Second post... over a year later

It's January. January 2016.

It's been 14 months since my previous entry here. A lot of things have happened since, a lot of people have died since: Georges Wolinski, Jean Cabut ("Cabu"), Stéphane Charbonnier (Charb"), Philippe Honoré, Bernard Maris ("Oncle Bernard") and Bernard Verlhac ("Tignous") were killed by terrorists at Charlie Hebdo in January 2015.

On the evening of 13 November 2015 terrorists attacked Paris once again, this time killing 130 innocent people and injuring 368.

People I admired and/or influenced my life, like Anita Ekberg, Michele Ferrero, Claude Criquielion, Leonard Nimoy, Günter Grass, Percy Sledge, Richard Anthony, Ben E. King , Geoff Duke, Jef Geeraerts, B.B. King , Erik Carlsson, Christopher Lee , James Last , Heinz Polzer ("Drs. P"), Laura Antonelli, Val Doonican, Jules Bianchi, Cilla Black, Guy Ligier, Dora van der Groen, Erik De Vlaeminck, Lemmy Kilmister, Natalie Cole and David Bowie all passed away. Some of them, like Jules Bianchi, much too young.

I, myself, nearly escaped death and had to undergo a quadruple coronary artery bypass.

In December 2014, the coming year seemed promising, as I was about to move house, and leave the troubles and noisy neighbors behind. For the first half of 2015, I was busy in the new house, painting and decorating, doing the garden, digging a pond, figuring out what plants to buy, etc...

Then one sunny Summer's day, I had a series of angina pectoris, so I went to the hospital for what was to be a percutaneous coronary intervention, but it turned out that I needed more than just a stent, and had urgent surgery on Saturday July 18.

It took several months before I was able to function "normally" again, in the mean time using a mobility scooter for transport in the village, instead of my beloved MV Agusta F4, that I had to sell when the flood of hospital bills came trough the letter box. I had to rent a hospital bed, since my bedroom wasn't finished yet, and I was sleeping on a camping stretcher at the time of the operation. Since I was unable to cook, I had my meals delivered at home. It was quite a harsh period, and with no one around me, I had to do it all by myself.

Today, a half a year later, I am still suffering from a deep depression, in spite of two different Antidepressants and regular visits to the psychiatrist. Doesn't life suck?

After several blogs with different providers, I humbly surrender myself to the almighty Google-powered 'Blogger'. The main goal of this blog will be to give you an inside view in the daily life of someone diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome.
But where are my manners? Isn't it common well-behaviour to introduce one's self? So here's a short resumé.
This old-timer first logged in on the internet way back in 1993; but that wasn't my introduction into computers. That happened in 1979, when I started as a telephone engineer. In those days we had to write our own 'software' to test the telephone exchange. The system worked in Octal and the software carrier was a paper ribbon, with holes punched in it. Very, very High-Tech!
I have since changed career a number of times -even working as a maintanance engineer in a sweet factory- but I've never been without computers ever since.
In 1981 I bought a Texas Instruments TI-99/4, (the version without "lowercase" characters) for which I wrote some Basic software. In those days, creating a game was more fun than playing with the finished product. Fixed internal memory was 64Kb (yes KILO bytes!) and the most frequent notice on the (TV-)screen was 'out of memory'. Mind you: it was a jolly good way to learn to work with routines and subroutines, in order to save memory!
The next in line was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, that -believe it or not- was compatible with the major hardware component of the TI99: the humble cassette recorder, that was used as a storage medium for the software.
The ZX was followed by an ATARI ST 1024. No more TV-screen, but a 'real' monitor, and gone with the cassette recorder: this pc look-a-like worked with floppy disks! Atari made me discover the MIDI gate, although I have no musical talents worth mentioning. The ST was my first computer with a mouse!
By the early nineties Bill Gates was conquering the PC-market, and I finally submitted myself to his victory. My first (12 floppy disks of) MS-DOS pc was assembled by a 'specialist' and never worked properly. So  up to this day I have been building my own pc's.