Life has been too busy lately to write here. Work and home and church eat up a considerable amount of time. My creative outlet lately has been webmastering; doing intranet stuff at Apple, and some playing with this site. I guess I've also written a few daily writings on my PowerBook. Nothing substantial.

I find the potential audience of these daily writings stifling to my creativity. I had hoped it wouldn't happen, but I just can't open up to what could be such a huge audience. The medium keeps drawing my attention to the technology, and the issue of privacy and security keep me thinking "oh, I guess I shouldn't write about that..." for many topics: family, work, etc. Of course, working at a large company, I'm under non-disclosure so I can't really talk about work. As far as home goes, I doubt you'd find much of it interesting, unless you happen to be a friend or relative reading this. I have made a sort of promise to avoid talking about Internet junque, so what does that leave?

And so you see why I haven't been writing here. When I have a topic, I'll be back.

February 23, 1996 11:52pm at home

I've decided to go ahead and get PPP access for my Mac from home. My current method of connecting from home is via RARA to work. Dennis showed me his connection and it was a lot faster than what I enjoy. Okay, bleah, enough talk of network protocols. You can read that anywhere on the 'net.

Of course, when I try to think of something to write about besides computers, the Internet or the weather, I draw a blank. I could write about politics, since Dole, Buchanan, Forbes, etc. are all vying for the post of President, but I won't. Well, although I'm neither a democrat nor a republican, I suppose I support Clinton. But I'm willing to look into the possibility of fresh blood.

The problem with writing here is that I'm enveloped in technology. I need to think of something to write about before I sit down here. This is useless.

February 18, 1996 1:50am at home

Exhaustion. I just finished updating the Wilmot home pages. I added some pictures and textures of the real actual Wilmot, thanks to a borrowed QuickTime Conferencing camera.

Morale at Apple has improved since Gil Amelio took over. And the press doesn't seem to be bashing us quite so hard. I still get relatives writing to see if my job is all right.

I haven't been writing Daily Writings either here (cyberspace) or at home (PowerBook). My creative energies have been flowing elsewhere I guess. But, considering most of the hits on my page have been me, I don't think I'm disappointing anyone. Goodnight.

January 28, 1996 4:10pm at home

Still working on these home pages. Today's San Jose Mercury News ripped into Apple again today. It's getting pretty old. I spoke to some friends today at church about the spin the press has put on Apple's latest restructuring, and the fact that Apple seems to be on the selling block. I think the fact that we're selling more computers than we ever have before, that we're the number one computer in schools, and still have a system that eclipses the competition should count for something. I recently bought a kid's "Living Book" called "Just Grandma and Me" The CD-ROM runs on both Macintosh and Windows machines. For Windows it comes with three brochures: "Windows 95 CD-ROM Installation and Troubleshooting Guide", "Windows Troubleshooting Guide" and a sheet labelled "Important" about installing on Windows. There are no special instructions for the Mac; you just stick it in the CD-ROM drive and double-click.

Egad, I'm talking about work. I should change the subject. But an alternate eludes me at the moment.

January 28, 1996 1:07am at home

Up late again, and for the Internet at that. I'm just updating my pages. Fixing the look. Making them feel more like home. It rained most of today, and Ginger was sick so we spent the day indoors at home. I guess it's been a peaceful day. And this is as good a time as any to go to sleep.

January 21, 1996 4:09pm at home

I have moved this to the "Daily Writings" page so that I can start using my regular homepage for biographical information, links, all the traditional home page stuff. Amazing how quickly traditions form, isn't it?

I just finished reading a very good book on the art of comics. It's called "Understanding Comics, the Invisible ARt" by Scott McCloud. Written as a long comic, of course. Unfortunately, I haven't really read comics (except for the newspaper) for several years, so I didn't have practical examples to apply it to. It's kind of hard to apply it to Daily Writings, except for the parts that apply to any expressive medium.

And, for what seems like the billionth time this Winter, I have a cold.

January 9, 1996 5:41pm at work

I just put counters on two of the Gold Bug home pages. The place to get info on adding counters to a home page is Web Counter. I guess I should add a counter to this page.

I shaved my beard off last night. I should update the picture to reflect the change. For the moment though, just imagine the above picture with less facial hair.

January 8, 1996 6:40pm

I'm working from home today, because I'm sick with a cold. I decided that if I didn't stay home, I'd get sicker, and I'd infect my coworkers. So here I am.

There's a blizzard in the East that they're calling "the Blizzard of 1996." Of course, it's only the eighth of January, so that's not saying much. But is sounds like Washington, DC is getting more snow than the Sierras have right now. We could use some. I lived in DC for 2 1/2 years and it never snowed more than a couple inches, usually twice each Winter. I remember the day we pulled into town and saw the large drifts of snow in the parking lots. It had melted from everywhere else. I was astounded that the parking lots smelled like mildew; it was a bad sign. The other thing that worried me was that the Californians I spoke to had all been there 10 years or more. "I don't know what happened," they would say, "time just slipped away." I vowed it would not happen to me. After 2 1/2 years, we packed everything up and drove back to the sunny state.

Naturally I would like this to be the blizzard of the century, because it would be fun watching it on the news. But I do hope it doesn't become a disaster. I still have friends out there.

We detrimmed the tree this weekend, and took down the lights. It's actually the fastest we've ever put the house back into its non-holiday state. I doubt if this means our lives are starting to be organized, but it could be one of the warning signs.

January 2, 1996 8:23pm

The screen is fuzzy because I'm not wearing my glasses. This didn't happen before I got glasses, but now it's normal. It's like wearing cotton, comforting and fuzzy. My keyboard doesn't like the letter "z", wanting to write "fuzy" every time, a lingering memory of the previous keyboard that slowly lost letter by letter until it was unuseable.

Anyway, I'm sitting by the fire, which isn't a fire yet, rather a bit of burning paper wrapped around an "environmentally friendly" duraflame. I remember when they came out, they promoted the fact that they burned a long time, and had lots of pretty colors. They were supposed to be a more convenient way to have a fire in your fireplace, but I always thought they were cheating. Now I like them, partly because they're better than burning smokey wood for the environment, partly because they're basically a big sideways candle with pretty colors, but mostly because they're a convenient way to have a fire in my fireplace.