"Although biologically the brain capacity of the human race has remained the same for thousands of generations, it takes a long evolutionary process to arrive at objectivity, that is, to acquire the faculty to see the world, nature, and other persons and oneself as they are, and not distorted by desires and fears. The more man develops this objectivity, the more he is in touch with reality, the more he matures, the better can he be to create a human world in which he is at home. (Erich Fromm "The Sane Society")

One of my biggest gripes I have are with all those people I have met who try to be what they're not. I don't know about you, but too many people I have known have an ego bigger than they are. They lack experience and they want glory but they don't want to earn it. And they're always trying to sell something. I meet so many people like that they make me want to puke. They are not nearly as gifted or talented as they may think they are. They overcompensate by exercising bragging rights - but ironically they have nothing to brag about. I'm sure everyone who reads this will know people like this. I really hate the fakes. I dislike the pretenders who try to appear to be something other than what they are. It is likely to be some social psychological illness which causes people to overcompensate. I look for the real person. It is that part of them which has real value in their life and everyone they come in contact with.

This was our home in Montverde on the orange grove which due to two back-to-back freezes, the worst they ever had, killed all the trees. The house was 1/3rd underground, build into a hill and I built the pool on top. Below the house you can see the lake which was several hundred acres and loaded with Largemouth Bass.

The bottom level of the house in Montverde also had a bomb shelter which was completely self contained with water and ventilation. For television, back then, we had the large rotating dish which got all the feeds as they happened. We also raised some cattle there. It was a little piece of heaven, but it didn't last. I traded part of the property, including the house, for a house in Orlando which we moved into for awhile but we had another bad turn of events and it turned out that there was asbestos in the ceiling which we had to have removed.

I was on the Internet before anyone knew what the Internet was. I got on the internet during it's inception and when it became accessible to the world through various universities and other research facilities in 1982 when Debbie and I were going to Durham Tech. We used large IBM mainframe computers then. I had been using computers for a long time but there was no Internet. That was a project of the government to overcome the problems associated with Electro Magnetic Pulse, if there was ever a nuclear attack on this country. While we had computers at the Pentagon they were only experimenting then with packet transfer of data and while we used something similar in radio it was not applied to wire communications until much later. At Durham Tech the schools in the Research Triangle were interconnected. In those days only universities and the Pentagon were using an Internet network and it was my privilege to be able to use it. But it was nothing like what we have today. There was no WEB. It was all non-graphical. I am a Linux geek and use it mostly non-graphical, almost like we used the old net.

I was a "student" member of ACM, Association for Computing Machinery and studied programming languages. I learned cobol, rpg, business basic, pascal, fortran, lisp and others -- and later became acquainted with C and perl and php and MySql and XML markup language.

Jane pruning some of our orange trees on the grove at Montverde before the freezes took them all out.

I sold all my ham equipment at a ham fest in order to get a newer computer so I could use it on the Internet. Previously I had Commodore computers and before that I had a heath kit computer which I built. I remember buying a hard drive for the Commodore when hard drives were new and it cost me $1,700 then (in the 80s). And I used the Commodore as a radio-teletype machine on Army MARS. That was fun.

Much later when WEB was started in the early 90s we hackers, knew it would take off but the net was great then because it was completely non-commercial. Commercial postings were not permitted. Then it happened and people started to sell things and it has become a commercial toilet.

I always did my own WEB publishing and never used an editor until Content Management Systems (see my portals) and Wikis (see them also) -- Follow the links at: http://pnews.org/. I still use linux, just as I used Unix before - as the operating system on all my computers because it is faster, more secure, open source code, faster, efficient and much less vulnerable to security problems and more oriented for developers. I also use various forms of encryption.

The latest trend is for blogging and I have introduced blogs to my Wiki sites. Blogs are the new trend because software now makes it possible for everyone to write web pages without any technical know-how. It is a mixed bag. There is an information overload but there is also some empowerment.

When I moved to Orlando I stayed very active on the Internet and I was always involved in peace and justice issues, both on the net and off of it. In Orlando we participated with the Florida Peace and Justice Coalition and I attended demonstrations, some in Washington.

We moved to Boynton Beach for more quiet and because there just seemed to be more going on and it was I suppose in a way a return to roots. But in my life it is never really quiet and peaceful.

Tic Deloureux

I was diagnosed with tic douloureux, which means "painful tic". It is a severely painful disease which becomes progressively worse and requires very aggressive treatment. It is also a very expensive disease to have. And I went through it all. I endured the pain for years and finally when I was ready to bail, I enrolled in the VA and went to Gainesville for surgery.

But first when I was first diagnosed, it is treated with anti-seisure medications, but they lose their effectiveness and the most successful method of treatment is brain surgery.

I think I went to every neurologist in South Florida. I begged for pain meds. Nothing really helped. Even the anti-seisure meds didn't not work enough to eliminate the pain. I joined a support group and the main topic at each meeting was who was it who committed suicide that month. TN is also considered the suicide disease.

The cost of my disease was somewhere in the neighborhood of $250,000. And I had no insurance.

I had a Rhyzotomy in August of 96 at the Veteran's Hospital in Gainesville, Florida. The procedure was unsuccessful. It involves sticking a long probe through the skull from the ovale foreman, a hole under the front of the skull near the cheek bone, and the probe is inserted into an area of the brain where radio waves are used to deaden certain nerves at the ganglia. It didn't work. I woke up while still undergoing the operation and was in so much pain I had to be restrained. The doctor said I tried to hit him. I'm sure I did, but all I remember is the pain and screaming for more morphine. And, I remember someone saying, "give him 1600 mg of morphine in an IV". It was so much morphine they had to work on getting me to breathe again.

One month later I had seven hours of brain surgery at the same VA Hospital in Gainesville. The procedure was called micro-vascular decompression. They cut out a portion of my skull and lifted my brain to get into the pons in my cerebellum where with micro-surgery they performed their surgery in that very small place, which is a very complicated procedure. It was successful. My neurosurgeons removed the superior cerebellar artery from where it was compressing the 5th cranial nerve and padded the offending vessel. The said the 5th cranial nerve ganglion was literally "smashed". The operation worked perfectly. When I awoke in ICSU the pain and tic were gone.

TN is not the suicide disease for nothing, but since my brain surgery, it seems like I received a reprive. Now, it seems, everything else is starting to break down and you have to wonder if it is all really worth it and when do you say, enough? I had cancer surgery and a heart attack (the second one actually) - and a stent and Hemorrhoid surgery, which I can tell you was about the worst torture I have experienced. The morphine I take every day is a reminder how close to pain I am and the retinal aneurisms I had (apparently this year) is also a warning that time is on the wane and the stomach pain I've been getting is new. How do I feel about any of this? I don't like it but I think I am becoming more used to the idea. However, my father is 96 and every day I expect to receive a call from my brother telling me he is gone. My mother passed away at 76 and I have a way to go to reach her age and my genes may be favorable for me to be around awhile. So why did I have so many more health problems than my parents? I sometimes think it must be something environmental. My father was never in the military. I also lived at Roth Groves (my father had an orange grove and later on I had one too) when they used the worst poisons before they outlawed many of them. Maybe it was that? It doesn't matter really. Poisons, cosmic rays, UVs, etc. The future is determined for all of us as fragile biological units. I think what bothers me the most is not dying but if Jane should go first. I don't think I could deal with that. I don't want to survive my kids or my wife. I don't even want to survive my dogs. I would miss them too much.