I will not say I’m retiring because I hate that word. It makes me think a person is giving up. Besides, biblically, the only retirement is death. I’m just getting my second wind and preparing for new adventures, new struggles, and new dreams.

This self-named website indulgence is for my opinions about life, tech, and cars.

I love tech. It makes me happy. I love cars, especially muscle cars from the sixties and early seventies. And life … what can I say. I am blessed with a wonderful family: my wife, my son and his wife and the two wonderful granddaughters.

Life

At my age, many have thoughts of slowing down, but nothing is farther from the truth. For me, it is time to pivot. To begin anew.

• What is it like to be home every day?
• What is it like for my wife to have me home every day? How do I deal with the flexibility?
• Starting a new business
• Time management for the above
• Sleep management (no more 3:50 alarm clocks)
• And more …

My wife reminds me frequently, “I took you for better or worse, but not lunch every day.” 

Tech

I love technology. All kinds of technology. 

Remember Day Planners? They were early time management technologies. Then digital arrived and I was blown away.

Personal Tech in a Small Way

Then Radio Shack had Rolodex develop and private brand a device that held contacts, notes, to do lists, and a calendar with reminders. It was fantastic and I went through three of them before they were discontinued.

Then came the Sharp Wizard. The high end model allowed for a cabled connection to a computer to backup information. Again, all four functions were available, contacts, notes, to do lists, and calendar. I went through two or three of those before the introduction of the Palm Pilot.

I used both the Rolodex unit and the Sharp Wizard for work. I was an outside sales rep and these electronics stored all the information about my customers on me at all times.

Then Palm released the Palm Pilot and everything changed. My brother-in-law loaned me his Palm Pilot (yes, the original) and my world changed forever.

First Owned Palm

Eventually I purchased a Palm Vx. It was the best device on the market and leaps ahead of my first devices … open pdf, Word, and Excel documents using apps built by third-party developers. That changed everything.

The Vx gave way to the T5 and later still, a Palm Centro phone. By the way, I still have all the Palm devices and they still work. I’m saving them for my Tech Museum.

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Tech in a Larger Way

When Radio Shack decided to close out the TRS-80 Model 4P for half price, I bought one. The P stood for portable, but it was as large as a suitcase. It had two 5-1/4″ floppy drives and no hard drive. One floppy was for the Operating System, TRS-DOS, and the other drive was for programs and saving work.

Next was a DAK computer and I also bought a Gorilla Banana dot matrix printer. This was before Michael Dell began building computers in his dorm room.

Our second desktop is an interesting story. The DAK was getting old and slow and was ready for replacing. Our family got together and bought my wife and me a new computer for our 25th wedding anniversary in 1995. I still have that computer. It’s boxed and in the closet and last time I checked, booted and worked. Powered by a 286 Pentium processor, it was top shelf and set them back $2500. The good old days.

After that, my wife and I moved to laptop computers and I have a closet full of old, dead laptops waiting to be recycled. I just counted, and there are nine laptops in the house, but only four work.

There is one more desktop bought 11 years ago, an E-machine bought at Walmart for a few business applications. It still works, but is old and slow.

CARS

Car are a completely different topic and will be thoroughly discussed in another article.

Well, that is a quick overview of the new LarryHendrick.com. I hope you come along for the journey.