Sidetracked Charley

  Charley was John Steinbeck's Standard Poodle. I first met Charley, and John Steinbeck for that matter, in Union Station in Los Angeles. It was the culmination of an escape from my college dorm with five friends and a Buick Special which threw a connecting rod just outside of Kingman, Arizona in the middle of the General Motors strike in Detroit. Over the years I have written many short stories about that adventure, toyed with making it a coming of age novel except only men seem to write those, named every computer, and half my journals or blogs Charley. I have also read all the John Steinbeck novels since that day I used some of the last of my travel money and bought the just out in paperback Travels with Charley.  If I had gone ahead with getting my masters I might have made my thesis about John Steinbeck's works.  I abandoned the masters when living with someone who was doing his masters on Moby Dick. That may be a portion of my life I need to examine more fully. It i...

Has it occurred to anyone yet that we are at that special time when Trump said it would just go away? It is even worse than that. We are at that part of the calendar when most viruses seem to go dormant. And we are having infection rates of 70,000 a day. If this is the lull before the fall second peak what will that look like? And heaven forbid flu season this winter. Wondering, if we survive, if this time will go down in history as the second dark ages. We seem to be denying science and throwing truth sayers under the bus, calling out the troops on those demanding a hearing on their grievances. Can we be very far away from burning witches. Okay, I admit we seldom burned them. Joan of Arc maybe. We drowned them, hung drawn and quartered them, stoned them, pressed them, tortured them to death. And at one time in England, during the Black Death, we locked them in the house with all their relatives sick or well and waited for them to all die. Then landlords could rent the pro...

Some years back Microsoft made a mistake and came up with an operating system nobody liked. In a couple years they realized their mistake and came up with something better. I was sure the same would happen with Windows 10 but no. At the very least before they stopped supporting Windows 7, I expected a professional version of 10 but that is also a no. So it looks as if I may be stuck with IT, the clown in the sewer of the Stephen King book, so I am now looking at work arounds of its major limitations. Do not send me to Microsoft Help because they are no help. They consider their new operating system flawless. Course, if that was the case, why all the endless updates?  Within hours of the second updating of IT a friend told me here basic complaints were the updates and file organization. Specifically how it handles photo files. I totally agree. They never seem to be where I left them. And then they also decided to rename things. What on my Windows 7 computer is folders is on ...

A couple years ago I bought an HP Laptop with the view that my desktop was aging. The theory was to transition from a desktop to a laptop with peripherals i.e. keyboard, wireless mouse, external hard drives, second or third screen. It seemed like a good plan. All those extras would take care of what I did not like in a laptop. The laptop came with Windows 8.1 which Microsoft from day one refused to let me keep. I had no sooner booted it up than it updated to the dreaded Windows 10. Okay, there must be a fix I told myself. And there was. With help from Google I transitioned back to Windows 8. Microsoft restarted my computer in the dead of the night and updated back to Windows 10. As I am writing this IT (I think of it as the Clown in the Stephen King book of the same name) has warned me it is going to do an update yet again. Try as I might I seem unable to get it to obey me as to proper time to update the system. And every time I think I have learned enough about 10 to make peac...