Apr 082010
 

Apologies to Lerner and Loewe, but I did it! And then I did it again — better! Believe it or not, I’ve actually been programming — on and mostly off — since the days of Fortran and punchcards. Around 1970, when I was till in high school, I got my first taste of computing when a big honking mainframe and its operator — wish I could remember that fellow’s name — set up shop in a small classroom off the upperclass hallway.  I spent a bunch of my free time noodling around with it, learning Fortran — functions, routines, coding. What I mostly remember is the fat stacks of cards required to do even the most basic things. The operator told me I had a knack for programming and should consider pursuing it in college. Around the same time another operator in a school in Seattle told a guy named Bill Gates the same thing.  Guess who took the advice? A few years later, when I was in college, I spent the summer working for a bank and wound up overseeing the conversion of their personnel records from typed logs to computer files.  Again the computer guru in charge of the project told me I had an aptitude for programming and suggested I pursue it in graduate school. (The English major? Right!) Fast forward to the 1990s and I’ve got one of the first author webpages around. And the computer guru who built it told me…you get the picture.  Fast forward to 2008, when I decided to actually erect a webpage on my domain and my computer guru was nowhere to be found. I did it myself. Ditto this year when I decided the time had come to convert that page to this blog. Did it again — better.  Today I’ve finished my TRAVEL page — the text and photos for each story actually fit inside the little whosits — and in the next week or so I’ll have live links to the rest of the stories. After that I’ll tweak the NOVELS page a bit more and add more stories — and a few awards — on NEWS. Finally, I’ll add a few notes on writing and mystery on ABOUT. After which I will have done ALL of it. Again!