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Adaptive myopia
When I was a kid I had near-perfect vision. I remember being able to read street signs and license plates at a distance, and feeling good about that. But I don’t think that was exceptional. Unless we...
View ArticleOld skool influential software
I came late to personal computing, which was born with the MITS Altair in 1975. The first PC I ever met — and wanted desperately, in an instant — was an Apple II, in 1977. It sold in one of the first...
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Remembering Mom
Mom would have turned 100 this week. She got to celebrate her 90th ten years ago, though it seems like yesterday. She died several months later, of a stroke while recovering from a botched gall stone...
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TV 3.0
We’re not watching any less TV. In fact, we’re watching more of it, on more different kinds of screens. Does this mean that TV absorbs the Net, or vice versa? Or neither? That’s what I’m exploring...
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News: Watching Cable Die
Now that Al Jazeera English‘s stream has been killed in the U.S., the only two streaming global news organizations available on computers and mobile devices are France24 and RT. They look like this: In...
View ArticleMy Top Ten Talk Radio Hosts of All Time
Here is my short list: Larry Josephson Howard Stern Bob Grant Bob & Ray Barry Gray Bob Fass Steve Post Rush Limbaugh Alex Bennett Allan Handelman And here are my qualifications: a) the performer...
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Remembering Uncle Chris
Yesterday was my Uncle Chris’s 100th birthday. When he passed fifteen years ago, I wrote the following, which I just unearthed from the Old Web. Now seems like a good time to expose it to the world. He...
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Fun with tropo
Right now every FM and TV station in Santa Barbara and San Diego can be heard in both places. Between them lays more than 200 miles of ocean across a curved earth. I’m not there right now, but I see...
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What’s up with @TMobile in North Carolina?
Check this out: I took that screen shot at the excellent Oakleaf restaurant in Pittsboro, NC a few days ago. Note the zero bars (or dots) of telephone service, and the very respectable (tested!) data...
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Free Money!
I’d like to find a way to say “You may be owed money!” that doesn’t sound like spam. But I that’s the message, and it’s true, so here you go. A few days ago a cousin-in-law told the extended family’s...
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BYSMD
Once, in the early ’80s, on a trip from Durham to some beach in North Carolina, we stopped to use the toilets at a roadhouse in the middle of nowhere. In the stall where I sat was a long conversation,...
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Why fix a problem that doesn’t exist?
We all know what this symbol means: Two people are not allowed to share an iPad. Just kidding. It means the lavatory in the airplane is occupied. Also that it can be used by persons of either gender....
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Where the nickname came from
My given name is David. Family members still call me that. Everybody else calls me Doc. Since people often ask me where that nickname came from, and since apparently I haven’t answered it anywhere I...
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Speaking of character
It seems fitting that among old medical records I found this portrait of Doctor Dave, my comic persona on radio and in print back in North Carolina, forty-five years ago. The artist is Alex Funk,...
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Remembering Iris Harrelson
In the late ’70s, I worked for a while at the Psychical Research Foundation, which occupied a couple of houses on Duke University property and did scientific research into the possibility of life...
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