Tom's Diary

Looking backward from 2010-06-13 to 1969-11-30.

Ah, the price of acquired knowledge can indeed be high; particularly for an inquisitive little boy, whose curiosity over how things worked, far surpassed his knowledge of how to put them back together once he’d opened them up to learn what was inside.  Yes, this curious cat was me, and sometime during the fall of 1969, I disassembled the   second   record player, which  my parents had bought me for Christmas, 1967.  I had taken my first one apart as a kindergartner sometime in 1966, and promptly damaged it beyond repair.  So thinking that I was too young to appreciate the intricacies of such equipment and that I should therefore go without music for a while, my parents delayed buying me another for over a year.  But thanks to Mom’s love of listening to her record collection, and the fact that we had no other LP players in the house, they relented and purchased a green and white music machine with a removable lid, as I worked toward completing second-grade.

But the major problem with these players was that they required a “needle”, that rode inside the groove of the record, as it spun, in order to “read” the musical vibrations, and translate them into electrical impulses which, were then amplified up to room-filling volumes.  Extremely delicate, this needle often broke, and cost approximately $3 to replace.  I broke several of these during the first year we had the record player and after the fourth one, Mom and Dad had enough, and stopped immediately purchasing new ones. 

So, being unable to play records without a needle, for months, the player collected dust in my little bedroom at third street, where I kept it stashed, in plain sight, underneath the east-facing window.  In fact, that was the only window in my room.  Now by this time, I knew that no little people inside sang or played instruments, when one played a record.  But still, other questions flooded my mind, and emboldened me to investigate further with a screw driver in hand.  These included the following:

• Why did the player get warm?
• What made the turntable spin?
• Why did it hum?
• How did the speaker work, and how could it sound like people singing, when there was no one singing inside?
• What was an amplifier?
• What happened inside when you switched it on?

So, one dreary fall day, after all the leaves on our maples and oaks had fallen, but before the first snow flakes coated the grass, I decided to investigate these questions. There was nothing else to do, with the weather so damp and cold, and with no needle, I couldn’t play the thing anyhow.  So, I entertained myself by removing the silver Philips-head screws that bound the motor board  to the box-like bottom part.  The motor board was the top piece of the enclosure, on which all the mechanical and electronic parts were mounted. 

Actually, dis-assembly was easy, even for a pre-adolescent like me.   Loosening a screw at each of the four corners of the square-shaped motor board provided immediate access to the interior, allowing me to peer into the dark cavity underneath the turntable.  Since I had powered the unit on (not OFF mind you) before starting, I immediately noticed an orange-glowing spot inside as a gust of heated air wisped past my face.  What was that light?

I lifted the now-free motor board out of the case and wondered in amazement at the cone-shaped contour of the four-inch, full-range speaker; this was one place this soft hum came from.  So I fondled the speaker’s cone from the back, and notice it vibrating in lock step with the hum.  I also found that if I pressed the cone, the hum subsided a little.  Curious.  What made that paper vibrate, and why did the  noise get softer when I restrained it?

I gaped at it, and saw the big nut that held the tone arm in place, as well as the very fine pair of extremely flexible and twisted wires that connected the arm to, what I later learned was the amplifier module.  That amp piece also contained the orange glowing light protruding from it the same way that a light house sticks up from a sandy beach.  This luminous orange dot topped a dusty, gray-colored glass cylinder with a silver nipple at its crest, which I found out later was a 50C5 amplifier tube, about two inches long approximately, and way too hot to touch.  In fact, I couldn’t handle the tube for more than a second or so without getting painfully burned.   I surmised that this must have been what made the record player warm on the outside after you played it a while; this 50C5 tube generated much of the heat, as well did the motor.  But I had so many more questions, and so, I pressed on with the exploration.

I also noticed that blocking the turntable from spinning made the speaker hum a little louder, and the tube glow even brighter; that glow turned from naval orange to sandy yellow.  I thought this was the coolest thing, and I wondered at it in amazement.  I later understood that this happened because the tube’s heater was connected in series with the motor windings, and this meant that when the motor drew more power, it forced extra current through the tube; thus, intensifying its glow.  Since restraining the motor caused a significant increase in the current, the tube naturally glowed brighter.  But at the time, there was nothing   natural   about this phenomenon to me, and I looked in awe; repeatedly holding and then releasing the turntable to observe the tube grow correspondingly brighter, and then dimmer. 

Then, I studied the motor with its fast-spinning wheel that had serrations at its rim; probably for cooling its iron core and windings.  I touched that too and got a start as the teeth at its edge tickled my index finger.  The motor had insufficient torque to cut my skin, though I didn’t know this then.  So it scared me a bit, and I avoided it for some days; but not for long.

Eventually, my youngest sister (Jojo) came to my closed bedroom door, announcing that it was dinner time.  So I hid the exposed unit under my bed and headed downstairs, for I knew that I’d be in serious trouble should anyone discover this latest result of my insatiable curiosity. 

When I returned to my bedroom an hour later, day had completely given way to night, and I dwelled on what the orange-glowing glass tube would look like in the dark.  So I turned off all the lights and felt my way to the bed, hurriedly sliding out that musical box of mystery once more; the thoughts of which had distracted me all the way through supper. I plugged it in and switched it on.  I watched impatiently as gradually, after several seconds, the orange light returned; first appearing as a dusky, deep red, then a brighter, reddish-orange, and then finally, it settled in as a full-blown fiery orange that was just shy of amber, that reminded me of the embers of some very hot camp fires I’d seen the previous summer.  The motor whirred too. Yet on this occasion, the 50C5 tube was what completely captivated my interest.

As I watched, something even more curious happened once the orange light in the top center of the tube, just underneath the glass nipple, reached full brightness.  The speaker’s quiet humming I’d noticed earlier came back, and as it did, another, much dimmer glow appeared in the 50C5.  As the hum grew louder, so too did the intensity of this new, deep blue light in almost exactly the same proportions.  What on earth caused this?!?!?  Blue was always my favorite color anyway and   this   blue, though quite dim, was the deepest, most beautiful shade of high-frequency light that I’d ever seen. Why did it appear only after the orange light reached full brightness?  What tied this blue light to the humming speaker?  Why, when I turned off the switch, did the blue light go out right away but the orange light took  a few seconds to go completely dark?  How was it that when I turned the player  on, the blue light would take a few seconds to appear?  How was the blue light related to the orange light?

These questions fired my imagination and fueled my interest in electronics for years, until 1972 when I attended my first electronics class.  Even before the teacher had completed the introduction involving how to wire up bells, buzzers, and push buttons, I asked about that tube that I’d observed some three years earlier, and why it glowed blue.  He first assured me that I wasn’t crazy, then went on to explained that this luminescence resulted from electrons inside the operating tube striking the inner surface of the enclosing glass. So the only time you’d expect to see the glow would be when power was applied, because otherwise, there would be no electron flow to ionize the atoms in the glass and create that blue hue.  Further, the orange glowing cathode in the middle of the tube, that I’d seen first when I opened up the record player, enabled the electrons to flow from it, to the plate which encased this cathode.  The plate was located nearest to the tube’s glass envelope. In a perfect world, all electrons originating at the hot cathode would be absorbed by the plate and flow out of the tube through the plate connection pin.  But this world is not perfect.  So, some of the electrons completely pass through the plate, and their momentum carries them to the glass envelope, where they strike it and make the outer glass shell glow blue. 

The blue glow and the humming went together because the 50C5 provided the audio power to the speaker.  As it turned out, the tube can only amplify and thus provide speaker power, whenever electrons flow inside.  Without this current in sufficient quantity, there is insufficient amplification, weak or non existent output to the speaker and thus no hum, and there’s no blue glow either; thus the reason I observed that the speaker hummed only when the tube glowed blue. This current flow made both the speaker hum and the tube glow blue.  

But in 1969, I had no electronics teacher to explain this operation and so, to figure it out over the next few days, I unbolted the amplifier module, the filter capacitor with its four multi-colored wires, and I pulled the speaker off the motor board with brute force in order to see the front of its black-paper cone.  Whoever put this thing together used rivits instead of screws to fasten the speaker, and so a flat-head screw driver did not as easily work to remove it, though it did make a great prybar for snapping those rivits loose. Unfortunately, breaking the rivets nullified all chances of putting this contraption back together without help, as I had no idea of how to replace the broken fasteners.  I couldn’t ask for help either because Dad was the only person in our house who’d know how rivits worked, and I was convinced that he’d kill me if he learned that I had cannibalized yet another music box. 

So, for a few more days, I pondered over this growing mess of electronics under my bed; I’d pull it out and handle the motor, capacitor, speaker, and amplifier module.  But soon, loose rivets were no longer my only problem, for with all the moving about and wire-flexing that resulted, the wires that connected the motor to the amplifier, and the amplifier to the speaker, and the power leads to the on-off / volume combination knob, began breaking.  I had no idea where they went either, and even if I did, I’d not be able to re attach them securely, as they had originally been soldered in place, and I surely didn’t know how to solder, much less what solder even was.  Now did I have access to a soldering iron.  In fact, at this point in my budding electronics career, I’d never seen a soldering iron.  So, like the first record player, I once again found myself totally befuddled about how to reassemble it.

For weeks, I carried this fearful, sick feeling of apprehension in my gut, suspecting that Dad would eventually learn what I’d done and be quite upset.  It was just a question of when.  But in my ignorant, youthful way, I thought I could hide the foiled fruits of my inquisition.  So, while he had no clues about my latest distructive experiment, I imagined ways of avoiding his wrath.  I could hide the record player under a sister’s bed.  Then when he found it, he’d think that she had done the dirty deed, and thus I’d be off the hook.  Or. maybe if I put it in the trash, he’d never realize that it was gone.  He might even forget that he’d ever bought it for me in the first place.  Eventually, I settled on the second option because I didn’t want to get my sisters in trouble for something they did not do. 

So I spent some days planning how I’d get the record player out of the house and into our big garbage cans in the east alley beside the dog pens.  This would be difficult, as Dad was the one who always took the kitchen garbage out there several times each week.  I’d therefore have to wrap up the record player and all its broken wires and rivets in an opaque trash bag, and take it out very late on the eve of garbage collection day, after Dad went to bed.  Sounded like a good plan at first.  But then I remembered that the garbage truck often did not arrive until mid-morning, and that Dad often carried the last bags of trash out just prior to leaving for work at 7:00 AM.   

Well, this piece is getting pretty long.  So rather than enumerate all my thought gyrations over how I’d get over on Dad, suffice it to say that I did not succeed.  Dad came into my bedroom one day to chat.  But unknown to me, some parts from the record player weren’t tucked fully out of sight under the bed, and he saw one (the cylindrical electrolytic capacitor) near the top of the bed.  “What’s this?” he queried.  Then, he reached down, grabbed the capacitor, and pulled.  Then, out slid the motor board, to which the capacitor was attached by the multi-colored wires.  “What’s this?!?!”  His question became no longer a question, but more of a statement, that whatever this thing was, it should not have been found, all exposed, under my bed.  He didn’t care that I was intensely curious; either that, or he knew too little about electronics to satisfy my inquisitiveness by explaining why that tube glowed blue.  

I was punnished.  I got smacked and tanned with a belt, yelled at, and shamed.  Sometimes, Dad would literally slap us kids upside the head when he got very mad.  In fairness to him, this didn’t happen much.  But this time, he cracked me a good one; the sound of which was so loud that it made my ears ring, and at the moment of impact, I saw a lightening-like flash.  Then, he confined me to my bedroom for two days, and I had to cope with the headache that his slap had deposited. 

I never fully forgave him for that, and in the several years that followed, I felt closer to my electronics teacher at WPSBC than to my father.  Though our relationship would be civil throughout the nearly thirty-five years between then and when he passed away in 1997, I rarely ever felt comfortable reaching out to him as a son after that.  We never had the talks about girls that would likely have been so helpful to me; particularly in a house full of girls (my sisters and mother).  Indeed, I could have benefited from hearing more of the male perspective.  As it was though, I often avoided him, fearing that he’d hit me again, and he on all but a handful of occasions, didn’t want to talk much about personal things.  To come to think of it though, that was the last time he ever swatted me that I remember; Mom told him later, that if he ever walloped me on the head again, that she’d leave him.  He took her warning to heart.  But, the damage was done, and we never quite got past it. 

So parents?   Never, ever hit your kids, because it has a much more profoundly negative effect on them than just teaching them right from wrong.  It’s drawbacks far outweigh its positives.  Corporal punnishment hurts, not only physically.  But it’s emotional injuries go deep, and you just might never be able to take it back, even if you apologize.  Dad never apologized.  But even if he had, I’m not sure I could have allowed bygones to be bygones.  So before you smack, think of a different way.  Instead of getting fearfully angry and then doling out the physical punishment, Dad would have done well to talk openly and calmly about the blue tube with me, or connect me with an electronics guru who could.  After all, I didn’t disassemble the record player to be a bad kid, and I wasn’t bad because I did that, though his punishment suggested that he emphatically thought otherwise.  I just wanted to know how it worked.  But instead of considering that, he palmed me.  Then, afterwards and always, I carried a hint of suspicion toward him, and I found it exceedingly difficult to openly talk to him about anything.  He was a good provider and always kept the house warm and in great repair.  But this act forged a chasm between us that neither one of us had the power to bridge.  So if you wish to build an impenetrable wall between your kids and yourself, hitting them or needlessly humiliating them during punishment is a sure-fire way to do it.  Take the time to explain why that tube glows blue and don’t punish ther curiosity.  Regard this as sacred, not folly, and you’ll do right by your children.

Take care.

Tom Hesley

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• Dear Lynn: On Neon Lights
• Dear Lynn: On Tube and Transistor Radios
• My First Spring Concert
• Today’s Business: 2010-03-25

06:15 PM: [Emmy] just emailed to say that the Penguins are playing the Washington Capitals this evening, beginning at 7:30.  I may listen to some of the contest with her.  But I have lots of reading to do in my quest to make up for all that wasted time in high school when, instead of the studious consumption of books, I spent most of my study hall periods out on the playground, listening to the radio.  I enjoyed the music supremely, and remember all of it today, just like then; I hold those memories in this highest esteem. 

However, filling my mind with popular tunes for hours each day while most of the other students studied, did little to advance me academically, and in fact, it may have hurt me severely; though that pain would not become apparent for nearly a decade.  Indeed, those leisure times in the late 1970s laid the road to a very disheartening subsequent era for me in college during the mid 1980s, as I struggled to overcome my academic short-falls while at the same time, trying to keep abreast of all the new material being taught.  Much of what the college curriculum assumed I already knew well, I actually knew not at all.  Nor did I ever quite manage to catch up either. 

As a result, though I got through college with a 3.0 GPA, I always felt like I was behind; like the other students knew so much more than me, though I had no idea of precisely what that was.  Now that I’ve begun reading the classics in earnest, I’m starting to understand that there were many, many things I needed to learn prior to college, but did not.  Remembering things was most difficult, and I suspect now that this was because I did not have a good level of high school academic knowledge in my head, upon which to build more learning.  I’d have done well to attend community college for a year or two, to better prepare for collegiate course work. 

I have only myself to blame, as many books were available to me in the WPSBC library during the music years.  But I just never felt like reading them.  It’s not that I never tried.  I did, but usually found the books boring.  They used so many words I did not understand, and wrote of many concepts that were foreign to me.  Sometimes, though written in English, I felt as though the books were actually speaking a foreign language; one that I’d never studied.  In those years, I rarely enjoyed reading; the activity nearly always left me confused and feeling quite inadequate.  So along about ninth grade, I decided that I’d probably never do well with books and academia in general.  Now, here I am some thirty-five years later, hoping to undo the ravages of that choice. 

I never liked writing in school either; no doubt because with my weak reading background, the task of writing seemed overly complex as I possessed fewer immediately recallable metaphors and similes to site in my papers.  As a writer today, I understand that reading and writing come as a package, and that one is not complete without the other.  It’s hard therefore to do one of them well without doing the other too.  Since I did neither of these very much in high school, it stands to reason therefore, that I’d find both of them difficult and pointless besides. 

So it’s ironic that I should choose a writing career as my final livelihood.  How did this come about?  As a software engineer, I had to write profusely to maintain and cultivate my business relationships, convey high and low-level software designs to team members, and to adequately document the software I assembled.  In a typical work year, I might issue nearly four thousand email messages and printed documents and letters.  Fifteen years of that sort of work therefore, went far to eliminate the dreaded writers blocks, that so plagued me in school.  Thus, by necessity, once the act of writing grew to be less of a struggle, I came to enjoy doing it. 

Then, when Internet blogs came into vogue, I thought that blogging would be the ideal job for me because I can do it all from home here, and therefore don’t need to worry about getting rides anywhere; at least not routinely anyhow.  The upfront investment costs for a blog-based business are very low (I’ve spent less than $500 on my three blogs), and the only thing you really have to put into it to make it fly besides a modest amount of money, is your dedication.  With blogging, you can also avoid the dreaded and nearly countless rejection letters you get when submitting articles to paper-based publishers.  As a blogger, I decide what gets published and when, and none of my choices requires the approval of a single person.  A sole proprietor’s bloging success (or failure) depends ultimately on the collective approval or disapproval of all those who read it.  It does not rely on a single boss who may dislike me personally and thus too-frequently rejects my pieces.  Nor does it count on an editor who thinks I don’t write well enough, a curator who doubts that he could find any publishers wanting to print my works, or publishers themselves who deem that my stuff does not fit well with their type of content.  With my blogs, I avoid all these problems, and at the risk of sounding cliché,  I write my own ticket. 

Since years working in the corporate world have left me averse to ever being employed again in any tightly-organized corporate command structure, I’ve come to see blogging as my way back to success, without all that corporate overhead and stress to interfere.  Not only does Internet publishing offer good money-making potential, but I can do it as I feel, and I’m rarely if ever forced to write about things I care nothing about.  In fact, it’s best that you don’t write about a subject you have no interest in. 

So it seems that, though I angrily resisted writing in school some twenty to thirty years ago, these days, the act of jotting down my heart has become my friend, my teacher, and hopefully my salvation.  I’m eager for writing to enable me to once again contribute in meaningful, respectful, and positive ways to society, without having to answer to pesky bosses.  But as I said above, to write well, one must read well too, and reading well cannot be accomplished in my opinion, unless you read  a lot.  I believe that the more I read, the better I’ll write. Further, the sooner I eliminate my high school academic deficiencies (by reading all those great books that I avoided back then), the quicker my blogs will become successful. 

This is why I have this driving (and perhaps obsessive) urge to read so much today, because I’m making up for much lost time.  So over the next year or two, you’ll read on this blog about many books that I’m reading myself.  I’ll use  Tom’s Diary to track my progress, and hopefully as time advances, you, my readers, will notice vast improvements in my writing style.  I wish more than anything to be learned; the older I get, the less tolerant I am to my own ignorance.  I want to be in the know.  The hope is that not only will blogging generate a good living for me, but will also make me smarter and thus, bring the solutions to life’s many problems closer to hand.  We’ll just have to see how it goes.  So stay tuned.

Take care.

Tom Hesley

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• Books I’ve Read
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Just heard from   [Tad]   that Pittsburgh radio talk show host Fred Honsberger passed away this morning.  I mention this because when I interned at KDKA Radio back in 1978-1979, he often recorded commercials and news items while I was preparing news-clip tape cartridges in the control room.  Then, during the 1980s, when he first switched from news to hosting talk shows, I listened for many hours while house-cleaning, writing computer programs, and so on, on Craig St.

I opposed his political views, and found him generally to be obtuse and intentionally adversarial.  But he made people laugh, just the same.  You either loved him or hated him.  But now I suppose, we’ll mourn him.  He was 58 years old.

Tom Hesley

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• Today’s Business: 2009-12-16

Dear [Sarah],

Well, I’m writing software to better manage the songs on my computers (playing with dynamic link libraries, Windows programming, and tag management in the MP3 files). I just finished what they call an IFilter program, which allows searching through the songs for ones that have a specific tempo (number of beats per minute). That way, it’s much easier to keep rhythm going when cross-fading from one song to the next. If they match in tempo, or

If they at least   closely   match, you get a really neat mix that the crowds enjoy. The next project is to classify the music by genre (disco, pop, hip-hop, and so on). A few pieces must be written before I can get to that though, but hopefully, I’ll have made some good headway by the time camp gets here this summer. Have you decided if you’re going to work there again?

I wasn’t sure if my email ever got to you, and am so glad that it did.

Yes, I remember college quite well, even though it was 20 years ago.     It was rough, but I bet it’s rougher for you, working in a hospital and all. I was just writing programs, reading the Greek classics, and working lots of Calculus problems. Calculus. It made me cry back then. But it’s coming in handy today. My software has to go through the Music files and count the beats-per-minute in each one and store the results in the tag for each song. That process looks like it’s going to involve   Fourier Transforms – an interesting second-term Calculus concept. In fact, much of the more advanced digital audio such as encoding files into MP3s involves much Calculus. So I’m glad I learned a bit about it.

Anyway, I’m thrilled to hear that you’re doing okay, and hope we can stay in touch, even if you don’t return to camp this summer.

Well, gotta go. So write soon, and keep me informed on your school progress.

Take care,
Tom

[The local Lions Club asked me to prepare a biography about myself for them, in preparation for the speech I'm to deliver at the district L convention this coming November. I sent them the following information:]

[Friends:]

This is Tom Hesley. Here’s the bio information about me you requested..

History

1970 – 1979: Completed elementary, grade, and high schooling at the Western PA School for Blind Children (WPSBC).

1973 – 1979: Worked as a pot and dish washer in the WPSBC kitchens.

1976 – 1981: Held the novice class amateur radio license as well as the third and second class radiotelephone licenses.

1978: Worked as a farm hand in Bellwood, PA, bailing hay, weeding gardens, and other odd jobs.

1978 – 1979: Held a part-time engineering intern position at KDKA radio in Pittsburgh, PA.

1978 – 1979: Worked as a student telephone operator at WPSBC and was also the head technician at the WPSBC student-run radio station.

1979 – 1981: Completed electronics technician training at the Connelley Skill Learning Center in Pittsburgh, PA.

1981 – 1983: Held an electronics position at the University of Pittsburgh, repairing audio visual equipment including TVs, projectors, VCRs, amplifiers, speakers, tape recorders, stereos, lighting systems, and auditorium wiring.

1984 – 1988: Obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science with a minor in mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, PA.

1988 – 2003: Held various software engineering positions at [...], an electronic publishing company near Dayton, Ohio, where I developed and supported several software systems which to this day, are still turning profit for the company. I led software maintenance teams from 1997 through 2001 there, and at the very end, helped develop a web-based document retrieval system.

1998 – 2003: Maintained Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) expert status for the following computer operating systems: Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT 4.0.

Current Activities

1992 – Present: Holding an Extra Class amateur radio license.

2002 – Present: Running a part-time mobile disc jockey business, called Tommy’s Tunes Professional Disc Jockey Services.

2003 – Present: Pursuing writing full-time, with hopes of publishing motivational books for the lovelorn. I also participate in a monthly writer’s workshop group in Bellwood, PA.

2004 – Present: Holding the treasurer’s post in the alumni organization at WPSBC.

2005 – Present: Bellwood Antis Lions Club member, where I and routinely assist in their fundraising activities.

Interests

I enjoy classic literature, [studying] world religions, science fiction, music, maintaining a healthy life style, home maintenance, computers, old time radio, ham radio, and camping at Beacon Lodge in Mount Union, PA.

Tom Hesley

[Bill],

Joanna says that I should send you a brief history of my activities since high school, so you can describe me in the [WPSBC Alumni Association] news letter when you discuss your new treasurer. So, here it is:

Graduated high school in 1979, at which time I attended the Connelley Skill Learning Center to become an electronics technician.

Graduated Connelley in 1981 and immediately began working at Pitt, repairing their audio visual equipment including TVs, projectors, VCRs, amplifiers, speakers, lighting systems, tape recorders, and so on.

Then, in 1984, I went to college to get my Bachelor of Science degree in computer science, which I finished in 1988.

In the summer of 1988, I left Pittsburgh for Dayton, Ohio, to work for [...], an electronic publishing company as a software engineer. My career there spanned about fifteen years, where I developed several software systems which to this day, are still running and making lots of money for [the company]. I led a software maintenance team in my final years there and at the very end, helped develop a Java-based document retrieval system.

In 2003, I resigned that position as a senior software engineer to pursue disc jockey work as well as to hone my writing abilities, the hope one day being to publish a book that helps shy people not be so shy about expressing their desires to the people they find most attractive.

At present, I do one to three DJ gigs per month, and the writing is coming along. I’m still searching for the “exact handle” on exactly how to present the information I wish to disseminate. But sooner or later, I’ll have it, and I’ll write it then.

[Bill], let me know if you need anything further.

Thanks,
Tom Hesley

Hi there [Lynn].

Life is going well. The book has about 80,000 words in it now, however I’ve taken some time away from it to work on a few short stories. Organizing all the data for the book proved to be a more complicated task than this beginning writer can perform. I’ve been toying with the idea of going back to college and getting a masters degree in creative writing. That might give me the skills I’m lacking for the book project. But right now I’m just doing the short stories and in January, plan to take what I have to an agent to see if it’s sellable. If it is, then maybe I won’t go to school. If it’s not, then perhaps I will.

I’m still living in Altoona, with Mom. It’ll probably stay like that until some earnings start coming in from the writing.

I’m still doing the disc jockey work too, but that hasn’t been very lucrative. So I’m considering pulling out of that. Going to give it another year or two. Hopefully, business will pick up.

Well, partially hopefully. I’ve done about 15 gigs since getting into this and found that I’m not crazy about hauling the heavy equipment around to every job. There are four speakers, each weighing 80 pounds. The amp weighs 70 pounds. The mixing board weighs 50 pounds. I’m worried about hurting myself with all that. It’d be nice to pay the help to do all the hauling. But though I have three guys in my crew, I still end up carrying a fair amount. Ah well, I suppose I’m more of a behind-the-desk worker than a manual laborer.

It’s partly sunny here today. Low humidity, so the skies are deep blue with bright white puffy clouds.

How are things for you? [Your son] probably has a deep voice now, ‘eh? How’s your daughter? Is she finished with college yet? Did she end up marrying that computer guy she was dating when I visited four years ago? You know, the one you admired so much? How are you and Fred getting along? Still together? And of course, you know I have to ask. How are the cats? Ours are fine. They’re going to be four years old in August.

Well, I have to go work on today’s revisions. Hope your business is still working well for you. That’s cool that you’re on high-speed DSL now. Isn’t it great? So take care. You know that you’re my buddy for life, even if we talk but once a year. I think of you often.

Later,
Tom

Dear   [Mentat],

Thanks for the info [...]. These notes look like they’ll be very helpful.

Yes, it’s quite cold out, but very warm up here in the new office, where I started working last week. There is still much to be done – doors need finished, phone lines need installing, and so on. But at least now, it’s starting to come together very nicely. I just installed high-speed Internet up here last weekend. It’s wonderful.

Well, hang in there with school. With each term, you’ll probably notice it getting harder as the material presented becomes more complex. Hang in there. You know the old saying: Do it or die trying.

Well, I have to get to work. Talk to you again very soon.

Tom

Dear   [BB],

Good morning.

Well, on your decision to discontinue pursuing your engineering studies: It’s good that you learned that this is not for you now, before you would have spent lots of money and time on it. Perhaps you’ll be able to tap into more of your creative side, as opposed to your scientific side, by studying computer graphics technology.

Many folks find artistic work more pleasing and fulfilling than the rigors of engineering. So, don’t be discouraged over deciding to change careers, because is unusual these days, for people to stay in one career their whole lives. In fact, many folks, as they learn about themselves and what really makes them happy, switch to different disciplines several times while in college. I myself have changed careers once already and am working on a second change now. Started off as an electronics technician in the early eighties, then moved into computer science and software engineering in the late eighties, which is what I’m doing today. But now I’m working on becoming a freelance writer. And who knows? Before it is all said and done, I may end up doing a few more things with my life. I kind of like being a handy man around the house.

So, the point is that such changes are routine these days, and it’s good that you have the courage to do this in your own life. Changing when necessary goes a long way toward making one’s life more fulfilling as well as fulfilled.

I’ll say nothing to [that guy you like] about your decision, or to anyone else for that matter. Getting the word out is entirely up to you.

[All the family is] doing well. Christine is having a birthday party for Grant this weekend. He turned seven years old this past Tuesday. All of us will probably be there.

Diane was just commenting the other day that she liked talking to you. So, send her some email if you have some time. I’m sure she’d really like that.

More later,
Tom Hesley

Hey there [sister Diane].

Well, Mom is vacuuming the living room. She’s got all the book shelves and other furniture pulled out for painting, dusting, and so on.

My day is going well. I found a neat software package that makes DJ mixing from a PC very easy. It should really enhance the music at the next dance / party we do – probably Labor Day or New Years. I’m evaluating it tonight.

Work is moving along. Still have lots of reading to do in order to get up to speed on this Java stuff, and it’s hard to stay awake through some of it. But I’m starting to feel like I know a little bit about Java Beans development now.

Well, I’d better get back to reading Java. Thanks for writing and will probably talk to you before I return to Philly this Saturday.

Later.

Tom