Hello, jdow!

[jdow]

From: "George Bond" <gbond13 at gmail.com>

> Joanne,
> 
> How are you? It's been years since we corresponded. I just came across
> you in the fedora-list. What are you doing? Where are you? Over the
> years, every time I've come across something relating to Ataris I
> thought of you on BIX.
> 
> George Bond
> 
> PS: As the mother of Bixies, you must be amazed at what they have
> transmuted into. g

Heh - actually it was Amigas and me. Ataris - that was someone else.
And as the main transmuter - well, nothing surprises me. Although I hear
the Japanese prefer the BiXie shape rather than the usual smiley. They
can't perceive the face in " 8-) " or something. At least, that is what
I read somewhere and didn't quite believe.

What am I doing.... On so MANY levels.... I am currently sitting in a
chair and typing to someone I have not heard of in YEARS thinking he might
be amused to check out http://www.nlzero.com/. If you want I'll see if I
can get John to give you a comp for a month or so just to look at what
is left of anything CoSy. (It is readable via nntp now. But otherwise
it is an open source upgraded from a rather early CoSy source capture.
(It IS legally blessed by the original copyright holders.))

What am I doing.... Well, how does "still using too many parenthesis"
sound? {O,o}

I found my current partner on BIX some time after you were gone. Loren
was another Amiga fan. We started dating. And now we're together for
over a decade. He's a fellow I can rather respect as well as love. That
is rather nifty nice.

I'm also getting into ham radio and starting to mourn its demise via
creative misinterpretations of Part 15 FCC specifications for projects
that are not economically sound - like BPL.

I'm writing software for broadcast video hardware. (George Stephanopolous
uses a touch screen on his Sunday AM show. That's our equipment design.
I did the software for a small company called Spencer Technology over in
Burbank. I'm telecommuting from due North of the Ontario Airport tower.
Interesting irony there. I was pretty much due north of an airport in
Ontario Canada when I was an adolescent. Anyway, the equipment uses
Matrox DigiSuite video cards pushed pretty much to their limits and the
PCI bus limits.

I've grown sadder and wider - maybe a little wiser. I have an annoying
chronic health issue. But, I'm just getting on with it in spite of the
problem - it's a hearing and balance issue. The sense of humor is still
there. I can laugh about it. That's how I live through it. {^_-}

I've also grown a little Linuxy what with maintaining our firewall
and email receiver here. I am modestly adept with Linux. I've used a
lot of RedHat, left when the Fedora crowd started getting downright
nasty on their mailing list, and came back when Mandrake "lost it"
with their sudden expansions. A couple people have pi**ed me off
with their flip nastiness so I may go back to Mandrake. At least the
people on the Mandrake lists are nicer folks.

The money maker, though, is all built around W2K and XP. (I REALLY
wish XP was more stable for me. Explorer.exe seems to be allergic to
me or something. Both my laptop and development machine experience
explorer lockups in some form of buzz loop. I have ot kill it and
restart it. That leaves it a little unstable sometimes. So I generally
reboot. It's crazy that you should have to reboot any serious computer
in this day and age. <sigh> I even had Amigas stay up longer than XP
does for me.

And I'm sitting in a chair typing - while surrounded by a suite of about
20 computers, another dozen or so "gadgets" that connect to computers,
and some nice ham radio gear. And I'm anticipating the new Harry Potter
novel tomorrow.

So that's probably more than you thought you'd hear. But I'm still
around and as ornery as ever.

So what've you been doing all these years?
{^_^}