the mousepad

The Mousepad

Welcome to my website. Most of the time when folks I know In Real Life find this site they come back and say, "dude you're pretty weird". Ok. I already knew that.

Assorted rants
I'm basically apolitical, although I've been known to have a few oddball opinions and rants. And I am frequently wrong.
And I seem to have struck some nerves with my pages on getting and giving good tech support.

vices and hobbies
My main hobby is collecting and listening to Old Time Radio (OTR), especially the CBS Radio Mystery Theater. I also brew my own beer.
When I get too pasty and vitamin D deprived I go outside and do some geocaching with a GPS and a Palm PDA or plink at some targets. It's ok; I'm licensed. Sometimes I geocache on a Suzuki DR650 dualsport thumper.
I am particularly pleased with a few well-designed and well-made objects like my beloved thermos. I also pay peculiarly close attention to the shapes of Cheetohs and popcorn.

about this site and the 'net
This website is pretty much a mess, but I'm in the middle of a conversion to xhtml/css layouts. I'm starting with the pages mentioned in the menus and working outwards from there.
I really hate the whole this site optimized for [FITB], but I do have a couple of browser preferences.
I spend most of my time on the newsgroups, where there is much goodness and many borderline illiterates.
Search engines seem to send people here for some pretty odd reasons, and spammers seem to hang around, too.
I have given up the ghost on some old pages. Don't expect them to load completely or correctly.

behold my geekiness
People laugh and stare at my large, oldschool GSM phone, a Ericsson r520m. That's ok, the scoffers chicklet phones still don't do bluetooth, IR, and allow almost all settings to be tweaked. PGP massively parallel computing
I timeshift TV with TiVo and radio (mainly the local DFW NPR affiliate KERA 90.1) with an FM tuner card. I also do a lot of scanner/radio geek stuff, and am a amateur radio operator (ham, kb5yyl)..

changework
This is the real marrow of the story, the heart of my experience.
From books that changed my life starting at an early age to my army service in Schwaebisch Gmuend (Pershing II base in the former FRG, where my daughter was born) to my time spent with a mentor that started the ball really rolling.
I learned about religious toleration, living a life of light toward others, learning what I was looking for in a woman, things on my lifelong "to do" list.
I learned that I love to teach; it is rewarding, challenging, and people tell you each week what kind of difference you made in their lives.
I learned that I prefer to work with civil people who are self-aware and at least nominally educated. I pulled myself up out of the trailer park so I could minimize contact with the glurge swillers, the evangelists, the abusive and the incivil.
I have learned that a good wife and a good dog, productive work, and a running car are very nearly all I need to survive. Right now, my daily driver is a 1996 Mazda Protege DX.

Misc
I like this section, and I'm glad you read far down enough to get to it. It's got some weird-ass lost and found notes that I've scanned/typed for the amazement of all, an explanation of why I spell my name with a lowercase j and the origins of the whole mouse theme.
There are pics from our last vacation to Mexico in 2004 and also from a cemetery that's on my family's land in east texas.
And here are some words I like.

This page best viewed with a monitor.

You can if you are not a spammer.

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