valley

Hey val,

Tested all the formatting . . . colors, bold, underline, italics, even inserting a url with embedded text and an image . . . and everything worked nicely. Don't know what I did yesterday to piss this thing off and make it warn me that BBCode was not allowed (as I recall I did some bolding only, but must have been something else), but it works nicely now.

If you had not mentioned it in your answers, I likely would have gone on thinking that I couldn't do any formatting (based on that nasty notice I got the other day). Thanks.

Ben had asked you one time . . . I have the same question: should we be counting characters?? Does this thing have a limit . . . have you ever hit it??

I tried that "Open Contacts Popup" and it was very cool, EXCEPT it showed that Ben was obviously offline . . . very sad reminder. I'm wondering if I should remove him from my friends list . . . waddya think?? It would be to avoid nasty little reminders like that.

And it also has a neat PM button feature, btw.

I get the impression that maybe Howard was a bit full of himself if Ben called him "the man".
Never thought of that, but that's a good guess.

From Ben:

His voice offends my ear (he has a life-long teacher's strident projection). His being alive and about, and my dealing with him is offensive to me. He is the club president; pictured in all his glory on the 'Contacts' page of my website. But part of me needs him both alive and president. He is the guarantor of my being allowed to live here in this illegal dwelling. I have an undeniable envy of him and his apparent self-confidence.

I was tempted to write to Howard and tell him how much I will miss Ben. I wonder what he would think of that.
Hmmmm . . . would be even more interesting if both you and I, and maybe Mike (ekim68) and some others from here wrote that bum. I think Ben would approve.

Most people consider me "old-fashioned".
That's good as far as I'm concerned . . . but then I'm slightly to the right of Atilla the Hun, and might characterize "myself as a right wing fascist pig" (well . . . not THAT far . . . do not appreciate the lunatic right or left).

I have clear conservative ideals about life, politics, religion etc..and I really appreciated his gentle way of speaking and how kind he was to me.
I never could figure out where Ben stood on those things, though I never really probed because in my way of thinking those things are personal and should be left that way. If someone wants to offer their views on those things, fine, but I'm not going to dig it out or argue it if it's their belief and not mine.

I do make an exception for those Jehovah Witnesses that knock on my door (and so did Ben btw . . . he and I did talk about that specifically). I always invite them in kindly (no reason to get nasty with those folks) and get around to discussing the Bible. Now I'm pretty much a heathen myself (been long since excommunicated by the Pope I'm sure, and am certainly not running for sainthood . . . just ask my wife on that one), but when I ask them if Cain and Able had a brother, they usually don't know. Heathen me knows more about the Bible than they do (the answer is Seth, as I'm sure you know).

Well . . . enough about that. I just wanted to say that it was something Ben and I stayed away from . . . with the exception of the Jehova Witnesses. Here's one of the kinder things he had to say about them:

The Jehovah's Witnesses have put me back on their target list and I sat with two wives recently while their husbands chewed the chaff in their posh car (Volvo). What a difference a couple or three years makes in us all. The wife I knew from the past began by reminding me of the girl I was engaged to in New Zealand who was a Witness (so I found out later). Nothing like going on the offensive. And these people are hardened from the conflict they have taken to heart.

looking back, I wish I had spent more time writing to him.
Actually, that may not have been as you think it would be. Ben seemed to get overloaded quickly, and there was one time that he asked me to slow down on my emailing. I complied of course.

I would appreciate your sending me one e-mail at a time, BJ, and awaiting my response. Anything else is just too speedy for me.

I first started writing to him because I thought he seemed lonely.
Very perceptive of you. Yes, he was.

My single (loner, loser, mis-fit,hermit?) life is not so dissimilar. I have two modes which are antithetical, able to cope and not so. Two memories as it were, which, if I retain both, may sustain my existence regardless of the quality, the down-market quality of each. There is my trap. Show me a man not trapped by his life and we shall be in one of three places - heaven, hell or neither (between? - if that's a place). Life is the trap we find ourselves in, between the before and the after.

I cant tell you how glad I am that you were such a good friend to him through your emails, Bob. I'm sure he enjoyed your correspondence greatly.
Yes, I think he did.

I enjoy your humour, Bob, and appreciate your graciousness

And a profound thanks for your e-mail

It was always my pleasure to correspond with him.

Wow, just happened here. Thanks so much for the insights and travels with Ben, Bob...
I had no idea of the dept of Ben's emotions, although we shared many good times...
He was one of a kind...Oh, BTW, hi val...

Good morning, val (but not early enough on my part). Will share a few more anecdotes about Ben, but before I forget. lemme' ask you a few questions about this Quick Link thing (and you seem to know your way around this relatively new GUI).

What's "Social Network"? (Not selectable for me). What's "Open Contact's Popup"? What's "Social Groups"? What's "Miscellaneous"? (Also not selectable for me).

And before I get to anecdotes from Ben's emails, let me first address some things in your last post. Am reviewing that "Hey Ben from Western Canada" thread myself because I don't want to unnecessarily repeat anything in it.

I think Ben called that shack his "cabin", though from how he described it that thing was hardly a cabin to me. His calling it a cabin may have been from his days at sea, where a "cabin" on a ship is not the same thing that most of us think of as a "cabin". In fact, there was a post in that "Hey Ben from Western Canada" thread where he chastised me for calling it a "thing" and "unfinished" (I think it's on page 3 or 4 . . . it's right after his thumbnail image of what he first calls a "box"), and I think he finally called it his cabin there.

The closest he came to having someone care for him was a guy named "Howard", who was also the manager of the local cricket club and his landlord (well, Ben explained that Howard actually "let" him stay on the property in what was apparently a storage shed originally, in return for Ben's cricket score keeping and cricket web page . . . it's at http://www.geocities.com/cowichancricket/. Ben didn't like Howard, but in his final days Howard apparently helped him some . . . Ben said of him "The 'Man' offered to empty my porta-potty (his heart is in the right place) but I declined". Ben called Howard "the Man", which I think was not a compliment.

I took a look at that cricket club web page I just gave you the link for, and I had expected to see some kind of tribute to Ben, or at least a mention of his passing. Nothing. Either I missed it, or else Ben's contempt for Howard may have been well placed.

There is a story to Ben and that laptop and his apparent displeasure over it because one of his sons did not come and get it. Well, actually Ben wasn't so much pissed at the laptop as angry with the son. I'll tell you that story sometime.

Ben always ran hot and cold. I think maybe he was manic-depressive. One day he would be on top of the world and the next day he would be down. I never knew which Ben to expect.

Yes, he certainly did have a way with the language . . . of which Winston Churchill, one of my favorites, said about the Americans and the Brits . . . "Two common cultures sharing a different language." That may not be an exact quote, but you get the idea.

Once in a while I failed to get what Ben was saying . . . sometimes he rambled on waxing poetic, and I have no idea what he was saying or what he was getting at. It was either so profound that it went over my head, or it was gibberish . . . probably a little bit of both. When he did that, I think maybe he was on his medication, or else was severely depressed. Sometimes he seemed very lucid and other times he seemed looped. (Of course, the line between genius and crazy is very fine.)

That brings me to another observation. Ben always maintained that he was clumsy when it came to women. But in his writing to you I see someone who was very deferential, kind, and poetic to women . . . NOT clumsy. Of course, we talked like two old bulls with remnants of testosterone, so I wouldn't have expected to see that side of him in our conversations. Clearly he held you in high regard. Ben was not gregarious to most, and he and I both shared a tendency to shy away from strangers, and picked our friends very particularly. So again, his choosing you as a friend was rare, unique, and meant that he held you in high regard. It is unlikely that "more people" would "know how special he was" because he didn't want to know "more people". Like myself, he gives most people a "grunt", and that's it.

He characterized himself as a "loner", and while I may be a little more gregarious than he was, we both commiserated on our mutual dim view of the human race in general (you excepted of course).

Perhaps more telling of our same but different opinions, he liked T.E. Lawrence (of "Lawrence of Arabia" fame), while I liked Winston Churchill. Both were contemporaries, and both knew each other and befriended each other. And both were brilliant (and here the analogy fails, because I'm definitely not brilliant). But Lawrence was a "loner" and dark and doom and gloomish, while Churchill was an optimist. Churchill is my guy, while Lawrence was Ben's guy.

If you follow that "Hey Ben from Western Canada" thread, you may get a sense of his depression toward the end of that thread.

Change gears for a minute . . .

I don't get what you mean by "I solved that problem by copy and pasting another person's words into my reply and then changing them to another color" when you spoke of your workaround to the forbidden formatting. I did see in one of your replies to Ben how you did the "What's" in blue. What's confusing me is that apparently if this thing detects any formatting it's rejected . . . so how did you "sneak" in formatting without this thing detecting it??

Now formatting for me isn't to make it look "pretty" (my wife's word for football passes). And where you used it for your replies to Ben's questions, it wasn't for that either I don't think (in spite of your abundant use of smilies . . . sorry, sarcasm crept into it there . . . just chalk it up to old and cranky). Formatting makes things easier to read. So it frustrates me that I can't get any formatting into these things. My stuff is generally lengthy anyway, so formatting helps organize it for the reader.

Yes, I was a teacher for about 5 years. I'm sure it has changed now because that was back in the late 70's and early 80's. Nevertheless, your daughter has a real challenge ahead of her, not so much because of the unruly behavior but because the education system is in bad need of repair, and a lot of the kids can't even read, much less study English Lit.

You mentioned that the local high school there had 400 students. In the highschool that I graduated from in 1965, Bishop Kenrick in Norristown, PA, a Roman Catholic highschool, there were 500 students IN MY GRADUATING CLASS ALONE. Sister Doris, the "Prefect of Discipline" had a permanent frown carved in her lips. She gave me plenty of detention slips for chewing gum in the hallway. Us boys had to wear a jacket and tie every day, and the gals had uniforms. Gals got sent home if their jumper skirt came up above their knees. While the Nuns and Brothers (Dominicans) were strict and rigid, I did in fact get a good education from them, which equipped me well for college later.

Would you have to get some kind of New York State "certification" to be a sub??

Well, this is already too lengthy, so I'll just tantalize you with one small excerpt from Ben's emails (I have 345 of them):

"my sight is definitely on the wane"

This from an email of his in August of 2007 (exactly a year ago). I've included this seemingly unremarkable comment of his because you can see in the "Hey Ben from Western Canada" thread a time when he switches to bolding (I think it's on page 5 or 6). That was because of his poor vision. In fact, about a month after that he began to ask me to put my characters in bold and make them 14 point. Then he asked me to do a light blue background (HTML code for that is f0ffe8) to make it easier to see.

Poor guy, his teeth (that's another story) and his vision were going.

OK . . . enough for now, This should get you through at least one cup of coffee.

Forgot . . . you are in New York and three hours ahead of me here in Arizona. Got up early this morning (5:35AM here) to compose something 'cause I don't want to break the conversation we're having here, but I guess not early enough. Will continue to compose, but it may not make your morning coffee.

val,

I remember reading in a conversation between you and Ben where he asked you if you wanted him to spell val with a capital "V" or a small "v". You responded that the lower case "v" was OK, so that's what I'll use.

For this second post without one from you in between, it looks like either the visitor chat in your profile would work or the "View Conversation" link in mine would do sort of the same. However, your instructions clearly say to use the "View Conversation" link, so that's what I'll do. Intuitively, it seems like that visitor chat post window in your profile would actually start a second conversation apart from the first here, and that's not my intention and would be like a PM I think. So unless you instruct otherwise, I'll keep using the "View Conversation" link as you first instructed. Sorry, this learning curve is steep.

In that second message I did, I had pasted an excerpt from one of Ben's emails and it was formatted with a font and color, so I suspect that's why I kept getting the message "BBCode not allowed" when I tried to preview my post to you. I finally composed in Notepad, which has no formatting at all, copied and pasted that excerpt into Notepad and then copied and pasted the whole thing back into the posting window and it went. So in the future, I think I will first compose in Notepad, especially if I have an excerpt from an email.

Thanks for that Quick Links tip. In the past, if I wanted to go to my profile, I did a search for my posts and then went to my profile when I veiwed one of them. That saves me several clicks now and a lot of scrolling.

I know I haven't waited for your response if you like me talking about Ben, but for now I'm going to use you and this conversation as a sort of "therapy" since I'm still thinking about him a lot.

I always thought of Ben as a sort of "hurt puppy dog" that you see on the road when a car has hit it. It's gut wrenching, and his living conditions particularly struck me. When he first told me about it, I was going to say "You mean you have to live in a 12X12 space as a home??" but I thought better of it and suspected that may have been one of those comments that would throw him over the edge.

And amazingly, the shack had NO windows. Ben had to poke a hole in the wall to get fresh air. At our stage of the game, you would at least like to think there would be some creature comforts.

But Ben had lived in that shack for some 12 years, so I suspect it wasn't near as big a deal to him as it was to me.

We joked back and forth about us pushing up daisies pretty soon . . . sort of gallows humor. I expect Ben would say now, "See, BJ, we were right."

His other hobbies besides computers, were keeping score at the cricket matches and maintaining their web page, and space exploration news. He knew everything there was to know about the International Space Station.

Enough for now . . . there's plenty more though from the emails I've saved.

OK . . . I think I got it. We'll see. Thanks for the lesson.

If you want to see some light conversation between mostly Ben, myself, and Mike (ekim68), go here http://forums.techguy.org/random-dis...rn-canada.html. Ben and I had exchanged some WAY off topic stuff in another thread and I thought it might be better if our conversation was transferred to the Random Discussion forum. That new thread, "Hey Ben from Western Canada", turned into 9 pages of light banter.

Poor Ben lived in a 12X12 hovel on the Cricket Club property that he caretook . . . sort of. In one of his emails to me (I've fortunately saved them all), he told me how he landed there. He led a pretty miserable existence there, and his only real outlet was the computer he used to communicate with the outside world.

He was suicidal . . . had attempted it once . . . and was on heavy doses of anti-depressants. As I'm sure you know, he was a pretty sensitive guy and I always had to be careful not to send him over the edge. Normally, that would be pretty hard to do, but with Ben you never knew when he was going to snap. One time I had said something in jest, and he reacted badly to it:

"If you insult one you insult all since all are equal under TSG's social scheme of things!! Insult away, BJ, it's who you are."

After that I was very careful in my communication because I didn't want to be the cause of another suicide attempt. I pretty much kept it very light and rarely got into controversial matters.

I don't mean to indicate that Ben was a prima-donna or anything like that . . . on the contrary, he was usually delightful to converse with. Only now and then did his "dark side" come out. I really looked forward to his emails.

In fact, I found myself just today checking to see if I got any emails from him, and then right away I remembered the bad news.

By the way, you are the same age as my oldest son, who is an attorney in New Jersey.

Thanks for the heads up on this "public conversation". Will be careful not to say anything inappropriate here, and if I have something to say that I think might offend the general public maybe we can exchange emails. I can do yours through this site (so can you now because I just today changed my profile to allow it), but you can also email me directly at my gmail address, which I think shows up in emails via this site. Otherwise, if it's light banter that wouldn't be offensive to the general public, then this method is fine.

I also noticed that I can't do BBCode stuff here (I'm not a premium member and I keep getting messages that BBCode is not allowed when I've tried to send this, so I'll have to remove all formatting), so I assume I wouldn't be able to send you an image here. I do have some pictures of Ben's "home", so if you want to see them I'll have to do it some other way I guess.

Hope I got this right.

As I understand you, if I want to see if you made a reply to this I will see a notification of it in that notification (redundant?) window, and see the actual reply in my profile.

Thanks again. Hope you don't mind all the talk about Ben. Since he and I exchanged quite a lot, I have a lot of stories about him.

Oh . . . one more thing. I saw your exchange with Ben asking him if he minded all the smileys you did in your stuff. When my wife watches football with me, she says "That was a pretty pass", or she'll refer to something as "cute". "Pretty" and "cute" are like scratching fingernails on a blackboard or chewing tin foil to me (it's a guy thing), though I'm certainly glad she watches football with me, so I'm immune to "gal things" now. Smileys seem to be more of a gal thing, so smile away all you want.

I viewed your conversations with Ben. He had mentioned this "socializing" stuff a few times in our emails but I never did get it. I saw that you explained it to him, but I'm still dense about it.

So what do I do . . . ask you to be a friend (I think I did that already), and then check my own profile for your response . . . and then what??

Sorry to be so dense about it but I really don't know how this "friend" stuff works. I did see that you told Ben that it saved space on your PM allocation, but other than that . . . what's the advantage of this thing??

And will I get an email notice of your response like I do with posts and PM's or do I have to edit my preferences to get that??

OK . . . same question again . . . where do I go to see your response to this . . . your profile or mine?? You might consider PMing me on this ('cause then I KNOW I'll get an email notification) and then we can go from there . . . that is if you have the time and/or the inclination.

Valley, thanks for reminding me of Ben. I've sent him a note...I'll check back...

Hey valley, I hope the summer's been good to you and your family. We've been busy. We only have about three months of sunshine so we make the best of it. Just got through playing volleyball with the kids and grandkids a little while ago. Take care.