I YESTERDAY FORGOT TO POST MY SATURDAY BLOG.  SHOULD WANT TO READ IT, CLICK ON THIS.   The following is my Sunday posting. There are no graphics today.  I drafted this posting a month ago, but held it back.  Since then, there have been issues with my health, and, after 17 years of daily articles, there could come a day in the near future when you will see nothing.  It could be because I am temporarily incapacitated.  Might be only a day, or a week, or......  As of this moment, we are still planning on a trip to San Diego and Paso Robles in October, followed by a very long journey of nearly two months from mid-November to mid-January.  I hope to be alive and well, so return for those postings if a gap occurs.  In any case, the following was written when I was a lot more optimistic about my well being. ******************************************** Most of you have an advantage over me.  When you die, many will go to Heaven.  When I pas...

To begin: The year 1968 was a turbulent one, and   2001   was released right in the middle of that chaos.  The Vietnam War intensified, the US military stunned by the ferocity of the Tet Offensive earlier in the year.  Fervent opposition to the war led to widespread and often violent demonstrations and police responses across the country.  The Civil Rights movement was painfully gaining momentum through the 1960’s; Martin Luther King would be assassinated just two days after the world premiere of   2001 .  The Space Race was still very real.  The Apollo fire that killed three American astronauts occurred only a little more than a year before the film’s release and the US was still trying to recover from that loss and still meet President John F. Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the Moon before the end of the decade.  No American had yet flown in an Apollo capsule, the giant Saturn 5 rocket had flown only once and without a crew (its second ...

This blog site is into my 18th year.  Thought I'd glance at how many partly written articles were in storage and  spent yesterday discarding many of them.  There were around 450.  After a hundred or so I gave up, and still have around 350 drafts.  However, one was the basis for my posting today. I was born and grew up in Honolulu, but did not spend any school time at the University of Hawaii until August of 1972, when I was hired by the College of Engineering as an assistant professor.  So it's been 53 years since I first came to the main Manoa Campus. I originally taught Fortran IV Programming and a couple of other computer courses.  This is the textbook I used.  I knew the co-authors, Paul Murrill and Cecil Smith.  Murrill went on to become president of LSU. After a couple of years, I joined the Civil Engineering Department.  Environmental Engineering and Technology & Society were two courses where I had more than a hundred student...

My Sundays are usually devoted to something spiritual, and sometimes personal.  About the latter topic, in May of 2014 I began a 15-part series on my life transitions.    Part 1   dealt with an overview and my early youth, while  Part 15E  a couple months later was on the afterlife. Transitions  6  and 7 caught my attention, so today, I'll focus on one of them.  After graduating from high school in 1958, off I flew to Los Angeles.  This was the first time I had left Hawaii, and this was perhaps my most monumental transition: I was fortunate that my older brother was a structural engineer with the Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory (NCEL) at Port Hueneme, California.  He got me a slot as a draftsman there and I also stayed with he and his family the whole summer ( and repeated this two more times, with the summer between my junior and senior years in Hilo, Hawaii with C. Brewer--where the   little league baseball team   pla...