A Story of Youth

It happened while I was still shrouded in innocence and naiveté. I was about ten years old.

It was about 5:30 AM, and it felt very cold. The early morning sky was tremendously dark hanging like an enormous blanket over the city; no stars were visible on this still windless morning. I carefully made my way down the driveway onto the sidewalk noting the shadowy tree figures created by the single lamppost at the corner of the block.

I began staring upward into the darkness thinking about how unusual everything appeared, almost black on black. The light from the lamppost, without which I’m sure I would have seen nothing, almost resembled a wayward moon disrupting the magnificent stillness of the moment. I intentionally avoided looking directly at the glaring sphere and focused on the stark black sky. It was beautiful.

As I passed under the lamppost still staring at the early morning heavens I heard something I cannot describe, something electric, like a soft sizzling sound that caused my body to tingle. I slowed and looked straight upward towards heaven. There was total darkness for a while. Then there were hundreds, maybe thousands of brilliant white stars illuminating the heavens, and descending upon me, in a slow and graceful dance as if they were being manipulated by some hidden puppeteer who was veiled by the mysterious pre-dawn sky. I froze in place.

There was a peculiar exciting feeling in the air and I wanted to know more about it. As I waited, warmth filled my being, comfortable feelings soothed me, and I felt tremendous peace. This was truly wonderful. “It must be God,” I thought.

The cold snowflakes hit my face and exploded into water as they set down upon my warm skin. I stood there for a few minutes, and then continued on my way.

Another Monday is upon us.

This blogosphere is new to me. It seems to be the wave of the future, and the future is now. People are able to publish their thought and ideas via the miracle of the internet.

The concept of WANs began circa 1958. Under the management of the ARPANET, former President Eisenhower initiated this advanced research in reaction to Sputnik’s successful launch and orbit in 1958. ARPANET, now called DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Sorry Al.

During the same period, from an unexpected arena, an English professor named Marshall McLuhan (whom some consider the father of the electronic age), coined the term “the medium is the message.” In addition, he first popularized the notion of a global village (another of his intuitive expressions), and rightfully deserves credit for his vision. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, he wrote:

If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness (61).

The internet seems to be moving us towards that single consciousness. Doesn’t it?

Another important name in Internet history is Vannevar Bush, a graduate of MIT’s engineering school, president of the Carnegie Institution, and inventor. Although Bush did not invent HyperTextMarkupLanguage (HTML), in 1945 his theoretical machine (memex) created a foundation for Tim Berners-Lee to invent the next internet evolution, the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee was the son of mathematicians and a consultant to Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucleaire, commonly known as CERN. HTML enabled the use of Uniform Resource Locator (URL), as website addresses. Creating a union of the various internet technologies, using the aforementioned XML, SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL, and adding Douglas Engelbart’s inventions of the mouse and graphical user interface (GUI), you have the functioning World Wide Web, as we know it today. It’s a wonderful thing.

Good Day

I've waited quite some time to get started in the writing business. Writing requires a person to develop a great many skills, as any writer knows.

For the past several years, I have worked at learning not only the craft of writing, but also developing general knowledge of the world and people. That may be I you see at Starbucks watching people, getting ideas, and extrapolating human behavior beyond the pale, just for the sake of a good story.

I have completed many short stories and research papers in my quest. In addition, I’ve nearly completed Elevator 37. It’s a science fiction novel with a few twists, here and there.