Brains versus brawn, you decide!

When I was a young man, I was athletic and I didn’t realize it. I just did athletic things better than a lot of other kids. I was unusually strong also. I was the oldest of 4 sons and when I was in the 6^th grade; my Dad gave me a 6 pound shot put as a gift. Living on a Michigan corn farm, I had no idea what to do with it, but I threw it around the yard, like kids did back before video games and other senseless and lazy current activities.

Ford Motor Company was embracing a new program named Punt,Pass, and Kick and like the other kids, I signed up for it at school. Now mind you, my dad was what was commonly called, a job shopper and as a tool and die maker he went where the money was and this meant we moved a lot - a whole lot. This was another reason I had no idea where I was in the athletic pecking order.

Consequently, we were the new kids on the block everywhere we went. What this means is you have no real deep connection with the kids at school and feel like a misplaced alien at every school. When the day came for the competition, I naturally wanted to chicken out, feeling like I didn’t measure up to the local kids.

My mom, in all her wonderful wisdom wouldn’t have that and forced me to go to the Dundee Michigan high school and compete. Now mind you, I was in the 6^th grade and although they had categories, the grand champ would get the prized varsity jacket which truth be told would fit a 16-18 year old athlete. Well, when the scores were finalized, I beat them all and walked away with a jacket that wouldn’t fit me for 4 years.

I was shocked, but this re-enforced the idea that the way to success was to be a very good athlete. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The way to success is making very good grades in school. We moved all over the place and I never played football, but found out that I was also very good at baseball.  In Woodstock Georgia, I made the All-star roster as a shortstop. Back then kid’s dad’s coached the team and although I could catch anything that was hit my way, and throw like Ken Caminiti, my accuracy was less than what it could have been.  I simply needed better coaching and didn’t get it.

Unbelievably, I flunked the 9^th grade. My acting up in English class allowed the teacher to flunk me by one point and our constant traveling made Algebra a foreign language. Well, I was of the mind that nothing really mattered except doing athletics and smoking cigarettes and being cool. Stupid times 100. The single best thing that happened to me was flunking and my decision to go to summer school. Back in 1967, it was something like $68 for the summer course and my Mom told me I had to pay for it and I did by working at the local Tastee Freeze every evening.  I think it took my paycheck for the entire summer too.

6 weeks later, I came out of the class with an A and a whole new understanding on school. 6 books on the must ready to enter college list and 6 book reports later, I realized that school was a whole lot more fun when you did your homework and actually knew the answers on the pop-tests. School is fun when you have learned to study and know the answers! What a revelation for a jock! What a revelation for any student.

I never stopped reading books after failing the 9^th grade. Those kids we made fun of who were terrible at sports became our bosses. Joking and skipping classes by jocks was simply making a path that later on put us in the lowest of low jobs. That fat nerdish kid with glasses runs the bank that we borrow from. That is probably a poor example, but you get the idea.

 

Jocks don’t run things, it’s the nerds. It’s the Steve Job’s, Mark Zuckerberg’s, Bill Gates’, Warren Buffet’s, and Donald Trumps’ that do. The only chance an athlete has is to be an Emmitt Smith or JJ Watt – or to have the brains to get a degree along the way that can make them money when their bodies fail and they do fail more times than not.

Think about this when you are pushing your kid to excel in sports over everything else. Nerds rule. They always have; they always will. Teach your kids to read.  Teach your kids to love books. Books and their imagination will take them places no ball could ever possibly emulate.

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PC Passion - but Never Saw It Coming

 

I bought my first PC computer in 1981 or 82 if I remember correctly and it was love at first sight.  It didn’t matter to me that it was already obsolete.  I owned a computer!  It was made by Radio Shack and was officially named the Tandy TRS-80 or unofficially the Trash-80.  My long time mentor Don Trumps was our church secretary and sold it to me when he upgraded the unit.  It came with a massive printer weighing close to fifty pounds and would print two foot-wide sheets of paper running both directions.  It was as amazing to watch as it was deafening and my bride was appalled when I set all of this up on the dining room table.

I am an outdoorsman to be sure, but also one of those nerdish people who are fascinated with computers.

When I say this, I do not mean that I am a gamer who needs 128 gigabytes of RAM memory on my video card to be happy, or an Angry Birds addict.  Holy hard drives, I’ve never played Pacman, Mario, Frogger, or Duke Nukem for more than a couple of seconds before I became bored.

I am however fascinated by how they work and the vast amount of applications and programs they can run at my command.  I am just as intrigued in 2014 as I was in 1981, so much so that I learned to take them apart and put them together.  I’ve built a bunch of them from scratch, tuning them to the machine I felt I needed at the time.  I can remember when RAM chips were $40 a megabyte and how amazed the guys at work were when they learned I was running an astounding 4 megs of RAM in my machine at home.

My home location is what I facetiously call the OCSC, or the Orbiting Command Ship Central and everyone who knows me, knows I call it this.  It’s where I make stuff happen.  At any given time I’ll have as many as 6 laptops, notebooks, and desktops in various states of maintenance stacked on the giant table with hard drives spinning.

My real passion like I said is not in gaming, but in utilities.  I love to root out virus’.  Recently I got my grubby computer-mitts on 3 dead lap-top’s that were stuck back in closets (because it is too expensive to get them repaired, so I just use my Smartphone).  This is a most common refrain, by the way.  I’ll just use my Smartphone, even though I’m still making payments on my computer.

All 3 lap-tops were dead in the water, so to speak.  They had the dreaded blue screen of death, or wouldn’t boot past the Windows screen.  Now I look at an infected or malfunctioning computer the same way other folks look at a blank crossword puzzle.  I am drawn to it like a fly to the hamburger you are fixing to bite into at a picnic.  I find it irresistible.  I’ll swoop in from work with an infected laptop owned by a coworker, tell my bride I’m going to take it to the OCSC before I shower, and an hour later I’m pecking away at it, while still in my Nomex uniform.

Over the years I’ve had about a 90+% success rate and I figure this is very high, based on the machines I’ve received and repaired after someone else deemed them dead.  I figured after I retired I would supplement my fixed income by doing what I love – cleaning virus’ and repairing computers… or so I thought.

I never saw the Smartphone displacing the personal computer as the default go-to device.

To clarify my statement, I am not ignorant of technology and understand that there will be countless iterations of Internet access devices on the horizon, but please explain to me how staring at a little 2 inch screen and pecking on it can possibly be more desirable than a full-sized monitor and equally full-sized QWERTY keyboard for home use?

Plasma TV power supply repair

I have an Android-based Smartphone with a large screen and use it often, but it is no substitute for the real thing, not even close.  I run two 24 inch and one 26 inch monitors to keep everything where I can see it when I’m writing, reading, building OurBaytown.com, running BaytownTalks.net, or streaming audio/video.  I can’t imagine doing it on a 2 inch screen – well, some of what I do would be impossible to do on my phone to put it bluntly.

I love computers and will always have one, but I can walk away from my PC and go off on an adventure totally unplugged, which I often do.  Smartphones make this almost impossible, unless a person simply shuts it off and disconnects.  After all, who is in charge, you, or your computer?  

Geeze, Bert, you’re mean!

Smartphones should come with a warning on the side in my opinion, which would read “Caution:  Frequent use of this phone when friends are around will make you appear disconnected and anti-social if they do not have their own phone.”

The bottom line is this.  Dig that PC or laptop out of the closet, get it repaired, and when you are out socializing with friends, shut your phone off and disconnect for an hour or two.  You will be amazed what they look like in person.

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