Why I should have studied harder in high school.
HBomb
All I had was UCBU (now absorbed into Q&A,, Skiffy, and the juggling club. But then again, hanging around the sysadmins was my first experience with telnet and vi, which led me to ftp and having to uudecode a 50k image file split over 8 pieces in a newsgroup.
If that sentence actually makes sense you, you were probably doing the same thing I was at the time.
Oh Gopher, where are you now?
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This made me think about Chris Bauer, a man who tutored me through hours of command line skills. I just googled him to find out where he ended up after getting his PhD in Molecular genetics and found out that he passed away in 2001.
He was one of the first gay people I hung out with in college and we remianed friends. When we first met, his MS only required a cane. My second year, it required a walker. By the time I was out of college, he had a motorized wheel chair. We went to Party a titalating play housed at Chicago's own Gratiutious Nudity Theater. It was one of those those experience that really moved me and made an impression, in hindsight probably because of its novelty.
But my fondest memory of Chris is when he got his PhD and wanted to go where everyone goes when they spent 6 years slaving away in the artic Chicago north: Great America. So Chris, Chris (his boyfriend), and I headed went out one warm Friday morning. There, I found out one of the great PC rules of amusement parks: handicapped patrons get to cut in the front of the line. To be technical, we just went in the exits, could ride the rides as many times as you wanted -- after all it took 2-3 minutes to get him into the seats. The downside was that the ride operators talked to Chris as if he was retarded instead of just wheel chair bound (leaning over Chris, hands clasped on thighs, speaking loudly and slowly: "Do you want to ride the rollercoaster? Wee!") But we did get to ride Batman, very first seat for 5 times in a row, so it was worth it. Chris didn't mind and at times he even milked it a little. We did, however, underestimate the rides that only had lap retraints, as the g-forces flopped him around like a test dummy. He was a little sore after the Eagle, and from that point forward, we went on only rides that had harneses.
*pause 5 minutes*
Harumph.
