and who really made the system go. Thanks guys. I still think, even though the company was sold out from under us, that we set a standard in the industry that few have managed to reach and none have surpassed. Heck, the company who bought us *still* can’t get chromakey to work! (grin)

Today was pretty cool. Did a little geocaching down near Eagle with Aryntha and Rai (and no, we didn’t see anything dealing with Kobe Bryant) which resulted in the finding of a very old 50’s telephone hut half buried in a hillside. We then trundled around the mountains a bit on gravel roads till we’d run into a private property sign and be forced to turn around. It’s amazing how much of the wilderness out there is owned by someone. Aryntha took lots of pictures for posterity then we had dinner over at Fiesta’s in Edwards.

The major topic today was the job market and the economy, which both suck in ways that words alone cannot describe. The comment on CNN was to the effect that layoffs are increasing because sales are decreasing because no one is buying anything because they’re all unemployed… How does one fix this? Can it be fixed? Is this the decline and fall of the American Empire? Is King Bush playing fiddle as Washington burns? I don’t know, but I hope not.

My idea involves the fat cats at the top of the corporate food chain taking a little hit in their 6-7 figure incomes and keeping their employees from hording their meager $500 paychecks and waiting for the axe to fall. Will this happen? Will the RIAA admit that MP3s aren’t the source of their money woes? The answer to both is pretty obvious.

Speaking of MP3s, the BBC did a report recently in regards to the RIAA and their war on Joe Consumer. In this report the BBC points out some interesting facts such as: RIAA members for the last ten years have been making a *lot* of money on vinyl to CD re-releases but now the catalog has been drained and that cash cow has run dry. The RIAA members have halved their yearly releases over the last 5 years. And above all let us not forget that people are simply buying fewer CDs because the music released today *SUCKS*. (Asterisks and caps added by this author)

So, lo and behold we have some data pointing to the fact that yes, MP3 file sharing has impacted record sales, but it’s only a small leak in a ship full of holes.

What does the RIAA hope to do with their Gestapo tactics and “we spend more on lawyer’s retainer fees per month than your entire neighborhood earns in a year” bullying? Will this make people buy more CDs? Will it ensure they start making “enough” millions in pure profit again? I don’t know, but I doubt it.

Anyways, the crows circling the job market and the economy, which both lie in smoldering ruins, has got me a bit worried; though I’ve been though this before. When I got out of the Navy I got a job with a laptop hard drive manufacturer called “Prairie Tech” then within weeks was laid off due to the tech crunch of 1990-1991. I spent the next few years working my way through different job fields weathering the storm till the economy improved.

Well, Aryntha and Rai headed back down the mountain about a half hour ago. They’ve got cats to care for and Jag is driving in tonight on her way from Wisconsin to California. Tomorrow my week resumes with another day of being tech support for the Vail Valley and all will once again be right with the world.

Aryntha and Rai are up here at Château D’Isaster for a few days to get away from all that is Denver and to reaffirm their faith that the world doesn’t completely suck.

They’ve had nothing but trouble down there; cars getting broken into, gas siphoning, extremely rude neighbors (the folks downstairs smoke so much it seeps though the floor and stains the windows and the people upstairs own one CD, 50-Cent, and play it 24/7 with enough volume you can hear the change jingling in the rapper’s pocket clearly from anywhere in Aryntha and Rai’s apartment.)

The sad thing is they live in a “good” part of Denver, specifically South West Denver.

So, after an excellent meal over at Narayan’s Thai in Avon (If you’re looking for *really* good Thai food and are in the area, email me and I’ll send you a map), we opted to just hang out in the hot tub for a few hours where we talked about the future of digital audio formats. Aryntha is a bit of an expert in the field and the topics ranged from the backwards compatibility of SACD2 to the latest reports on the movements of the RIAA’s jack-booted thugs.

This is where the title of the post comes in. The hot tub here at Château D’Istaster is a large, octagonal stainless steel job set flush into the back deck and looks amazingly like a people-sized stew pot…

When I get all the pumps running and its sitting at about 110 degrees, steaming, one can easily imagine dicing up a few carrots and potatoes to round out the boiled human stew.

Right now I’m waiting for Aryntha and Rai to stumble out of the guest room so I can find out what they’d like to do today.

In the beginning all was dark and without order.

No words graced the formless void of the Journal, no witty prose skittered about the web page in vain attempt to clutter its seamless background. It was then, in a flash of white hot inspiration that a great whirling and bashing of keys arose and words spewed into the perfect blankness…

Hello and welcome to my LiveJournal!

Sit back, relax, and peruse the dimly lit alleys of my mind. Don’t be worried, what you find here is… mostly… harmless.

Thought for the day: Eagles may fly, but weasels aren’t sucked into jet engines.

We pulled into Aurora Sunday evening, the 23rd, and I immediately stopped at El Chubby’s to get a to-go burrito before we check into the hotel… There was simply no such thing as a decent burrito on the East Coast, and I was jonesing for one.

Monday, June 24th I got the keys to my new apartment at 1747 Peoria St. To offset the cost of the rent I was doing maintenance for the lady who managed the building while I tried to nail down a new job.

Over the next couple of months I got a few positions though a temp agency. They gave me all sorts of placement tests that indicated I was perfect for high-tech jobs, but all they ever sent me to were weird day-labor gigs. One was working second shift at a plastics factory making rubber pond liners, and another was doing concrete work.

Zeze was having even less luck and I was rapidly running out of money to keep us afloat.

During this Zeze’s ex loses the yacht and the storage unit where everything Zeze, Pegasus, and I didn’t have with us was stored. This happened due to her not being able to get off Everquest to get a job, and then not telling anyone she was financially fucked so that we could save it…

Zeze, Pegasus, and I lost pretty much everything in July of 2002…

In August of 2002 I transitioned my iTools account over to the new .Mac offering, at which time my email went from my old ddw.net account to ravik@mac.com.

In September Richard and Mike from our RMA days reached out to me and asked if we’re still doing development work. They had started a new company and were promising us the moon and stars if we could make some more magic for them. They commissioned a website as a ‘good faith’ gesture.

On October 30th I finished the Vistech website for them and get a couple hundred bucks for my effort.

I can’t support Zeze any longer, so Zeze and I discuss; I can move in with Wolf and Lyon for a couple of months and extend what little money I have left while job hunting, and he can move back to Virginia and get a job with Dan who has been pestering for more recorders and other tech work.

I take the couple hundred I got for the website work and fly Zeze back to Virginia in early November. I once again make a backup of everything on November 10^th right before I move into Wolf and Lyon’s spare room at Lowry.

I spend the rest of November, December, and January with Wolf and Lyon.

2003

In late January I reconnect with Larry, who I worked with on some projects back in 1996. He has a proposition for me: He runs a pawn shop up in Vail and thinks there might be some potential for a computer repair business there. He has a big stock of old Compaqs that need fixed up and sold as well. He also needs someone to watch his mansion in Vail while he’s away most of the year and handle things when he rents the place out during the ski season for $2300 a night… So, he’ll give me a room in his 6000 square foot monstrosity, cover all of the bills, and pay me a small wage plus 30% of any repair business I generate.

I move up to Vail on my birthday in February.

By March 2003 Zeze has been working for Dan for a couple of months and I’ve gotten the computer business off the ground in Vail.

March through May is spent dealing with Richard and Mike trying to screw everyone. It eventually embroils Pegasus and Geoff in England, Myself and Aryntha in Colorado, and Zeze in Virginia…

June and July pass fairly uneventfully.

August 5^th, 2003, I join LiveJournal.

Starting in July Zeze and I built a new wireless network to connect the various dormitories and resident student houses on the grounds of the school. We also built a new Apple-based computer lab as well as install Apple ‘eMac’ systems in the common areas of the various houses and dorms.

We wrapped up just before the school year started, and having seen me in action with both the computers and the students, Steve offered me a teaching position for the 2001-2002 school year. I accepted.

September arrived, and I was teaching high school comp-sci to a class of 15 students… Zeze and I were also in charge of the senior’s wing of St. John’s; we took our meals at the school’s cafeteria, worked with the students after hours to help with both school and personal problems, and in-general became ‘dorm parents’.

And then September 11th happened.

The end of November finally rolled around and so did the end of the first term for the 2001-2002 year.

On December 6th I turned off the DSL on the yacht; Zeze’s ex still hadn’t gotten a job and had been spending every waking moment playing Everquest – so Zeze told me to cut her off. On December 19th Zeze flew to Baltimore to gather up the stuff we still had on the yacht. Zeze returned on December 30th with their truck and jet ski.

2002

On February 8th, 2002, I drove down to New London to spend the day walking around the Connecticut College arboretum. The last time I was there was my birthday on February 7th, 1990, so I spent the afternoon reminiscing about old friends and laser tag.

The school was having a bit of a problem with the headmistress and the politics that had put her in that position, and over the next few months there was a big shakeup in both administration and board.

On June 3rd the 2001-2002 school year had ended… I decided that teaching wasn’t for me, and there wasn’t much opportunity at the school if I wasn’t teaching, so I gave my notice. Steve gave me a couple of months pay for all of the above and beyond I’d done over the last year, and I start finding an apartment in Aurora Colorado.

Zeze sold their truck and jet ski for some quick cash on June 17th, and on Thursday June 20th I made a large backup of my laptop, threw all our crap back into the Caprice, and we hit the road the next day, Friday June 21st.

By June of 2000 Zeze, Zeze’s ex, Pegasus, and myself were all living on the StarChaser in Baltimore’s “Inner Harbor”, and the horses were boarded about an hour away at “Stonemill Farm” in Street Maryland.

Zeze and Zeze’s ex have the back bedroom, I have the forward berth, and Pegasus resides in the living room / dining room / kitchen area. It’s actually a very spacious arrangement and everyone is pretty comfortable, and the proximity makes working on projects quicker and easier.

In July, after five major revisions, the production version of the DVX code was shipped. Unfortunately, the guy at IDSI had the demo unit in a van and left it running while getting a sandwich. It was equally unfortunate that someone from the NRC was parked next to him also getting a sandwich. The NRC guy came back to his car to discover something has been delivering huge doses of x-ray radiation – and IDSI’s license was revoked.

We got paid, but the product never materialized.

Somewhere along the way Zeze had picked up a “Westward Go-4”, which is a three-wheeled cart used for things like municipal parking meter readers.

This became our main mode of transportation around Baltimore, and was instrumental in getting to places like Popeye’s Chicken and the laundromat.

In September we found out that Harborview Condominiums, located right next to the marina, was looking for a digital security system, so I whipped up a demo and a proposal. In a couple of days I had a proxcard reader, database, and can bus door controller ready to go. Unfortunately we didn’t get the contract though.

On Sept 18th the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute demo code is complete (BIOMAPER) – and RMA has another project for us; this one is creating a modular digital camera system for use at DMVs to digitally print driver’s licenses. The camera has to reside in an adjustable mast to ensure a level image for any height. Pegasus starts designing the circuit board for this and we call it “PegaMast”.

In early October I reverse engineered a cuecat for giggles. And by the end of the month I had the data interface to the TINI-based PegaFloat system Pegasus made running. I also traded my Scarab to Dan in Virginia for a burgundy 1991 Chevy Caprice, which gave us a more economical option from Zeze’s monster truck.

A few days later I had the UDP data server for the Ships Data Repeater (SDR) running. And on Nov 8th 2000 the PegaFloat and Ships Data Repeater (SDR) demo website was running from 64.0.93.82 – the DSL connection we had on the boat.

On November 5th Zeze and I spend a day at the Baltimore Zoo.

On November 26th the prototyping for the PegaMast began, and we started buying tools and parts for the project.

2001

In December I invited a friend of mine from England to come give us a hand with the DMV project, and have a bit of a vacation while he was here. Geoff was an amazing electrical engineer, and helped with some of the motor controls on the mast. He arrives in early January, and while he was state-side I took him to see the horses and the B&O museum there in Baltimore on the 7th, 8th, and 9th of January.

On February 8th we purchased the final parts needed to make the DMV camera, and we assembled the first prototypes on the kitchen table on the yacht. By late February the prototypes were done, the late beta firmware was loaded, and Zeze and I headed up to RMA’s office near Boston in my Caprice to show it off.

A few days later, on March 4th, Zeze and start the drive back to Baltimore. On the way I drive through Framingham, stopping at Fun and Games for old time’s sake. And then I take us down through New London for more strolling down memory lane.

On March 20th the finished PegaMast boards arrived from fabrication…

And April was mostly filled with flying around to install the system at DMVs in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Ohio.

In May we discovered that the DMV project had become the last hurrah for RMA, and we started to get conflicting information from Richard, Mike, and Ronald as to what was going to happen with them (and in turn, us).

In June Richard, who sat on the board of Marianapolis Preparatory School in Connecticut, asked us to help out the school with an internet upgrade to a fractional T1. Zeze and Pegasus headed to Connecticut for a few days to get it all working, and when they got back Pegasus decided to move to England to live with Geoff. Pegasus left the Starchaser to Zeze and Zeze’s ex on his way out…

Steve Bliss, the head-honcho of the school in Connecticut, asked Zeze and I to return and spend the summer upgrading the school’s computers in both the computer lab and the dormitories, and while we were at it, network the various buildings on the school grounds.

Being as Marianapolis was a boarding school and it was the summer, most of the students and faculty were gone. So, Steve offered to put us up in one of the wings of “St. John’s” dormatory, on the condition that we’re okay with looking after a couple of summer students who were still there.

Zeze and I agreed to go while Zeze’s ex would stay on the yacht until they could either get a job and live there or do something with it.

On July 10th I made the last entries into the PFM financial database, made a backup of everything that was on my computer, and then threw everything I thought I would need for the summer into the trunk of the Caprice…

In June I landed at Dulles International where Zeze picked me up and, after a week of helping their family move, I arrived at my new home in the back woods of Virginia.

Everything I’d shipped from Colorado was there, and I got all of my systems back up and running in short order… The problem was the new farm was so far out in the boonies the best we could get was a couple of phonelines, and 14.4kbps at best on those… So, I started figuring out how to fix this.

I quickly landed a job at Amerind in Alexandria, where Zeze was already working, and was put to work doing things like converting the coast guard’s internal systems at the Pentagon from Banyan Vines to Novell, or flying out to Ohio to work on a database project for the US Army.

Things quickly evened out for us – it was Zeze and I working at Amerind and Zeze’s ex working for “American Photobooth” (APBI) also in Alexandria. All told it was Zeze and Zeze’s family on one end of the house and myself on the other end, three horses, two dogs, two cats, and assorted chickens on a 40-acre bit of paradise in the deep woods of Virginia.

In September Zeze and I were approached to see if we could fix the issues APBI was having with their Generation One “Sticker Station”. I got turned loose on the spaghetti code in the Gen 1 and had it literally re-written in a weekend, creating “Gen 2”.

The owner of APBI, Sam Attenberg, was impressed and set up a meeting with Zeze and I where he asks “What could you do with an unlimited budget?”

I started going on about live chromakey of a full-motion subject based on the stuff I used to do on the Amiga with a video toaster, and I wanted to use network connectivity to allow for the rotation of new backgrounds without having to actually go to the machine… Zeze chimes in with miniaturized dye-sublimation printing technology being demoed by Fujitsu.

We left that meeting with employment contracts and a virtually unlimited budget to create the Generation Three “Sticker Station” … A system that would briefly become the most advanced vending machine on the planet.

The hitch was we would have one year to build it, starting January 1, 1998.

Given the numbers involved (and the prospect of not having to drive 150 miles a day round trip to Alexandria), Zeze and I tendered our resignations from Amerind and began using UniGraphix temporarily for our contract work. I also run the numbers and decided that having a T1 trenched in from Orange (the nearest hi-cap switch) was a no-brainer, so I set that up… It would be a mere $8000 installation and $2200 a month.

But, while Zeze and I were really good at what we did, we knew we would need a low-level programmer to do some driver stuff for the various bits of hardware involved… Conveniently, a fellow Zeze knew from FurryMuck – Pegasus – was an amazing low-level programmer and circuit designer, and was working on selling his ISP in Tennessee. He also said he was looking for something new to do.

We explained the project to him, and in October he came out to visit and to get a feel for what we were up to.

In November Zeze and I were sent to the “International Association of Amusements Parks and Attractions” (IAAPA) show in Florida to support the Gen 2 machine – and do research on what other vending machine companies were planning.

Zeze made connections with a cabinet manufacturer and some other parts vendors while I did a couple of live updates on the Gen 2 codebase before the show to give out free prints.

I did get to see the show though. IAAPA was basically the tradeshow for Willey Wonka – it was amazing.

1998

1998 arrived and the countdown began.

Zeze and I put on our game faces by taking two weeks to drive from Virginia to California and back to run UniGraphix one last time at “ConFurence 9” from January 15th to the 18th in Buena Park, California. We arrived a day early just so we could walk Disney Land…

We returned to the farm in late January by way of Colorado, where I picked up everything that I didn’t ship last year.

We turned the first two of our six garage bays into the workshop for the Gen 3 hardware, and the sunroom into the software development room – and I got the touchscreen UI and some of the core portions of Gen 3 running by mid-February.

The T1 into my bedroom was also completed at this time – nice birthday present!

Zeze started spending time in St. Louis in March, working with the new cabinet maker to get the mechanical parts of the design in a prototype state. Pegasus drove to St. Louis while Zeze was there and helped out with drivers for the mechanicals.

On March 25th, Widget (Frencheska x Thing) was born.

Collectively we busted our asses for the next six months; Zeze worked on the mechanical aspects of the system like case, touchscreen, camera tilt mechanism, and internal wiring and layout. Pegasus and I worked on the code – me from there on the farm and Pegasus from Tennessee. Pegasus did come out and visit a few times, eventually planning to move to the farm in ’99.

When September rolled around we were about 99% done with Gen 3. The mechanicals were in production and the code was waiting on a driver from Sony for the custom dye-sub printers.

Zeze and I took a breather and headed to ConiFur NW in Washington state, September 4-6, 1998. The convention was run by Flinters, an old friend, so it was nice to go bum around with him for a weekend and decompress.

According to my code archive I sent the final 1.0 code to production on September 23^rd. Which means we were officially “done” two months ahead of schedule and under budget.

And to thank us for all of that hard work – by Thanksgiving there was a rumor that APBI was being prepped for sale to FotoFantasy…

Zeze and I were listed as company assets and keeping us on for at least a year was a stipulation of the sale. While this was interesting, I was frankly tired of having my work sold out from under me.

1999

Pegasus sold his ISP in December and suddenly became very flush with cash… He moved to the farm in January, and noting that the farm was a short jaunt from the Chesapeake Bay he started shopping for a yacht…

He’d always wanted a really big boat he could live on, and now he had the opportunity. So, he and Zeze spent the month of January yacht shopping, eventually locating a 47-foot 1967 Chris Craft “Commander” in Baltimore.

In February we were approached by Ronald Massa Associates (RMA), who we used as a source for the Targa image capture boards and Sony cameras we used in the Gen 3, to see if we would be interested in developing a digital signage system for ADT’s use in airports. We looked over the project requirements and, being as it was pretty simple (sending still images to a monitor over a network), decided to add it to the plate. I started work on it on February 10th, calling it “Arch View”.

Pegasus purchased the Chris Commander, christened it “StarChaser” (I called it PegaBoat to keep with the tongue-in-cheek naming convention we used for anything Pegasus worked on), and he and Zeze started fixing up the boat as the 1999 handyman project. The boat spent several months in Baltimore getting the engines worked on and the hull repainted.

FotoFantasy purchases APBI on February 19th, 1999. With the purchase of APBI we were now working for a different company based out of Hew Hampshire.

As far as I could tell, the purchase was to do three things: put APBI out of business, acquire APBI’s patents, and acquire APBI’s location portfolio. FotoFantasy still had to honor the orders for the Gen 3 though, so we still had some spot work tuning up the codebase and adjusting the hardware spec as little issues cropped up here and there throughout 1999.

We come up with a name and incorporate to cover ourselves with the contract work it looks like we’ll be doing. PFM Technologies was formed, I banged out a logo for it, and the domain was set up (pfmtek.com).

In March I acquired my 28 foot Scarab off-shore racer. My boat came with a three axel trailer and the guy selling it was also selling the truck he built to haul it around; a red 1991 Ford F350 4-door long-bed dually… Zeze bought the truck.

On April 12th Arch View Version 1 was finished and I sent it off. And on the 19th of May, 1999, Gen 3 systems are loaded with licensed imagery for the opening of “The Phantom Menace”.

Zeze, Pegasus, and I went to Kings Dominion on June 6th and rode rollercoasters until we couldn’t see straight.

On June 21st of 1999 I was in England on FotoFantasy’s dime to assist with the setup of an international order for Gen 3 systems for the UK. This involved a few minor tweaks to the code for the coinage and disabling the network systems as they didn’t have the service in the UK.

While there I palled around for a week with Geoff and Matthew whom I’d known on the internet for a few years.

And I rode more rollercoasters until I couldn’t see straight…

When July rolled around, RMA checked to see if we could build a digital video recorder that would replace the analog 7-day VCRs used by casinos. Of course we could! Pegasus started inventing a video storage format (PegaVideo Format – PVF) and Zeze started working on the design for DVR servers.

In August RMA returned with the requirements for ADT’s “Arch View 2.0”… This time it would be four large HD LCD TVs mounted in portrait and they would need to be run from a single programmable controller accessible over LAN. Each TV had to show 30 second full-motion video signs for travel alerts, security directions, etc. on a rotating basis with up to six separate images played in succession.

I got started on it…

In November we were contacted by a gentleman in Amsterdam who purchased 18 Gen3 systems. He told us that FotoFantasy was not going to continue Gen 3 production, sales, or support – so he was on his own. He wanted to contract us to come out and adjust the software to support the local currency as well as localize the software.

The “Arch View 2.0” project was finalized and sent off to RMA on November 20th 1999.

Six days later, on November 26th of 1999 I was in Amsterdam to work on the Gen 3’s purchased by the Benelux company.

It was pretty easy and I got it done and tested in a day. While I was there I removed the royalty code so that his systems aren’t reporting their sales numbers to FotoFantasy – if they aren’t supporting him, I assume they don’t need his money either.

I then spent the rest of the week in Amsterdam being a tourist:

But, all good things must come to an end… On the 3rd of December FotoFantasy had a conference call with us to tell us that, due to discontinuing the Gen 3 product line, our services would no longer be required after February.

We got ahold of RMA and explained the situation, they said they had a few things in the pipeline that should have big payoffs – and we agree to take any projects they have. They mention a portable digital x-ray system that’s in the works – we say we’ll take it.

I get started on that portable digital X-ray system (DVX) for “Innovative Digital Solutions Inc” (IDSI).

2000

We survived the 2K “Clock Apocalypse”; no planes fell out of the sky, no satellites burned up on reentry, the robots didn’t rebel… It was actually kind of a letdown after the 24/7 media fearmongering that went on for a year.

I sent off the demo code for the X-ray project (DVX) on January 31st, 2000 for client approval. And in February RMA sent us another proposal from ADT; this time they wanted a video recorder that could trigger an alarm if something moved from left to right while everything else in the field of view was moving right to left…

This was intended to be part of an airport security system that could catch people or objects like a tossed weapon moving backwards through an exit gate… Pegasus started on the new ADT project and I put rihahn.com online to take a few art commissions.

On March 2nd we delivered the finalized DVR hardware and software to RMA (DVR Xpress, which used Pegasus’ custom PVF video format and wavelet compression routines). It had been through five revisions as the goalposts moved around – but we still managed to score a touchdown.

RMA had another project brewing that required our expertise; an automated submersible for Woods Hole Oceanographic that would count plankton in a water column, untethered, for months at a time… And we get started on it.

Aryntha and their brother came out to visit the farm on March 25th, and we tooled around looking at old AT&T microwave towers…

In late March the fellow we were buying the farm from has decided he doesn’t want to sell anymore, and he gave us 90 days to move out… So, we got a 15’x30’ storage unit in Fredericksburg and started moving stuff into it in preparation for finding a new place to live.

We looked at some other farms for a bit before Pegasus said “Why don’t we just live on the StarChaser for a year or two and save up for something really nice?” So, we eventually settled on moving Pegasus’ boat back to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor… Baltimore was close to DC, where all of our projects were coming from, and the berth rent was super cheap at around $300 a month.

The StarChaser had been mostly revamped over the last year and housed about $30,000 in radios, radar, navigation and other seafaring gizmos. One of the things all of this hardware did was talk NMEA over a can bus – which meant I could do things with it – so I started researching NMEA format communications with the intent of putting the boat on the Internet. (Basically IoT a decade before IoT)

In May I gave Pegasus my beautiful hot-rodded 1967 Mustang. I figured I wouldn’t be needing a car in Baltimore and he’d been lusting after the Mustang since he moved in, so it became my way of saying ‘thank you’ for putting a roof over my head on his yacht.

A week later a herd of deer charged across highway 20 into Fredericksburg while Pegasus is doing about 60, and totaled the Mustang – the car was sold for parts.

Anyway, the spare change we had went into the 200-gallon diesel tank for StarChaser as well as the assorted fees / payments to get it set up in Baltimore. Zeze and Pegasus moved her from Hampden Roads up the Chesapeake to Baltimore; It was 90 miles at 10 knots, so it took a while.

I met them at Harborview with Zeze’s truck full of stuff. We tied up the boat, got the shore connections set up, and started moving in…

In life, success tends to be equal parts effort, timing, and luck – I generally have none of the second two and therefore try to make up for it with excessive amounts of the first.

Looking back, we can see that in late 1990 a recession and massive unemployment had arrived on the scene…

So, naturally, this is when I decided it was a good time to restart my life in the ‘real world’.

Spoiler alert: Everything in my life seriously sucked until the end of 1993…

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We arrived at my parent’s place in Longmont in early November 1990 without issue and I quickly landed a job in QA at PrarieTEK, working on 2.5″ hard drives, but things with my parents were pretty tense…

1991

So in January of 1991 I found a room for rent and moved my ex and I there.

The end of January is when PrarieTek started laying everyone off and I was told I had work through the end of February… So it was back to pounding the pavement – but Longmont was being hit hard by the economic situation and we needed to make it to Denver somehow.

We attended Genghis Con XII on February 15-17, 1991 at the Sheraton in Lakewood.

My ex made friends with a very nice lady selling handmade fantasy garb in the dealer’s room, and she trades a couple of on-the-spot drawings for a circle cloak with unicorn clasps for me.

At the end of the show we all had dinner to discuss a business proposition; convention sales.

I explained the complexities of our situation and they offered us a spare room at their place in Aurora in exchange for my ex making art to sell and helping make garb, and me helping run the business and getting the books in order. See, our business partner’s husband worked full time for an airline and didn’t have time anymore to go convention hopping for fun and profit.

We took them up on this, and a week later we have moved from a tiny room in Longmont to a slightly larger room in east Aurora.

Between March and August I attend a few conventions:

• SCA 25th year celebration in Texas – March 21-31, 1991
• I-CON in New York – April 19-21, 1991

While I was away at these conventions, my ex had hooked up with a couple of guys across town… So she was absent when I saw the Yes “Union” tour at BigMac in Denver on May 9th, 1991.

Soon enough though, it was time to hit the road again. And the next convention was NOSFFF in Louisiana – June 14-16, 1991. And while I was away in Louisiana my ex had moved in with the above guys.

Right after I got back from New Orleans I discovered this state of affairs, but decided that if that’s how it was going to play out, I’d just leave her to her designs… But a couple of weeks later one of the guys she’d shacked up with got mad and discharged a firearm in the apartment, and she called in tears, terrified… So I rode to the rescue…

She was apologetic, and said she was lonely with me being on the road and it ‘just happened’.

I believed her…

So, I quit the convention gig and then spent what little money I had saved getting us another room with a couple of folks in an old house at 1865 S Federal Blvd.

It was here that I worked probably a dozen different day jobs while scouring the Denver metro area for full-time work. We were just barely scraping by, and we ate more dollar store soup than I’d like to admit over the next month or two.

My ex went with our roommates to StarCon on September 27-29, 1991, and she returned with more fans; Wolf, Lyon, Lynx, and JJ. I was working in a call center, third shift, so I couldn’t go to the convention.

The economy still sucked and in mid-October both of our roommates were laid off and they both immediately bailed, leaving me responsible for a house I couldn’t afford… So, we had to move out as well at the end of October – but without anyplace else to go…

This resulted in sleeping in the truck with all of our worldly belongings for a night until JJ took us in for a few days, and then Wolf took us in long-term.

We spent the holidays with Wolf and her two daughters. My ex got the couch, I slept on the floor, and I continued to try desperately to get some work in the economic hellscape that was the early 90’s.

For November and December I scoured the papers, made phone calls, and delivered resumes during the day and played handyman around Wolf’s condo at night – fixing the dishwasher, the oven, the furnace, whatever. My ex entertained folks in the evenings when the clan would gather in Wolf’s living room for the next chapter of the game my ex was running.

Eventually my persistence paid off and I landed a job at EDCON across town in December. The job was working gravity and magnetic survey equipment on oil company seismic ships, which wasn’t too terribly different than the gravimetric navigation systems on a submarine – something I qualified on while on the 735.

1992

The job at EDCON paid well – like $40,000 a year well – but it had a requirement of being at sea for 2-4 months at a shot. Of course, I’d be off for 2-4 months after each tour, just like being on a sub, so it wasn’t too bad in my opinion.

My ex assured me that with Wolf and the gang she wouldn’t wander off again, so I took the job… And I started training on the LaCoste and Romberg gravitometer in mid-January while my passport was finished.

The job also had a $2000 signing bonus, so I rented a condo upstairs from Wolf’s place on Exposition Ave (#254), so my ex would have someone close by to lean on if required, and picked up an arrest-me-red 1988 300 ZX turbo to replace the truck.

I was promptly pulled over on Highway 36, on February 22nd 1992, for going unbelievably fast… The citation said “Speeding 10-19 over limit” – but that was the officer being really nice to me because I pulled over and waited the minute or so for him to catch up… JJ finally got to drive the Z because the officer forbade me from driving any more that evening.

My passport came in on the 3rd of March 1992, and on March 22nd I was on a plane to Mersin Turkey out of Chicago O’Hare.

I returned in mid-May to everything seeming to be okay; my ex was still around and everyone else was still in one piece.

Things were pretty amazing while I was off, but soon enough it was time to head back out; and in July I left for the Gulf of Mexico.

In Late July I contacted Wolf via sat-phone for a check-in and was told that my ex had not only hooked back up with an old navy acquaintance of mine but had drained my accounts to buy him a new Honda and move him out to Colorado. In the process she had moved out of the place we had upstairs from Wolf’s place, rented an apartment across the street from Wolf’s condo, and shacked up with her new beau.

I got to spend the next month fuming over this while I was stuck on a seismic boat in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.

I returned in September to my ex being repentant for cheating on me, again, but now she was insistent on having an ‘open relationship’ where she could see other people while I was away – because she was lonely.

Yeah – that didn’t work for me.

Anyway, with the fighting and frustration over this my ex ran off with Mr. Right Now, to California, leaving me in ashes. Right after this EDCON decided to lay me off and I was once again looking for work.

In October I sold the 300ZX and acquired a gold rattle-trap mid-70’s Ford LTD that I was using for part-time day jobs. I’d been doing things like fixing windowsills, concrete work to support plumbing upgrades on office rework, and over the holidays I was driving around hanging decorations at strip malls.

And during all of this I was still pounding the pavement looking for steady full-time employment, but there just wasn’t much to be had.

1993

In January my ex managed to get ahold of Wolf and explain how distraught she was; they had run out of my money and had been holed up in some flea trap motel in Barstow California for a couple of weeks. And her glasses were broken, and she couldn’t afford her contacts, so she was effectively blind.

Wolf agonized over even telling me because she knew I’d jump on my horse and ride off to rescue my ex yet again – but she eventually did, and I did…

My LTD wouldn’t make the trip, so I borrowed a friend’s newer Hyundai and made for Barstow. I arrived, collected my ex and what few things she still had, and headed back to Colorado.

On the way back the Hyundai died – it threw the timing belt on the long I-15 hill out of California into Nevada, and we became stranded in the parking lot of Buffalo Bill’s Casino in Primm Nevada.

Wolf arrived to rescue us, we abandoned the Hyundai after cleaning it out, and I added replacing a car to the list of things I needed to do.

Me ex was once again repentant for running off and said she had learned her lesson and that things would be better…

I believed her…

About a month later I landed a maintenance position with D.C. Burns, the company who owned Townview Plaza – a 120-unit collection of low-income 1, 2, and 3-bedroom apartments at the corner of Colfax and Federal in Denver. Part of the building maintenance position was actually living on the property, so I moved my ex and I into a third floor 2-bedroom apartment at 3131 W. 16th ave.

Things at Townview were pretty nice, even if I was extremely overqualified to be replacing burners on thirty-year-old electric ranges and swapping worn faucet seats. I wasn’t making much money, but the rent was part of my pay so that wasn’t a worry any longer.

Townview was across the street from Mile High Stadium, so we had a towing company come in on weekends and haul out the freeloaders. I quickly got to know the owner of the towing company, who also owned two used car lots, and he let me have anything on the lot for cost… This led to getting a replacement for the Hyundai that died rescuing my ex, and I traded the LTD wagon for that Fiat X-1/9 I drove around for a while.

Things were looking pretty good, so, as one should expect at this point, things went south again with my ex… In April she got into marijuana, a month later, in May, she started seeing her supplier, a psychology student at DU, and by early June had moved out to live with her supplier.

While all of this was going on, I had gotten into the local BBS scene and on June 16th, 1993 I landed on “Empire of the Dragon” run by Aryntha. I was still using the Amiga 500 I bought back in New London, but it was now the “Franken Amiga” due to all of the modification I’d done to it; upgraded CPU, extra chip and fast memory, bodged hard drive controller and 40meg HD, new higher density floppy drives, the ‘fat’ Agnes chip for improved graphics, etc., etc.

I visited with my ex a couple of times in July at their apartment over on Havana and Mississippi, but I’d finally learned my lesson and washed my hands of her and left her to her own devices.

In August, a friend of mine named Wulfer had recently become unemployed and had run out of savings to keep his rent paid. So, I offered him the second bedroom at my place.

I went with Wulfer to see Jethro Tull at Fiddler’s Green on September 14th, 1993.

By October Wulfer had landed a third-shift assembly job at Intelligent Electronics over in Commerce City.

1994

The first half of 1994 was filled with hanging out with folks from the BBS scene… We did a lot of crazy stuff and, long story short, the powers that be favor the bold and the idiots – and we were equal parts both.

The Fiat had vapor-lock issues when the days got warmer, and it was eventually replaced with an orange 81′ VW rabbit that I got in trade for a one gigabyte HD (seriously). And when the rabbit died two months later it was replaced with a burgundy 1984 Mercury Marquis.

During this period the Amiga was replaced with a Pentium-based PC, and the Amiga went on to live in Addox’s basement. The first setup for Silicon Psychosis, my BBS, happened on that Pentium.

On June 18th, 1994, Aryntha from EOTD and I attended the Pink Floyd “Division Bell” tour at Mile High stadium; it was pretty amazing.

In August, Wulfer mentions that I.E. is looking for more people and that I should put in a resume… I did, and I was basically hired on the spot. So, I gave my two weeks notice to Townview.

The apartment at Townview was conditional on working there, and I wanted to be closer to work, so I started looking at apartments in Aurora – and by the end of September I’d moved to a mobile home in Aurora and had started over.

The trailer was a small 60’s era one-bedroom single-wide that I got for a rent-to-own deal – and once again I had the living room as a bedroom while Wulfer had the bedroom at the back.

I started at I.E. working 3rd shift assembly for IBM’s EduQuest line, and two weeks later I was a line supervisor. And by mid-October I was in charge of Q.A. for the EduQuest line.

As I moved up the ranks my pay increased, which freed up funds for high tech toys. One such toy was the first TV I’d had since I left New London. I promptly caught up on “Babylon 5” which was in its second season.

1995

By 1995 I’d moved into I.T. at Intelligent Electronics and was reporting to the department head. I was designing huge file server setups and cutting-edge network topologies, and working with system architectures from companies like Sun Microsystems, Compaq, IBM, HP, and others.

At home I was getting into some rather esoteric computer systems. My living room / bedroom was full of odd machines like a PowerMac 8100/100, an HP9000 C110, a DEC AlphaStation, and even an SGI Indy.

I also started the groundwork for “Infinity Web Design” in early ’95. IWD never really went anywhere, but I learned a ton about HTML and graphic design.

While I was still active in the local BBS scene, I was also spending a lot of time on “FurryMuck” as well, creating text-based worlds and adventures. This was where I meet Zeze in February of ’95.

Zeze and I got to talking about conventions and whatnot; Zeze ran “UniGraphix” which traveled from show-to-show selling prints and art services. I used to run a similar company doing similar things, so we were able to commiserate.

In March of 1995 I have ISDN installed at the trailer, and get 128kbps service in my bedroom. I’d also sold the Mercury and bought a 67 VW Beetle as a new project car.

In April I got hired away from Intelligent Electronics by a local computer shop called Action Computers. I was brought in to start their computer repair business, as was Chimles from EOTD. Together we spent the next six months basically building Action Computers for Mark and Allen, the two guys who own the place.

It was while working at Action that I met Larry in July of ’95. Larry had stacks of Compaq servers that he wanted to mesh together with a hypervisor for ‘reasons’, and had discovered I could make those plans come to fruition. Due to this he spent a lot of time in the store picking my brain…

1996

In January I was contacted by I.E. to come take over their Denver network operations, I bail on Action and go back to I.E. and 1996 passes with me building some really cutting-edge services for I.E.

I wrote “Intellitrack”, the warehouse management system they used, created the data interchange and conversion systems they used to talk to IBM’s proprietary systems over X.25, the imaging system that was used to flash customer configurations on the assembly lines, and the data storage and server system that made it all happen.

In June I picked up a 1974 Porsche 914 as a replacement for the VW, but wound up keeping both of them in the driveway while Wulfer’s Wagoneer was relegated to sitting on the street.

In October the Blizzard of ’96 hit, and this is of course when I figured it was a good idea to go to ConFURence East in Cleveland Ohio to actually meet Zeze, Zeze’s ex, Jeff, and his wife Ronie who were also part of UniGraphix.

I landed in Ohio on November 15^th in the middle of another blizzard, met a ton of very nice people, and then returned to Colorado for another pleasant holiday season at home.

1997

November was so much fun that I flew out to Buena Park California to attend ConFurence 8 with the UniGraphix team on January 16-19, 1997.

It, too, was a lot of fun and we decided that we should do this every year.

In February though, rumors began to circulate at Intelligent Electronics about the company being sold. And on March 28^th the rumor becomes true; Ingram Micro was going to make an offer to buy I.E., and if Ingram Micro did buy the company, I’d have a choice of moving to Memphis or finding another job.

I talked to Zeze and they offered to put me up if I wanted to fly out to D.C. and see what the job market looks like out there. So, on the following Monday after the announcement I took a week’s vacation to fly out to Maryland… Everything looked good, and Zeze told me I was free to use their spare room as long as needed.

So, I flew back to Denver and started the process of moving back to the East Coast…

Over the next month I sold my VW Beetle and my Porsche 914, boxed up and shipped anything I deemed essential to Zeze, and signed over the trailer to Wulfer.

While closing down operations at I.E., in May, the department head handed me two trays of 200Mhz 512K Pentium Pros while I was at my car one evening, stating those were my severance because “the assholes in corporate got their payday and no one outside of C-level was going to get anything”. I started to respond, and he just held up a hand and walked away.

200Mhz Pentium Pros sold for about a thousand dollars each in 1997, which meant I had about $16,000 in CPUs. So, I sent a bunch of them to Zeze who sold them in D.C. and they used that money to move their farm from Maryland to Rhoadesville Virginia.