Hi, my name is DuckTapeJourneyman... and I've been using performance-enhancing drugs for the last 6 months.

It all started this fall.  I was hanging out with a new group of friends.  We got to talking, and they talked about using this particular drug.  They said that everybody did it.  Sure enough, I looked around, and everybody was doing it.  My friends said it made them feel more alive, like they could do anything.  After a little prodding, they talked me into it.  In one night, I became hooked on a performance-enhancing drug.

Eventually, I couldn't go in front of people without my performance-enhancing drug.  I needed the rush that I felt with it.  I'm a big guy, so it didn't affect me like it did others, but I could still feel it.  I felt more awake... more aware.  All the other times without it, I felt sleepy in comparison.

I couldn't believe how easy it was to score these performance enhancing drugs.  You could practically find it anywhere.  I'd score my hits at this one gas station.  And it was surprisingly cheap, considering how long it lasted in my system.

What blew my mind the most was watching children do this stuff.  I saw teenagers downing these performance enhancing drugs like it was a coke.  And it barely seemed to phase them.  I couldn't believe it.

These performance-enhancing drugs go by different names.  Some call them Rockstars, or Amp'd, or Full Throttle.  My particular drug of choice was one called Monster.

So, the next time you join a theatre troupe, and they tell you to drink an energy drink before you go up on stage, think of me.

So, my darling Weedie came to Texas for the weekend.  We had a wonderful time; we laughed, we talked, and we ate WAY too much (she may not have, but I certainly did).  Anyway, one of the things we've started recently is shopping for guys clothes.  Why?  Because I need a lot of help in the fashion department.

"Do you hate me for taking you shopping all the time?" she asked.

"If we were constantly buying your clothes... maybe I would." I replied as we started walking into the women's section. 

"Do you hate that I'm so bossy about your clothes?" she asked another time.

"Nah.  I'll admit, I need help." I replied.  And admitting your problem is the first step towards recovery.

To tell you how bad my sense of fashion is...

• I have gone to work with a duck tape tie on.  (in another post, I'll tell you how you can make one, too).
• I've bought ten of the same color work shirts (five short-sleeve and five long-sleeve) because my work limited us to ordering from three different colors.
• I wear tennis-shoes to a professional work place because "I work with computers and most computer people break dress code and wear comfortable stuff".
• I have worn white socks with dress pants and dress shoes because I didn't feel like sifting through my blue dress socks to find a black one.
• And finally, I have worn suspenders to work. 

Don't worry, they weren't this bad.

So, do you consider yourself a fashion expert, or a fashion disaster?

I walked into the little house, holding in my chest what might be my last gasp of clean air for a while.  The squalid rent-house was littered with food packages, half-opened boxes, and furniture shoved into strange locations.  The thing that compounded the mess, however, was the layers of ashes and tar on... well, everything. 

No, there was no fire in this building, unless you count the successions of little fires at the tips of the countless cigarettes the former inhabitant of the house smoked over the years.  Everything I brushed by deposited cigarette ashes on my clothes.  The windows of the little house were stained brown from the tar of cigarette smoke.  The stale odor of cigarette smoke seeped through the dust mask I wore over my face.  I was so glad I didn't smoke, because this would make me want to quit.

I was so shocked by what I saw, it took me a few minutes to figure out what I needed to do.  I'm normally not a neat freak, but almost every thought firing off in my brain told me to leave.  I had been warned by my friends about the condition of this place, but to see it in person was unfathomable.  It took about 10 minutes of standing in this mess to collect my nerves and

I ventured to the back of the apartment, to find what I thought I was looking for.  A bank of older computers lined the back walls.  Old Apple IIe's and PowerMacs that were popular when I was in school.  I found one newer PC, with roughly the same stats as my computer at home.  Okay, it was a little better, but not by much since it was an e-Machine.  All the computers were stained brown and many were covered with ash from the former occupant's smoking habit.  The smoke and stains were so bad, you couldn't make out the letters on some of the keyboards.  Maybe a third of the letters on the PC keyboard were clean of the stains, from the repetitive commands the user typed there.  The mouse was covered with tar, except for a handprint where the user repeatedly clicked with the left mouse.  

By the look of the place, you would expect this to be the home of some sort of recluse; a hermit who seldom expected company.  But you probably wouldn't expect this to be the home of one of the most powerful chess programs in the world.  Donald had been working on Chesster for over 20 years, developing an artificial intelligence that could actually remember and learn.  In the last couple of years, he had made great strides in the programming, and felt like it was working the way he wanted it to.  The problem was, this was on a dinky old Mac computer.  He spent the last year or so porting the software over to PC.  The last time I walked with him, on New Years Eve, he told me that Chesster on PC was ranked third or fourth amongst other computer chess programs, and the true AI feature hadn't even been translated from the Mac to the PC.

Unfortunately, Donald's work was cut short.  Two weeks ago, he was found unconscious by paramedics after a heart attack.  He went into a coma, and didn't come out.  He passed away a week later.

I asked the family what they were going to do about Chesster a few days later.  They told me I could take whatever I wanted from Donald's computers.  They warned me that most of what he had were old-school Macs, and what condition many of them were in.  But I just couldn't see 20+ years of coding go to the landfill just because his family didn't know what to do with it.  With the family's permission, I went over there and recovered what I could of his equipment.  I may go back again, once I figure out where I'm going to store all that smoke-soaked equipment.  The project is a bit overwhelming, but I'm used to taking on overwhelming tasks. 

I'm wondering now what's in the harddrives and disks I picked up.  Is it all junk from years of crappy conditions and data rot?  Or is it something more?  Do I have in my posession a great chess program, or is it perhaps the beginnings of Skynet?