Category Archives: Technology

Contemplating Life – Episode 76 – “The Quality of the Debate”

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This week, we continue reminiscing about my first and only full-time job as a computer programmer. I worked in the IU Department of Medical Genetics along with my college mentor, Dr. John Gersting.

Links of Interest

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/contemplatinglife
Where to listen to this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/contemplatinglife
YouTube playlist of this and all other episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFFRYfZfNjHL8bFCmGDOBvEiRbzUiiHpq

YouTube Version

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Yuzq0JlXrg

Shooting Script

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 76 of Contemplating Life.

This week, we continue reminiscing about my first and only full-time job as a computer programmer. I worked in the IU Department of Medical Genetics along with my college mentor, Dr. John Gersting.

I don’t recall what hourly rate I was paid when I went full-time at the genetics department, but it was substantially more than I made as a student programmer. I recall that my annual total came out to about $11,700 per year, which may not seem like much, but that would be about $56,500 in today’s dollars. According to a website I found, that is well above what an entry-level programmer would make in Indianapolis today. I don’t have statistics for how it ranks in the late 70s. There was a common conception that jobs in academia did not pay as well as those in business or industry, and computer programmers were in short supply in those days, so I probably could’ve earned much more elsewhere. But I really liked the job. I liked working with Gersting even though he was just a part-time consultant on the project, and it was very convenient for me.

As I mentioned previously, I would ride to work each day with my dad. I would arrive around 8:30, and most department employees began work at 9. I would leave each day at 4:30, while the others stayed until 5. My bosses were quite understanding. This schedule worked well for me and my dad.

As I had predicted, limiting my work to just 40 hours per week was a great relief compared to the frantic schedule of being a college student. The only challenge was it was quite tough to get up that early. Mom would get me dressed every morning while Dad was getting ready for work. Often, it felt like I slept through it. I joked, “Sometimes I wake up in the lobby of Riley Hospital and don’t have any idea how I got there. I have to wake up to drive to the elevator, go down to the basement, and to my office.”

The department had its own minicomputer, a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP 11/70. The term “minicomputer” was relative to the huge mainframe computers of the day. This minicomputer had significantly less computing power than today’s desktop PCs, which are called microcomputers. The PDP 11 was a 16-bit computer, whereas today’s PCs are 64-bit. The minimum configuration of a PDP 11 had only 4k of memory, although the 11/70 was expandable to 4MB. I don’t know how much memory our computer had.

By size comparison, it was huge. It sat in a row of four cabinets about 2 and a half feet square and about 6 feet tall. The front panel has lots of blinking lights and toggle switches. See the YouTube version of this episode for photos of similar machines. One of the cabinets contained a 12-inch tape drive that we used to back up our data from the hard drives. In the center of the room sat two large cabinets slightly smaller than a washing machine. These were our RM05 hard disk drives. A removable stack of 12 disk platters that were 14 inches in diameter was inserted into the drive. Only 19 of the 24 surfaces of these platters were used for writing data. The others were protective platters or contained information that helped position the read/write heads and index the sectors and tracks of the disk platters.

Each of these two drives held only 256 MB. Your smartphone likely has at least 32 GB, or 8 times as much storage. My desktop has several drives that can hold 1 TB, which would be 8,000 times more than these washing machine-sized cabinets.

Periodically, we would back up the entire system. You would take the system offline, put a backup platter stack into one of the machines, and copy the other drive in its entirety. Then, you would remove both of those and copy the second drive to a backup.

We had two printers connected to the machine. One was a traditional line printer, and the other looked like a laser printer but used special chemically treated paper. I have no idea how it worked.

We had 4 CRT terminals and a DEC-Writer teletype machine connected by serial cables.

The computer room had its own air conditioning unit, but it wasn’t like we had to use clean room protocols in the area. We could come and go as we pleased. I remember the air conditioning being quite noisy.

As I mentioned, we were in the hospital’s basement. Next to the computer, they had drilled a hole in the concrete floor and driven into it a copper stake about 3/4 inch in diameter. Connected to the stake was a large braided copper cable that grounded the computer. About once a week, someone had to take a watering can and pour water around the ground stake so that it would make good contact with the earth. On occasion, we would forget to do so, and the computer would start acting crazy. We would water the ground stake and do a reboot, and it would work fine.

I’ve told you about the other student programmers who worked with me that one summer, but I’ve not told you about the three other full-time programmers who worked there while I was there.

The full-time programmers worked in three offices adjacent to the computer room, while the student programmers and I worked in an office across the hall. Adjacent to the room I worked in was a genetics lab. Apparently, they used mildly radioactive reagents in some of the lab work, so there was a sticker on the door with a radiation symbol and a warning that read, “Radioactive materials used inside.” Someone had written below that the words “pre-faded genes only.”

Unfortunately, I don’t remember all of the other programmers’ names. There was a guy whose name, I think, was Steve or Joe or something similar. For future reference, we will call him Steve, but I don’t guarantee that was his name. He was a talented programmer who managed to get that graphics family tree program working to a certain extent. He was a nice enough guy but a bit of an introvert and not very sociable. I didn’t get to know him well.

There was a very outgoing African-American woman named Dale who was very friendly, and I got along well with her. We joked around a lot. More stories about her in a minute.

The third woman, I think her name was Linda, was in her mid-30s, divorced, and I believe had a couple of kids. She had a grumpy attitude most of the time, but occasionally, she would come in Monday morning with a large smile and a cheerful attitude. We learned that on these occasions, she had spent the weekend sleeping with her ex-husband even though they had been completely divorced for a couple of years. This seemed to drive Dale crazy because her relationship with her ex was nothing like that. It was funny to watch Dale rant and rave about the situation.

Dale was a devout religious woman. She taught Sunday school in her church. I don’t know what Protestant denomination she belonged to. But one day, she was struggling with her lesson plan for, I believe, kindergarten or first-grade children. She said, “The Scripture reading this week is from the Book of Revelation, where it says that in the end times, the sun will go black and the moon will turn to blood.” She knew that I taught Scripture classes at my church and wanted my advice on how to teach young children about the end times. “What do I do,” she asked. “Have them draw a picture of the night sky and color the moon red?”

I asked her, “Why do you want to teach the end of the world to a bunch of 5 or 6-year-olds? Isn’t it better to say that someday Jesus will return, and there will be signs that we can see that he is coming back? Tell them to look at the leaves in the fall, which is a sign that winter is coming. Or tell them to look at the flowers and the grass in the spring, which is a sign that summer is coming. We don’t know exactly what kind of signs we will see when Jesus comes, but they will be there. You can’t get caught up in the details. Find the message behind the Scripture.”

I tried to explain to her that the prophecies of Revelation were symbolic. When it says that the sun will turn black and the moon will turn red, it’s just talking about solar and lunar eclipses. Naturally, during a solar eclipse, the sun goes black. During a lunar eclipse, the earth casts a shadow on the moon, and the scattering of sunlight through the Earth’s atmosphere gives the moon a red tinge. Ancient people believed that eclipses were an omen of something serious coming.

“But it doesn’t say there’s going to be an eclipse,” she protested. “It says the moon will turn to blood.”

I said, “Just so I understand– You really believe that at the end of the world, the moon will suddenly transform from a giant rock into a huge drop of human blood?”

“Of course not,” she replied. “It doesn’t say human blood. It just says blood.”

“Sorry, Dale. You’re on your own on this one,” I said.

I mentioned that when I first tried to inquire about the job, Dr. Coneally was in a weekly staff meeting with Dr. Gersting and others. Although I didn’t attend those meetings as a student programmer, I did attend once I worked there full-time. We met in a conference room on the ground floor. The programming staff, including Gersting, sat on one side of the table, and the genetics staff, including the department chairman, Dr. Merritt, sat on the other.

Because it is difficult for me to turn my head side to side, I generally sat at the head or foot of the table so that I could look slightly left or right to make eye contact with either side of the table.

The programming staff had difficulty explaining to the genetics people what was going on and what challenges we were facing in getting the software up and running. Similarly, the MDs on the other side of the table had trouble expressing themselves in language that the programmers could understand.

Of course, I understood the programming issues pretty well, and having lived my life with a genetic disease, I knew enough genetics to follow along even if I was no expert. So there I sat with PhDs on either side of me who could not communicate with one another because they were so stuck in their own jargon that they couldn’t speak plain English. Often, I found myself innocently saying something like, “So what you are saying, Dr. Gersting is…” And then I would repeat the same thing in plain English. And I occasionally had to reinterpret what the genetics people were saying in plain English. The response generally was, “Why didn’t he just say that?” That’s what I wanted to know. Why can’t they just speak plain English?

It frustrated me that I was surrounded by highly educated people with such poor communication skills.

After these Friday staff meetings, Gersting and the computing staff would return to our dungeon offices. Gersting would sit back in his chair and say, “I don’t know if we accomplished anything today, but the quality of the debate was much improved.”

I’ve been using that sentence for decades, especially during some of those contentious Finance Committee and Parish Council meetings that I had at Saint Gabriel during my years of ministry there. Sometimes, success is measured in such tiny increments that simply getting your point across can be considered a victory.

I’d like to think that in my two years working in the genetics department, I contributed to improving the quality of the debate.

In our next episode, we will discuss my remaining work at the department and the circumstances under which I eventually left for health reasons.

If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and other exclusive content. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.

As always, my deepest thanks to my financial supporters. Your support means more to me than words can express.

Even if you cannot provide financial support. Please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience. I just want more people to be able to hear my stories.

All of my back episodes are available, and I encourage you to check them out if you’re new to this podcast. If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback, please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you found this podcast.

I will see you next time as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.

Contemplating Life – Episode 60 – “Ghost Writer in the Machine Language”

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This week we continue my nostalgic look back at my college days starting with my fourth semester at IUPUI and the paid programming jobs I ever had.

Links of Interest

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/contemplatinglife
Where to listen to this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/contemplatinglife
YouTube playlist of this and all other episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFFRYfZfNjHL8bFCmGDOBvEiRbzUiiHpq

YouTube Version

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxfDHzcy1KU

Shooting Script

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 60 of Contemplating Life.

We took a couple of weeks off after my office reviews and now we return to my nostalgic look back at my college days starting with my fourth semester at IUPUI and the first paid programming jobs I ever had.

My transcript for the spring semester of 1975 shows that I took “Psychology as a Biological Science PSY 105” which I discussed in a previous episode. I earned a B for that class. Next, we have “Physics 152 Mechanics” which I also discussed in my episode about my friend Mike Gregory. Another B with four credit hours. I also had “MATH 261 Multivariate Calculus“ which was my first calculus class. I never was very good at calculus or differential equations but I managed to sneak through with a C.

Finally, we get to my second-ever programming class – “Assembly Language Programming CSCI 300.” It was very frustrating that this was my fourth semester trying to earn a BS degree in Computer Science And I was just now getting to my second class in my major. I explained previously that they had me mistakenly identified as a Math major rather than a Computer Science major and that got me off sequence.

Let’s talk For a little bit about what we mean by Assembly Language Programming. We are going to get a bit technical for a minute or two but I will try to explain some programming concepts in layman’s terms.

There are a variety of ways to program a computer. Computers don’t understand English-like languages or algebraic formulas to do calculations. Most of the time we write programs in what’s called a “higher-level language.” My previous programming class CS 220 taught programming in a now obsolete language called FORTRAN IV.

Suppose you wanted to calculate the area of a Rectangle. In FORTRAN, you might have statements such as…

Width = 5

Height = 7

Area = Width * Height

(Where an * is a symbol used for multiplication).

That’s a very simple formula but you could have much longer calculations on one computer statement. For example, the volume of a sphere might be

Radius = 5

Volume = 4/3 * Pi * Radius * Radius * Radius

Because the volume of a sphere is 4/3 pi times the radius cubed.

Computers cannot directly understand any of this. You have to use a specialized program called a “Compiler” which translates a high-level language like FORTRAN into something called “Machine Language”.

Machine Language is nothing but a series of numbers that the computer interprets as commands to do various things. Computers have a section of circuitry called an Arithmetic Logic Unit. The ALU consists of some registers to store temporary numbers. Some commands load data from the computer memory into a register. There it can be added, subtracted, multiplied, or divided by a number in a different register or perhaps a number stored in memory. Once a number is in a register you can also compare it to the number in a different register. Based on how that comparison went, you can conditionally jump to a different part of the program. Or you can remember where you were, jump to something called a subroutine, and then when the subroutine is finished, you jump back to where you left off.

There is a special register called the Program Counter which points to the next instruction in memory to be executed. When it completes that command, it increments the counter to the next instruction. Your program instructions and the data it works on are all stored in the same memory. If you’re not careful, you can jump to a location that contains data rather than instructions. The computer will try to interpret that data as an instruction to do something when it really wasn’t meant to be. The program goes haywire doing God knows what.

Machine language consists solely of binary numbers (a series of ones and zeros) which is hard for humans to read. We can group the ones and zeros into groups of four and use base 16 numbers also known as hexadecimal numbers. But that still doesn’t tell you what the instruction does unless you memorize the codes. For example,3c 12 67 means that you should take the value at memory location “6712” and load it into the A register. That’s not a mistake, it stores the lower order two digits first. So you specify the address as 1267 but it means location 6712.

Assembly language, which is what I studied in CS 300, is one step above machine language. In machine language, the previous command we talked about would be…

LDA MyValue

The command LDA means you’re going to load something into the A register. That’s relatively easy to remember that LDA means “Load Register A”. But where are we going to get what we want to load? We could remember a memory address like 6712 but it’s easier if we just make up a name for that location. In this case, we called it “MyValue”. A program called an Assembler translates this command into machine language. Assembly language is just a human-readable form of machine language. Somewhere in the program prior to this, you had to tell the assembler to send side a memory location and that we would in the future refer to it as “MyValue”. The assembler sets up something called a “symbol table” so that you don’t have to deal with numbered locations. You can just refer to it by a name you made up. You don’t have to remember it was location 6712 and you don’t have to remember that the opcode for loading register a was the hexadecimal value 3c. The Assembler takes care of that for you.

So there is a one-to-one correspondence between assembly language and machine language. Every time you write an assembly language line of code, the assembler translates it into a single machine language instruction. The advantage of assembly language is that you are talking to the computer in its native language. You can make the code run very efficiently because you are telling it exactly what to do in exactly what order. When you program in a higher-level language like FORTRAN, you are counting on the compiler to translate what you wrote in FORTRAN into something efficient in machine language.

The advantage of high-level languages is, they are easy for humans to write and read. The disadvantage is, that they might produce a sequence of commands that is not fully optimized. At least in theory. Today’s compilers can probably optimize code better than most programmers can. This is especially true now that computer processors have multiple CPUs that can execute multiple threads of instructions simultaneously. Modern compilers can figure out how to do that efficiently.

Back in the early 70s, people still used assembly language when they wanted the most efficient code. Sometimes today, you might still use assembly language if you are concerned about code that ran with exact timing because of hardware constraints. But these days, people very rarely write assembly code.

Even though assembly language commands tried to use mnemonic codes that were allegedly easy for humans to remember like LDA means load into register A, there were hundreds of commands with variations and we could never keep track of them all. We had something called an IBM System 360 Reference Card. It was a fan-folded card about 8 inches tall and perhaps 3 inches wide with about four panels printed front and back on green card stock. I’ve included an image of one in the YouTube version of the podcast. I found a PDF of one online. Somewhere along the way, the campus bookstore quit selling the famous “little green card”. They replaced it with a version for the IBM System 370 that was printed on white card stock. One day, someone said, “Can I borrow your little green card?” The sarcastic reply was, “They don’t make them anymore.” So then we grabbed the little white card and wrote across the top of it “This is a little green card.” So even though they were white, we still called them “the little green card.”

These quick reference cards were very valuable tools.

Years later, I met a guy named Paul Nanos. We were both members of the Speedway RadioShack Computer Users Club. Paul created a series of quick reference cards for a variety of personal computers. I helped him create one for the Timex/Sinclair 1000 computer. I sold the quick reference cards through my business although I never made much money from them. But that’s another story for another day.

By the way, in the examples above, I’m using codes for the Intel 8080 processor used in early personal computers even though the CS 300 class I took years ago was for the IBM 360. That’s another problem. Every type of hardware has its own unique set of machine instructions. It has a different set of registers and different commands to move numbers in and out of those registers and to manipulate them. So assembly language written for the IBM 360 that we had at IUPUI would not run on the Digital Equipment DEC-System 10 that we also had. Nor would it run on the IBM 1620 that we had. And none of those assembly languages would work on the new Intel 8080 or Zilog Z80 or MOS Technology 6502 processors that were used in the early personal computers.

However, if you wrote a program in FORTRAN and you had a FORTRAN compiler on your IBM 360, DEC 10, RadioShack Model 1, or Apple ] [ computer it would compile your FORTRAN program into the machine language of your particular machine, as long as you didn’t try to use any hardware-specific or operating system-specific features, it would work.

But when using machine language, a program written for one type of computer will do nothing on a different type of computer. A program intended to run on an Intel-based processor in machine language running Windows would do absolutely nothing on your iPhone which uses a completely different kind of processor.

That’s what bothers me about sci-fi stories where we can hack into alien computers or they can hack into ours and upload viruses.

Probably the worst offender was the 1996 film “Independence Day”. Jeff Goldblum was able to hack into the alien computer and upload a virus to disable the shields.

If I gave you a memory dump of a program written for IBM 360, unless you understood the internal workings of the machine and the exact function of every operational code, there is no way you could tell what the program did and there is no way you could write a program for that machine without that basic knowledge. When looking at the memory dump, there would be no way you could tell which of the numbers were program codes and which numbers were data that the program operated upon.

Machine language programs are nothing but strings of numbers in memory. There’s nothing inherent about them that tells you it’s from an IBM 360, Intel 8080, or a modern Intel series CPU. Oh, perhaps if you understood machine language for those types of machines you could try to reverse engineer it and see if it corresponded to machine language instructions for one of those machines. But if it was alien hardware, and you had no idea how the internal workings of their computers worked, you couldn’t make heads or tails out of it let alone write a program that would run on their hardware.

Anytime you see someone in a movie look at a string of numbers and suddenly declare, “It’s an algorithm that does… Whatever” that’s nothing but BS. I have seen that in a number of movies and TV shows. The worst offender of this scenario is the Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 6 Episode 20 “The Chase”. Captain Picard reunites with an old friend who is an archaeologist. Prof.Galin is killed by pirates who are trying to steal information from him. Picard discovers the professor is collecting a series of numbers but they have difficulty deciphering the pattern. They finally realized the numbers corresponded to sequences of DNA that had been found on planets all over the galaxy. They also determine that there is a secret message in DNA. There is nothing scientifically impossible about that. We can already produce DNA strands of a particular sequence so it’s not impossible to think that you could encode a message in someone creature’s DNA. The problem comes when Lieut. LaForge suddenly declares that there is more to this DNA than appears.

LaForge: This is not part of a natural design Captain. This is part of an algorithm coded at the molecular level.

Picard: An algorithm. Are you saying that these DNA fragments are elements in some kind of computer program?

LaForge: I know how this sounds but there is no way this could be a random formation. This is definitely part of a program.

That’s just ridiculous. So we got a string of numbers and they are encoded in DNA and we link them up to get a certain pattern but there’s no way to know that that string of numbers is actually a computer program. Because the way you turn numbers into programs is totally dependent upon what kind of hardware you are using. The number 3c in hexadecimal means something in register A on an Intel 8080, but that number could mean anything on a different kind of computer. A string of numbers that represents a program on one machine would be nothing but random noise for a different type of computer processor. Whoever it was that encoded this DNA allegedly billions of years ago would have no idea what kind of hardware we would be using today.

Later in the episode when they finally connect all of the pieces of DNA, somehow their tricorder device magically starts running the program and projecting a hologram of the recorded message. First of all the idea that this program could magically reconfigure the tricorder to project a hologram which is something we’ve never seen the device do before and that somehow decode the video and audio in 3D to project the message is totally ridiculous but we will them that one. The message was two minutes and 10 seconds long. I timed it. I downloaded that episode, clipped out the two-minute 10-second scene, and it was over 68 MB long. That must’ve been some lengthy sequence of DNA. Much longer than it appeared in the episode.

There are also stories where someone creates a computer virus and the simple act of looking at the file causes your computer to get infected. That’s a load of crap as well.

Probably the worst offender in this category was Dan Brown’s 1996 novel “Digital Fortress”. There was a computer virus that was so dangerous, they couldn’t open it to see what was inside it. That’s ridiculous.

A computer file is nothing but a string of numbers. If those numbers are in the proper form and you name the file “something.txt” then you can open it using the Notepad application and theoretically, it would have plain text in it. Or it would look like garbage. But opening a file with Notepad is not going to infect your computer.

Or if it had an extension like .docx then maybe it’s a Microsoft Word Document file. And if you use Microsoft Word to open the file, there might be some macro codes or program extensions embedded in it. That could possibly be dangerous but only because Microsoft Word allows you to embed programs in what should otherwise be a text file.

The most dangerous type of file is one with the extension .exe which means “executable”. If you try to “open” that file, your operating system will execute it as if it is a program. All you have to do to examine that file safely is to rename it as “whatever.dat” which means it’s nothing but a data file. Then you open it with a safely created program that doesn’t try to execute any code but just looks at the string of numbers inside the file and displays them for you. That is 100% safe. The only way a file can infect your computer is if you load the file into memory and somehow cause the program counter to start executing it like a program.

You don’t need anything special to look at a file safely. You don’t need an antivirus program. You don’t need an air-gapped machine (which means it is not connected to the internet). Computer programs are just strings of numbers no different than data. It’s only what you do with those numbers.

Okay, time to get off my soapbox and get back to my story…

When I got my first personal computer using a Zilog Z80 processor, I did have to write some assembly language. Sometimes I had to translate that assembly language into machine language myself because I didn’t have a suitable assembler program. One time I taught a class in Z80 assembly language for members of that computer club I talked about. The concepts I learned in writing IBM 360 Assembly carried forward when I had to write assembly language for other types of hardware. However, for the most part, I never had any practical use for the IBM 360 Assembly Language Programming that I learned in CS 300.

I said “for the most part” because although I never had a legitimate use for IBM Assembly, my first paid programming job was writing IBM Assembly Language– Illegitimately.

Anyway, I think it was perhaps my third year at IUPUI that a Computer Technology student came up to me and asked me if I would write some programs for her. She had to write about 15 very simple programs in IBM 360 Assembly. It was one of those situations where she had all semester to write these programs and waited until the last minute to do it. I was sympathetic towards her because I had been through the same scenario which I will tell you about in a later episode. Anyway, she needed to write about 15 programs in 10 days. She said, “I can write all of these programs but I just don’t have the time to do it by the end of the semester. Look at the list, pick 4 or 5 of them, and I will pay you $20 per program.”

I picked out 4 of the assignments and told her I would do them. I wrote the programs in FORTRAN but I did it in a very primitive kind of way. I pretended I was writing in assembly language. So I used very simple FORTRAN commands. I made sure that the program ran and produced the proper results. I could run FORTRAN on the DEC-10 by sitting at a computer terminal. If the program didn’t run properly, I could edit and rerun it a dozen times in just a few minutes.

Running programs on the IBM 360 was more difficult. You had to type the code onto punchcards using a keypunch machine. Submit the deck of cards to the computer operator which he/she would put in the pile and run them in the order they were received. Then you had to come back in a half-hour or so, pick up your output, and if it didn’t work, retype some of the cards and resubmit them. That’s why this woman could not get all those programs finished in time.

By getting the basic logic of the program working in FORTRAN, working out all the bugs quickly, and then rewriting them in assembly language code, I’m pretty sure all four of the programs worked the first time I submitted them.

She paid me in brand-new crisp $20 bills fresh out of an ATM. I used the $80 to buy a fancy new HP 21 scientific pocket calculator. It cost $125 but it got me most of the way there.

I know I shouldn’t admit that I helped someone cheat by doing their homework for them, but I looked at the other code she wrote and I am confident she was correct when she said she could have done them all if she had time.

My first legitimate programming job was also in assembly language but it wasn’t for the IBM 360. It was for the Intel 4040. The 4040 was a slightly more advanced version of the Intel 4004 which is widely considered to be the world’s first microprocessor. It was a 4-bit computer. Compare that with computers today that are 64 bits. It wasn’t good for much of anything although the way the computer architecture was designed, it was obvious it was intended to be used for a calculator. I don’t remember the details about it.

It was very primitive in that it would only add or subtract but it could not multiply or divide. Binary multiplication is pretty easy. You just shift the bits left and then add repeatedly. There was a guy who was an electrical engineer who was a friend of a friend. I don’t remember the guy’s name. I don’t remember the friend’s name. But he needed someone to write about 30 or 40 lines of Intel 4040 code for a digital thermometer. All it had to do was read in 6 bits of data from an input port, do some addition and multiplication on it, and store the result in a particular location. He gave me some photocopies of the hardware manuals for the 4004/4040 processor. I had to teach myself 4040 Assembler Language, write the program, and then hand translate it into a hexadecimal code because we didn’t have an assembler.

Along the way, I learned a little bit about digital electronics. For example, the “input” command read data from a pair of 4-bit ports for a total of 8 bits. However, we only needed 6 of the bits. I assumed that the other two bits which we were not going to use would default to zero. But they don’t. A disconnected pin on an input port of a microprocessor in all likelihood defaults to a “one” rather than a “zero”. So you have to mask off only the bits that you want. This was a lesson that I would use regularly decades later when I began programming Arduino-based microprocessors. I never dreamed that someday I would be programming a computer smaller than a deck of cards that had similar computing power to my first PC which was the size of a microwave oven. And that the programming skills I’ve learned on that simple little digital thermometer, would be essential to the microprocessor programming I would do much later in life.

Anyway, I wrote the program out in Intel 4040 Assembly Language on a yellow legal pad. To the left of each Assembly Language instruction, I wrote the hexadecimal codes that I hand-translated into machine language. To the right of the instructions, I wrote comments that explained step-by-step what the program was doing.

The guy paid me $100 and was quite grateful. He said if he ever needed another piece of code written he would be happy to hire me but he never did. But it was my first legitimate job as a computer programmer and I have fond memories of the experience. I spent that money on the more advanced HP 25c scientific pocket calculator that was programmable. I’ve got some funny stories about that gadget for another episode.

With the exception of everything I described above, I had absolutely no use for what I learned in “CS 300 Assembly Language Programming“. I earned 3 credits and an easy A.

I’m not sure who taught the class. I think it was a guy named Dr. Rizo but I’m not sure.

There was a more significant aftereffect of that class that has had a major impact on my life ever since then. One of my classmates in CS 300 was a guy named Rich Logan. You’ve heard me talk about him previously because he and his wife Kathy have been very loyal friends ever since our college days. They frequently take me to movies and occasional sporting events and have been the best friends anyone could ever hope to have. We will talk more about them and some other friends I made at about that time at IUPUI in next week’s episode.

It may be a difficult episode to write. I’ve talked about other people I went to school with in grade school, high school, and other college friends but they are all long gone from my life. We either drifted apart like my girlfriend Ellie or my buddy Dennis who I still keep in touch with but we are not close. Some of them sadly have passed away like my girlfriend Rosie or my good buddy Mike. But, Rich and Kathy are still a very big part of my life nearly 48 years later. I’m not going to be able to tell their entire story in one or two episodes but we will hit the highlights of the early part of our friendship in the next episode.

– – – –

I’d like to dedicate this episode to my good friend and caregiver Brandon Drake who tragically passed away from an epileptic seizure on March 9. You were a good friend and a great caregiver and I will miss you always buddy. Rest in peace, my friend.

– – – –

If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and other exclusive content. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.

As always, my deepest thanks to my financial supporters. Your support means more to me than words can express.

Even if you cannot provide financial support. Please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience. I just want more people to be able to hear my stories.

All of my back episodes are available and I encourage you to check them out if you’re new to this podcast. If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you found this podcast.

I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.

Contemplating Life – Episode 52 – “The First Picture Show”

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This week we begin a two-part episode recounting my history as a movie buff. In this episode, we cover the drive-in movie era as well as early widescreen film formats such as Cinerama. Note there are lots of movie clips in the YouTube version of this week’s podcast so you might want to watch it on YouTube.

Links of Interest

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/contemplatinglife
Where to listen to this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/contemplatinglife
YouTube playlist of this and all other episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFFRYfZfNjHL8bFCmGDOBvEiRbzUiiHpq

YouTube Version

Shooting Script

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 52 of Contemplating Life.

I recently saw an interview with MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow talking about her new book titled “Prequel”. It’s about Nazi influence in the US government during World War II. Her colleague Chris Hayes asked her how she got into the topic. She said she had planned to do a book about present-day anti-Semitism but after researching its roots she ended up back in the late 1930s and 1940s. She said she suffers from a condition where every story she tells she wants to begin with, “An asteroid hit the earth and then the dinosaurs died, and then…”

I suffer from the same condition. When I tell a story, I always want to start at the beginning. For me, context is everything. You’ve already seen that in previous episodes. For example, I couldn’t tell my history of attending IUPUI without telling the history of IUPUI itself.

In last week’s episode, I talked about my ongoing struggles to be able to get out into a theater to see movies. It took everything I had to not start the story with, “The first movie I ever saw was…”

However, I can no longer resist the urge to scratch that itch. So rather than continue speculating about when I will see my last picture show, this week let’s go to the beginning and talk about the first picture show. This episode is about my history with the movies as far back as I can remember. My history as a movie buff is going to take more than one episode to cover in the kind of excruciating detail that I like to tell stories. So this is the first of a two-part story.

I will put my disclaimer up front this time. Last week I misremembered the order in which I’d seen some films over 40 years ago. Now we are going to go back 60+ years so I make no guarantees about the accuracy of this narrative.

I don’t know what was the first movie I ever saw, but I’m confident it was at the Lafayette Road Drive-in Theater. The drive-in sat in a 19-acre triangular lot bounded by 38th St., Lafayette Road, and Georgetown Road. It opened in August 1953 before I was born in July ‘55. It closed in 1982 when it was demolished and a strip mall was constructed there.

My earliest memories of the venue date back to when I was perhaps 3 or 4 years old. In those days, W. 38th St. was just two lanes. There were no streetlights, fast food places, or shopping centers. Lafayette Square Mall just north and east of Lafayette Road wasn’t constructed until 1968. I also seem to recall that the 38th St. bridge over White River was not yet constructed in my early days of visiting the drive-in so 38th St. was not yet the major east-west thoroughfare that it is today.

The nearest homes were perhaps two blocks away with the rear of the homes facing the drive-in. There may have been a small wooded area blocking their view of the screen. But as the area became more developed and the trees were turned down, residents complained when the theater started showing R-rated movies. They said that their children could look out their bedroom windows and see naked women on the screen.

I remember there was a small playground in the front near the screen with swings and slides for the kids to play on before the feature started. One of the swings had a baby seat that had a backrest, armrests, a bar across the front, and a strap that would go between your legs to keep you from sliding out. On at least one occasion my mom was able to get me into the seat. It was the first and only time I was ever to play on a swing set. I also have a memory of going back a second time and insisting that I get to play on the swing but I had outgrown the seat and we could not get my legs underneath the crossbar in the front.

In my quest to recall the first movie I ever saw, I’ve racked my brain and I’ve done lots of research on IMDb. My most likely candidate is “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad” featuring stop-motion animation by legendary animator Ray Harryhausen. According to IMDb, Sinbad was released in December 1958. That would’ve made me three and a half years old.

My family moved into the Eagledale neighborhood just seven blocks south of the drive-in in May 1959. I always presumed we didn’t go to that drive-in before moving into the neighborhood. Then again, even at our previous home on West 34th St. near White River and the canal, the Lafayette Road Drive-In would have been the closest to our home.

I have very few memories of living in that old house on 34th St. but I suppose a cool movie like that would have made a sufficient impression on me that I remember it at that young age. I wondered if perhaps I was thinking of a different Ray Harryhausen classic such as “Jason and the Argonauts” which was released in 1963. We probably saw both of these films but I’m fairly certain we did see Sinbad because it featured a battle with the legendary monster Cyclops and I definitely remember seeing that film at the drive-in.

I’m not ready to claim that this was the absolute first film I ever saw because I also have a vague memory that perhaps we saw a trailer for that film and my dad said, “Wow, we definitely needed to come back to see that one.” Then again, I could be remembering a trailer for “Jason and the Argonauts.”

While we are talking about Harryhausen films I am absolutely positive we saw “The Valley of Gwangi” in the summer of 1969. That film featured a bunch of cowboys who discovered a lost valley filled with dinosaurs. They capture one, bring it back to civilization, and put it in a circus where it kills a circus elephant and several innocent people. We had my five-year-old sister Carol with us. She wasn’t scared of the dinosaur. Quite the contrary, when they killed the dinosaur in the end, she cried. We tried to explain to her he was a very bad dinosaur who killed lots of people. She didn’t care. They didn’t need to kill it. I recently asked her if she remembered the incident. She said she didn’t have any direct memory of the movie but she has heard us tell that story for many years so that’s how she knows the story.

I’m about 90% sure we also saw the 1959 Charlton Heston version of Ben-Hur at the drive-in. It seems strange however that that film was released in November and Sinbad was released in December. I find it a bit improbable that we would go to the drive-in in the middle of winter. I have a vague memory that we did go to the drive-in in cold weather and that they would provide you with a small electric space heater that you could plug into your cigarette lighter rather than run your motor with the heat on. Unsure of that memory, I posted a message on a Facebook group called “Grew up in Eagledale” to see if anyone else had more certain memories of the Lafayette Road Drive-in. One person confirmed that she remembered that they would provide you with a heater and another confirmed that the drive-in was open year-round. Furthermore, just because IMDb reports when the movie was released, it’s quite likely that it went to indoor theaters first and drive-ins might not have shown it until summer. So I really don’t know when I saw these films.

In 1960, my dad bought a 1959 Plymouth. He was able to make the down payment on the car because we won $1000 in a Knights of Columbus raffle that we used to put in $1 each week. It was one of those cars which were typical of the time period with huge fins on the rear fenders. It had a large sloping rear window. See the YouTube version of this podcast for a photo of a similar car.

When we would go to the drive-in it was typically a double feature. I would be allowed to watch the first movie but they would put me in the back of the car on a shelf above the rear seat underneath that large window. I was supposed to try to sleep during the second movie and many times I did. But mostly I would lie on that shelf underneath the glass dome and stare at the stars and wonder how they worked.

I have distinct memories of asking my dad, “If the stars are suns just like our sun only really far away, and if the sun and the stars are in outer space, how can they burn when there is no air up there?” He didn’t have an answer but I vowed to figure it out one day. It was the start of my fascination with science, especially astronomy, and I trace it all back to staring out the window of the 59 Plymouth at the Lafayette Road Drive-in.

I can’t remember all of the films I saw at the Lafayette Road Drive-in but there are three that I remember quite distinctly because I bootleged them. Of course, this was long before you could buy your own video camera. So, I couldn’t bootleg the film itself but I could bootleg the soundtrack. For my eighth birthday in July 1963, I got a small reel-to-reel tape recorder with 3-inch reels. This was before the widespread use of cassette recorders.

In June 1964, I took my tape recorder to the drive-in with me to see “Mary Poppins”. By this time, we had traded in the old Plymouth for a Chevy Corvair Greenbrier Van which allowed me to sit in my wheelchair. I had a lap tray that sat across the armrests of my wheelchair and I set the tape recorder on my tray. I put the microphone up near the drive-in movie speaker. The quality of the tape recorder, the cheap microphone, and the horrible sound quality of the drive-in movie speaker produced a really bad recording but I didn’t care. I had a free recording of every song in Mary Poppins. A friend of mine had the soundtrack album but I claimed that my recording was superior because it included sound effects that were not in his album. For example when Mary is singing “A Spoon Full of Sugar” she is magically putting away the children’s clothes and toys. In my recording, you could hear the dresser drawers opening and closing

A month later, I also recorded everything from the Beatles film “A Hard Days Night” as well as a year later when I recorded the soundtrack from the Beatles film “Help!”. These three tapes were my prize possessions at the time. I have no idea what ever happened to them. Sometime in the early 70s, I got my first cassette recorder with a built-in AM/FM radio. I would use it to bootleg the latest hit songs off of WNAP-FM. [Echo FX] “The Wrath of the Buzzard!”

Although it was just mono and not stereo, the quality of recording off of FM was pretty good. I don’t recall bootlegging the soundtrack of any other films except those three but then again there weren’t many musicals that interested me in those days.

I talked to my sister Carol about her earliest memories of the movies and she recalled seeing “The Sound of Music” at an indoor theater but I think she went with my grandmother as I never saw that film until it made it to TV and I’m not certain I’ve ever seen it all the way through.

The first movie I ever saw at an indoor theater was in early 1964. The Marion County Muscular Dystrophy Foundation hosted an event where all the families were invited to the Indiana Theater at 140 W. Washington St. downtown. We saw the film “How the West Was Won” in Cinerama format.

Cinerama was sort of the 1950s and 60s version of IMAX. It was shot using three separate 35mm cameras that slightly overlapped. The outer two cameras were crisscrossed such that the right-hand camera pointed left and the left-hand camera pointed right. It was also projected the same way using 3 standard 35mm projectors which projected onto a large curved screen with a 146° viewing angle. It also featured seven-channel surround sound with five speakers spread behind the screen and 2 speakers in the rear corners of the theater. The sound was recorded on magnetic tape rather than optically recorded as were most soundtracks of the day.

Although there were some areas at the far edges of the theater where there were no seats and you could sit in your wheelchair, it wasn’t a very good viewing angle especially considering the curvature of the screen. Rather than sit with the other kids in wheelchairs on the side of the theater, my dad lifted me out of my wheelchair and I sat in a regular theater seat between Mom and Dad in the middle of the theater for a good view.

Watching a film on such a huge screen indoors with high-quality surround sound was an amazing experience compared to what I was accustomed to at the drive-in. There was a dark red curtain in front of the screen when you entered the theater. When the lights went down, the curtain would open to reveal the gigantic curved Cinerama screen. The film began with an overture of music. IMDb reports the runtime was two hours 44 minutes which was huge in those days. So much so, that there was an intermission and more music to introduce the second half.

I remember intermission music included the Civil War-era song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”. I was so enveloped by the surround sound I started singing along in that embarrassing way that one sings out loud with headphones on and you don’t realize people can hear you. My dad had to tell me to shut up and just listen to the music.

Especially memorable were the scenes of a raft going down the rapids of a river partially breaking apart as well as a buffalo stampede that goes right over the cameras. I think that initial experience with Cinerama planted a seed that makes me such a huge fan of IMAX today.

Like IMAX, the first films shot in Cinerama format were documentaries and 5 such films were made from 1952 through 1958. Only two regular feature films were ever shot in the three-strip Cinerama format: “The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm” and “How The West Was Won” both released in 1962.

Filmmakers discovered was difficult to compose a scene using the three-camera process because any objects close to the cameras would be distorted if they went across the seams where the cameras overlapped their field of view. Although they took steps to try to hide the overlap, it was still visible in films. Documentary three-strip Cinerama films were shot and projected at 26 frames per second but the feature films were shot at the standard 24 frames per second.

Cinerama had a camera aspect ratio of 2.59:1. That means that the width of the image was 2.59 times its height. However, when projected, they often slightly cropped the top and bottom of the image to hide some distortion anomalies giving a projected aspect ratio of 2.65:1. For comparison, HDTD today uses a 16 x 9 aspect ratio which comes out to 1.77:1.

The three-camera Cinerama format was later replaced with systems called Ultra Panavision 70 and Super Panavision 70 both of which were shot on 65mm film to produce 70mm prints. Some of these films were marketed as Cinerama even though they didn’t use the original three-camera process because they still used the curved Cinerama screen. The river raft scene in “How The West Was Won” was shot in the single-camera Ultra Panavision 70 and then transferred to three-strip Cinerama.

Ultra Panavision 70 has an aspect ratio of 2.76:1 which was wider than three-strip Cinerama. It used anamorphic lenses to compress the aspect ratio during filming and then uncompress it during projection. Among notable films shot in Ultra Panavision 70 but marketed as “shown in Cinerama” were: “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World” (1963) (which I saw at the drive-in), ”The Greatest Story Ever Told” (1965), and “Battle of the Bulge” (1965).

Probably the most famous and most effective use of the wide, wide screen of Ultra Panavision 70 was“Ben-Hur” (1959) with its iconic chariot race. It was never marketed as Cinerama. As previously mentioned, I saw it at the drive-in presumably from a 35mm print. The most recent Ultra Panavision 70 film was Quentin Tarantino’s 2015 film “The Hateful Eight”. He used 65mm film and cameras to produce 70mm prints. He paid extra to help theaters show the film in Ultra Panavision 70mm format wherever possible.

Several recent films have been shot using Ultra Panavision 70 lenses on digital cameras such as “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” (2016), “Avengers: Infinity War” (2018), and “Avengers: Endgame” (2019) all of which I saw in modern digital theaters.

Another similar format is Super Panavision 70. It uses spherical lenses to create an aspect ratio of 2.20:1. Down 20 as that Among notable films shot in Super Panavision 70 and marketed as Cinerama were “Grand Prix” (1966) (which I saw in the drive-in), “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), and “Ice Station Zebra” (1968). Many other notable films were shot in this format but were not marketed as Cinerama because they were projected onto flat screens.

When Ultra or Super Panavision films were shown in Cinerama theaters using a single projector, they had to use special optics on the projectors to get them to conform to the highly curved Cinerama screens.

I saw “Ice Station Zebra” with my parents at the Indiana Theater in Cinerama again as a guest of the Muscular Dystrophy Foundation. I begged my parents to take me to see “2001: A Space Odyssey” in Cinerama but from some things they had heard about it, I think they thought it was perhaps too adult for me. I didn’t see 2001 until it was shown on TV many years later. Then it was rereleased to theaters and I was able to see it in a small 2-screen theater in the Speedway shopping center. It was described as Super Panavision 70 format but my guess is it was probably a 35mm print. I was always disappointed I never got to see it on a huge screen but at least seeing that one version in the theater was better than the TV versions I had seen which used pan and scan to fit the widescreen image onto a 4:3 standard definition TV screen.

Years later when seeing these films on TV, I never could understand why you could see the vertical seams dividing the Cinerama image into three parts on “How The West Was Won” yet you cannot see the seams on “Ice Station Zebra” and “2001: A Space Odyssey”. It wasn’t until I began researching this episode that I learned that only 2 Cinerama feature films were actually shot in the three-strip format and the others were shot with a single camera and projected with a single projector onto the curved Cinerama screens. That finally explains a lifelong mystery of why there never were any seams in these other so-called Cinerama movies.

See the links in the description to Wikipedia articles on all of these formats and other similar formats of the era such as Todd-AO. These articles include more extensive lists of famous films which were shot and shown in these widescreen formats.

Before we leave the drive-in movie era completely, we have to talk about the 1969 film “Winning” starring Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and Robert Wagner. Newman and Wagner played racecar drivers who were rivals. Much of the film was shot on location at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway just a couple of miles south of the Lafayette Road Drive-in. My entire family has been lifelong fans of the Indy 500 so this was a must-see film. It included actual race footage of crashes from the 1966 Indy 500 and other races.

If that wasn’t enough to make the film important in my moviegoing history, it’s also the first film I ever saw that had a sex scene. Well… Sort of a sex scene. The film was rated “M” for mature audiences. Today probably it would rate PG-13 at worst and perhaps only PG. Newman and Woodward who were married in real life played a married couple. In the film, she has an affair with Wagner. There is a scene shot in the Speedway Motel where Newman walks in on Wagner in bed with Woodward.

Wagner was on top of Woodward in bed but they were under the covers and there was no nudity involved. Even though I was 14 years old I was still quite uneducated about such things and it prompted me to ask, “What were they doing?” I don’t quite recall what sort of evasive answer my parents gave me.

The last movie I ever saw at a drive-in was not at Lafayette Road but was at the Tibbs Drive-in which is the only drive-in movie still in operation in Indianapolis. I went with some of the guys in the neighborhood. It was the 1970 Roger Corman gangster film “Bloody Mama”. Corman is known as the King of B movies. The film starred Shelley Winters as real-life gangster Ma Barker and a then-unknown 27-year-old actor you might ever heard of. His name was… Robert De Niro. Do we know him? Yeah.

Not only was it a bloody gory gangster movie, but Ma Barker routinely had sex with her adult sons and their friends. The sons would argue over whose turn it was the spend the night with Mama. None of them wanted to do it.

I’ll never forget one line from the movie. When one of the Barker boys played by De Niro overdosed and died, mama was hysterical she shouted out to her son Herman who was out alligator hunting with a Tommy gun. “Your brother’s dead. It was that dope he put in his arm.” Herman Barker played by Don Stroud calmly replies, “Just bury him deep. There’s a lot of animals around here.” Typical Roger Corman B-movie fair. Some people consider it a cult classic.

This episode is getting quite long so I think this is a good place to split it. In the next week’s episode, I will recount more of my history of enjoying movies. We will focus on the evolution of special effects which have always fascinated me. Most of the times that I have purchased DVDs of films it was not typically because I planned to watch them over and over again but so I could see the “making of” features that explained how the special effects were created and this into the director’s commentary.

If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and other exclusive content. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.

Many thanks to my financial supporters. Your support pays for the writing seminar I attend and other things. But most of all it shows how much you care and appreciate what I’m doing. Your support means more to me than words can express.

Even if you cannot provide financial support, please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience. I just want more people to be able to hear my stories.

All of my back episodes are available and I encourage you to check them out if you’re new to this podcast. If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you find this podcast. Tell me your stories about the first movies you ever saw or take a nostalgic look back at your driving experiences.

I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.

Contemplating Life – Episode 51 – “The Last Picture Show”

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This week we explore the transitions I’ve had to go through in my life as it relates to my ability to get out into the world and do ordinary things like enjoying a movie with my friends. It’s based on an essay I wrote for my writing seminar. Note there are lots of movie clips in the YouTube version of this week’s podcast so you might want to watch it on YouTube.

Links of interest

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/contemplatinglife
Where to listen to this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/contemplatinglife
YouTube playlist of this and all other episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFFRYfZfNjHL8bFCmGDOBvEiRbzUiiHpq

YouTube Version

NOTE: This video may be blocked in some countries because I used a tiny bit too much of a copyrighted film. It should be visible in the US so set your VPN accordingly or listen to the audio on any of my podcast platforms such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, etc.

Shooting Script

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 51 of Contemplating Life.

I planned to get back to the stories about my college days at IUPUI. But this is movie awards season. The Golden Globes will have already been awarded by the time you see this. Oscar nominations come out January 27 (not the 17th as I said in the video) and the Oscars will be awarded March 10. I hope to be able to see all of the Best Picture-nominated films and review them here as I did last year. I’ve already started watching some of the contenders. To prepare for my Oscar reviews, I want to spend an episode or two talking about what movies mean to me.

Today’s episode is based on an essay I wrote for my writing seminar. We were told to write about a character in transition. I chose to write about the various transitions I’ve had to go through in dealing with my disability and the effect it has had on my independence and my ability to enjoy entertainment. My writing instructor, award-winning sci-fi author David Gerrold, had high praise for this essay and several of my fellow students had nice words about it so I hope you enjoy it as much as they did.

Recently, on the Friday between Christmas and New Year’s, I went to the movies with my friends Rich and Kathy Logan. We saw “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom”. It was pretty good but after a while, all of the superhero movies tend to feel alike. It was worth the trip to the theater and I really enjoyed the 3D but overall it probably wasn’t that great of a movie.

I guess that for most of you, going out to your local Cineplex and catching a film with your friends is something you take for granted. For me, I can’t do that. Every time I go to the movies, somewhere in the back of my mind is the idea that it might be my last time. I’m not talking about my own mortality here. Someday, we’ll all see our last picture show. We know not the day nor the hour when that will happen.

I’m talking about my ability to get out of the house and see a movie in a theater. There’s something special about seeing movies on the big screen with multi-channel digital surround sound, especially in IMAX or IMAX 3D. As the IMAX marketing phrase says, “Watch a movie or be a part of one.” Movies have the capability of transporting me to places, real or fantastic, that I could not go otherwise. It’s wonderful that we have access to so much entertainment via cable and streaming but nothing replaces the magic that happens when you see a film in a theater with a crowd of people. The reason that such an event is so precious to me is that on more than one occasion, it felt like it might be the last time I ever had that opportunity.

I’ll never forget the day back in 1979 when I had such an experience.

It wasn’t the last movie I would ever see in my life, but it was the last movie I would ever see in a theater by myself. For such a significant milestone, it should have been something great and memorable. It wasn’t. It was the comedy farce “The In-Laws” starring Peter Falk and Alan Arkin.

I was about a month short of my 24th birthday. A few months prior, I had to quit my job as a computer programmer for the Indiana University Department of Medical Genetics. My disability had worsened to the point where I could no longer work a full-time job. After two weeks in the hospital recovering from congestive heart failure and several months home in bed I was finally getting out into the world again.

Going to the mall to see a movie on my own was something I’d done dozens of times since I was a teenager. My parents would drop me off, I would see the film, and they would pick me up when it was over. Getting out of the house to the movies was my celebration that things were finally getting back to normal.

In those days, they didn’t have stadium seating in movie theaters like we do today. The floor transitioned from a gentle slope near the front to a steeper slope at the back. There were no areas designed specifically for people in wheelchairs. I had to sit in the aisle which meant that people often ran into me in the dark. It was uncomfortable to sit on the sloping floor so I always sat near the front where the slope was less severe.

About halfway through the movie, I started to slump slightly in my wheelchair. I could feel myself getting more and more uncomfortable. I feared I would slump over sideways, my hand would slip off my wheelchair joystick controls, and I would be unable to get it back again. I would be stranded there. There were very few people in the theater and they were all sitting behind me. So, when the movie was over, no one would be walking by and I could easily get their attention and ask for help. They probably would all have left not knowing that I was stuck there. I didn’t look forward to the idea that I was going to have to yell for help when the movie was over.

I was filled with anger and frustration. I thought that after recovering from heart failure I was back to normal but this was in no way normal for me.

I had to try to get my wheelchair onto level ground. I was already sitting very near the front because the slope of the floor was less severe but it wasn’t enough. I turned my wheelchair around and drove up the steep slope of the theater aisle. It took everything I had to maintain control as the aisle steepened on the way up. There was a level area at the top near the door. I thought perhaps if I sat there, I would be safe.

It took everything I had to get up the steep slope without my hand slipping off of the joystick or my head flopping backwards but somehow I made it to level ground. At last, I would be able to watch the rest of the film.

But after a few minutes, I felt myself continuing to slump over. I finally gave up. I drove my wheelchair to the theater door, pushed it open with my footrest, and drove out to the lobby of the theater in the mall. There was still about a half-hour left in the movie but I didn’t care anymore.

I sat there quietly with tears streaming down my face until my dad arrived to pick me up. I was so weak I couldn’t drive my wheelchair anymore and he had to disengage the motors and push the wheelchair himself.

By the next day, I had recovered enough that I could continue to drive my wheelchair around the house but I knew that I would never be safe to be out in the world on my own again.

It wasn’t just the end of seeing movies by myself. It was the end of the most independent era of my life as a disabled person. I’d gone to college and had a full-time job. My dad would drop me off at work or school and I would be on my own all day long.

In my college years, during the summer I would drive my wheelchair all over the neighborhood in a routine that I dubbed “The Grand Tour.” I would travel about six blocks to the local branch library and check out the latest Scientific American or a sci-fi book. Then I would drive a half-mile down 34th St. to the Burger Chef for lunch. I would go across the street from there to the drugstore, pick up a magazine or comic book, maybe a candy bar, and return home.

Each year during May, mom would drop me off at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and I would spend the whole day at the track watching cars practice. I’d tour the garage area, and talk to mechanics and drivers.

All of these expressions of my independence came to a crashing halt at that stupid little movie that evening in late June 1979.

It wasn’t long after that that I lost the ability to feed myself. I could no longer type on my computer keyboard. Driving my wheelchair around my house even on level ground with no bumps became difficult.

I sank into a deep depression. I asked myself, “Where is that well-adjusted handicapped person I used to know named Chris Young?” The answer was obvious, he died when I lost the ability to use my arms effectively.

After sulking for many days, I did what I had always done… I found a way to adapt.

I discovered that if I propped my elbow up on the armrest of my wheelchair and stood up my computer keyboard on an easel so that the keys were facing me. I could use a long pencil or a wooden dowl rod to poke at the keys on the keyboard. We wired small pushbuttons into the Shift and Control keys on the keyboard. I would type with my right hand and work the buttons in my left hand.

I also discovered that if I held this typing stick in my mouth, and held the other end in my hand, it would steady my right hand on the wheelchair joystick. In some respects, I was using the mouth stick to push my hand which in turn pushed the joystick. That gave me the ability to get around the house or to go outside if it was on smooth ground. But I wasn’t able to go anywhere alone anymore.

Shortly after that last solo trip to the movies, Dad and I went to the movies together. We saw one of my favorite cheesy disaster films of all time “The Cassandra Crossing.” It featured an ensemble cast that included Sophia Loren, Richard Harris, Burt Lancaster, Lee Strasburg, Ava Gardner, Martin Sheen, and O.J. Simpson. A group of people on a European passenger train were infected with a deadly virus. Fearing that the infection would spread, no country would allow them to stop. Officials eventually routed the train onto a bridge over a deep gorge called the Cassondra Crossing where they planned to blow up the bridge and kill everyone on board. The special-effects miniatures of the train crashing into the canyon were spectacular. Dad and I both loved the movie.

Shortly after that Dad and I saw “Apocalypse Now”. Not only was I getting to season good cheesy action movies, I also got to see some quality filmmaking and it brought Dad and me even closer together to share these kinds of films.

I’m blessed by other friends and family who have taken me to see countless movies over the years and they still do so to this day.

Over the years, I’ve had to make more and more adjustments as my ability has diminished further. Eventually, I could no longer type on my computer at all. Fortunately, voice control software was developed that allows me to dictate into a computer and have complete control of all of its functions. If you’d asked me back in the 70s when I first began studying programming if computers would ever understand speech accurately, I would’ve said never in my lifetime. But for decades now voice recognition has been my only means of computer access.

Seven years ago I lost the ability to drive my wheelchair completely, but I got a new wheelchair with new controls. A tiny joystick is mounted on a collar that fits around my neck and I can push the controls with my lips. I also use that joystick as a mouse on my computer. I strap my head onto my headrest so that it stays firmly in place and I am much more mobile than I was when I was trying to control the joystick with my hand. I can now ride over bumpy ground safely. I still don’t go anywhere unaccompanied.

In December 2016 I had to have a trach installed in my throat. Periodically I need to have it suctioned. I don’t go anywhere without my suctioning machine. At first, I was reluctant to ask friends to go to the movies with me because they would have to operate the suction machine if I needed it. It wasn’t anything beyond their capability but I didn’t want them to have to be a nursemaid to me.

The first movie I saw after I had my trach was in March 2017 when I went with my friends Rich and Kathy Logan to see the Marvel Comics movie “Logan”. It featured Hugh Jackman in his last film in which he played Wolverine. I had a history of seeing Logan movies with the Logans. The first film we saw together was “Logan’s Run” back when we were at IUPUI together. More on that story another day. Anyway, for this movie we brought my dad along in case I needed to be suctioned. Rich, Kathy, and I enjoyed it but he hated the movie. Again, I worried that my moviegoing days were numbered. Trying to find a movie that my dad and my friends would all enjoy was going to be a challenge.

After that, I finally got the courage to ask my friends if they could do my suctioning. My most loyal friend Rich said, “We were wondering when you were going to get around to asking. Of course, we can do it. We’ve been adapting to your disability along with you for decades now. This is just the next phase.”

Because my stamina continues to fade gradually, I wasn’t certain I could ever go to a concert again but since I got my trach, I’ve seen some of my favorite acts including memorable concerts of Peter Frampton, The Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Steve Miller Band, The Who, and Sting thanks to my sister Carol who accompanies me. Carol and I also catch a couple of hockey games each year. Although, we try to go to afternoon games because I have a hard time staying up late.

These days, I’m still able to get out to the movies with friends and family but I pick and choose them carefully. I go for the big blockbusters in IMAX and/or 3D. If I’m willing to risk COVID, flu, RSV, and God knows what else being out in public as well as the strain on my ever-diminishing stamina, it had better be something big and spectacular. I have seen Dune, Avatar 2 twice, and Oppenheimer in 70 mm filmed IMAX. Rich, Kathy, and I have seen every Star Wars film together over the years in the theater sometimes multiple times as well as most of the major Marvel and DC movies. This latest visit to see Aquaman 2 was just the next in a long series of such films.

My life has been a constant struggle to keep up with my ever-changing ability. I’ve had to reinvent myself and my activities multiple times over the past 68 years. And I will keep adapting until I can adapt no more.

One of my good friends who went by the nickname Buz, who was a fellow Christian, once told me he couldn’t wait until we meet someday in heaven and I could run up to him and give him a big hug. I told him, “Buz, I don’t see myself walking in heaven. For me, heaven is a place where I’m disabled but it doesn’t matter anymore. To the extent that you, my other friends, and my family try to give me as normal a life as possible, you make Heaven on Earth for me.” Much to my surprise, I’ve outlived Buz. When I make that final transformation to the next phase of my existence, I’ll roll up to Buz in my heavenly wheelchair and give him a big “I told you so.”

And I’ll see my parents again and Dad and I will talk about how cool it was when that train crashed into the Cassandra Crossing that first time he took me back to the movies after I couldn’t go by myself anymore.

Until then, I have lots more movies to see. I’ve not yet seen my last picture show.

Okay, this is me about a week later after I originally recorded this. I’ve been working on editing all of the video clips of the movies into the YouTube version of the podcast. I realized something awful.

The whole thing is a lie.

Well, not the whole thing. Just the part about “The Cassandra Crossing”. When I looked up the trailer for the movie and looked it up on the IMDb website, I found out that “The Cassandra Crossing” was in 1976 three years before “The In-laws” in 1979. However, “Apocalypse Now” was indeed in 79, and now that I think about it, it really was the first film I with my dad after I quit going by myself. Dad and I did see “The Cassandra Crossing” in 76 and it was indeed one of our favorite films but it just wasn’t the first one after I quit going by myself. But as they said in the classic film “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Dad and I watching that train wreck was legendary. So what if the timeline really doesn’t work out?

One more quick confession… I never have seen the 1971 Peter Bogdanovich film “The Last Picture Show”. So, certainly that part of the podcast is true I’ve not yet seen “The Last Picture Show” either figuratively or literally.

If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and other exclusive content. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.

Many thanks to my financial supporters. Your support pays for the writing seminar I attend and other things. But most of all it shows how much you care and appreciate what I’m doing. Your support means more to me than words can express.

Even if you cannot provide financial support, please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience. I just want more people to be able to hear my stories.

All of my back episodes are available and I encourage you to check them out if you’re new to this podcast. If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you find this podcast.

I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.

Contemplating Life – Episode 37 – “Putting the Deux in the Machina”

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In this episode, I begin a series of episodes about my life of ministry in my local Catholic Church. So that time was serving as the parish’s computer consultant setting up a database of parish records. I talked about the ups and downs of automating parish communications.

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Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/contemplatinglife
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Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 37 of Contemplating Life.

Back in episodes 6, 7, and 11 through 15, I told the story of my faith journey as I grew up Catholic, left the church in my late teens, and returned in my late 20s. For over 30 years after that return, I remained extremely active in my local parish. The only reason I’m no longer active is that I simply lack the stamina to get out of the house on a regular basis and contribute my time and talent to the church. My dedication to the church hasn’t wavered much over the years.

I included the word “much” because there have been some challenging times. There were times when the work became emotionally overwhelming. I occasionally disagreed with the clergy and other volunteers about the course we should take in our ministry. There were times when I felt as though the work I did was not appreciated or understood.

I thought we would go over some of those stories in the coming episodes. As always when I discuss my faith journey, I include a disclaimer that I’m not trying to evangelize, proselytize, or convert anyone to my way of thinking or believing. I’m simply telling the stories of my experiences that I hope you will find well… As my closing remarks always say… I hope you find them educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring.

Much of my early ministry in the church revolved around my expertise as a computer programmer and systems analyst. I helped my church and others computerize their operations.

As I mentioned in that earlier series of episodes about my involvement in the Catholic Church, I began volunteering my time and talent to Saint Gabriel Church even before I decided to return to the Church.

In 1978, I had a personal computer that my dad and I had built from kit parts. I have to laugh these days when I hear someone say, “I built a PC.” What they mean is they purchased a motherboard, a CPU, a graphics card, a power supply, and a case. When I say that I built a computer in the late 1970s, I purchased circuit boards and a bag of loose parts in kit form. We had to solder integrated circuit sockets to plug the chips into as well as discrete components like resistors, capacitors, and voltage regulators.

Anyway, I drifted off topic there sorry. Make a note to self… Do a series of episodes about all the computers I’ve owned over the years.

There was a woman named Diane Something who was the parish bookkeeper. She would come over to my house once a month and enter the monthly financial report into a spreadsheet that I designed for her. I believe we were using Borland Quattro spreadsheet software. The name of that software was a joke because the leading spreadsheet at that time was a product called Lotus 1-2-3. The word “Quattro” is Italian for four. The joke was that it was one better than 123.

[Note: My bad. Quattro and Lotus didn’t come along until 16-bit systems under MS-DOS. The story I’m telling was on the 8-bit system under CP/M. It must’ve been VisiCalc or Microsoft Multiplan which I mentioned later.]

My mom heard about a program called Parish Data System or PDS for short. It was written by a Catholic programmer in Arizona in conjunction with his parish priest. It was a database program for keeping track of members. Each family had a family number and the members within the family had a member number. There were screens full of information at both of those levels that included addresses, phone numbers, and so on. It also had the ability to track financial contributions.

You could establish your own lists of keywords to assign to families or individuals. Family keywords would include things like, “school family”, “inactive”, or “out of parish” the latter being for people who attended our church but didn’t live within our boundaries.

Member keywords were usually used for the type of activities a person was involved in such as “parish council”, “board of education”, “maintenance committee, “men’s club”, “women’s club”, “Eucharistic minister”, and so on.

There were a wide variety of ready-made reports built into the system. The most useful one was called “fam-quick” which was a quick report of family information that included family name, address, and phone number. You could also print mailing labels based on keyword searches. So if you wanted to do a mailing to everyone in the men’s club, you would simply specify that keyword and it would spit out labels for everyone who had that keyword.

It also contained some rather useful Catholic-specific features most notably whether or not you had received certain sacraments and the date in which you had received them. So you might search for all children of a certain age who have not yet received First Communion and send them a mailing encouraging them to enroll their kids in sacrament preparation classes.

Someone had donated a personal computer to the parish. It was made by Zenith which was a brand name known mostly for TVs, hi-fi stereos, and other appliances. rather than computers. It was probably made by someone else and they just stuck their name on it. It had a Z80 processor and ran CP/M. It had a pair of 5.25” floppy drives. That wasn’t sufficient to run PDS. You really needed a computer with a hard drive to make good use of it.

I taught our priests how to use WordStar word processing software and I built spreadsheets using either Quattro or Microsoft Multiplan. By the way, Multiplan was the first piece of Microsoft software I ever owned. It had a feature that is still not available on Microsoft Excel or any other spreadsheet that I know of. It was three-dimensional. Microsoft Excel has the ability to have multiple pages or tabs within the same sheet. And you can reference cells or ranges of cells between pages. But Multiplan would allow you to select a range across pages. Suppose you had 12 sheets in the file, one for each month’s expenses. You could write a formula that would give you the sum of cell G32 from sheet 1 through sheet 12. If there’s a way to do that in Excel, I haven’t figured it out.

A decent personal computer with a hard drive could cost well over $2000 in those days. We then had someone make us the proverbial offer we couldn’t refuse. There was a company that would publish your weekly Sunday bulletin for you. You would send them a typed camera-ready copy by FedEx on a Monday evening. They would print your bulletin for you and FedEx it back to you by Friday afternoon. They made their money by selling ads on the back of the bulletin. If you could get a certain amount of ads sold, they would give you a free computer. I seem to recall the deal also included the Parish Data System program as part of the free bundle. That program alone was worth hundreds of dollars.

My mom told the salesman, “I’ve been lusting for a computer for our parish.” He was happy he could satisfy her lust.

The computer was a Kaypro 10. It was the second major “portable computer” mass-produced. When I say portable computer I’m not talking about a laptop. Those were still some time off. The term “portable computer” meant it folded up into a package about the size of a medium-sized suitcase. I believe the advertised it was capable of being stashed underneath an airline seat.

The first such computer was the Osborne 1 but it had a notoriously small TV screen. Adam Osborne, its inventor, sold them like hotcakes but then made the mistake of announcing more advanced versions with a better screen and a hard drive. Unfortunately, the machines were not nearly ready to ship. His sales dropped to zero because nobody wanted the old version. They were waiting for the new one.

The Kaypro II and Kaypro IV hastened the demise of Osborne Computers. They had better screens and better floppy drives. The Kaypro 10 included a 10 MB hard drive. Yes people that’s megabytes – not gigabytes. Your phone has multiple gigabytes of memory. You can get a flash drive with 256 GB of storage. But in those days, 10 MB was huge.

Whenever we got a new computer at our parish, Father Paul would give it a blessing that we would be able to use it for good purposes. I always warned him not to sprinkle holy water on it lest it short out

I helped them set up the PDS database software and put together a plan for data management. That involved choosing keywords that I thought would be useful such as those I’ve already described. This really helped them to unlock the power of a computer database beyond just printing mailing labels.

PDS report generation also had a bit of a programming language built into it so that you could create sophisticated reports. I did some pretty clever things with it over the years. Rather than just using the standard reports.

One of the limitations of the program in those days was that it would only keep track of monthly totals of contributions. It had the capability of recording donations across 9 different funds. They expected you would set up one fund for ordinary Sunday contributions and the other funds for things like capital campaigns or special fundraising drives, missionary work, etc.

I came up with a clever idea that we should create five funds one for each Sunday of the month because some months have five Sundays. That way we could keep track of weekly contributions even though the system was only designed to keep monthly totals. That still gave us 4 additional funds that we could use for other purposes like special collections or missionary work.

I had to rewrite the financial reports to take advantage of the crazy system I designed. Fortunately, the programming capabilities of the report generator were fairly sophisticated. We would mail everyone a financial statement to families a few times a year to remind them perhaps if they skipped a Sunday. Father would write a topping letter suggesting that if they notice they had missed a Sunday they might consider making it up. We would of course send them a complete report at the end of the calendar year that they could use for tax purposes.

We also had a requirement that if you had kids in our parochial school and wanted a discount on your tuition, you had to be a regular contributor. There were tax regulations that said if we required a certain level of contribution in order to qualify for a Catholic discount on tuition, you couldn’t count that as a charitable contribution. It was just a different way to pay your tuition. So, we had to drop the mandatory contribution requirement so people could still count their donations on their taxes. But still find a way to make sure that if you were going to get the benefit of the lower tuition rate, you had to be an active member of the church. Our school principal came up with a very clever plan even though in some ways it shamed people into paying. Hey, you had to be active in the church to get the church discount anything we could do to coerce you into doing your fair share was okay with me.

We preached the principle of tithing. That is giving 10% of your income to charity. It comes out of some Old Testament Scripture readings. We defined that as 5% to the church and 5% to other charitable endeavors such as United Way, American Cancer Society, etc. But we also said that the other 5% could include your Catholic tuition. I wasn’t so sure that was completely kosher if you pardon my cultural appropriation.

So we couldn’t force people to give 5% but we can use that 5% number as a standard. We participated in a federal school lunch program that would give subsidies for school lunches to low-income families. The principal knew what the income level was to qualify for that program. She took 5% of that and then concluded if you weren’t paying 5% of the poverty level income in your contribution it must be because you were too poor.

She would invite the parents to come in and very gently and discreetly offer them the opportunity to sign up for free or reduced lunch prices. After all, if you’re making more money than the poverty level, then why weren’t you contributing more? Of course, when you filled out the paperwork for the subsidies, you had to reveal your income and that’s when conversation would come about not doing your fair share. So technically we didn’t have a set amount that you HAD to contribute but we made it clear participation was a requirement. The school lunch thing was a ruse to start that conversation. Sneaky, but I liked it.

One of the clever things that we did with the program was to send out these financial statements encouraging people to meet their tithing pledge and we would send a custom letter depending on whether or not they were meeting their pledge, falling short of the pledge, or perhaps giving absolutely zero. This was whether they were making use of the parochial school or not. We wanted people to honor their pledges. But there was a limitation to what PDS could do. You couldn’t say to it, “Print letter version A to people who meet their pledge. Send version B to those who gave zero.” and do it all in the same run. You have to select the people who gave zero, print mailing labels for that group, stuff the right letter in those envelopes, and then do a separate run for the people who really gave something.

Members of the finance committee would get together on a Saturday afternoon for an envelope-stuffing meeting. I had to set things up with four different groups. School families who gave something, school families who gave zero, nonschool people who gave something, and nonschool people who gave zero. They each got a different letter and we had to run them separately.

I would give them names like Group A, B, C, and D so that the people stuffing the envelopes wouldn’t necessarily know that if they were doing Group B it was a deadbeat family with kids in school. We didn’t want them looking at those people sideways when they came to church. We wanted to respect their privacy.

Inevitably, the people stuffing envelopes wanted to know why we had to do all these complicated separate groups of mailings. I just said, “It’s a limitation of the program.” Then they wanted to know what the categories were. I finally just explained to them what the categories were. Afterward, I said, “But I’m trying to be sensitive to people’s privacy and not telling you which group is which. If you want to be really nosy and read the letter you’re stuffing and know who was a deadbeat then do so but it’s on your conscious not mine.”

Computerizing our mailings allowed us to do some really great things. For example, we could create a search of the database for anyone who had children of school age who were not already enrolled in our parochial school. We would invite them to consider coming to our school but if not, please enroll your child in Sunday morning religious education programs which we use the Catholic acronym CCD classes as I explained in an earlier episode.

Sounds like a really their idea doesn’t it? We want our kids to get a Catholic education one way or the other. If not in our parish elementary school then in Sunday school. Nothing wrong with that is there?

Unfortunately, that letter had the potential to cause someone a great deal of emotional upset. There was a man who was a very active and devoted member of our Catholic parish but whose wife was not Catholic. For centuries, Catholics were either forbidden or strongly discouraged from marrying someone non-Catholic. My dad was not Catholic. He had to sign a paper assuring the priest that any children they had would be raised Catholic. Apparently, this particular parishioner who was married to a non-Catholic did not have his wife sign said to paper or didn’t care that she violated it. The wife and kids all attended a Protestant fundamentalist church and were quite disapproving that the husband was Catholic. I can only imagine the emotional pain and marital conflict it would’ve caused if she opened a piece of mail suggesting she should send her kids to Catholic school or Catholic Sunday school. This was decades ago and I don’t recall if we were able to intercept that letter or if it was delivered. I hope we caught it in time but I think perhaps we did not.

In a similar case, a non-Catholic husband was unsupportive of his wife’s faith and didn’t want to see any mailings at all from the church. We had a special family keyword that I think we only attached to very few families that indicated “send no mail”.

One day someone asked me why we have a “send no mail” keyword. I explained that there were just some people who shouldn’t be getting mailings. They asked, “Why?” I got really frustrated And I lost my patience because they wouldn’t take my word we just needed it so I rather angrily explained, “Will if you have to know it’s because we’re trying to keep wives getting beaten by their husbands because they don’t like getting mail from the church!”

I didn’t realize it, but one of the women who had the “send no mail” keyword overheard me. I was about to apologize when she came over, patted me on the back, and said, “Keep up the good work.”

So, even though computerization gave us tremendous new capabilities, we learned very quickly that we could not take the human element out of the equation. In any such customized correspondence we created, we had to make sure we had someone knowledgeable reviewing everything that went out.

Everything I developed using the PDS program I did for free from my own parish. Then, three other parishes hired me to consult with them on the best ways to use the program. I describe those efforts as doing well while doing good.

Parish Data Systems was acquired by another company ACS Technology. It has expanded into a much more sophisticated suite of programs that also include general ledger, payroll, facilities scheduling, and other tools at both the parish and diocesan levels.

In the weeks to come, I will talk more about the eight years I served as a member of the Finance Committee and eventually as its chairman. At one point I think the community was called Ways and Means and it seemed like we always had many more ways than we had means. We’ll talk about those challenges and more in the weeks to come as I continue the story of my volunteer work at Saint Gabriel church.

If you find this podcast educational, entertaining, enlightening, or even inspiring, consider sponsoring me on Patreon for just $5 per month. You will get early access to the podcast and any other benefits I might come up with down the road. Although I have some financial struggles, I’m not really in this for money. Still, every little bit helps.

Many thanks to my Patreon supporters. Your support pays for the writing seminar I attend. But mostly I appreciate it because it shows how much you care and appreciate what I’m doing. Your support means more to me than words can express.

Even if you cannot provide financial support. Please, please, please post the links and share this podcast on social media so that I can grow my audience.

All of my back episodes are available and I encourage you to check them out if you’re new to this podcast. If you have any comments, questions, or other feedback please feel free to comment on any of the platforms where you find this podcast.

I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.