As faithful readers of the [DailyNewsLong] know, I'll be offline through next Tuesday. I didn't report where I was going in today's news, but I'll be at a resort in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts. That's all I know. My wife Leah keeps me well informed, telling me with plenty of advance notice what days I can't work and what general area of the country I'll be in while I won't be working. She's wonderful that way.
I was thinking about her tonight and what life was like twelve years ago in 1994 when I met her. I was an Assistant Professor at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina and had just bought my first house. In the main living area as you walked in the door was my desk surrounded by a network with Netware 3.11 running on a 386, a Mac SE (the Netware server had Macintosh Namespace support, of course), and another PC running Windows. I'd remote into my office through a 28.8 kbps dial-up and terminal from there to my AIX box where I had web sites with Mosaic HTTP, Gopher servers, full-text indexing of my Gopher documents with a WAIS server, and any other Internet application available at the time. If you don't know what some of those things are, don't worry about it. The main point is that Leah married me anyway.
We met in May, I proposed in July and we got married in October. The check-off list was filled pretty quickly, and one of the items on the list that got checked was that I knew this woman would save me from being a total geek by bringing some balance into my life. Of course, for REAL balance you also need to become a parent, and Thank God, that happened a few years later when Molly came on the scene.
We geeks need balance in our lives, whether we want it or not. This extended weekend at a Berkshire resort is yet another example.
See you next Wednesday!