March Madness Is Coming

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It's been a rough day. I had trouble sleeping last night. It's unusual. Probably has something to do with the stress associated with the job interview. I haven't had one in years. Don't want another, but if something appealing comes along I'll probably look into it.

It might have had something to do with me canceling my home phone and DSL account. They're gonna shut it down on the 15th. That may be why I woke up from a dream about an attractive young woman explaining how to use cell phones. Later, my brother came over to bring me the pair of glasses I'd lost a while back. His wife found them in the grass beside her greenhouse. He helped me program the family phone numbers into it.

I didn't know that I had to punch the letters of the names I wanted to enter by clicking the number of times the letters on the buttons appeared. That must be a feature of cell phones. Since I've never owned one all the things that veteran users take for granted I'll have to look stupid for a while to learn. It's all good.

As he was leaving he told me he had to do something about an account he keeps at GoDaddy.com. I asked him if he would help me set up an independent blog using one of their accounts. He does this sort of thing with aplomb. Interestingly, he told me he had an unlimited account that would allow me to set up an account for free.

I have four or five blogs that I have written on over the years. I'd like to import all the content on them to one site, and then figure out a way to use the total content to figure out how many times I've redundantly told the same stories. This blog was the first one I set up. It's got a history with me. The other sites were associated with the ISPs I've had.

It seems odd that they're all still online and the stuff I wrote years ago is still there. I've used lots of aliases because I wanted to write about stuff in a way that the people I wrote about wouldn't figure out that it was me. I figured I might write something telling about them, but eventually realized that what I actually wrote wasn't all that insulting as I thought it might be.

It may turn out that I could organize all that stuff on one site and use my legal name to publish it, and not have to worry about being sued for character defamation without changing or re-editing too much of it. I don't think many people interpret the events I write about in close enough proximity to what I thought happened to even know I was writing about them.

I'd have to use their name and I probably won't do that unless it's fairly complimentary. Currently, I don't think that white-washing what I've already written would make any difference. Since I usually write under pseudonyms they won't know it's them unless I tell them. Besides, many of those people never really learned how to use the internet anyway. It was literally "after their time."

It doesn't surprise me at our high school class reunions that many of my classmates didn't ever buy a computer and/or use the internet. Some of them literally state that they thought it was too late for them to learn something technical at their/our age. They're all in their early seventies now.

Of course, some of them had to learn to operate computers at their jobs, and they had savvy young people or their children at home to teach them if they could get over their nervousness about the learning curve. I was lucky my youngest brother learned to use the mainframe punch card system in the Air Force.

He was very eager to learn to use personal computers when they came out. He went to a Community College where they used Macs, and for the most part he's been loyal to Macs since the mid-Eighties. When he bought his first Mac, he brought the TS-80 he had over to my house and plunked it down.

He showed me how to boot it up and bring up the word processing program and left. I'm grateful to him for that. I was using an electric typewriter at the time, and when I realized that I could write what I had to say and correct all the typos before I sent it to the crude printer, I was sold.

I was not that great a typer back then. Since then, I've gotten a lot better. I had a battle royal with my father about taking the one year of typing I had in high school. He didn't think it was proper for men to do a secretaries work. I had ulterior motives for doing it. The class was practically all girls. What teenage boy wouldn't like that?

I've had the TV showing the Duke-Carolina basketball game on while I was writing this entry. It was the last regular season game for both of them and the ACC seasonal championship was on the line. I'm a Carolina fan, and was pleased they beat Duke handily.

That don't always happen. I'm actually more of a basketball coach fan than I am a player fan. I got that way watching Dean Smith coach. He and Coach K were really good rivals. When he retired and Carolina eventually got Roy Williams to return to his alma mater, the rivalry heated back up.

I've learned to appreciate Coach K even though he works for Duke. I don't really hate Duke. It's just a college basketball game and a fierce rivalry. I never attended either of these schools. These coaches are true gurus with deep spiritual values that really help their players learn about life. I should have been so lucky.

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