#dumpTrump #deportMusk: Meetings with Remarkable Men. A Friend Passed Away this Week and Now is a Good Time to remember Good Times We Had Together.

Meetings with Remarkable Men. A Friend Passed Away this Week and Now is a Good Time to remember Good Times We Had Together.

Ken III & Ken IV in a horse-drawn carriage

In the late 1970s I met Ken Coghill III when we both worked at Analytics Communication Systems, a defense contractor, in McLean, Virginia.

He had a hobby of building his own laser light show and inviting people over to his house to watch it while he played the record China by Vangelis...

He also owned a personal computer called an IMSAI 8080 with sound cards that he programmed to play classical music... This was a very early personal computer long before the TRS-80, Apple or IBM PC. The sound cards produced square waves at the same frequency as piano notes... Sadly, square waves are very horrible sounding and an irritating noise that made me want to just turn the damn thing off... However that was the state of the art of synthesizers at that time... And he seemed to like it because he spent thousands of hours programming that machine...

I met him right about the time I got divorced from my first wife and I decided that I wanted a guitar... So I learned to play the guitar... And I wrote down the lyrics to my favorite songs in a notebook and would go sing them in public... Including at his house... Then I got an electric guitar... And I talked to Ken into buying a synthesizer so we could play music together... That turned out to be an amazing journey... Soon I bought a synthesizer and together we would play music in his basement for hours and hours and hours... These were analog synthesizers that could make many bizarre sounds... Mostly sounding like the soundtrack from science fiction movies like Forbidden Planet... But Ken was a big fan of synthesizer music... And now we were making it! While the laser light show projected swirling galaxies or clouds or whatever on the ceiling...

He invited friends of his over to play music (or just listen) Most often Mark, Leon, Ford and Tom...

These Musical Jam sessions made his wife Charlotte happy because... "Here it is a Saturday night and I know where My husband and son are... Safe at home instead of out carousing with hookers!"

Charlotte was a daughter of the Confederacy and her grandfather carried the flag at the Battle of Bull Run. She's still owns the flag but it's on permanent loan to the museum in Manassas, Virginia. One day she took me on a personalized tour of the battlefield... She was very knowledgeable... And pointed to important locations... Like... "Over there is where the Yankees ran away!" - The first battle of Manassas was quite an event because the people from Washington DC thought it would be amusing to go witness a battle... Then they found out that war is an astonishingly horrible event and went back to Washington DC very quickly...

Charlotte also requested that we go to the Smithsonian Institute and see the Chippendale dollhouse... Not surprisingly, it was furnished with Chippendale furniture...

We went to two rock concerts together... Blondie... Which was so damn loud that it ruined the concert... And Tangerine Dream at the beautiful Warner Theater in downtown DC... We were so close to the stage then when the smoke machine went off we were covered... And that kind of freaked me out because I was concerned about breathing... And carbon dioxide... That was especially excellent concert because I'd spent the whole day wandering around the National Art Gallery high on LSD...

We also went to a fantastic movie theater called the Uptown which had a giant screen and a rock concert volume sound system... We saw The Wall, the Right Stuff and Koyaanisqatsi!

We traveled a couple of times... I like to drive and Ken would get us invitations to interesting places... We went to see a laserium show at a planetarium in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania... And there were very few people in the audience... So after the show was over Ken introduced himself to the laserist and told him that Ken had built his own laser light show... And that interested The Professional so he let us play with the actual laserium machine... I found it too complex to operate because it had a bunch of knobs and none were labeled and none had any obvious purpose... But Ken was able to make it work...

We also went to New York City to see the Museum of holography. This was a state-of-the-art show in the early 1980s when holography had just been invented... Ken was always good for Cutting Edge Technology...

We all went out to a very dark field in rural Virginia to look at a comet... Ken's friend Ford had a telescope that rotated 360 degrees once a day... Very handy to keep stars in focus... I've never been good at watching the stars because my vision is blurry... And it was especially blurry that night because I had smoked marijuana before driving... I was Safe for driving but bad for comet watching...

Ken worked as a purchasing agent when I first met him... And then later as a programmer at Tom's small computer company... And then finally he got a job with the County of Prince William as an Oracle SQL programmer... That is powerful but incomprehensible language... When I went to college for computer science that's the only class that I had to take twice... Because I just didn't get it!

One of Ken's friends owned a sailboat on the Chesapeake Bay. Four of us went sailing on a lovely sunny day... And then a storm came up... And it was actually dangerous... And the owner of the boat, while being rich enough to buy a boat, was incompetent as a captain... So the other guy who was sailing with us staged a mutiny and made the owner go below deck while he piloted the ship back to shore safely... This was all very exciting but I was scared... The boom swung wildly from one side to the other and it whacked Ken real hard and knocked his glasses into the water... No chance of recovery...

After playing music in Ken's basement for years I bought a battery powered portable synthesizer and speaker system that I took to the banks of the Potomac in Virginia... Right across the water from the DARPA headquarters... So at night, I made crazy "spaceship taking off" type sounds... Just to freak out the government engineers... At DARPA... I imagine that they wondered "What is that? A UFO landing?"

Ken also introduced me to the book: Godel, Escher, Bach... A legendary manual exploring the possibilities of computer science and technology... Years later, when I worked at Radio Shack, I actually put together a system where a video camera filmed its output on a monitor... And that created Visual Echo tunnels... Because the camera was seeing what it was displaying... Zen Trippy!