This Old Blog

While slumming the Internets this morning I came across the wonderful editorial on the New York Times website, " Slaves of the Internet, Unite! ", written by Tim Kreider (someone I'll have to start paying more attention to). In his wonderful editorial I linked to, out pops this one jewel among many: Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again. It’s especially hopeless for those whose work is easily digitized and accessed free of charge. I now contribute to some of the most prestigious online publications in the English-speaking world, for which I am paid the same amount as, if not less than, I was paid by my local alternative weekly when I sold my first piece of writing for print in 1989. More recently, I had the essay equivalent of a hit single — en...

Once upon a time, in a far more innocent era (the late 1990s), I had a personal website on Geocities along with a lot of other people. I'd been introduced to HTML and the web while working for Time Warner's Full Service Network (FSN) in 1996. The irony of that last statement is that Time Warner wanted nothing to do with the web, as they rightfully saw it as the ultimate destroyer of what they were trying to accomplish at the time with the FSN. But I stood up an early copy of Apache (version 1 vintage) on several SGI workstations, and showed management how to use the web and browsers to manage all the far-flung SGI hardware we had to manage at the time. In the end I took those hard-won learned skills with me to another company called MicroClinique and used them to help build a web front end for a project called Theater Telemedicine Prototype Project (T2P2) using Java and Microsoft technologies. In the mean time I discovered Geocities, and decided to set up a small personal w...

Polaroid of my past You're looking at something I'd completely forgotten about, something I built around 1980. It's a custom perf board I built on a slab of aircraft-grade aluminum, on which I wired a complete 6502-based embedded computer. It has 4,096 bytes of static RAM, 16K of EPROM (2716), a combo-peripheral chip that included two serial ports and two eight-bit-wide parallel I/O ports, a fully decoded keypad and a six digit display broken into four digits for an address and two for data, all in hex. I was proud of those displays. They were special HP multi-segmented alphanumeric displays that read ASCII bytes. I had them display hexadecimal and special words, and then got them to scroll text. Although the keypad looks like it will only handle hex digit input, I had added software so that if you held the key down it would give you a display of the function and an alt function. Primary and alt key functionality was toggled by the tiny switch on the top left. The cal...

I started documenting Orlando cemeteries again by stopping off at Lake Hill Cemetery. It's a rather large rambling place located at 5950 Old Winter Garden Road in Orlo Vista, on the south side of Old Winter Garden Road between South Kirkman and South Powers Drive. I stopped off to investigate this place well over a year ago. At that time it was in terrible shape; the sign over the gate had fallen down into a pile of rusted metal, and the rest of the cemetery was so overgrown that I only saw a few gravestones sticking above brush that choked the area. I left wondering what would happen to the area. Today I checked back in and it appears that a group has pulled together and is working to clean the place up. While I was there I saw someone on a lawn tractor cutting the grass on one side. The rest of the cemetery was mowed and in much better shape. I was able to see quite a few gravesites. There's very little online or in print about this cemetery. Walking around I found a few ...

I had planned to do a bit more exploration up and down SR-426, looking for the remains of Slavia , the community from the early 20th century for which the cemetery bears the same name. I found the old Martin Stano store, sitting empty and falling apart on 426, silently watching the traffic go past on the big five-lane road that SR-426 has become. I tried to stand in the same location that the unknown photography stood in to take the black and white in 1926. I almost got it right. It was an old Florida combination general store and gas station, which would have been handy in that area back in those days. The gas island is still there but the gas pump is long since gone and the plumbing that once led to a storage tank filled over. Yes, that's a National Trust for Historic Preservation sticker on the front door. Does that mean it's part of the trust? I don't know. I would have thought that some stranger didn't run up one day and randomly slap the sticker on the front d...

The museum is a small affair, on one side of the small one-story terminal that sits at the main entrance to Apopka Orlando Airport. While it may be small it's been built with care and attention to detail, and filled full with interesting memorabilia that help to document the history of the airline industry. While it may be small the museum deserves a far larger treatment than what I gave it Saturday. After spending too much time inside the 240, I had barely enough time to look around the museum and meet the hosts who'd invited me out that day. I had the most interaction with Retired PanAm Captain LeRoy Brown (left) and Retired Delta Captain Bill Lupo. Capt. Brown was a past president of the museum foundation, while Capt. Lupo is its current president. While both are very interesting individuals, it's Capt. Brown who truly piques my interest. Capt. Brown is 94. His career in aviation stretches back to the Second World War. His wife, Wanda Brown (left) was his radio "m...

In a field next to the main and only runway of Orlando Apopka Airport sits a Convair CV-240 undergoing renovation by and for the U.S. Airline Industry Museum Foundation (USAIMF). I spotted it while driving up to Renninger's Antique Center up Mt. Dora to visit a mutual friend who sells antiques. On the way back we stopped at the airport and I walked up the taxiway to where the 240 was sitting. According to the USAIMF website the 240 sat for 12 years, from 1997 to 2009, at the Daytona Beach (Florida) International Airport before it was moved to its current location. Since then volunteers have been involved in essentially a work of love in restoring the old airliner from the inside out. When I stopped by today, two volunteers were working to tape up the outside windows in preparation for repainting the exterior in the aircraft's original livery. Whether that livery will be American Airlines, or one of the other carriers that flew her, I have no idea. But from what I saw the a...