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Transistors

  I can remember when the transistor radio was the coolest tech device on the planet. I did not know what a transistor was. I just knew that I could have a radio that I could carry along with me. Prior to the transistor, radios, TVs, and computers had vacuum tubes. They were appliances that were large and had to be plugged into the wall. When you turned the device on, you had to wait a minute for the tubes to warm up. If you looked into the ventilation slits you could actually see the glow from the filaments in the vacuum tubes as they warmed up, exactly like the filaments in a light bulb, except they took longer to start glowing. When the radio or TV had been on for a while you could feel the heat coming off it. You could even see the heat shimmer. But the main problem for the old tube radios was that they were fixed in place. The new transistor radios encapsulated a new word “portable.” The old devices were heavy and produced a lot of heat, a lot of waste heat. That is wasted e...
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Philip Margolin

  I had a good experience last week at the Willamette Writers meeting in Newport. The guest speaker was Philip Margolin, a best-selling author who has written 30 books. He writes “legal thrillers’ not to be confused with mysteries. He said when he started out, the term legal thrillers did not really exist. If you had a lawyer taking on a murder case, the story was usually classified as a murder mystery. Authors like John Grisham (and himself) turned legal thrillers into its own genre. Two of his stories have made it on screen, The Last Innocent Man , and Gone but not Forgotten. He graduated with his law degree from NYU Law School. He said that he already had a job lined up when he graduated, that being, a law clerk for a justice on the Oregon Court of Appeals. When I heard that, my ears perked up and I went, “I wonder . . .” The rest of his presentation was interesting. He went into private practice. He loved Perry Mason when he was growing up, but he said Perry Mason’s clients...
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Coming Soon!

  So, I am getting ready to put out another book. It’s been a while. Eight years, in fact (doesn’t seem like that long) since my first book came out. This time I had it professionally edited, and now I can’t imagine what I was thinking with the first one. I had gone over it many, many times as had my wife and my friends. I thought it was about as error free as it could be. It was not. Feedback was eye-opening. So, this time I spent the money. I probably spent more money than I will make back from the sale of the book, but I don’t want to produce something to be embarrassed about. And who knows? Maybe I will sell enough books to make a profit. It could happen. So, getting my edits back from the editor meant I had tasks that now needed to be complete. Yeah, a whole lot of tasks. Getting the edits back meant now I had to get serious. First, I had to go through all those edits. Most of the time I accepted the editor’s suggestion, but it was not 100%, so I had to go through them one by...
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Pocatello Part 2

  Having decided the next phase of my college would be at Idaho State University, I had to say goodbye to my friends and move to Pocatello. I coordinated this move with my parents. I got rid of stuff including my car as I didn’t fancy the idea of driving around in the snow in my Datsun 1200, and I could use the money. What I did not get rid of but couldn’t take with my I stored at my parent’s house (thank you, parents). Then my parents agreed to drive me the twelve-hour trip from Eugene to Pocatello (thank you again). My parents got a hotel room for themselves, but I would be staying at the track coach’s house along with the other incoming track and field refugees. My parent’s hotel was called Bidwell’s and it was just off campus. They noticed that the owners of the hotel also owned an adjacent building that had apartments that they rented out. They told me about it. We checked them out and decided to take one. I was able to get out of my coach’s house fairly quickly then, but my...
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Dungeon Crawler Carl

  I have a guilty pleasure. I have been reading the Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman, and I am hooked. I read the first book a while back, and now I am up to book five. Okay, the premise may sound a little wild, but here goes. One night (or day, as this event happens all over the Earth at the same time, no matter what time of day or night) all roofs collapse. Any person who is under a roof of any kind gets smashed flatter than a pancake. Instantly. Anyone who is in a car, or a house, or a building, is dead. This leaves only a fraction of the human race left alive. Why has this happened? Aliens did it. Why did they do it? For entertainment. Carl, it seems, had gone outside in the middle of the night to rescue his ex-girlfriend’s cat (named Princess Donut). So now Carl and the cat found themselves in a subterranean labyrinth forced to participate in a game for the amusement of aliens. This game comes with nonplayer characters like orcs and goblins and dragons, but th...
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That Road Trip to Pocatello

  After two plus years of junior college, I had to decide where to go to continue my education. I was at a gray point in my life. I no longer considered myself a boy, but I didn’t really consider myself a man yet either. Some college done, but not complete. And what was my actual goal in life? What was I becoming? I needed to take the next step, but what was I going to step into? Track was very important to me. I had been accepted to the University of Oregon, but if I went there, I would be a small fish in a very big pond, as U of O had a nationally renowned track and field program. The coaching staff had not really gone out of their way to entice me to go there (no scholarship offer). A friend of mine had a connection with the new track coach at Idaho State University in Pocatello. The coach there (Jerry Quiller) was visiting my friend in Eugene and asked me if I would be willing to come to Pocatello and see the program. I thought it couldn’t hurt, so I said yes. We made arrange...
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Eternal Empire

  Consider the Roman Empire, so vast and “eternal.” At least it would have seemed eternal to a Roman citizen living in it. At its height it stretched from Scotland to North Africa, from the Atlantic Ocean to Iraq. Imagine yourself as a Roman citizen living in the year 200 A.D. You would have considered the Roman Empire (your empire) to be something that would last forever. It had already lasted 600 years, and in fact it would continue on in one form or another for another 1200 years. It was all you had ever known. You would not be able to conceive of a day when the empire no longer existed. It was the world’s first superpower. It was militarily dominant. It exported its art, culture, and values to most of the known world. No one could remember the last time they ever lost a war. They even survived some incredibly bad emperors. I am talking: Nero, Domitian, Caligula, etc. These guys should not even have been allowed to run a tavern, let alone an empire. Yet even with these incompe...
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