Life Stories

“A life story covers an entire life.”

SUNDAY – 09 August 2009:

Okay, so there is a lot of time to cover with this one.

I have bits and pieces to add to this, which I have previously written…for now I will keep it to this introduction paragraph (or three) about myself.

At present, I am a home-based “freelance computer application specialist” — what does this mean?

A) I buy used items locally, and sell them on eBay.
B) I have done computer related jobs as a independent contractor.
C) I have many years of experience using computers.
D) ALL of the above and much, much more.

The best answer for the question is D, but any of them could be correct, depending on what projects I am currently working on.

How did I get to the point of being at the computer keyboard for most of my daily routine? There’s a long tale — guess it began when Mom took a friend of hers, me and my brother to Florida State in 1969. Mom’s friend went as a baby-sitter; but some days Mom would take my brother, Byron, and me with her to the Florida State campus. Fellow students would make a fuss over us “yuggins” — when Mom attended computer classes, other students told her, “leave the kids here, we won’t let anything happen to them.” AND they meant it!

Byron and I were still very young — I was 5, going on 6 — he is 2 years and 2 months older than me. Both of us knew how to read, write and do kid’s puzzle books (dot-to-dot). Many days were spend in the Florida State key-punch lab, typing (“hunt and peck”) with one or two fingers. We would have a huge stack of punch cards we had done — some with name, address, and other details — which we had typed up, when Mom got back from one of her classes.

Hundreds of those punch cards went back home to Sycamore, Alabama at the end of that summer. I think I may have one or two them tucked in a box somewhere…but it has been way too long since I looked for one.

No I did not use a computer during elementary or high school! The high school I attended my senior year, did not have a (TRS-80) computer lab until a year and a half after I had graduated (class of 1982) — get this…Mom was the instructor/teacher in charge of the introduction computing classes.

I will have to get back with you about my next encounter with a computer keyboard — details such as dates can be slippery if you do not have hand-written notes to go by.

I will say this — Microsoft Windows helped me realize that I could succeed in using and doing a bit of programming on a computer.

The Internet?

Ah, here is another facet of history loosely tied to Florida State — 1969, computer students were using what then was a “new technology” which allowed students to access other computer many miles away, via phone lines. I heard one tale that Florida State got into serious trouble for leaving the connectionactive overnight, after a class dismissed — would have hated to see that “access bill”.

My first encounter with the Internet?

Summer 1996 — the first thing I did was sign-up for an email account with Hotmail. I still have an account with them to this day.
Second thing I set about learning was how to post a webpage on Tripod.com.
Then, Tripod was set up where it would ‘walk you through’ the steps to building a webpage, as it used templates, then gave the HTML code it produced in a lower section — so the ‘writer’ could see the framework involved in making the page work.

Yes, I still has a Tripod site…it has changed greatly, but I still visit periodically, and update code — just so I don’t loose the ‘knack’, and to keep my site from getting stale.

[MORE to come... -- CAA]