ric@large

Category: Commentary

Thoughts about things

  • Shaken & Stirred: My First Quake

    Shaken & Stirred: My First Quake

    USGS Bay Area earthquake map
    Earthquakes and Faults in the San Francisco Bay Area 1970-2003 (Map by USGS)

    This, I would imagine, only happens to new immigrants to California. Though rare, natives will have grown up with them. (Please note that “though rare” can apply equally to California natives and earthquakes.) I had just turned 30 when I arrived in the Bay Area from the Boston suburbs. Within three weeks, I found a cheap, furnished apartment and a graveyard shift doing data entry for a small startup nearby.

    I moved to California from a Boston suburb after my first visit, staying with my aunt and cousins in the Bay Area. I unexpectedly fell in love with the place. So much so that I pulled up stakes and moved back there a little over three months after I came home. And I’m not normally the kind of person who does radical things like that, giving up a newspaper job I had for over ten years and quite likely my media career. But after seeing California, I couldn’t face another New England winter.

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  • Don’t It Make You Want to Go “Boom”?

    Don’t It Make You Want to Go “Boom”?

    mushroom cloud

    Though this is indeed a bit morbid, I couldn’t think of a better place to start off something called The Boomer Blog. If it’s gonna’ start with a bang, it might as well be a big one. It shall begin with them, or at least our generation’s innate fear of them.

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  • Welcome to the Boomer Blog

    Welcome to the Boomer Blog

    bunnies at a table

    Hello. My name is Ric and I’m a Boomer. In fact, being born in 1950, I always had the feeling that year was peak boomer”. It was ground zero for a population explosion the likes of which the country had never seen. The people who returned from World War II, came home and reproduced like crazy. They went at it like bunnies.

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  • Construction in progress

    Construction in progress

    Having gone untouched for countless years, rgetter.com (a.k.a. ric@large – I’m not even sure if I’m going to keep that name, what do you think?) is finally becoming active again. I was afraid my stories were going to be lost in the crowd on SubStack, so I figured this may be a better place for them.

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  • The Woke vs. The Sleepers

    The Woke vs. The Sleepers

    Man sleeping on street
    Makes Me Grateful for My Bed 1972 Daniel D. Teoli Jr
    By: Daniel D. Teoli Jr. via Wikimedia Commons

    “Woke” is a beautifully designed term of derision. Aiming a verb misused as an adjective at a well-educated, generally grammatically correct population is uniquely irritating. Then again, it is very hard for those of us to whom it can be applied to categorically deny it. This is especially true for me, a woke Boomer. I can easily look back and see the arc of the transformations that have been happening over the past two decades, having lived through the before and after. 

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  • Hello! (again)

    Portland Waterfront cherry blossoms

    Decades ago, I built a website by stumbling around Adobe Dreamweaver. It wasn’t half bad and got a few viewers. After the initial flush of success, it lay dormant and became embarrassingly outdated. Five years ago, I gave WordPress a try in a subdomain (go.rgetter.com–the “go” part is the subdomain). After the initial flush of success, it lay dormant for five years.

    Now, I quietly disposed of the old site and am embarking on fleshing out this new one. Here’s what I have planned, levels of self-motivation permitting:

    • This modest post
    • Migrating various content I created elsewhere that should be useful to the general public
    • Moving the once-popular Journey to Japan pages here
    • Creating a gallery where I can show off my pictures and videos
    • Links to some of my better MacDirectory Magazine articles
    • Nagging myself to create some new content here

    This little ice-breaker complete, if I have successfully fixed the file permission problem and it posts correctly, I may have the confidence to continue. Someday maybe I’ll even get good at it

  • OMG, my first post!

    OMG, my first post!

    cropped-Japan2015_0621_0771.jpg

    Getting started in blogging, particularly being new to running a content management system is incredibly intimidating.

    Getting the blog set up was like the first time I put on ice skates. I had read everything I needed to and acquired all the necessities. Instead of skates, socks and a hockey stick, it was a sub-domain, a book or two and a bunch of how-to sites. Then I spent an evening trying to get it right, performing all the necessary tasks, except for remembering to write down the new passwords.

    But the first time I put on ice skates, I was standing up on the carpet on my parents’ living room and it was pretty easy.

    But this is like the filling of getting out on the actual ice for the first time. It is very slippery, it feels pretty strange, and if I fall on my butt, a lot of people will know.

    Welcome to the blogsphere, I guess.