My wife and I met twenty-five years ago, as of this December. She was literally the teacher, and I the student when I took a week-long UNIX system administration course just before the Christmas holiday in 1988, mostly because my co-worker friend Mark signed up, but decided at the very last minute that he didn't want to attend. I was looking for someplace to hide so my boss couldn't send me to another yet customer site. The single "fly-and-fix" debugging expert in my group,I'd been on the road for almost eight straight months, six of which I spent living in Hong Kong. I just wanted to stay close to home, so I took Mark's place, even though I had no interest or need to take the class. It seemed that Lisa and I were destined to meet, fall in love, and get married. Both of us were "on the rebound" as they say...Lisa came as a package deal from her divorce that hadn't even been finalized, with an adorable three-year-old daughter who is now the mother of our three grandchildren, and I remained a little gun-shy after a failed international romance. Needless to say, we were advised to slow things down after I announced our wedding date had moved forward from September to May, less than six months after we first met. We didn't listen. If I had any lingering personal doubts about my bride-to-be, it was that she seemed too good to be true. However, I wasn't completely sure that I trusted my own judgment. Perhaps a few of the naysayers advising unnecessary caution had some subtle influence on my thinking at the time, or perhaps it was fact I'd been burned … [Read more...]