Irvine is a pretty square place. This isn’t always a bad thing. I mean, all the neighborhoods are nice–there are no “bad” areas of town. The schools are the best in the nation (Irvine has a University of California campus, a private university, and a junior college). The Spectrum, Irvine’s business district, is one of the largest high-tech meccas in… Read more →
Category: Other
FidoNet
In 48 hours I’ll be somewhere over the Atlantic on my way to London. Three weeks without web or e-mail access is going to be strange. I haven’t been without e-mail that long since…. well, since I got my first internet e-mail address in 1989 (ronrapp@f940.n103.z1.fidonet.org). Man, that brings back some memories! My first online experience was when I started… Read more →
Travel Prep
That TNT flick (“Pirates of Silicon Valley”) was pretty good! Although I wouldn’t have tried so hard to clear my schedule if I had known they were going to re-play it again. Immediately afterward, no less. And again after that. What kind of station plays the exact same movie three times in a row? Not even the premium channels like… Read more →
Three Days To Go
It’s T-minus 3 days until departure for Europe, and there’s still a ton of stuff left to do. Some Europe related, and some work related. But it’ll all get done. It always does. The flight to London is not something I’d normally look forward to because of how long it is and how little leg room you’re given. Commercial air… Read more →
Jack of All Trades, Master of None
I enjoy going to the gym, but the crowds really get to me. From about 3:30 to 9:00 p.m., it’s wall-to-wall people. And it seems that the average age of a person there is trending downward. I’ve seen kids as young as eight or nine years old working out. What the hell does an eight year old need to be… Read more →
Three California Moments
Class Exiting Interstate-5 and Jeffrey, I came to a stop at the light and my eye caught something large off to the left. It was a car, specifically a late ’60’s Pontiac Elektra. This thing was huge. So huge, in fact, that some serious pretzeling was necessary to get a glimpse of the back end. A rolling work of art… Read more →
Postcards from the Edge
I’ve been away from the House of Rapp for a while. Probably you have too. Life has a funny way of and overtaking you like you’re an old lady leisurely cruising on Interstate 5 at midnight. If you can’t relate to what I’m talking about, then you should consider yourself lucky to have internet access in that hermetically sealed bubble.… Read more →
The Art of the Chase
In the olden days, when I was a little snot-nosed punk, I used to love to play tag. I could run fast, so whoever was “it” would usually get one whiff of my superhuman speed and go after one of the other kids. I almost went on to become a teen-aged comic book hero, but the name Flash and skin… Read more →
Gun Control
This whole Littleton, CO high school shooting incident is spawning some ugly things after the fact. It’s not enough that something terrible happened, we have to pollute the healing process too. Or maybe it’s me. Perhaps the things that help other people just sit wrong with me. Today I was visiting someone’s web site. It wasn’t a very good one,… Read more →
The Wet Burrito
One of the unfortunate things about the passing of time (besides hair loss) is that my college friends get together less and less often. Oh, there are still parties here and there, but it’s just a reality of life, I guess, that people go their own way. My good friend Greg, who is the WBA/WBC heavyweight Quake II champion of… Read more →