(Editor’s note: Today’s column ought to be titled “Work of Art(‘s Son.”) The guest writer is Stan Adam Trujillo, a Robertson High School graduate who wrote four books on computer programming, all before age 28.
    He has taught college-level programming courses for E-Institute. Currently he is a writer-programmer for Microsoft in Seattle.) ———
    Matters such as religion, politics and education are never black-and-white. No matter how persuasive an argument one advances, someone else can always cite chapter and verse and contradict it.
    Optic editor Jesse Gallegos is sweating next week’s flight to Louisville for training with the newspaper’s parent organization, Landmark Inc.
    An admitted aerophobe, Gallegos is not looking forward to the layover at Dallas-Fort Worth airport. He will need to clear security. In light of heightened measures in the aftermath of 9-11 , we thought it best to convince him that joking about carrying a bomb is no laughing matter. I know.
    We needed to attend two funeral services in Las Vegas, Saturday and Sunday, in addition to a rehearsal dinner and wedding in Albuquerque on the same days. Though rushed, the trips were trouble-free. They made us wonder whether such trouble-free driving would have even been possible in the old days of Highway 85.
    Rosie O’Donnell appeared recently on the Tonight Show. As an unbelievably wealthy and influential woman who gets listened to, she rattled off some information about other celebrities.
    Thanks to a maddening mannerism of hers, I cannot remember the subject matter. What I paid attention to–and tallied–was “like.”
    Like millions of my generation, I grew up in a household that encouraged the use of English at the expense of everything else.
    My father, J.D., an admitted Hispanophile, was obsessed with the Spanish language, often telling us tales of his father, who’d traveled overseas and acquired a command of several languages, the most important of which was Spanish.
    A flyer came in the mail today offering more than 100 TV channels for a low monthly fee.
    Even without reading it carefully, I’m convinced the package will contain a host of religious channels, which I don’t watch; oodles of home-shopping-network-type stations, which should be banned; scores of sports channels, which probably feature the all-time pro table tennis championship and muskrat hunting.
    In 1956, several of us National Guard recruits were sitting around a campfire during encampment in Fort Bliss. As we smoked our cigarettes and drank warm beer, it feel on each one of us to “tell a story guaranteed to curl our hair.”
Exactly a year ago, close to 30 area students and faculty members were boarding a plane for Miami, the first leg of a trip to Spain.
The eight-hour-plus flight to Madrid was by far the longest trip most of them had made, and for some it was their first flight of any kind.
Sadly, dreams of making the trip an annual affair have been interrupted. Last year’s tour was conducted by members of the business and education schools. It involved travel within Spain and considerable coursework. Participants still talk of it longingly, some wishing there’d been an opportunity to take the trip again, or to persuade others to attempt it. Whether for lack of enrollment, a budget shortfall, lack of planning, or any number of reasons, there will be no return trip this year.
It’s decision time. It’s a question of whether to attempt an expensive upgrade of my home computer system—at the urging of my three sons.
Any thought of acquiring new equipment makes one hark back to the days when a manual typewriter sufficed.
My I-Mac is a quantum leap from the Mac Plus model of the mid-eighties, which could hold as much as two megabytes. This was in the era when Bill Gates himself decreed that nobody would ever need more than two megabytes. Today’s personal computers hold dozens of gigabytes. How much is a gigabyte? Go ask your computer literate 14-year-old.