Blog posts

Okay this is probably my best story and by putting it out now, most of the other stories I have are going to seem infinitesimally trivial by comparison, at least they are for me. The story is true as is most of the dialogue verbatim, and you'll see why I remember it in such detail........

ET gave me a nice assignment for a pleasant Saturday in 1982. I was to go out to the Beverly Hills Hotel for a City of Hope - a charitable foundation - award ceremony. I have covered several of them.

This a true story about a talented man named David Sheehan, how he led his life and how he changed mine. But we've got to first have the lay of the land.

Time for more Hollywood stories.

This is a twofer. Two people I worked for who could not have been more different from each other, yet both left an indelible mark on the entertainment industry: Robin Leach (1941–2018) and George Schlatter (1929 -  ). If neither name rings a bell, you are either a post-baby boomer or you simply weren't paying attention to television between 1979 and 1995.

Like most folks, there are so many people that changed my life in some major way, sometimes by pure chance, where it is impossible to pinpoint what life would have been like if I never met them.

In the mid 1980s, I ran what was known as a Bulletin Board System (BBS), "Hollywood BBS", which was a computer connected to a modem running software called "Wildcat!" allowing folks to communicate and share files. This was pre-internet. Yes, I am a thousand years old. At the time, I had left doing TV shows and was freelancing as a director/editor, so my time was my own.

React was a spectacular advance in JavaScript programming, and should be recognized as such, but JSX? Really?

React is supported by Facebook, but Vue is open source. For me, I would rather use an open source framework. Consider what happened to MySQL after Oracle bought it. There was some concern about the product being meaningfully maintained, so it was forked to MariaDB. Other community concerns resulted in PostgreSQL.

Yes, things can generally work fine until a corporation gets involved and wants to dick around with an already good product.

Hello!

I have written a lot of stuff over my career and I really did not have a good place to show them.

I'll be putting old and new stuff in. I hope you will enjoy some of it!

-Norm Strassner

January, 2026, Erie, CO