DWise1's Home Page

In Loving Memory of My Son,
Matthew David Wise

Born: 1985 January 21
Died: 2002 October 24

2018 September 07

It should be noted that there are some archive sites on the Web, such as the Internet Archive WayBack Machine. Parts of my original AOL website are included in such an archive site. This could cause some confusion in that it causes me to have two sites, effectively two versions of the same site, that you could arrive at through a search engine. I can change the content of one site, this one, but not of the archived site. Fortunately, this site does not try to access any part of the archived site and the archived site knows nothing of this site.

I discovered this in the past year when I received an email pointing out something on one of my pages that needed correcting, maybe a broken link. My page didn't contain that error, but then I looked more closely at the URL and saw that it was archived from AOL and it was something that I had already corrected on my current site. I replied with that information and apologized since I could not change what was in the archive, but I refered him to my new site here.

Also, I retired earlier this year, so I no longer work for a living. Unfortunately, that hasn't exactly translated to more time for working on my site.

For one thing, I'm back in school through the Oster Lifelong Learning Institutes (OLLI) for adults 50 or 55 and older. OLLI is hosted on hundreds of university and college campuses in all 50 states of the USA. Drawing on the skills and talents of its members (which include retired professors, physicians, engineers and scientists, musicians, dancers, artists, and other professionals) and of campus faculty members, they offer their own classes, lectures, and activities. In addition, members have access to almost all campus facilities, including being able to audit regular university courses. The program may vary from campus to campus, but in my case the cost per year for the entire program, including a parking permit, is just slightly more than what students pay for one semester of parking alone.

2011 July 07

This used to be my home page with AOL at http://members.aol.com/DWise1/index.html. That is, until AOL suddenly and abruptly left the web hosting business in 2008. With too much going on in my life post-divorce, it wasn't until a few years later, in 2011, that I finally got my own domain through Go Daddy.com, dwise1.net (which is this page that you're reading right now, so no need to link to it). At first, I worked on restoring most of my old content. Then I started adding new content, though that has been going much more slowly since I still work for a living.

The move also required a little restructuring. Since I could take advantage of multiple screen names on AOL, I used to segregate content into different sites under different screen names. Now they're all on one site, but I have given a couple sections their own names. Here is how the old names corelate with the new:

pgm.dwise1.net and cre-ev.dwise1.net are also accessible in the Links section below.
HARD HAT AREA

WATCH YOUR STEP

I had worked professionally as a software engineer since 1982 and with MS-DOS and Windows systems since 1987. I retired in January 2018.

I arrived at my profession almost by accident through a kind of an odd path of foreign language study, followed by Air Force training in electronic computer systems repair, followed by the earning of a BS Computer Science while on active duty, all of which do tie together, believe it or not. I have tried continually to broaden my knowledge and experience, which is quite necessary in the software field.

The Internet and World Wide Web opened up to commercial use around 1995 and America OnLine (AOL) started providing Internet support including a free website for each screenname. Around 1996, I started studying HTML and so I created my AOL site as a Lehrstück, a practice piece to help me learn and practice web programming techniques and with which to experiment. However, content took over very quickly and superceded experimentation.

Now with this resurrection of my old site, I will first be restoring most of the old content and then, as time allows, I will add new content and then play with different techniques. Needless to say, this site will forever be under construction.

Studying Spanish? Download a free study aid!

SPANVERB is a complete tool to help the Spanish student learn and practice the simple (ie, single-word) conjugated forms of any regular or irregular verb, plus the forms of haber and the present and past participles that are used to form the compound tenses.

I tried it and it worked very well for me, so I obtained the author's permission to distribute it for free.

CAVEAT: the program is a 16-bit MS-DOS app. It will run under 32-bit Windows, but not under a 64-bit version (which is about all you can buy now). So unless you have a 32-bit Windows box or can emulate one (eg, as a virtual computer), you will not be able to run it. That is really a shame, because I found it to be very useful. Sorry.

Links

My interests are eclectic and rarely tap into the popular culture, most of which I refer to as being "after my time." The following are a few of my areas of interest. This area will be under construction for some time, as I work to bring up the various link pages:

 

Over the years, most especially in on-line "creation/evolution" discussions, creationists have often engaged in personal attacks against me just because of my AOL screen name, "DWise1". In fact, one infamous professional creationist, Kent Hovind, went so far as to twice attempt (via email) to pick a fight with me over my screen name in order to avoid answering a very simple question about one of his claims, namely what his source was. I informed him that the story behind that name is really very mundane and has nothing to do with what he was railing against and I presented it to him.

So then why "DWise1"? Here is the story:

In every multi-user computer system, there are corporate policies for assigning user names. One common one is to append the first letter of the first name to the beginning of the first n letters of the last name (since there's always a limit to the length of the user name), adding numeric digits if the resultant user name has already been assigned. For example, one Dilbert comic depicted a "Brenda Utthead" complaining about the user name they had assigned her.

When I went to work at Hughes Aircraft in 1985, that was their policy, so my user name was "dwise". At the same time, they had bought some of the first Macs, non-networked floppy systems which we used to combine text and graphics in our presentation visuals. To identify my data floppy, I labelled it with my user name, "dwise". Then when I had filled that one and start on a second data diskette, I labeled that one "dwise2" and, for symmetry, I relabelled the first one, "dwise1". Then one day a co-worker read the label of the dwise1 diskette and started to laugh. I didn't get the joke until he told me to read it out loud; up until then I had not realized that it sounded like "The Wise One" and we all had a good laugh over the unintentional pun.

Then when I signed up for AOL several years later, in the middle of the sign-up process I suddenly had to think up a screen name. All I could think of was that accidental pun and so chose "DWise1" as my screen name.

Well, there you have the story. Nothing at all to it. And others have also chosen that name, albeit on other domains, of course -- in each domain there can be only one of any user name.

You can contact me at:

E-Mail Address: dwise1@aol.com.

First uploaded on 1997 June 10.
Last updated on 2019 November 27.