The Life and Times of the Watters Family

More Old Essays Posted

I’ve posted some more essays from a few years back. The quality is definitely sub-par, but they’re interesting to look at for what they are, hence the disclaimer at the top of each.

License To Drive

Frankly, I’m beginning to believe that it should be more difficult than it is to get a driver’s license. Aside from the usual comments about people in their nineties, with their tortise-like reflexes and their quad-focal glasses, I’d like to suggest that we add emotional capacity for maturity to the criteria.
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Love Is All Around

One of the other items I stumbled across as I was sifting through my old floppies was this scan of a postcard that I picked up during a trip to Turkey in April of 1994. I share it here without further comment.

Dream A Little Dream

I had the oddest dream this morning after my alarm clock went off. Church. The SuperBowl. Mentally retarded, indigent cowboys. Naked pregnant pacific islanders. Crazy stuff!
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Nostalgic For School Days

A few weeks back I was cleaning out my office and I happened across some old floppy disks from the “good ol’ days”. I found some interesting stuff on them, some of which I’ll post on this site. The first item is one of my essays from back then, written in March of my senior year of high school (’95/’96 school year). Keep in mind I was 17. I’ll post the rest of the essays as I’m able migrate them from their original format (Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS). Some of the writing is pretty bad. I’ll likely fix the grammar and the spelling and vocabulary as I update them, but they’ll remain true to the spirit of the original. Enjoy.

UPDATE: I’ve posted another one from the same class. This one required far fewer corrections.

Feeds To Which I Would Like To Subscribe

I would absolutely LOVE it if I could subscribe to RSS or Atom feeds containing the following information:

- Newspaper Classifieds (by category)
- Employment Postings (from Monster, Hot Jobs, Microsoft, etc.)
- Real Estate Listings (customized by various parameters a la Apple’s iTMS feeds)
- Stock Quotes (one feed per symbol)
- Sports Box Scores (by team, by league, by sport)
- Athletes (Baseball/Football players; useful for those of us playing fantasy sports)

I’d volunteer my time to any company with meaningful content in any of the above areas stored in a useful form (no page-scraping) in order to provide/create and maintain the scripts/applications to generate such feeds.

Beyond that, though, what can be done to push syndication outside of the traditional news/blog boundaries to allow more data to be usefully centralized using aggregators, etc?

Still Labouring

I’ve made a couple of changes. Removed all of the political entries. No particular reason, but I figure, if I’m not going to stay current, and I’m not going to write compelling opinion pieces, why post political items?

Anyway, baseball season starts soon (Go Mariners!). Maybe I’ll be inspired to write about that. I’ve been so busy of late that it’s hard to find the time to write anything worth posting. I’ve also discovered that the three “readers” I appeared to have were just bots spoofing IE anyway, so it isn’t like I’m being missed.

I’m still working on getting some of my older essays from high school, etc. posted in the writings section. While the writing style is a bit more plain, some of it was pretty interesting for me to read. I’ll probably edit them a bit to try to make them flow better if I can.

Anyway, until next time…