Years ago, the first computer that I owned didn’t have a hard drive.

In fact, it didn’t even have a floppy drive.

Its operating system and the BASIC programming language were built into its chips, so it booted up almost instantly — and it came with a cord that I could use to connect it to a cassette tape recorder, to load and save any programs that I bought or wrote, and any data that I created. [more...]

I don’t know what that title means.

I’m guessing that it’s German, but Google translate thought that it was Italian — and couldn’t translate it into English for me, either way.

Anyway, lately, I’ve seen a commercial — I think it might be for an insurance company — that features a group of human performers, back-lit behind a large screen, forming the shadows of their bodies into [more...]

Regular readers of this Journal know that, because of an 1978 accident, I’m missing part of my brain.

It was a miracle that I survived that.

And that, in 2007, I had a stroke that killed another part of my brain.

Another miracle. [more...]

Would you care to dance?

We’ll get a whole group of people, and do an incredible-looking line dance.

It’ll be very simple — all you’ll have to do is repeatedly jog back and forth between two spots on the floor.

At a very specific speed. [more...]

I started teaching myself how to play the guitar at age 12.

When I was 20, I began working as a professional singer/songwriter/musician/performer.

427 concerts in 26 states, in about five years.

Now a new study says that [more...]

I have a baby face.

Most times, having a baby face is a blessing — like when a student thought that I was a little older than him.

But the combination of having a baby face and not having any children or grandchildren makes it very difficult for me to think of myself as being as old as I am.

So it’s often a shocking reminder of [more...]

In the early days of home computing, we called it ASCII art.

It consisted of surprisingly detailed pictures that people painstakingly created by juxtaposing letters, numbers and punctuation symbols.

I have no idea how the early ASCII artists had the skill, the eye or the patience to do it manually.

But I remember that, later on, you could [more...]

On June 13th, nine days from now, it will be the 33rd anniversary of the accident that took the front of my brain.

It doesn’t feel like more than three decades have passed since it happened.

Until I remember that it was one of my first adult traumas in a what became a lifelong series of them. [more...]