GlennLog

Turning technology from mumbo-jumbo into rich tasty gumbo

May 18, 2009

Regular Life

Life has returned to its semblance of normality, with the kids generally happy and well, along with Lynn and I. A few bumps along the way, but nothing like April. No antibiotics are currently in use in the house, no fevers, and I must go knock some wood.

It's been a month since my mom died, four weeks ago today, and the fact that life seems normal belies how well people cope with huge change and loss. I have had a lot of conversations with friends, colleagues, people I barely know about my loss and theirs. So many people I know lost their mother or father or both when they were young, or when their parents had barely reached middle age.

I picked up mom's ashes from the funeral home last week, and it was a very odd thing to drive around with the carbon atoms and other minerals that represent a part of mom's bio-mass. I found it kind of reassuring to have some part of her, which isn't that odd, than if she'd been lowered into the ground somewhere. We're material beings. Her carbon started in the heart of a star, like all of ours; some of her self is still with us, and I like that.

The best news I have is that Lynn's folks arrive this week to take up residence about 30 to 45 minutes away. They didn't want to be right in the heart of a city, even one as poky as Seattle, and they found a nice adult living place both close enough and far enough away. I'm so looking forward to them being here.

My dad is on the other side of a divide, in Port Townsend, with the Hood Canal Bridge having parts replaced (long overdue), and thus requiring one of several workarounds to get to Seattle. (Ferry from PT to Keystone, drive Keystone to Langley, ferry from Langley to Mukilteo, then a drive down I-5; drive to a parking lot, take a shuttle to a passenger ferry over the Hood Canal, then a bus to a ferry, like Kingston or Winslow; or you can drive 3+ hours around most of Puget Sound!)

He's been having a variety of things attack his body, but fortunately getting better, and his plan is to come see us soon. When the bridge is back up, we'll take the boys over there, too.

This last weekend, my brother-in-law, Michael, and his fiancée, Kathy, were up to visit. We saw the Red Sox lose in a somewhat sloppily played game yesterday that was nonetheless highly enjoyable. (He's a Red Sox fan, and is trying to get our boys on board with that, which is fine with me. I have no team. The Mariners have never struck me as awe-worthy.)

The two of them asked me to officiate at their wedding this fall, which is about the biggest honor I have ever had bestowed. I can't think of anything in my life that feels like a bigger gift than being asked to join them together. I told them it made my month, and it's true.

I read about other people's lives, people who travel the globe or scale mountains or deal with incredible highs and lows or celebrities and the super-rich with dozens of homes...and all I long for right now is just what I have: some peace and quiet, family, a calm life.

Posted by Glennf at 11:24 AM | Comments (0)

April 26, 2009

Rough Weeks

I blog a lot less these days, partly because I twitter (follow me @glennf), and partly because the whole "expose everything going on in your mind and life in a journal" thing has lost its general charm to me. I try to write only when the spirit moves--call me a Quaker Blogger.

My mom died last Monday, and her passing came in the middle of some awful (but not dangerous) family illness. Everybody in the house has been sick at some time or another. Rex was on three antibiotics at once at one point. Ben clearly has my allergies, with a real flowering (no pun intended) of coughing during this very heavy tree pollen season.

Myself, despite taking an effective prescription allergy med that worked early in the season, am overwhelmed by the tree pollen. I've had to add sudafed and other stuff just to get rid of the post-nasal drip, cough, and other side effects.

The night my mother died, I had to make my first visit ever for myself to an ER. My throat went from sore to horrible over about an hour around 5 pm. I went to UW Medical Center where mom had died about 10 hours earlier. The crew at the ER was just fine, although it took a while to get all set, as ER visits do. I wound up being sent home with an antibiotic, a course of steroids, and a Vicodin prescription for the pain. I started the drugs immediately and saw an improvement within an hour. The next day, I could actually swallow without pain. Woo hoo!

The boys' health and their night-time sleep problems (Rex has stopped waking, but Ben is coughing at times) have meant that Lynn and I are working on something like 5 or 6 weeks of mostly broken sleep, with a few good nights in there.

This hasn't left me much time for reflection, for mourning, for thinking about much.

I miss my mom. She was a lovely woman, sometimes driving me crazy (every mother must), but a generous person who mostly only thought of what she could do to help other people.

The thing I notice most of all is the silence. It's not that I have actual silence in my life, but I feel a palpable quiet where mom used to be.

In the coming weeks, I hope our health all improves, and we actually get some consecutive nights of complete sleep. Maybe then I can get some still time to think of my mother.

Posted by Glennf at 9:09 PM | Comments (0)

April 20, 2009

Passing

My mother died this morning.

The cancer she's been fighting for four years finally gained the upper hand. The good news is that she got the best care she could possibly have gotten on the planet, and that most of the last four years, she's felt good or, at worst tired. The bad news is that her cancer became aggressive a few weeks ago and couldn't be beaten down.

Oddly, thinking about her death makes me think about technology. Technology is a form of worship of immortality and godhood. Of taking the things that are beyond mortal control and turning them to your ends: electricity, matter, the basic forces of nature. Digital cameras take pictures that will last forever (if you back up) with perfect fidelity.

Technology in its apotheosis is represented in the Singularity, a science-fiction notion that's becoming mainstream in which the continued exponential growth of computational power allows the complexity of a human brain to be completely modeled in a single device. The singularity drops the boundary between mortality and technology, allowing us to transcend our bodies and step into the computer.

Which is what many of us working in fields related to and around technology today do in a virtual sense every day when we plan, fix, describe, invent.

But technology is part of the material world. No matter how much we want to transcend our material beings, silicon isn't going to get us there.

My mother is gone, and what I have left are spinning arrays of electrons.

(Top photo from my 3rd birthday in Poughkeepsie, NY, in 1971; bottom from some morning after we moved to Fremont, Calif., probably late June 1971. My dad said we took one of these every year for a few years. That was when we had just moved to California, where we stayed until 1979, when we moved to Eugene, Oregon.)

Posted by Glennf at 1:11 PM | Comments (1)

April 13, 2009

Rex Captures His Dad

Rex captured me with a hoop.

Posted by Glennf at 11:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

April 8, 2009

Gimme My Money

Rex has been mommy focused a bit since her return from 6 Days in Connecticut (not a major motion picture), and at bathtime, he often says, "Just mommy," meaning that he wants some solo mommy time. Fair enough and Lynn's been a good sport about it.

We're letting Rex set the pace on this, but were trying to turn the ship a bit. A few nights ago, I said, "Rex, can daddy give you your bedtime?" "Just mommy." An idea pops into my head. "Rex, if I give you $5, can I do your bedtime?" and I pull out some fake money we play with. His eyes light up. "Yeah."

So we joke around with this, and by the time it's bath, he's given me a fake quarter that I give to him and all goes well.

It's two nights later tonight, and time again for me to do Rex's bath. I offer him various sums, and he finally agrees. In bath, we play with tools, and have a good time. When I get him out of the bath he looks at me and says, "Where my ten dollar?"

We'll have to start a price sheet.

Posted by Glennf at 7:10 PM | Comments (2)

April 6, 2009

Durian Pudding

Lynn bought some Durian pudding from a local Asian market. I am fascinated with Durian, a spiky fruit that grows in Malaysia and elsewhere, and which apparently smells, when ripe, like a rotting corpse. However, each of the custard-like pods inside the hard-to-open fruit apparently taste both exceedingly delicious, and have a unique taste. This pudding is about 5% durian juice, 16 percent coconut.

Posted by Glennf at 9:14 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

April 1, 2009

Mailsmith Preference

Ow!

For some reason, this preference appears every year on this date. Ow!

But I still don't turn it off.

Posted by Glennf at 1:49 PM | Comments (0)

March 31, 2009

Full Glenn Feed

A friend gave me a suggestion on how to combine all the various RSS feeds for everything I do into one monstrous MegaGlenn feed. Here it is. This is a combo of this blog, Wi-Fi Networking News, TidBITS, Ars Technica, and Macworld.

Here's the Yahoo! Pipes embedded scrolling list for your enjoyment.

Posted by Glennf at 12:31 PM | Comments (0)

March 27, 2009

It's Getting So You Can't Walk Down the Street without Being Interviewed

I produce some bon mots about empty Seattle P-I newspaper boxes since the end of the print edition.

I'm actually quite saddened to see the empty boxes. The P-I was a great paper with a unique voice. It persists online but with so many fewer staffers that it can never be quite what it was. I hope it thrives online. We need a new model.

Posted by Glennf at 10:06 AM | Comments (0)

March 24, 2009

Make Your Laptop Recoverable before It's Stolen

A couple of brazen laptops thefts in Seattle prompt this post. If your laptop is stolen, it will likely never be recovered unless you have already installed software that "phones home" when it's reported missing.

Laptop recovery software is designed to be active constantly in the background, and not be removable by a thief unless he or she entirely erases the laptop and does so quickly. (It's called laptop recovery, but you can install it on desktop machines for the same purpose.)

The best time to install this software is right now! Right this instant! The second best time is one minute before your computer is stolen. The worst time to think about installing? Right after your laptop is snatched.

This kind of software scans regularly for a network connection, and sends a very small amount of data to a central server operated by the recovery software maker. If your laptop is stolen or goes missing, you go to the software maker's Web site, and enter a special code the firm gives you when you register the software that's unique to the laptop.

The next time your laptop checks in, which could be when a thief powers up the computer to see what's on it and connects intentionally or accidentally to a Wi-Fi network, a recovery mode is activated.

Regardless of the software, the recovery mode starts sending information about the current state of the computer to either the software maker's server (that's typical) or to a site or email you specify.

Some software will start snapping pictures (without any audible sound) if there's a built-in camera, such as on Apple's series of laptops. Most will send network information. A few packages now use Wi-Fi networks to create a rough position using a national location database that's also used by Apple and other companies for phone positioning (to augment GPS when GPS is available).

Depending on the company, you might be provided with this information and need to take it to authorities, or the company will call your local law enforcement for you and make arrangements to transfer the data.

Many companies advertise a 90 to 99 percent recovery rate for laptops or desktop computers with their software installed in cases where a user has marked it as stolen. This is less unlikely than it may seem because of how easy it is for a computer to join a Wi-Fi network and how rapidly the software can send enough identifying information--such a picture of the thief!

Authorities apparently pay close attention to these reports from laptop-recovery software firms, because if they find one laptop, they may find a dozen or 100.

Some software requires an annual subscription fee that includes the software and monitoring. Others charge just a one-time fee, but you have to pay for upgrades in the future if you want newer features.

Some prominent software includes (one-year price shown, multi-year discounts typically available):

Computrace LoJack for Laptops ($40 or $60 per year). This software works as a black box, communicating directly with Computrace's monitoring center. Many Windows computers (see list) have an extra capability that the $60 version can activate: The software is partly stored in the BIOS, a part of a computer that can't be removed just by a thief erasing a hard drive. The $60 version can also let you remotely erase your hard drive to protect data, and comes with a limited $1,000 recovery guarantee. The $40 version is available for Mac OS X or Windows.

GadgetTrak believes only you should get tracking data; this allows them to avoid having central storage systems for your data (it believes this could jeopardize your privacy), although the firm does work with law enforcement. The company offers several different packages for Windows and Mac OS X. Its Mac software, MacTrak ($25 per year), uses Wi-Fi positioning to provide a good location in a city or town, and sends email and uploads photos snapped via the built-in camera to a Flickr photo-sharing account (you can set up a basic account at no cost). Windows Standard Edition ($30) sends basic network infomration, while Search & Destroy ($65) can remotely destroy data on the laptop, too.

Undercover 3 from Orbicule is what I use myself ($49 one-time fee). It's a Mac OS X only package that takes pictures of the active screen, snaps photos through the built-in camera, and uses Wi-Fi positioning data to obtain a location. The software also has a neat option that if the computer isn't recovered within a period of time after it's marked as stolen, it activates a mode that simulates slow screen failure. If the computer is then brought into a known repair location, like an Apple Store, a speech program is used to scream out that the computer is stolen and display a recover message on its screen.

There are other options available, too; ask for recommendations from friends or computer-store staff if none of the above meets your needs.

Posted by Glennf at 9:25 PM | Comments (0)