My family has never lacked for anything, at least, my parents, my sister and I never did. My Dad grew up in a home where his Mom had worked three jobs at a time just to keep her family off of county assistance. Dad invested incredible effort into making sure that his family avoided the financial challenges he grew up with. The focus was obviously on getting / keeping yourself out of financial difficulties, rather than blaming someone else for putting you there.

I don't know if that lesson was ever really put into words, but seeing my grandmother working behind the counter at a soda fountain had an impact. It probably set the foundation for my belief that we should not expect to live on handouts. I remember my Dad and his siblings talking about how hard it was for her to be on her feet all day, but I never heard a single complaint from her, I just saw that smile and could see how dedicated she was to making her customers happy. What a powerful example.

I never had a mini-bike like David, two doors over, but I got to ride his around the back yard from time to time. I never had stylish clothes or expensive shoes, and we ate beans and meatloaf a lot more than I liked, but we did get to grill hamburgers and an occasional steak and we never, ever went hungry.

Mom always made sure we wore clean clothes to school and church. I would have never dreamed of destroying clothing for the sake of style. I remember the first time a classmate tore one of my t-shirts at recess. I was horrified, not because I expected to be punished, but because it was something that couldn't just be erased and restored. That tear was permanent, unlike the patches ironed onto the holes worn in my jeans. Oddly enough, those stiff iron-on patches were preferable to letting the holes get larger.

Growing up my friends and I walked or bicycled to construction sites and picked up pop bottles on Saturday mornings for money to spend on luxuries like candy, comic books or an occasional toy. We built our toy guns, forts and football goalposts out of scrap lumber, tree branches and cardboard boxes because that's what was available. Sure, it would be nice to go to the store for Mattel's latest plastic M-16, but they were no more accurate or effective than my hand carved M-2x4...

Bonus: All the practice with the saw and file made my soapbox derby cars far easier to manufacture. I earned a trophy once for Best Design, and I'm still proud of it and treasure the time my Dad and I spent on it.

I remember saving up for what seemed an eternity to buy a gas-powered, U-control airplace, $9.99 at Gibson's. That's a lot of pop bottles to collect for the $.02 deposit. I remember the pain I felt the first time it hit the ground following a less than controlled flight-plan. I don't think the plane made it off the ground again. A similar thing happened with an Estes Mars Lander model rocket I launched on Sunday, January 31, 1971. I spent weeks building it to make every detail as perfect as possible, and I desperately wanted to launch it on the same day as the Apollo 14 launch. Unfortunately I lacked the judgement to make sure launch day was as perfect as the rocket turned out to be. January winds in Tulsa can be intense, but the sun was out for the first time in a while and I just had to launch it that very day. And it did fly, up 30 or 40 feet before nosing sharply into the wind and diving right into the ground. I knew that the error was mine alone. It hurt a lot, as do many of life's most valuable lessons. Removing the immediate pain would be nice, but it helps make the lesson more permanent.

Patience is a virtue; impatience is a wrecked model and a long disappointed walk back to the car.

The idea of never destroying anything just because you can has probably formed much of my adult decision-making process. I remember how hard it was to put a tachometer in the dash of my 1969 Ford LTD. Mechanically and electrically it was a snap, but cutting a hole in the blank clock panel behind the dash bezel meant making a permanent modification to the dash. You can bet I made that hole as perfectly round and as clean as possible, and I centered it perfectly. My old shop teachers' mantra kept running through my head: "Measure twice, cut once". It was personal, I owned both the decision and the process, and I measured it more than twice to be absolutely certain it was perfect.

I got my first email account in 1987: langston@convex.com (don't bother, it no longer works) and boy, was that cool! What a great way to get a message to or an answer from someone without interrupting them with a phone call or going to visit. I used it for months before discovering something called "notes". Not "Lotus Notes" but a character-based "GUI" front end for internet news. Suddenly strings like "comp.sys.ibm.pc" meant I had access to an entire universe of people interested in the IBM PC and clones. Again, a really cool thing, but it really hit home when a guy from the University of Illinois, Urbana - Champaign posted an article saying he wanted to attach a reset switch to his PC's Limited AT-8 and didn't know where to start. I had an identical machine sitting on my desk at home and had just wired in a reset switch, so the light came on over my beanie: I could help this guy! I described the location of the reset jumper on the motherboard, told him how to wire in a switch, even described a spare port on the back panel where he could mount it. I sent off the email and thought it was pretty cool to be able to help someone I'd never met resolve a mildly technical problem. A couple of hours later I got a reply with a thanks and another question about whether a particular type of switch would work. At this point I was completely hooked on this new (to me) medium. Since that event, much of my career has been providing the infrastructure for it.

Streaming Video: Merlin Mann on solving Email Saturation (videos.google.com)

Time and attention are finite, don't waste them on the unimportant. Jenga is hard to get back in the box and will only fit when PROPERLY assembled.

Priorities Must Come First!

My parents told me for years and years that I can accomplish anything I set my mind to. I'm starting to believe them.