Category: family

my father

I haven’t been posting anything lately, because my father, Chester Huey, has been in the hospital for the past few weeks. Early yesterday morning, he passed away. I usually don’t post a lot of personal stuff on this blog, but just in case anyone’s reading this, and they knew my father, but haven’t heard yet, I thought I’d post some information here. We will have viewing hours for him at Manchester Memorial Funeral Home in Whiting NJ on Wednesday 9/30, probably from 2-4 pm and 7-9 pm. He will be interred at the Brigadier General William C. Doyle Memorial Cemetery in Wrightstown NJ, probably on Monday 10/5. We’re still finalizing things.

I’ve been working on an obituary of sorts that I may eventually post here. I owe my Dad a lot — for everything from buying us a TRS-80 and giving me my first exposure to computers, to introducing me to George Orwell’s Animal Farm (“Four legs good, two legs bad”).

e-mail clients for my Dad

My Dad has very serious vision problems, but he’s not completely blind. This means that he can use a normal computer, but he has a lot of problems doing so. We’ve got his machine set up so that he’s using very large fonts, and a high-contrast color scheme. The problem we frequently run into, though, is that most software developers don’t take these kind of things into account. We’ve found that developers are really haphazard about when and where they respect the default font size and color scheme in Windows.

We recently switched him from a dial-up ISP (Wal-Mart Connect) to Verizon DSL. The Wal-Mart Connect service used a proprietary client for e-mail and web browsing (basically, the old CompuServe 2000 client), and that actually worked pretty well for him.

When we switched to Verizon, I switched him over to using Outlook 2000, largely because it was already installed on his machine, and I was familiar with it. That turns out to have been a pretty bad idea. Outlook does a pretty poor job of respecting large font sizes and still leaving you with a usable interface. My Dad just hasn’t been able to get used to it, and there are a number of hurdles that make it hard for him to use.

I’ve been researching alternative e-mail clients for him. Basically, I’m looking for something with a fairly simple interface that’ll work well with a high-contrast, large font environment. I tried Scribe first, but that had a few interface quirks that made it unusable. I then tried Sylpheed, and that actually looked like it might be usable. I didn’t get too far with that though, since my Dad couldn’t remember where he’d written down his e-mail password, so I couldn’t actually get all the way through the setup. We’ve also been talking about just switching him over to Outlook Express, but I’m not sure that’ll be much better than Outlook. Hopefully, the next time I visit my parents, he’ll have found that password and we can play around some more.

memories

I’ve been shredding old credit card receipts and stuff like that tonight. While I wait for my overheated shredder to cool down a bit, I thought I’d write up a blog post with some of the stuff I found.

Interesting things found in 10+ years worth of credit card receipts:
– I shop at Best Buy and Borders a lot!
– I paid $259 for a Microsoft Office upgrade back in 1993. (That’s a little more than what I just paid for the Office 2007 upgrade.)
– Gas used to cost $1.39 a gallon!
– My Kenwood receiver is ten years old.
– I paid $94 for a 14.4 bps modem at the Egghead in Green Brook in March 1995.
– I paid $50 for a copy of OS/2 in 1994. Purchased at the Short Hills Mall, no less.

Memories brought back by looking through old receipts:
– Dinner at Next Door Nobu with Paul and Rob a few years back.
– Disneyland after Ankur’s wedding.
– Hitting Epcot and Pleasure Island with Rob during a Great Plains conference in Orlando.
– Many large hotel bills from San Diego!
– A hotel bill from a Best Western in Troy NY from 1995. I’m pretty sure this is from when I took my brother Patrick up to RPI for student orientation.
– I found a bunch of bills from San Francisco, May 1995, iincluding one from Lefty O’Doul’s. These are probably from the trip I went on with my Mom and Dad to go see my brother Mike graduate from law school. I think that was the last time we ever took a vacation together.
– I moved into my current apartment on 3/19/94. I had to put down a $200 deposit on the truck we rented to get me from Rahway to Somerville.

The last e-mail I got from Patrick

I’ve been organizing my e-mail and archiving old stuff tonight. I came across a number of e-mails from my brother Patrick as I was sorting through things. For some reason, I got curious about what the last e-mail I received from him might have been. It turns out to be a message from October 17, 2003, telling me about a recent visit to the doctor. The doctor had told him that something was wrong with his lymph nodes, but it probably wasn’t cancer.

Mix CD for Pat

1. Manowar – Blow Your Speakers
2. Metallica – Fade To Black
3. Voivod – Astronomy Domine
4. Metallica – Damage, Inc.
5. Jimi Hendrix – Castles Made of Sand
6. Warren Zevon – Knockin’ on Heaven’s door
7. Tori Amos – Thank You
8. Bad Brains – Sailin’ On
9. Charlie Parker – Bird of Paradise
10. Beach Boys – I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times
11. Golden Smog – Glad & Sorry
12. Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here
13. Trespassers William – Vapour Trail
14. Warren Zevon – Don’t Let Us Get Sick

I created this CD in memory of my brother Patrick. Some of the songs are by artists he introduced me to, such as Voivod, Manowar, and Metallica. We were both into that kind of thing at about the same time, although he was always a bit further ahead of the curve than I was. There are a couple of songs that I was listening to a lot while he was in the hospital: Vapour Trail, and the Zevon songs, specifically. Then, there’s some stuff that just seemed appropriate, like “Wish You Were Here”.