Archive for Uncategorized

Peter’s attitude toward money

My memories were stimulated yesterday (by some unrelated comment) of the first day of my arrival to visit Peter in NYC in 1964, (the year of the World’s Fair there, which Peter later sent me off to, alone for the day). I had finally found my way to his apartment, having taken the bus all […]

Thinking and pens

Peter regularly said, when I was a kid, that he couldn’t think without a pen in his hand. (I think I know the feeling–if I don’t have a computer keyboard or a pen or some other means of transcribing thoughts in front of me, it’s easy for my thoughts to get stuck running around in […]

Matrix encryption

Sorry for the long silence–was busy, then had to spend a bunch of time fixing some problems with the blog. All fixed now, I think. Welcome, Dobe! Thanks for posting! On my way home from work this evening, I suddenly remembered something I hadn’t thought of in years: at one point when I was a […]

Patience with tantrums

Peter told me (at some point in the past ten years or so) that when Jay and I were kids, he used to take us to the store sometimes when he went shopping. And he said that if one of us started throwing a tantrum inside a store, he would just take us outside, sit […]

No Gremlins

Most of the time, Peter didn’t restrict our reading or viewing. (Other than the fact that we didn’t own a TV from the time I was small ’til mid-high school–but we were allowed to watch TV at friends’ houses.) We had the full run of his bookshelves; I was reading his old science fiction as […]

Book clubs

Peter would sign up for book clubs, but never paid any attention to their flyers or catalogs. When the month’s automatic selection arrived in the mail, he would carefully open the invoice attached to the outside to see what the book was, and if it wasn’t one he wanted, he would re-seal the invoice and […]

Finding bugs

Peter worked in QA (Quality Assurance–finding bugs in software) for a while in the mid- to late-’80s. He always said that he had a talent for finding bugs. I think it was while he was working for Mead, testing LexisNexis, that he told us about one of his bug-finding techniques: lift both hands in the […]

Milk

Various of my friends have had babies in the past few years, which has given me plenty of opportunities to remember something Peter used to say when we were kids: “Milk is the perfect food–for a baby cow.”

Devil

One night when I was a kid, I couldn’t get to sleep. I had a songbook of folksongs, one of which was “Jesse James.” There’s a line in that song that goes “The devil will be upon his knee.” And I don’t know what got into me, but that line kept running through my head. […]