I ran into my friend Barney at the coffee shop last night. I see him there at the poetry readings, but not much in between.

He was laid off from his job several months ago and we talked about that. He's told me he gets depressed about it sometimes. Then he told me his wife told him he should go down to the coffee shop and look for me. Apparently she ( Read more... )

Bluegrass guitar virtuoso Doc Watson died Tuesday at the age of 89. I feel very fortunate to have seen him in concert twice. The first time was at a local venue called The Neighborhood Theater sometime during the 90's, and the second was at Merlefest in 2010.

The Neighborhood Theater concert was memorable, partly because any Doc Watson concert is ( Read more... )

Many today are celebrating the birthday of Robert Moog (rhymes with "vogue"), inventor of the Moog synthesizer. Google even has a special doodle that, when clicked, opens an online synthesizer app that the user can play.

Moog touched my life in a couple of small ways. When I was about 12,I acquired the album Switched-On Bach, a set of performances ( Read more... )

A facebook friend of mine (I'll call her Nancy)  recently posted that she'd heard some news that made her very said. She wasn't specific about what the news was, so I asked her about it in chat. I learned that  she has an elderly neighbor who is very ill and near death.

My friend had been this woman's neighbor for a long time and had a lot of happy ( Read more... )

One of Elle's Christmas gifts to me was tickets to see Jersey Boys, which we used yesterday afternoon. The TMBG tickets were a Christmas gift too. She was really way too generous. Not that I really mind ( Read more... )

Yesterday was a very special valentines day. Elle took me to see They Might Be Giants at McGlohon theatre. It was a wonderful show, and Elle as always was wonderful company ( Read more... )

I've begun teaching stacks in my data structures class. Today I was going over the implementation of a stack using an array, and I used a small stack of strings for my example. I went through several push and pop operations, showing  the contents of the array as well as the index to the top of the stack were everytime.

The first three operations ( Read more... )

Last night at the coffee shop, I heard an intriguing instrumental piece on the radio. It was played entirely on the ukulele, and the melody sounded familiar. I figured out pretty quickly it was "Bohemian Rhapsody". I would have figured it out even more quickly if it had been a more likely choice for a ukulele solo ( Read more... )