Last week, I saw Bat Boy: The Musical with some friends.
This coming Friday the 13th, I’m going to the opening night of Evil Dead: The Musical with some friends.
Tomorrow night (Sunday October 8th at 7:00pm EST) I’ll be a guest on the debut episode of The Meaning of Fandom, where we’ll all talk about our hobbies: costumes, games, comics, artwork, theater, and who knows what else…
Stop by and join us all in the comments. We’d love to hear from you.
My podcast interview with Life of Emerald‘s Kate Lee as part of her Make Mental Health Normal Again series is online.
Now that vaccinations are plentiful, it’s time to finally gather in person to say goodbye to Linda Mattingly.
Saturday June 5, 2021, 10:00am-1:00pm
Chapel in the Woods
1407 Moser Rd
Louisville KY 40299
502-253-8000
The chapel seats 400 when it’s operating at full capacity, and the parking lot can hold 150 cars.
There will be a brief service at 11:00am.
Two new videos are online.
Achievement Unlocked: How to Get Promoted is a presentation I gave on career advice for SQL Saturday Minnesota (12/12/20). SQL Saturday is a worldwide recurring training (free unless you want to pay for their onsite lunch) primarily about databases, but also security, reporting, technology in general, and personal development. Look for one in a city near you at www.sqlsaturday.com.
Back of the Cereal Box with John Pyka (12/26/20). John Pyka is an author, a magician, a singer, a comedian, a game reviewer, a blogger and podcaster, an an IMPOSSIBILIST. Follow his channel at Back of the Cereal Box.
My beautiful bride…
My lovely wife Linda passed away this weekend from an apparent stroke.
We met in Florida in 87 at a theater where she was acting.
I introduced myself and kissed her hand, so of course she melodramatically swooned.
We dated a week later, engaged a month later, and married a year later onstage in that very theater.
Her big heart and ready smile inspired all she met, and even taught a shy nerd like me how to open up, laugh, and live.
…until the make-up came off.
(No, wait, this is her as the ghost in Fiddler on the Roof…)
She’d been in a wheelchair and near-constant pain for the past twenty years or so…
…But now she’s finally free, and once again dancing and cartwheeling.
She had to give up her sign language interpreting for the church years ago because of her tremors…
…But now she’s enthusiastically praising the Lord with her hands (and putting her whole body into it) once again.
Helping others was incredibly important to her.
Most of you know that she was highly involved in a volunteer homeless outreach every Wednesday night, faithfully providing meals, blankets, socks, and more.
She’d want to ensure her mission continues, so if you’d like to help, please consider donating to The Forgotten Louisville, either via PayPal to forgottenlouisvilleoutreach@gmail.com or via mail to The Forgotten Louisville, 911 Southview Rd, Louisville KY 40214, or even by volunteering yourself, or otherwise caring for those around you.
I know she’d appreciate it.
Last year we revisited that theater, which had the perfect show going. I’m rotten, and she’s really something.
Thanks, everyone, for all the support you’ve already shown us.
I love you all, and so did she.
In honor of St. Valentine’s Day, here is some of my favorite love songs.
Some are well known, but there are probably others you haven’t heard before.
Others: Honorable mentions, or barely-about-love songs.
Go back to Part 15: Retro Rock
I’ve done a lot of things for a living over the years, and after working with a number of short-lived startups and a large corporation in Louisville, I left town for a new start.
A recruiter friend of mine found a job for me. This was before the internet had revolutionized our daily lives, so recruiters were a great way to find something, especially out of town.
The job was at Essex Group in Fort Wayne, Indiana. That’s the northeastern corner of the state, around 250 miles away from Louisville (four hours on the road… barring traffic, construction, or weather).
Essex is a wire manufacturer, with several brands around the world. They’d bring in various metals, and turn it into long spools of wire, sort of like a giant Play-Doh Fun Factory, but with more metal.
My job was to build an EIS (Executive Information Summary) system. EIS was the precursor to Business Intelligence (BI, sometimes called dashboarding). The goal was to take all the data from all the departments from all the locations, roll it up into drill-downs, and highlight areas that need attention from the bigwigs.
This would help them find problems that arose (with any luck, even before they arose), like:
Boss: “Are you good at PowerPoint?”
Me: “I Excel.”
Boss: “Was that Microsoft pun?”
Me: “Word.
Until this job, I had really only written software. I learned a lot about data management and reporting from this job.
In fact, I still do a lot of this kind of thing, but using very different technologies and techniques. Turning “facts” into “information” into “action” is still highly useful.
Once I had gotten a good grip on using Excel to pull data from the mainframe and SQL databases, and worked my magic on it, I took a strong interest in the data itself. How was it organized? How did it get in and out? When did it go in? Who put it there? What did it really mean? How did we know it was correct?
I spent a lot of time hanging out with the DBA (DataBase Administrator) team, and learned from them. Before too long, I didn’t have to rely on them to get the data I needed — I got it myself, and cleaned/joined/moved it the way I needed it to be.
While in Fort Wayne, I got involved with the local gaming convention, took over as editor-in-chief of Haymaker APAzine, drove to my first GenCon (in Milwaukee), saw They Might Be Giants in concert at the Wooden Nickel record shop, and found a church I really liked (after trying probably thirty others).
After I left, I missed out on the people voting for an inside joke — to name their new government center after former mayor Harry Baals. But the city officials wouldn’t go for it. As NBC reported: Scratch “Harry Baals” off list of names for government center. Buzzkill.
I loved my job. I was learning great stuff, and kicking butt while doing it. I was getting paid nicely. But we had just had our first son, and two of my brothers were also have their first kids (one was born just three days after my boy), and I wanted these young cousins to grow up together.
So I used my newfound database skills, and took a job as a Database Administrator back in Louisville.
Go back to Part 4: Corporate Agent or on to Part 6
Here is some of my favorite music about Halloween, death, monsters, and otherwise spooky stuff, often on the silly side.
Go back to Part 13: Earworms or on to Part 15: Retro Rock
The Christian Gamers Guild has reposted an article of mine about the similarities between running a roleplaying game and writing a story.
The article was originally published in the guild’s ‘zine, The Way, the Truth & the Dice. The original article is much longer, and will be serialized into multiple posts.
Earworms are catchy songs that get stuck in our heads. I consider a song to be a personal earworm if I’ve ever listened to it continuously for an hour or more. Here, I’m only calling out songs from bands that I haven’t already covered in this series.
Rather than rank these by importance and meaning to me, I present them alphabetically. Being earworms, they all sort of “tie” anyway.
Go back to Part 12: Guiding Lyrics or on to Part 14: Halloween Music
Dave Mattingly 