Matt - Electronics

For work, Dad had a laptop starting in the early nineties. There was a game on it with two gorillas on buildings, à la King Kong, that would throw bananas at each other. You adjusted the angle and velocity of the throw, and tried to hit the other gorilla, and the first one to hit won. We loved that game. We were able to take advantage of Dad's technology quite a bit, actually. Dad used a laser pointer for his presentations, and he told us how one time Mike was playing out in the rec room and Dad pointed the laser right by him to see what he would do. Perhaps because Mike was a big fan of Star Wars growing up, he just looked at the glowing red dot, and didn't even care! He just accepted it as a part of his world, a naturally occurring phenomenon. For work, Dad always had new computers and projectors, which he used a ton for presentations and things like that, but at home he used the projectors to play humongous-screen movies on the wall or a hanging sheet. We watched "The Sixth Sense" on one of those big screen nights, and it made a big impression…perhaps more than Dad bargained for. All of the boys ended up sleeping in the same bed that night! Dad has always been computer savvy, and as I learned more about Microsoft Excel in college I realized that Dad had been doing some of the advanced stuff for years, writing programs to help clients out and things like that. Dad helped us out whenever we had difficulties with computers, especially when we had homework trouble. He taught me to save my work often after I lost a huge project because I didn't save my work at all, and coached me through Power Point presentations and everything else I needed to know. Until I was proficient at typing, Dad would help type up my reports for me because he did it ten times as fast, if not more. He was always willing to help, and always willing to have fun.

-Matt