F is for France

I absolutely, positively love France!

I will admit that I had a typical American scepticism of France when I was asked to spend a year there working for CDC bcak in 1967. But the per diem doubled my salary and I got a free furnished 3 bedroom apartment, so I agreed.

After a French friend from the bowling alley (only one there that spoke English) in Toulouse introduced me to his former girl friend and skating partner in Holiday on Ice, my perspective changed.

Thanks to Claudine, I was introduced to France as a native would see the country. Her grandparents lived in an old 4th floor walkup in Paris; her parents lived in the same tiny apartment where Claudine grew up; the matriarch of the family was the first woman Senator in France and was a leader in the WWII Resistance and lived in a high-end apartment in Paris.

The French are super polite -- which Americans have a hard time accepting given a few rude waiters at tourist spots.  Just a couple of easily learned customs and you'll be accepted and welcomed.

First off, when you enter a shop always say, "Bonjour, Madam"  as a hello. It is a custom. And, when you leave say a thank you of "Merci, Madam".  Believe me, you earn points immediately for doing that.

Handshakes when meeting and leaving someone is expected. Air kisses are reserved for the opposite sex and for someone you know well.  I actually had a hard time with this when I started working at Sud Aviation.  I couldn't remember if I had shaken hands already with someone that I then met a hour after arriving. Offer to shake hands a second time and they look at you questioningly; not to offer if you hadn't met them yet was an insult. Considering there were about twenty French around the computer room, you can imagine my problem. After two or three weeks, I started getting air kisses from some (but not all) of the female coworkers. Yet another memory problem for me.

While there, I learned to drive like a mad Frenchman. And I actually still love to drive in Paris. I know the city well and can speed along with the best of the French. Yes, even around the Etolle -- the large circle around the Arc de Triumph. Twelve streets empty into it and it is about twelve lanes wide with no lane markings. FUN!

When I left France in 1968, I went to London for three weeks to install a new computer there. My car, me and Claudine hopped across the English Channel in an airplane like the one pictured above.

I brought Claudine back to the states with me and we got married. We celebrated 49 years of marriage back in February.  She became a US citizen in 2000.

I bet you know what to do if you see RSVP.  But do you know what it is an acronym for? RSVP stands for Repondez S'il Vous Plait or please respond in French.

My wife does advertise our French connections on her car. Her vanity plate translates to "French Iceskater" and you see her "I Love Paris" sticker and my cowboy hat behind it.

E is for Email

Do you remember the first time you used email?  I do.

My first email experience was back when interoffice mail was still the only way to communicate with coworkers and U.S. mail was the way to communicate outside.

I always followed the computer industry by reading trade publications to keep current with the state-of-art.  One day, I read an article and the author invited readers to express their comments and he posted an email address.

Coincidentally, I had just seen a memo at work where the company's IBM PROFS Notes system now allowed sending email outside the company. I never used the IBM mainframe, but I did have an account on it due to a prior project that mated with it.  On a lark, I typed up a PROFS blurb expressing my thoughts on the article and sent it off. (Back then you had to insert the email address in the top of the body of the message. Weird.)

An hour later, I had a answer from the magazine author.  WOW! Instant communications! I was hooked.

I started looking for email addresses that I could send messages to.

I also started sending a "Morning Message" of quotes, humor and puns to a few coworkers and Toastmaster buddies.  After I got my personal email address, that morphed into a daily email of clean humor. I published that daily for over five years.  I received so many off-colored jokes back from my subscribers that I started the "Castaways" as a daily email for those.  Some of my subscribers for that one were professional wrestlers -- which I guess figures.

I have had my current personal email address for over 20 years. That means my daily in basket tally is around 70 emails. Mostly ads and spam that gets deleted unread.

What's your email experience?

D is for Darhl

I go by DC because I dislike my first two names.  The D stands for Darhl and the C stands for Caylor. If you do a Google search for "Darhl Caylor", you'll only find me.

Amazingly enough, Google did turn up a few Darhl's. It is even an acronym for Durango Adult Recreational Hockey League. I'm not sure how the other poor sods with the name ended up with the moniker, but I know how I got stuck with it.

A friend of my mother had a cute little boy about 6 months before I was born. She liked the name he was given, so she stole it. Only problem is that the silent H in his name is at the end and my mom stuck my silent H in front of the last L.

I saw that "cute little boy" at my grandfather's funeral. He was dressed in bib overalls and weighed at least 300 pounds.

One of my problems with Darhl is that no one can spell it or pronounce it.  It rhymes with Carl. Most people confuse it with the more popular Daryl -- which rhymes with Carol.

As far as the name Caylor goes, it was the name of an uncle that died a few months before I was born. He, in turn, got it from the last name of the doctor that delivered the uncle and my dad in Washington, D.C. Which has always struck me as being weird. Did my grandmother have an affair that no one in the family knew about?

My parents were aware of my dislike of the name because for years and years I signed off all letters with "Silent H".

Now, I must admit that I have been called worse than Darhl on quite a few occasions. I won't list them here since this is a family-friendly blog.

Around the computer industry, many people called me Tex because I favor western wear. Even all of my wife's French relatives still call me Tex.

If you forget my name, no problem.  I also answer to "HEY YOU!"

C is for Computers

I made my living working with computers for 45 years. I joined RCA in Palm Beach Gardens in 1965 and worked on the bring-up floor for their Model 301 computer. As a technician, I tested them and fixed them when they emerged from manufacturing. Memory was 4K of magnetic core donuts. It had no arithmetic capability in hardware; it used table lookup -- if you wanted it to add 2 and 3, it went to location 23 in memory and pulled up a 5. Primitive, indeed.

A year later on June 6, 1966 (i.e., 6/6/66), I joined Control Data in Minneapolis as a hardware Customer Engineer. They offered me $550/month. I was hired to go to a site on Kodiak, Alaska to babysit a small system. They had a change in requirements and I had done well in training, so they offered me to stay in Minneapolis and train on their supercomputer, the CDC 6600. (Pictured above). After training, I went to a site in Albuquerque and a mere four months later I received a phone call, "How would you like to go to France for a year?" After a flight to Minneapolis for a physical, a stop in Chicago for a passport, return to Albuquerque, a drive to Tampa (where I traded my Chevy for a VW Fastback for delivery in Paris) and a flight to Paris, I arrived in my dress western suit, cowboy hat, boots and a bullwhip in one of my two suitcases for work in France. I was assigned to Sud Aviation in Toulouse, which is 400 miles south of Paris. It was a very educational experience.

When I returned to the states, I worked as a Diagnostic Programmer designing and programming the diagnostics for a black box that allowed two of the supercomputers to talk to each other. It was a super computer in its day. Of course, your cell phone today has many times the capability of that big machine pictured above.

Digital Equipment made me an offer I couldn't refuse to go back into hardware as a Regional Customer Engineer. I found I didn't like being back in hardware, so I jumped ship after only nine months and became a software instructor for Univac in the Washington, DC area.

I had an opportunity to return to Florida and worked for GE's nuclear plant in Largo, then at Kennedy Space Center in the Shuttle Firing Rooms. I then spent 15 years with Harris Corp. in Melbourne, Florida and worked on several interesting projects including a nuke blast detector system at Patrick AFB, working on programming spy satellites to put "sunglasses" on them so Russian lasers wouldn't harm them and various bar code systems for manufacturing.

I joined Raytheon in 1995 in St Petersburg, Florida and worked on various manufacturing software systems. THe last ten years at Raytheon, I designed and programmed web applications using Perl for their intranet. I retired in 2010 and many of those web apps are still running!

So... I have seen it all. Magnetic core, paper tape, teletypes, time share systems, monster supercomputers, PCs, the web.

B is for Books

I am a reader. I love books. As far back as I can remember, I have had a book or a magazine -- something to read -- in my hands.

In particular, I love mysteries. And, that love probably started with John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series. Oh, how I loved them. Paperbacks cost a quarter or maybe 35 cents, which was a lot of money to me back then. But somehow I manage to save and buy every one.

I have spent a fortune on books over the years. Now, I buy some off of Amazon, some off the bargain table at Barnes & Noble and some at our new St Petersburg, Florida used book shop called 321 Books. The name comes from the prices on the books: $3 for hardback, $2 for paperbacks and $1 for kids books.

I know I am shorting authors money that I like by buying used books or remainders, but I justify it by giving the books away and those castoffs often get the receiver's attention and they then follow and buy that author's books.

I own a Kindle and a Kindle Fire and have read a good number of books on them. But, I am old fashioned and do love to hold the actual book in my hand. And, I have a $10 price point cap on buying e-books.

My recent reads? At the first of the year, I bought Tim Dorsey's latest Serge Storms book. I love them. Set in Florida with tidbits of arcane Florida history and with a protagonist being a serial killer "who only kills those that need killing", the yearly romps of the series are laugh-out-loud funny

Since I am a political junkie -- especially after the last election -- I bought and read Fire and Fury. That was a great read. I am currently slogging through Russian Roulette, which is good, but a difficult read due to all of the Russian names in the darn thing. I need Rachel Maddow to create a huge graphic of all of the players in the book for me!

Hmmm, that book is sitting beside me at the moment. I think I'll quit typing this and go slog some more in that book.

On average, I read 50 or more books a year. How about you?

A is for Alcoholism

Our first day as part of the A to Z Challenge

Alcoholics come in all shapes, sizes, and ethnic backgrounds and are not just the people under the bridge or drunk on a bench, like Kermit in the picture above.

They come from all walks in life. I've personally known lawyers, doctors, the head of a large chamber of commerce, firemen, fishermen, pilots (both commercial and military), submariners, engineers, nurses, roofers, clergy (including Father Martin), and more who are recovering alcoholics.

In Alcoholics Anonymous, they consider sober alcoholics as recovering versus recovered since once an alcoholic always an alcoholic -- and we are always just one drink away from a drunk.

Yes, I said, "we". I'm an alcoholic -- a recovering one with over 35 years of sobriety.

I am a very lucky alcoholic. While at the end of my drinking I was drinking a quart of 100 proof vodka a day -- plus a beer or two and probably some wine and cognac to boot -- I never had a DUI, I never got fired from my job, I didn't get divorced. I used to say that I never had an accident, but I now remember hitting the curb a couple of times and blowing out a tire.

I was also fortunte enough at the time I got sober to work for a company whose insurance paid for my 28 day stay in a rehab center and who paid me my normal wages for those four weeks.

During rehab, we were taken to local AA meetings every day. And, were welcomed there. After rehab, I transitioned to going to AA. The slogans on the wall made a lot more sense then than they did when I played at going to AA prior to rehab.

The sobriety journey has been a wonder.

* I found out that I could dance sober. (Who knew? Gosh, and I didn't fall down either.)

* I had a number of relatives and friends die and I didn't find it necessary to take a drink.

* I got the ax and involuntarily retired after 15 years with the company twice while sober and I didn't pick up a drink.

* I got involved with AA service work and working with alcoholics in my community.

I'm sure you know someone (maybe even you?) that abuses alcohol. Suggest they go to AA. It is a lifesave.

An aside: One of my favorite jokes while drinking was asking what the difference was between a drunk and an alcoholic. The punchline was "an alcoholic has to go to all of those meetings." It is a bit ironic that those meetings saved my life.

Paris, France... Here we come

Claudine and I will be going to France next month. Due to finances and health, this will be our last trip, no doubt. Have rented an apartment, so will not have the expense of renting a car. Mass transit is excellent in Paris.

If I think of it, I might blog some on here, so stay tuned.