On my first father’s day (as a father) I felt it only appropriate to give a shout-out to the old man who got me interested in all this computer nonsense in the first place.  A truly inspirational individual – even if he doesn’t know it – my dad’s responsible for who I am as a father, a man, and… well… a technologist!

We ran our first bulletin board service (BBS) on the Commodore 64 twenty-some odd years ago on a 300 baud modem (then 1200, then 2400, then 9600!) using Ivory Joe’s 6485/Ivory BBS software.  Which we eventually got the BASIC source for and hacked up ;)  From that moment on (sometime around 1986) I knew what I wanted to do with my life.  Cool, eh?  At some point I’ll write something up that’s a more complete history… because a lot of what my dad taught me about over 20 years ago set the stage for what I’m working on right now.  We had IM, forums, email, page designers / homepages, and all that jazz back then!

Thanks Dad!  Happy Father’s Day!

Hello?  Anyone out there?  ;)  I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything of substance.  Certainly longer than I’ve gone with respect to blogging since late 2004.  Again, I expect I’ll be posting just as sporadically in the future as I am now given my “life priorities” and how they’ve expanded since welcoming a baby girl into the world back in October.

I did want to spend a minute or two giving folks an FYI post on the latest release of Windows Live Writer (Tech Preview).  If you’re a blogger and you’re NOT using Writer… well, you should be.  The new features include new formatting for photos, inline videos, word count, auto linking, and more.  It’s really a solid, solid product and one that makes the life of a blogger a lot easier.

Check out this pic of Stella using the new tilt + “reflection” features of Writer for photos:

Cool.  Interested in doing this yourself?  Get the Technical Preview of Windows Live Writer