Gee, it's been a while. My last association with a PCC event must have been about 1979 when Dragon Bob roped me into appearing on a panel at the Jack Tar Hotel in San Francisco with a rogue's gallery of current and former editors of computer magazines. (I had been the original editor of Personal Computing.) The fact that the hotel was burned down not long thereafter was probably unrelated. I've spent the decades since chiefly as a consultant to small technical companies set up by people who had no idea what a struggle it is to be in business for yourself, and who urgently needed assistance with corporate communications. Worked with a pattern recognition company twenty years ahead of its time that has survived, and will be a force in years to come. Worked with fellows who use luminescent bacteria to measure toxicity in water. (If something in the water makes the bugs sick, they faint, and their light output dims proportionally.)...and so on. Have been working with other people who are trying to establish new ideas and are being properly punished for it. I've published a few books (some about robots) in these years, and go out as a speaker occasionally to explain how to deal with the fact that people are profoundly offended by anything new...probably fortunately. Since 1985 I've published a newsletter, The ABQ Correspondent, just to keep my network intact. Since 1995, that's appeared also in an online edition at http://www.swcp.com/correspo. It's brief, just talks about odd things that happen to catch my attention. My contact information is all there. I should mention that my daughter Chantal, who as a high school student illustrated some stuff of mine that appeared in PCC, has for years been building elaborate walkaround outfits - team and commercial mascots, for example... six-foot sandwiches, bears, roadrunners, skating scorpions, and all that. Her Her PCC experience encouraged her to press on with other creative activity. The downside is that I've had to try on sandwiches, bear outfits, and the like all these years while people stick pins in me, and my grandchildren laugh. Ah well. No lack of entertainment. --Nels Winkless |
