In praise of my life and times...

Back in 1991 for a few brief weeks a wonderful little jewel of a television show flashed like a comet briefly across the airwaves and died away into obscurity. Its title was My Life and Times. In the year 2035 an elderly man named Ben tells about episodes in his life (out of sequence) cover moments from the late 1970's to 1999. 

The show starred some amazing (at that point quite young) actors including Tom Irwin in the role of Ben, Helen Hunt as Ben's first wife Rebecca, and a glowing, ethereal Claudia Christian as his star-crossed love Jessie.  Only six episodes were aired between April 24, 1991 and May 30, 1991, but those few episodes made a significant imprint in my psyche. 

But this post isn't really about the TV show My Life and Times but rather about the wonders of my very own life and times, and how the Internet has transformed my personal experience of my own life. 

Yes, the TV show My Life and Times left me with memories, images and themes that have frequently surfaced over the past 23 years...but I could not remember the name of the series itself. Nor did I know the name of the actor who played the title role, although I would never forget his face, and always thought of this series whenever I encountered him in TV and movies. Yesterday, watching a rerun of Castle there he was, that familiar face, and it reminded me again of how I'd loved him as a young man in that short lived series.  

I wanted to find out if with all the movies and television shows now on-line was that half-remembered series out there to be seen?  But I didn't know his name, and I didn't know the series name. While I was pondering this problem, I happened to be reading recent posts on Facebook and  noticed that one of my friends had shared something from the page of Claudia Christian. Ah ha! I did remember that Claudia was in the cast (a name that I do remember because of her four years with Babylon 5). 

Armed with Claudia Christian's name it was off to IMDb.com the most useful tool for fans of television and movies. A quick scan of Claudia's filmography turned up the name of the series, My Life and Times, which I was surprised to see aired in 1991, some four or five years earlier than I imagined. Click on the link to My Life and Times on IMDb and there were all the other actors names, including Tom Irwin...so nice now to have a name to go with that so very familiar face. 

A Google search of the series title lead to some interesting things, including some articles written about the series at the time it aired. Best of all was a post on the blog Television Obscurities http://www.tvobscurities.com/articles/my-life-and-times/#comment-1080674 that provided me with a wealth of information, including the fact that: "My Life and Times was never repeated nor has it ever been made available commercially."

Having already done a quick search of Hulu.com and Netflix.com I suspected that to be so...but there was still Youtube.com to consider.  Sure enough someone named maureenkh1 has collected all six of the broadcast episodes broken into two acts (minus commercials) and shared them for everyone.


And because my life and times include blogs, and embedded video, I can share the first part of the first episode with you all.

When this series aired, in the spring of 1991, the Internet existed, and e-mail existed. But most the tools and resources that I used to aid my failing memory and bring that moment of my past back to life and share it did not.  The time I live in are both marvelous and perilous. 

a new tool for those who love numbers

A new, free resource on the Internet is Wolfram:Alpha, an astounding computational tool. While there will certainly be debate among mathematics instructors at all levels about whether or not students should be allowed to use this tool, there is no question that this is an amazing computational machine.

Not having any particular mathematics problems that needed solving this morning, I tried a few of the suggested demonstrations -- such as inputting my birth date. I learned that I am 21,311 days old, and that as I had long suspected I was born on Chinese lunar day zhenghue 1, 4648 (Chinese New Year). I was also born before sunrise, on Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras).

I also input the town where I work: Whitesburg, Kentucky and found that the exact coordinates of the town are 37.12 deg N, 82.82 deg W, and the current temperature is 59 degrees F, 15 degrees C. I was able to see a five week history of hourly temperatures -- including the unusually low temperature for last Friday night/Saturday morning.

You can put in a phrase like: "Poverty rate Kentucky" and get back not only the most recent, available poverty rate (16.3% in 2007), but also the median household income and the percapita income for the state (with years give for each piece of data).

Great stuff!

award winning service

We love Dell computers, but most especially we love Dell service at our house.

The last 48 hours have been wild here. We depend mightily on our computers and our connection to the Internet. Both John and I do much of our teaching (all of it in summer time) on-line, and we work from home. I could go into the college campus, but John has no other option. So on Tuesday afternoon when John's computer suddenly stopped so did our lives.

I did some diagnostics and determined that it was the hard drive (not the motherboard) that had crashed. So we got out our Dell info and placed a call. In a process that took nearly two hours, and huge amount of patience from the Dell service technician somewhere on the Indian subcontinent, we were guided through further diagnostics, including how to open up the computer chassis and check various connections. The process was interrupted by the phone (or phone jack) in John's office dying. The Dell technician actually called back five times before we were able to reconnect with her on a working phone. Unfortunately it was a phone in another room of the house, she had to wait while we disconnected the computer and brought it to the phone location, checked the connections according to her instructions (me on the phone calling out instructions to John with the computer), and then she had to wait again, while we hauled the CPU back to the office to hook it up again and check for any progress. In the end, our wonderfully patient Dell technician ordered us a new hard drive and operating system and driver disks (which we never received initially one of the rare times Dell messed up).

In an amazing display of efficiency, the part and disks were delivered to a service technician in West Virginia by Wednesday morning, who contacted us and made an appointment for late Wednesday to make the repair. The local service technician managed to fit us in at the end of a very long day of driving all over eastern Kentucky, and by 9 PM we had a new hard drive installed and the process of installing the operating system underway.

We ran into a glitch about 11 PM when through our ignorance we had failed to install the drivers (sound, video and most importantly Ethernet) properly. Once again, a Dell service technician managed to talk us through, step by step, installing first the Ethernet driver, helping us set up our Internet account anew, got us to the Dell service site to download and properly install all the rest of the drivers that we needed.

By 1 AM, John's computer was back functioning properly, connected to the Internet and able to check his e-mail and student forums. [He still had to reinstall MS Office this morning so he could grade all his student papers, but the hard work was done.]

First thing this morning, I pulled out the letter I got three days ago asking me if I wanted to extend my own Dell service contract for another three years, and called to sign up. We love our Dell computers, but its the Dell "award winning" service that really floats our boat!!