Ten things I know…

Here, for you to take as you will, are Ten Things I Know About Getting a GED, which are also

Ten Things You Should Know About
Getting a GED

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I love Married… With Children. Maybe the show doesn’t seem as daring today as it did twenty years ago (good Lord, it’s actually been twenty-one!), but at the time, there was nothing like it on television. In fact, despite dozens of copy-cats and pretenders, there’s never been anything quite like Married… With Children, since. Whatever your opinion on the show, there is no doubt that Married… With Children changed the television landscape forever. Along with its effect on television in general, Married… With Children was also the show that launched the Fox Network. Al, Peggy, Kelly and Bud are the first family of Fox, and the first original show produced by the fledgling network that has come to be a worldwide media powerhouse.

Married… With Children is crass, often tasteless, and frequently politically incorrect, but, damn it, it’s also hilarious. I think the real genius of the show is that it somehow managed to deal with politically incorrect crass tastelessness with intelligence. Yes, I just said Married… With Children is intelligent. A cliched sex joke is never just a cliched sex joke on this show, it always has deeper waters beneath it. This became increasingly true as the show progressed, the characters developed, and the relationships became more complex. Married… With Children is one of few shows that I believe really did get better with time, almost up until the last episode. Sure, there were a few bumps in the road, and the awful stretch of episodes featuring Seven, but the show is as close to perfect as anything else I’ve seen on American television.

I could go on for days about why I believe Married… With Children is so fantastic, and maybe I will in another post at another time, but this article is about Al Bundy, the put-upon patriarch of the Bundy clan. Al, whose time as king of his high school and dreams of football glory dead-ended in a reality of eking out a living by selling shoes to angry, overweight women, while absorbing abuse from his unsympathetic family. Al Bundy, who has dabbled in film making, invention, gambling, merchandising, and more, always to land back at Gary’s Shoes, with the unmistakable Al Bundy grimace on his mug. As I was returning home yesterday from an afternoon of taking pictures at a local state park, my mind took one of those weird, meandering routes that led from f-stop settings on my camera to me having an epiphany about who Al Bundy really is. After two decades of watching Married… With Children, and thinking the show had just about given me everything it could, I suddenly realized something about Al that I had never realized before, something that put much of his behavior into a new light. That revelation, which will be revealed in the next section, led me to write this post.

Here, for you to take as you will, are Ten Things I Know About Al Bundy, which are also

Ten Things You Should Know About
Al Bundy

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Due to a number of circumstances, such as my birthday being right on the cutoff for starting school as a child, and going from kindergarten to “pre-first” instead of first grade, I was a bit older than most of my classmates in high school. Consequently, I turned eighteen just before I would have started eleventh grade. I was never a good student, but I got by. I got good grades in classes that let me get away with just taking tests, but because I lacked discipline, I did poorly in classes that required a lot of homework. My standardized test scores always got me into advanced and “gifted” classes, but my poor work ethic delivered grades that made me look like a dunce, at times.

So, tenth grade ends, and eleventh is soon to start. My mother told me to quit school and get a job or to get out of her house. The logic seemed to be that if I didn’t do well in school, I didn’t deserve to be in school. Since I had nowhere else to go, I quit school and got a job. Shortly thereafter, I was kicked out of my mother’s house, anyway, which is sort of the back-story on how I ended up homeless.

So, I was a homeless teenager with no skills and a tenth-grade education. I don’t think I have to tell you that this is not an ideal situation to be in. My life had ups and downs and the years slipped by and I learned a lot about the effects of being at the very bottom of the hiring desirability ladder.

I can’t say that I feel a lot of regret for the way things happened. As Jim Croce says in One Less Set of Footsteps, “After all it’s what we’ve done, that makes us what we are,” and I like the person I became. I don’t regret the course of my life and I don’t feel sorry for myself, but that doesn’t mean I think the path I took was ideal. Eventually, at the age of almost thirty years, I got my GED and that is a source of internal pride that I am glad I finally found. I’ll leave that for another article, though.

Here, for you to take as you will, are Ten Things I Know About Being a High School Dropout, which are also

Ten Things You Should Know About
Being a High School Dropout

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This site is powered by WordPress, which is probably the most popular blogging software in the world. I’m feeling magnanimous, so I am going to skip my usual long-winded, useless wall of text introduction and get right to the meat of this issue.

Here, for you to take as you will, are Ten Things I Know About WordPress Blogging Software, which are also

Ten Things You Should Know About
WordPress Blogging Software

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Buying a house can be exciting, but also very scary. If you’re like most first-time home buyers, you are getting ready to take on the biggest chunk of debt you’ve ever had in your life. Not only are you taking on a large commitment in terms of dollars, you are also taking on a lengthy commitment in terms of your lifespan. A common mortgage length is thirty years. That is quite a commitment and a lot can happen in thirty years. Heck, you’re only legally responsible for your children for eighteen years. The mortgage company doesn’t care that your employer went under or that your elderly mother needs taking care of, they just want those monthly checks. Yes, a mortgage is a mighty big load to shoulder, but most people are eager to take on that responsibility because of the rewards of home ownership, not to mention the joy and excitement that come with the end of every month as you panic and scramble to put together enough money to keep your new roof over your head. Yes, all this can be yours, but only after you get a mortgage, which, it turns out, is slightly more complicated than splitting the atom with Tinker Toys and an Easy Bake Oven.

This article should rightly be titled “Two-hundred-fifty-three-thousand Things You Should Know About Mortgages and Home Buying,” but space, you understand, is limited. Plus, I purchased a domain name with “Ten Things” built right into it, so we’re pretty much stuck with the format. This is by no means a comprehensive guide, but it might cast an LED’s worth  of light into the pitch black cavern that is the home loan process.

Here, for you to take as you will, are Ten Things I Know About Mortgages and Home Buying, which are also

Ten Things You Should Know About
Mortgages and Home Buying

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I’ve been a hobbyist programmer since I was a little kid banging away on my Commodore 64 or TRS-80. I have experience in several flavors of BASIC, including Commodore BASIC, MS-BASIC, QuickBASIC, and BlitzBasic/BlitzMax. I am also an experienced, although out of practice, C++ programmer, having leapt straight into C++ as a child after being given a Tandy 1000 SL/2 and a Zortech C++ compiler as a gift. When I finally made my way onto the internet, I learned HTML immediately and with no trouble (although HTML is not really a programming language). Having mastered HTML, I started to desire more power and flexibility, so I branched into Javascript. Eventually, I ran up against the limits of what I could do with Javascript and, as PERL was by far the most popular web-oriented programming language, I decided to learn Practical Extraction and Reporting Language (PERL).

Although the web has largely moved on to PHP (in which I am also conversant), and although I have experience in a wide variety of scripting and programming environments, Perl has a special place in my heart. I have written literally hundreds of Perl programs (or Perl scripts, as they are often called), and the Perl language has never let me down. With Perl, I’ve written simple command-line scripts to sort files in a directory and I’ve written hugely complex automated site-building software, plus many things in between. Perl was my go-to guy for years and years when I needed to get something done quickly and simply.

Here, for you to take as you will, are Ten Things I Know About The Perl Programming Language, which are also

Ten Things You Should Know About
The Perl Programming Language

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Very shortly after my eighteenth birthday, I found myself in a “permanently mobile housing situation.” That sounds like a good, politically-correct way to say homeless, doesn’t it? My mother gave me a ride to work and told me not to bother coming home. I spent the night wandering around in the snowy suburbs of a major mid-western city. I was able to briefly find shelter in one person’s attic and then in another one’s basement, but those were temporary solutions. I spent the next year and a half homeless, some of it on the streets, some of it in an immobilized car, some of it in emergency shelters, and some of it just riding the buses rail system just to be indoors.

Like anyone who has been inside a group or organization that most people only ever see from the outside, I have a perspective on this issue that differs from what people generally believe of homelessness and homeless people. In the case of this particular issue, the phrase “things you should know” is not just rhetoric, I really believe it. Homelessness in this country, and the misunderstanding of who the homeless are and how they got to be that way, is an issue that needs ot be addressed.

Here, for you to take as you will, are Ten Things I Know About Being Homeless in America, which are also

Ten Things You Should Know About
Being Homeless in America

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I lived in Las Vegas, NV, for just over four years. For a little less than three of those years, I made my living exclusively by playing poker. The game of choice, thanks to the movie Rounders and TV shows like The World Poker Tour, was and still is Texas Hold’em. When I moved to Las Vegas, many casinos were in the process of shutting down their poker rooms. Within a year or so, the casinos that still had their poker rooms were expanding them, and most of the casinos that had been scrambling to replace their poker rooms with slot machines were now scrambling to find space to plant newer, bigger poker rooms. A few of the most stubborn casinos, the ones really determined to drag their feet and and appear ignorant and backward, didn’t catch on until late in the game, but well before I left the city at the end of 2007, all of the major players had opened, reopened, or expanded their poker rooms.

I had the good fortune to become involved in poker during what is quite probably the greatest time in the history of the game. I met and made friends with a lot of big names in the industry, both players and behind-the-scenes people, and I had access to a lot of knowledge that players before me did not. Once upon a time, Doyle Brunson’s Super System was the only complete, honest, and useful book available on the game of poker. Now, it seems that every player with a vaguely recognizable name has a book, a video, or both. This boom in the poker world was truly exciting and I am fortunate to have been caught in the middle of it. I met some fantastic people, I learned some important lessons, I felt thrilling highs and some disgusting lows. I also learned a lot about myself.

Here is an essay I wrote about a significant hand of poker that I played.

Here, for you to take as you will, are Ten Things I Know About Playing Poker for a Living, which are also

Ten Things You Should Know About
Playing Poker for a Living

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