Jim and I had the same sense of humor.
Whenever I'd enter the ham shack at lunchtime, he'd offer me a chair. He'd pull one of the stools away from the lab bench and say, "Can I offer you a stool sample?"
Then he'd hit the cloth upholstry on top of the stool hard with his hand a few times. A small but noticable cloud of dust would rise from the cloth. He'd point at it and explain, "Fart dust."
Jim doesn't hang out in the shack anymore, and I've moved far away. In case you read this, Jim, it was real, and it was fun. But it wasn't real fun.

Sometimes it bothers me that I get so few comments or moderations on my comments, and none on my journal. I'm invisible. Maybe it's better that way.
I'm not your typical kid: I'm 48.
Older than most children, and twice as experienced as some are old. I've written more code than you've hacked.
So be it.
The Rest Is Silence.

Of course, I've never done it. And I can't claim to be the only person to come up with the idea.
I first wrote a short story incorporating the sport of skysurfing in 1975. I further developed the story during the summer of 1976, resulting in a short novel. It was a science fiction book. The environment of Earth had been ruined, so some nice aliens intervened. They showed up, announced that the Earth would be cleansed, and all life would have to be relocated for the next 15 years. They provided the transportation, and relocated all Earth life to a sparsely populated planet which we Earthlings came to call Utopia.
The natives of the planet were humanoid, but much thinner and lighter, almost like birds. They were beautiful! Not in a sexual way: we humans were a bit awed by them but no more attracted to them than a dog would be to a cat. Anyway, the Utopians had a sport of skysurfing, and taught it to the humans. Utopians could skysurf very well, almost flying. Humans basically were in free-fall with a board strapped to their feet. The board was kind of the size and shape of a snowboard, but thicker in the middle and thinner at the edges. The Utopian atmosphere had strong wind currents (we called them Jet Streams, but they were stronger and more localized than Earth's jet streams), and we could take a balloon to just above one, then drop into it and surf it. The best human skysurfers could go for a hundred miles or so.
Anyway, I had about 450 hand-written pages, and was working on the ending, when I lost the whole thing while moving. I've often thought it would be fun to write it again, but whenever I've tried, I've been frustrated because the book I remember is so much better than what I can recreate.
I invented skysurfing, though.

I'm going to Kansas CIty tomorrow for my Uncle's funeral. Too bad he won't be there -- I'll miss him. Sure, his body will be there. But it stopped working, so I won't be too emotionally attached to it. The smart, funny, and extremely nice guy that was my Uncle has moved on. He's better off now -- we aren't.

Oh, geesh, I've never blogged or anything like it before. I've been running Linux since January 1994. At the time, my job was to develop software in SCO UNIX. I decided to try Linux, in hopes that it might be a usable facsimile of UNIX. I was surprised to find it almost as good as SCO UNIX, with the primary shortcoming being in its lack of Motif. Oh, the times have changed. Now I'd put Linux right up at the top, as the best O.S. I've ever used. Definitely better than SCO UNIX or even Solaris. Better than any Windows flavor. Even slightly edging out my old favorite: VMS. Thanks to Linux, I finally retired my CP/M systems since I could finally have a non-Microsoft machine at home. "What about the Mac?" Oh, somehow I just never got into a Mac. They were always expensive in the early days. I tend to pinch pennies, especially when it comes to hobby-gear like computers. My current server is an old IBM machine with a Pentium III at about 550 MHz ,which I bought used last year for about $100. It still has the same filesystem (although on different hardware, and converted to ext3) as my original Linux machine in 1994. So, I've enabled comments. Flame me, if you like. I might never return to the "Journal" tab to read the comments. But I'm vain enough that I probably will. So there.