Unspent Thoughts

Ending my Sixty-Ninth Year

am0@livejournal.com — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 04:53:17 GMT

Today is the last day of my sixty-ninth year. Tomorrow I celebrate my sixty-ninth birthday and start my seventieth year.

I made a comment to that effect today while having my hair cut and my beard trimmed. There were three of us old folk in the shop and the other elders had no problem with my statement. Susie, the barber, was confused. When I got home, my wife complained that my beard was unbalanced, one side having been trimmed much closer than the other.

I've been staying inside the house most of the time, but yesterday and today I felt restless.

Yesterday I went to CVS to get some cold relief medications for Cathy and then to Costco just to, well, walk around. As I entered CVS a man stopped me and asked me if lots of people asked me to play Santa (that's what prompted today's trip to the barber). Perambulating around Costco is lots less fun when you can't nibble on the free treats. Besides, I was having the first low blood sugar reaction I've had in a long time. I finally had to give in and try a tiny cup of some kind of coffee / chai drink that was much too sweet and a chicken nugget with a breaded surface. The drink didn't raise my blood sugar enough to bring relief but at least the poultry patty didn't bring any adverse effects.

Today, following my hair cut, I visited Henry's Marketplace. It's been so long since I've been there that I was shocked by the prices. However, a number of products were clearly labeled as being gluten-free. I accumulated a bunch of goodies that I could eat, including a six-pack of Redbridge sorghum beer. I selected a lamb shank to cook with some great northern beans and spotted some nice looking shoulder chops. I'll add both to my beans. I've never tried lamb shoulder chops but they looked like beef chuck in miniature, so they're probably tough enough to benefit from extended stewing. I also got a bottle of goat milk kefir despite its horrible price. And I got two small fennel bulbs to fry up along side of the small crimini mushrooms I had gotten at Costco.

I paid the price for my adventures both days. First, I became extremely drowsy following my return and had to take a nap. And my feet hurt, apparently the tendons at the side and underneath, leading to the toes. The strange thing is that the pain quickly departed instead of lingering as it usually does. Even my normal back pains vanished quickly.

As I was dressing this morning, I found my belt looser. I was able to tighten it a notch with no discomfort. I suspect some of my recently augmented girth was the result of inflammation, not weight gain, as I've recently had a similar experience with my watch band. Even though I can't really feel it, there are additional signs that the inflammation has diminished, such as being able to see better.

My blood sugar has been behaving better, too. I've gotten a couple of fairly normal readings in the last few days, instead of the constant highs and super-highs I've been having the past two years. As I mentioned, I had hypoglycemia for the first time in ages. Perhaps my chronically high blood sugars have been the result of my problem with gluten. If that's the case, perhaps I can get my sugar back under control again.

So my sixty-ninth year ends with a ray of hope.

Soy

am0@livejournal.com — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 02:20:51 GMT

You've got to be kidding: soy sauce contains gluten.

I didn't know that. I didn't believe it, so I looked on the bottle of soy sauce we use. The second ingredient, after water, was wheat.

I thought soy sauce was made from soy beans.

I scrambled up some eggs for my lunch yesterday. I used soy sauce. Almost immediately I had intestinal cramps and diarrhea, both of which I suffered again this morning even without using the salsa china or any other substance likely to contain gluten.

I'm learning about what causes me problems the hard way.

My Eyes

am0@livejournal.com — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 21:47:51 GMT

My eyes were perfect through high school. Rated 20/20, I could see small things others needed a microscope for. When I graduated, my eyes started going bad. I developed a variety of allergies, the strongest being to desert grass pollens. My vision dropped to 20/200 in one eye and 20/400 in the other when the winds brought pollen across the mountains from the desert. I was told I was legally blind.

Eye drops didn't help. Allergy treatments did.

I also developed astigmatism and became near-sighted at the same time.

Nothing much changed until I moved to Panama, where the winds brought different allergens. I was only mildly allergic to molds and the local pollens, so my eyesight improved.

Skipping forward two decades to the time I left Panama, I moved back to my childhood home, fully expecting to re-develop my former allergies. Instead, I became diabetic. Sugars in my blood started killing the nerve cells on my retinas, diminishing my visual acuity. I also started to form cataracts.

About five years ago, I developed a strange new malady, recently tentatively identified as Celiac Disease, an autoimmune condition that starts as an allergy to gluten, the substance that gives bread its form and texture. I was shafted by the staff of life. Wheat, rye, barley, triticale and other grassy grains are off limits to me now. Antibodies to gluten have caused my body to attack itself, destroying the lining of, particularly, my small intestine, allowing toxins and bacteria to be absorbed into my blood stream while blocking absorption of nutrients, vitamins and minerals. Patches of my skin have changed, getting red, swollen, rough, cracked or developing a peculiar scab that resembles the skin a snake discards as it grows. The snake skin thing is mostly on my butt.

My eyes are swelling, both inside and out. My eye doctor suggested that my retinas were swollen. From the multiple images I see, the swelling must be uneven, with ripples in two directions. It is highly variable. At its worst, I see four images superimposed.

A new phenomenon appeared yesterday: when I'm tired, my right eyeball moves more slowly than the left. If I lift my eyes from reading to look at a distant object, I see two images for a moment, usually under a second. When I'm really, really tired, the second eye has taken up to three seconds to catch up. Anybody watching my eyes while I watched a ping-pong or tennis match would be unable to guess where the ball was. It would make driving impossible. If it takes even part of a second to figure out what I'm seeing, that's far too long. I've stopped driving.

A book I have says that young people, up to forty, can recover enough in a year of completely avoiding gluten that they again absorb nutrients and avoid absorbing toxins. Over forty, it could take a couple of years or longer. That's long enough to develop a new non-driving lifestyle. I'll have to decide for sure on the other side, but it looks like I'm probably permanently a non-driver now.

Writer's Block: Role model

am0@livejournal.com — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 19:02:49 GMT

Is there any character from a novel or film that serves as a role model to you? What kind of advice do you think she or he would give you regarding any major issues you're facing right now?

Submitted By masakali

View 669 Answers

Well, there's the wizard Rincewind from all of the Terry Pratchett stories. He reminds me of many politicians, having strange powers he doesn't understand and doing strange, wrong actions based on his greed and fears. Whatever advice he might give, think on it and do something else, almost anything else. If he tells you to vote Republican, vote Libertarian. If he insists you should vote Democrat, consider casting your vote for a Libertarian. If he recommends voting Libertarian, vote Green.

It's nice to have somebody who is almost invariably wrong but seems to survive anyway.

Two Weeks of Detox

am0@livejournal.com — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 20:34:25 GMT

Smooth sailing? No, not yet. So far, I'm limited to hopeful signs.

I still get diarrhea that leads to bleeding and what I call snake skin, transparent scabs that shrink and cause pain or itching. It happens less frequently and the bleeding area has shrunk. Yesterday, however, was a particularly bad day for bleeding. Today I have more problems with the tendons in my feet and with my lower back than I do with my butt.

I've been worried about the inflammation spreading to my heart. Having acted as a scientist for most of my life, let me define my terms:

HB 0 would be when the heart stops (hopefully temporarily);
HB 1 would be severe bradycardia, slow heartbeat (KaThump ... KaTHuMP ... KaThUMP ...);
HB 3 would be normal heartbeat (Ticka Ticka Ticka);
HB 5 would be tachycardia, fast heartbeat (tikatikatika);
HB 6 would be fibrillation (Buzzzzzz), often quickly followed by HB 0 that is permanent.

So far, I've stayed pretty much at HB 3. Lately, I've noticed that I stray into HB 2 when I first lie down. I sometimes notice it during the day, especially when reclining to watch television. It may not be meaningful but it is new and noticeable.

My vision is still fuzzy. If I step outside at night and look at a bright star, I see four images, two pair of points. The brighter pair is below and slightly left of the dimmer. In each pair, there is a bright point to the left of and slightly above a dim point. This indicates to me that my retina isn't just swollen but is also wrinkled in two different directions.

Today, most of my problems are most likely more related to my arthritis than to the inflammation (in order by severity):

Pain in the very base of my lower back (it becomes uncomfortable if I stand for a minute);
Pain at the bottoms of both feet, probably in the plantar fascia and the outer edges;
Intermittent pain in my left knee;
Intermittent pain in my left hip.

There have been improvements. The left side of my butt is not bleeding, itching or hurting and the problems on the right side are restricted to a much smaller area. My knuckles are not bleeding or scabbing any more but I still get swelling and redness that comes and goes.

The various problems I have that might be due to gluten allergy (Celiac Disease) started over five years ago, became a chronic problem about two years ago and became a major concern just a few months ago. I started seeking medical help over three years ago. I started getting useful medical tips and feedback about a month ago. It is no wonder that half a month of gluten avoidance has shown little change. It's nice that there have been signs of improvement, indicating that I'm on the right track. I should show considerable improvement over the next year and may have the problem completely eliminated within five years.

Inflammation Detox Day One

am0@livejournal.com — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 02:03:41 GMT

Sometimes it takes a while to make all of the emotional and rational connections. I've lived with my inflammation problem more than half a decade. The one thing I didn't connect was the importance of antibodies, which can turn a body against itself.

When we were kids, we got vaccinations against the big killer diseases: smallpox, measles, mumps, polio and so on. Some of the vaccines were discovered as I was growing up. I knew several people who had been crippled by polio. I was there when smallpox was declared to have been defeated. We would get a shot, have our skins scraped or would consume a sugar cube that vaccine had been dropped on. Some vaccines had to be repeated several years later; for example, we were told that the tetanus vaccine would wear off after a dozen years and would have to be boosted. Flu shots were different; we had to get one each year because the disease mutated so rapidly there were new strains developed annually.

The vaccinations caused our bodies to produce antibodies. If we were ever infected, the existing antibodies would cause a massive reaction to destroy the invading organism.

The missing link was that this protective mechanism was an allergy.

We made our bodies allergic to invading pathogens and our bodies would react to an apparent invasion by destroying everything near whatever caused the production of new antibodies. The site of the infection would become inflamed, with swelling, heat, pus, itching, blistering or whatever destructive mechanism our bodies blindly threw at us.

Food allergies produce destructive responses that produce, in turn, vomiting, diarrhea, swelling, bleeding and other problems. I've been aware for over a decade that eating certain foods would be followed by diarrhea, often prolonged and violent. What I didn't realize until recently was that the diarrhea signaled destruction of my intestinal linings and that my ability to digest any kind of food was being compromised.

Maladsorption. I wasn't getting the vitamins and minerals my food was supposed to deliver.

And I won't start healing while I continue to inflame my gut with certain foods containing gluten, foods from the seeds of certain grasses like wheat, rye and barley. I've been destroying my body from the inside out and I won't heal until I stop eating those foods I'm allergic to. Once the inflammation subsides, if it does, then healing may take years to happen because I'm not getting all the nutrients I should.

All plants produce toxins, as do many bacteria. That is one of the reasons we are carnivores, animal flesh producing fewer toxic reactions than plant stuff. It is one of the reasons we cook our foods, using heat to destroy those toxins. A varied diet allows us to tolerate some toxins for a short time as long as we switch to other foods often enough. The inflammation from each toxin goes away quickly enough that no permanent damage is done.

I'm allergic to gluten and I've finally figured out what that means. It means, particularly, that I must now avoid the foods commonest to our civilization, especially breads and cakes.

I've been avoiding that particular toxin for just over a day now.

My anus still itches. My ass is covered with a material like the skin snakes shed that tightens as time passes, causing itching and, when it falls off in big chunks, bleeding. So I'm still bleeding, as I have been every day for over a year. But the corn, rice and quinoa I've consumed haven't caused additional diarrhea. I hope the itching, bleeding and abnormal skin will diminish quickly, in a few days or weeks.

I find I'm constantly hungry with a hunger that eating won't satisfy, probably a symptom of malabsorption. The lack of nutrients has probably also caused my mental confusion and the sleepiness that strikes me almost daily, driving me to sleep ten or more hours per night plus several hours more in the day. It reminds me of when I came down with something as a kid; I would sleep almost all the time until I started to recover. I doubt the hunger, the sleepiness or the confusion will diminish much over the next few months. It may take years.

My wife will probably insist that I consult my doctor about my problem. But I already did, about six years ago. He assumed I had a fungus infection and, without even looking at the affected area, told me to use a topical over-the-counter cream. As long as I was regularly applying the cream, the inflammation diminished. As soon as I stopped, it returned. I tried various creams and strategies over the period of two years, finally concluding that there was no fungus but that the creams were reducing my symptoms.

Other palliative measures I tried were taking anti-inflammatories, especially Tylenol, and consuming more bacterial cultures, acidophilus and other probiotics. Relief was temporary, as these attacked the symptoms but not the cause of my problem. I kept my Tylenol consumption to a minimum because I'm afraid of its side effects. The probiotics brought relief even more temporary.

Other symptoms haven't been reduced yet. The skin on my knuckles is still thick, rough, swollen, cracked and broken despite regular application of creams. My vision is still very fuzzy (my eye doctor told me my vision problems were probably due to inflammation and swelling of the retina, which he measured with a laser device, but I don't have the results back yet). I should probably avoid driving until my vision improves. I hope both of these problems improve soon.

I didn't have a headache today. My headaches, especially the migraines, have increased a lot over the past three years. With luck, my new diet will keep them at bay. Also, my body pains have not increased. There may well be a connection between arthritis pain and other inflammation and I've had increasing body pain over the last few years.

Most importantly, nothing has gotten worse in this past day.

Inflammation

am0@livejournal.com — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 02:04:53 GMT

My intestine is inflamed.

A decade or so back, my gastroenterologist told me I had diabetic gastric neuropathy. In other words, the nerves to my intestinal tract had died. Foods that I could previously tolerate started to cause me serious problems. I had to give up all members of the cabbage family (especially my favorite, broccoli), apples (high in the same substance used in gummi bears and laxatives) and whole grains. These foods, I was told, would inflame my intestine and cause diarrhea.

Despite giving up many foods and cutting back on many more, I've had frequent diarrhea. Now, apparently, I've started to have an allergic reaction to my intestinal inflammation: the skin on my butt becomes raw and sore, often bleeding, whenever I have diarrhea. I may also have become allergic to gluten, as in Celliac Disease.

I have to restrict my diet even more.

I've been trying to find what foods I can safely consume. Today I tried potatoes, rice, quinoa and chicken. This gave me problems of a different sort: my wife started criticizing me for excessive consumption of starchy foods that could make me fat.

I can't win.

Vampire Religion

am0@livejournal.com — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:07:31 GMT

I don't believe in vampires. I don't have to in order to be amused by speculation about them.

I belong to a group interested in reading books, a group dedicated in particular to reading books on the Amazon Kindle. Books about vampires have been popular lately and many are available free or at low cost.

According to tradition, one of the tools for defending from vampires is a cross. The question raised was: in order for the cross to work, does the vampire have to be Christian, does his intended victim have to be Christian, or do both apply? Extending this silliness, how will a Jewish victim defend himself from a Taoist vampire? Would an atheist vampire be free to feed on those of all religions regardless of what symbol they use in their defense? Would deeply held convictions, fundamentalism, be of more help to the victim or to the vampire?

I suppose the same kinds of questions would apply to holy water as defense. Other defenses, such as a stake through the heart, garlic, cutting off the vampire's head and so on would seem to be independent of the religions of either party involved.

Something else almost equally absurd was also mentioned by the group. When Congress is in session, the use of cellular phones is prohibited. The Kindle makes its connections for ordering books, downloading books, surfing the Web and so on through a cellular network, first Sprint and now also AT&T. A congressman was seen using a Kindle during a session. Was his behavior incorrect because the Kindle uses cellular networks?

Is Goth Evil?

am0@livejournal.com — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 01:11:08 GMT

I know that some people consider any celebration of Halloween to be evil. They tie Halloween to witchcraft, which they claim in a pagan worship of the devil. But the pagans and Wiccans themselves have no devil, considering that entity to be a Christian invention.

But Goth has nothing to do with Wicca or witchcraft.

It is a movement with its roots in the world of rock music, particularly punk, which, I suppose, some people consider evil. Goth are fascinated with the morbid, macabre and dark. They tend to dress in dark colors.

Looking at (particularly) a woman dressed as Goth, one could easily confuse her with the traditional image of a witch. Witches I've known don't dress like that. But people also confuse Pagan with Wiccan.

My wife, Delia, has pale skin and dark hair and prefers to dress in black with dark make-up. She had never heard of Goth when I met her. Many others, however, saw a touch of Goth in her appearance. At Halloween, she can easily take advantage of her natural appearance by simply exaggerating it, especially by selecting a clothing style with a medieval flavor to it.

The people she works for and with encourage employees to dress up for Halloween. It didn't take much for Delia to make the transition to a Goth appearance. But she intended to attend Mass after work and wondered if she should change first. I told her it should be unnecessary, as Goth wasn't evil or disrespectful in any way, particularly since any strictly superficial change would do little to lessen her Goth appearance, which is natural to her.

Aside: A group of kids just came to the door, the first in about three years of Halloweens. When I told them we had nothing for trick-or-treaters, they told me they were just dropping off invitations to an open house tomorrow. They weren't in costume, but their little white dog was dressed in motley. It's a good thing Cathy didn't see him or she would have wanted to dress Rocky up.

Clone Preparations

am0@livejournal.com — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 02:37:10 GMT

I've had bad luck with computers this year. The three computers we use most all had problems: the hard drive on my Windows box became unusably slow, the hard drive on my daughter's laptop got completely fried, and the Mac Mini lost its wifi capability. The Mini was the only one that got fixed; the other two got hard drive transplants.

I was able to restore the operating system and data on the Mini after the technicians who fixed the hardware replaced the software. I had the whole thing backed up but it took me a couple of days of research to find out how to restore the whole system instead of just a few files.

Cathy didn't have any problem with her data because she keeps her stuff in the cloud. I restored the operating system on her machine and she was ready to go with no real fuss.

The Windows machine was fussy. The people who repaired it gave me a new hard drive with an operating system in place, but it would no longer talk to my wifi network and all of my programs and data were gone. Well, presumably they are still on the original hard drive; I just can't get to them.

Until now.

I got a USB-connected hard drive enclosure and a USB-connected hard drive cloning device (with cloning software), assuming I could copy the contents of the bad hard drive to a new hard drive.

First, I tested the new enclosure and the old hard drive, to make sure both worked and that I could read from the damaged drive. I connected to the Mini and told it to copy over a bunch of photos, nearly 4,000 of them, to a USB-connected storage device. It took over three hours to perform a task that should have taken under twenty minutes but all of the files transferred.

The next step was to place a new hard drive in the enclosure, to receive the copy. I had previously purchased three 120 GiB hard drives to clone another machine. Unfortunately, Cathy has been cleaning up the basement, where they were stored, and she had cleverly stored them where I couldn't find them. I eventually found two of them.

Some day soon, I will plug in the new drive and connect the damaged drive to the cloning device, then run the software to make the clone. I expect this to take a long time, perhaps several days, so I want to get it right the first time. I don't want to have to repeat the process. With any luck, enough of my data files will be restored that I can get back to business as usual.

The problem is my Palm handheld device. It refuses to talk to Macs except to synchronize the calendar, the address book and my memos. It won't synchronize my diabetes data or produce reports from the diabetes data. I can't even move the handheld device to a different machine because all of the purchase information and passwords are still saved on the Windows machine's defective hard drive.

I hate to find myself in this situation because everybody writes programs only for use on Windows systems. I've spoken to the people who produce Diabetes Pilot, particularly now that they've made that program into an iPhone app. They told me they would consider writing a Mac version of the program if the demand got high enough but that I shouldn't hold my breath.

To make things worse, Palm has developed an attitude problem in the last year, perhaps longer. Now that one of their cellular phones has become popular enough to be compared to the iPhone, they don't want to permit apps that they haven't developed themselves in house. I've had enough of their temperamental and quirky ways. I'm almost ready to replace the Palm device with a different device. I came close to doing it once.

One candidate device is the iPod Touch, which has all of the benefits of the iPhone without the handicap of having to deal with AT&T or whoever has the iPhone monopoly. That will continue to provide me with the kind of portability I get from the Palm, too. But I've become sedentary, rarely departing from my cocoon. A small laptop would serve equally well.

I actually had the laptop in hand and was pleased with its size, weight, appearance and capabilities, an Asus eee netbook running Windows XP. Delia and Cathy made me send it back because they didn't understand why I thought I need it. That would still be a workable solution. But new possibilities have popped up. The rumor mill churns with news of a possible new Apple touch screen device that would fall somewhere between the Touch and their bottom-of-the-line notebook. And Asus has leaked information about their dual-screen touch screen device, possible with a Qi display, a new technology that can operate in a mode that has the low power consumption typical of electronic ink displays. Both of these touch screen machines would make decent ebook readers, which may be their primary appeal, and could free me from my Kindle machine.

But neither of the touch screen machines will be available this year.

I can wait (I hope).

Writer's Block: The one that got away

am0@livejournal.com — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 19:16:45 GMT

Do you believe in the concept of a soulmate? Do you think you've met him or her? Do you ever worry that "the one" got away?

View 1849 Answers

I arrived in the Republic of Panama in June, 1970, expecting to stay only two or three months. I was working with a Hawaiian company on Johnston Atoll, a collection of desert islands used by our military. After two years, they tried to send me to Kwajalein, another military outpost in the Pacific. I refused to go, so they sent me to Panama instead.

I attended a Halloween party that year that was hosted by IBM, who brought in a fortune teller to entertain the guests. The fortune teller wanted to read my palm -- my left palm -- and gave me several predictions about my life and health, some of which have come true. She also predicted that within a short time, a few months perhaps, I would meet the love of my life.

I made friends there. I got involved with a bunch of car nuts and managed to win my first ever slow rally with the help of one of them, Andre. Andre was in Panama with the Army, a civilian worker. He met a girl, Nila, and they decided to marry. I was invited to their wedding the following Valentine's Day. At the wedding reception I met Delia, a woman dressed in a pink pants suit. Our eyes locked. I really wanted to get to know her.

I spoke only English. Andre spoke English but knew a bit of Spanish. Nila spoke English and Spanish very well. Delia spoke Spanish.

I had a reason to learn Spanish.

One of the group I worked with, Gus, was a native of Germany who was raised in the Bronx, where he taught himself English. Gus had a very heavy accent and we had difficulty understanding him most of the time, but he quickly taught himself Spanish. I asked his secret and he told me that he bought the local newspapers every day (there were several) and read at least the front page of each. That quickly built up his vocabulary for the words he had to know, the words everybody used daily. I decided to put his method to use.

Andre wanted to learn Spanish. I wanted to learn Spanish. Nila wanted to improve her English, though it didn't need much improvement. Delia wanted to be able to use English. The four of us started going out as a group and studied languages together.

I had spent two years on a desert island. I got to a tropical paradise where a fortune teller told me I would meet the love of my life. We met. I fell in love. Delia, however, felt committed to Junior, a millionaire who was in Spain studying medicine. She decided we had to break it off for at least a month. By the end of the month, she had decided to drop Junior and marry me.

Panama has a strange arrangement: instead of issuing marriage licenses they perform a civil marriage, after which the couple is free to have a church wedding, which was the important one to Delia. We married in the courthouse in Balboa, under United States jurisdiction, in December of 1971, planning to have the documents quickly translated so we could have the church ceremony in January of 1972.

Delia came down with pneumonia and was in the hospital when we were supposed to get married.

We had to reschedule. The church had an opening for April 15; otherwise we would have to wait until August. Oh, well, at least it's a date easy for me to remember.

The bilingual priest that was to perform the marriage tried to convince us not to marry because we had too many differences: language, religion and culture at the minimum. We contacted him twenty years after the marriage. He was amazed and happy to have been proven wrong.

Things have not always gone smoothly as we approach the Halloween 39 years after the prediction was made that we would meet. Were we fated to meet and fall in love?

Does it matter?

Didn't It Rain?

am0@livejournal.com — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 23:10:40 GMT

It rarely rains in San Diego between June 1 and the end of August. The morning fogs usually vanish in June, so July usually doesn't even have fog or drizzle. We sometimes get a few weeks of rain beginning in late September, usually light, and occasional sprinkles afterward. The rain is usually heaviest in March, then abruptly shuts off late in March or early in April.

The following is what I recall of what may be an old gospel song.

Didn't it rain, children
Oh! Didn't it rain

Didn't it? Oh!
Didn't it? Oh!
Didn't it?

Oh my Lord
Didn't it rain

The song, of course, referred to the tale of Noah. Here, it might have rained lightly for forty minutes. The ground was moist except under trees.

The air was so clear afterward that I could smell the dog taking a leak from ten meters away. Why did the dog skip the moist ground but go on the first dry ground he found? Did the moist ground have a different, unfamiliar smell? Or was the feel of moisture on the pads of his feet off putting? Or was it simply coincidence?

Cathy called to report the phenomenon. Where she was, in Mission Valley, it rained hard for a longer time. She also discovered a dead rat in front of the Macy's where she was standing when she called. I've seen live rats in the same area over the years, so a dead rat was no great surprise ... except that nobody had cleaned it up and its condition indicated it had been there for many days, perhaps a week.

My shoulders were hurting this morning, both rotator cuffs, perhaps a reaction of my arthritis to the change in weather. We've had a cool summer with fog in the mornings and high humidity during the day, so rain may not have been such a big change. But I hurt in many places most of the time now, so maybe it was something else. The rotator cuffs were damaged a decade ago and had ceased to bother me at least five years ago. But today they felt as if the injury were fresh, as if I had just torn them hauling wet, heavy branches away from a freshly fallen pine.

The rain is a good sign. It brought refreshing cool and fresh, clean air. It was a nice change.

Screws

am0@livejournal.com — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 04:56:48 GMT

After many years, the black rubber band on my watch broke. Most watch bands are held in place with a spring-loaded pin having two small points. My Casio G-Force strap was held in place by what looked like two screws for each strap. I figured they were independent and that I could remove them one at a time. But when I turned one screw, the other turned too.

I needed to turn both screws in contrary directions simultaneously.

I have, over the years, accumulated lots of little screwdrivers. Most of them have Phillips heads. The screws required a flat bladed screwdriver. I eventually found two suitable screwdrivers, though each was a bit awkward. I know I have at least two more, much more useful, but I couldn't find them.

Then the fun began. The watch had to be held firmly while applying force to two uncooperative screws. I managed to hold the squirming watch and the smaller screwdriver in my left hand while twisting the head of the second screw with my right hand. There is now a bruise on my left palm and a strange bump on the second joint of the left pinkie, on the inside, that I can feel when I bend the finger.

I managed to get the broken strap replaced by some kind of miracle. I decided not to bother with the second, unbroken, strap. Not until I find the other screwdrivers or some kind of vice for the watch body.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Signs

am0@livejournal.com — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 03:57:29 GMT

We had dinner this evening at the Butcher Shop with friends. After dinner, we decided to sit outside the restaurant and talk. I tried to sit on one of the benches there, but it was broken and wouldn't support my weight. Delia was able to sit there with no problem. I sat on a low brick wall.

Don and I sat quietly while Anita and Delia talked. It was cool and pleasant with a slight breeze, but the traffic made conversation difficult for me and, apparently, for Don. I looked around me and noticed some perplexing signs. Across the street from where I sat were two signs, each an arrow with a diamond of reflectors under it. The arrow on the left pointed left and the arrow on the right pointed right. Did they say, "Go this way or the opposite way"?

The sign on the left was battered, pointed slightly downwards, and some of the reflectors were broken. There were no entrances close enough for drivers to benefit from the signs, so I asked the group what their purpose was. Some fanciful suggestions were made but no good explanations were forthcoming. Nobody going either direction on the road could clearly see the signs and nobody entering or exiting the road would benefit from them.

Behind the signs was a heavy barrier, a short wall with a strip of heavy metal that was battered in places. Behind the barrier was a freeway, Highway 163, and one of its off-ramps. The road had a slight curve at the point of the signs. Freeways are confusing anyway. It looked as if several vehicles had, over the years, either deliberately or accidentally headed for the freeway. My guess is that the signs were an indication to drivers that the road wasn't completely straight at that point and, if you could see one or the other, you should correct your course.

In other words, they were a vague and confusing warning of a subtle hazard.

Farther down the road, at Clairemont Mesa Blvd., there was a sign that said simply, "Snogurt". The illustration behind that word, from where I sat, appeared to show a piece of cauliflower. Could some establishment there be selling snow cones topped with yogurt? I remember show cones from the days of my youth: shaved or ground ice in paper cones topped with a flavored syrup. They had snow cones in Panama, too, but they were called raspados, not snow cones, and they usually had condensed milk on top. I suppose some bastard combination of show cone with a yogurt topping could exist, but I can't imagine anybody consuming them more than once.

Another sign -- actually a group of signs and arrows painted on the road -- said, "Exit Only. No entrance". This was, of course, where many people entered to park for the restaurant. There was no mistaking the intent of the signs. They were large enough they couldn't be overlooked by mistake. But those who had driven past the entrance had little option but to enter where it said you should only exit ... or to go someplace else.

Of the four of us, only I had noticed the signs. Why was that?

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Summer Annoyances

am0@livejournal.com — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 03:53:38 GMT

The ants have invaded. They won't vanish until we get a few days of cold weather, not unless we apply large quantities of bug killer on a regular basis. We can't feed the dog very much at a time or the ants will find out how to cross the moat and infest his food. Even a hair can supply a bridge for the creatures.

The hot weather wears on me harder than even a year or two ago. I still sweat, as witness my damp clothing, but it isn't enough. We will eventually have to have air conditioning installed. The heat now seems to be accompanied by high humidity. The local weather reports now refer to monsoonal conditions. When I was young, I remember, it got humid in late August or early September, not in June or July. Not unless a hurricane had crossed Mexico from the Caribbean and come up the coast.

When I was young ... . That now seems so long ago. I'm old now, seemingly having skipped middle age. Perhaps middle age just doesn't last as long as I expected. Perhaps middle age just didn't feel that different from the stage that preceded it.

I can clearly remember things that happened over sixty years ago. I may not remember when they happened but the memory of them happening is still fresh. Fifty years? Pretty much the same. Ditto forty years, when I had completed my education and was out in the world. Thirty years back my memory is vivid. Twenty years ago our return to the United States is still vivid. Then things get vague and foggy, probably a sign that I should have recognized that I had sleep apnea several years sooner. Things got really foggy just a few years ago, when I had a bout of pneumonia and my brain shut down.

Sixty years ago seems like a long time, but time has been speeding up on me. The last decade felt more like what a year used to feel like. I'm slowing down and doing less but the world is passing me by faster and faster.

Now I have a summer cold. My chest hurts from coughing and I'm in a mental fog from lack of sleep. I sleep poorly and spend much of each night either coughing or choking. I fall asleep on the computer or watching television but I can't nap longer than eighty minutes at a time, when the coughing starts in. Eighty minutes doesn't help. I need more sleep. Some nights I get only a couple of hours. If this cold lasts very much longer, I'm going to take it to my doctor. I'll even accept a short stay in the hospital if it seems necessary.

Having a cold and being unable to sleep is much like growing old. The distinction between being awake and being asleep blurs, as it did in my earliest years.

Am I writing this? Or am I dreaming that I'm writing this?

When the alarm goes off in the morning, do I wake up or do I dream that I have wakened? It has happened both ways lately. But I can't trust somebody else to insure that I wake up; that's what I do for them. They don't check to see if I've gotten up.

As a child I found it difficult to distinguish between being asleep and being awake, a problem I didn't conquer until I was seven or eight. In that respect, I seem to be suffering a return to my childish ways.

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Another Computer Bites the Dust

am0@livejournal.com — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 07:03:04 GMT

Today I took Cathy's laptop in for service. It hasn't functioned for about three days. The prominent symptoms have been a clicking sound being repeated and a screen blank except for a blinking question mark. I expected these to be symptoms of hard drive failure but was unable to confirm it at the Apple site, where all information tends to be obfuscated. I first took the machine to the Apple store, where it was confirmed to be a hard drive malady from the symptoms I described. They told me that it would cost me a fortune if they worked on something so old, and they suggested a place called Cry Wolf, who could do the work for much, much less.

When we first moved back to Lemon Grove, I bought Derek's first computer at a place on Clairemont Mesa Boulevard. I later bought a computer for myself and my first ink jet printer at that same place. Cry Wolf was in the same building that other store used to occupy but is only about a third as big. As you enter the store, you pass a big pile of life-sized and larger stuffed leopard toys and a couple of elegant long-haired black cats. We quickly agreed on what they'll do (replace the bad 80 gigabyte hard drive with a 250 gigabyte hard drive, not because Cathy needs more capacity but because that's the current sweet spot between the minimum 120 and the maximum 500 gigabyte drives, and attempt to recover what they can of Cathy's data).

I'm looking forward to hearing from them.

But that's our third computer fatality of the year so far and the second hard drive fatality, plus having the cable modem die on us.

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Breakfast

am0@livejournal.com — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 03:21:21 GMT

At a very early age I learned that I didn't like cold cereal.

My mother thought it was simply that we hadn't found the right one. She tried all of them on me. The sugared ones would get tried once and the remainder of the package ignored. I complained about, but would eat, plain cereals like corn flakes, Cheerios, grape nuts and shredded wheat. Then I discovered I preferred them without the milk or sugar. The puffed cereals, in particular, made good dry snacks, as did popcorn.

Having found the rightful place for cold cereals, I tried a variety of substitute breakfasts. I liked pancakes, especially wrapped around sausages, but they were too much work most of the time. We raised chickens, so I had eggs whenever I wanted them ... but I couldn't be trusted to cook them myself because I couldn't break them correctly.

Then I found hamburgers. A simple patty of ground meat, not necessarily beef, between two pieces of bread. Usually I added nothing else. Eventually I got to the point of making my own patties. At first I used simple ground meats, then mixtures of meats. Then I started adding spices, dried herbs like oregano, onion or garlic powder.

We always had a cast iron skillet in the kitchen. It was natural to fry the patties there. But eventually I had to make my own home. In 1965, the people I worked for sent me to St. Paul, Minnesota, for a two month class in repairing computers. I had to set up a cheap food factory that wouldn't take much of my attention. I bought a cheap little coffee percolator and a cheap lidded saucepan. I bought a package of cheap ground meat in a family pack, for the price reduction. I bought dried sweet peppers, dried grated onions and garlic powder. I bought a package of oatmeal, to extend the ground meat, making my hamburgers cheaper.

I had rented a furnished apartment for two months for far less than I would have paid for a motel for that period. That provided me a stove, a refrigerator and a freezer; I had to rent a bed.

I mixed together the ground meat, oatmeal and spices, placed some between sheets of waxed paper, and smashed them into flat, but highly irregular, patties about the size of my saucepan. I immediately froze the patties formed from the entire package of ground meat. I figured I had enough for three or four weeks. I no longer remember if I was correct.

Frying the patties in a covered saucepan wasn't very effective. The meat got cooked but it required too much attention. With the lid off they had a tendency to overcook severely. With the lid on, they steamed. One day I added some coffee and cooked the patty at a low temperature. The meat cooked with no additional attention required and the coffee gave it a good taste. But I had added too much oatmeal and the cooked patties were swollen monsters that resembled round blimps. I discovered that with the oatmeal inside I no longer required bread on the outside. I gave up the bread and thrived on my swollen boiled patties.

When I returned home, I decided to continue making my own patties with oatmeal and cooking them in a variety of liquids. Fruit juices were too sweet and too expensive. Soups from powders didn't work well for me. Finally I decided to turn it inside out again. I got a package of nine-grain hot cereal and cooked it up with the ground meat inside. I got the same meaty taste and I could experiment with additional ingredients. I discovered that dried apricots, dried papaya, dates and a variety of seeds worked well. I also discovered that if I added a raw egg when everything was cooked and the heat turned off then the mixture had a particularly good taste. That became my standard breakfast for several years, until I started having intestinal problems and was told to give up whole grains.

Neuropathy means the nerves are dying. It hurts and you lose all sensation. I have neuropathy in my feet, in my intestine, and ... elsewhere. Neuropathy of the digestive system leads to poor digestion and frequent diarrhea. I had to give up members of the cabbage family, especially my favorite, broccoli. I could no longer eat apples or pears (the sorbitol they contain is a laxative they share with gummy bears). I had to give up the breakfast food I had spent so many years developing.

My breakfast now starts with some fruit, usually melon or papaya, followed after half an hour by a hamburger, a pair of hot dogs, or chicken patties. Sometimes I'll fix eggs or pancakes.

Sometimes, when my intestine is really disturbed, I'll just have some chicken broth, although that is usually a lunch or dinner selection.

I often wish I could return to my blimp burgers or my hot cereal mixture.

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Modem Sick

am0@livejournal.com — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 22:59:46 GMT

My cable modem was sick.

When we first signed up for high speed Internet connection from Cox, they were charging $10 per month for the cable modem. The next time I visited Costco, I discovered that they carried cable modems in their computer department. I got a Toshiba for, if I recall correctly, about $90.

We've had slow Internet connections for the past two months, possibly much longer. I blamed part of it on my Windows computer, which turned out to have a bad hard drive. The Compaq computer with its original hard drive was even older than the Toshiba modem. It was no surprise it had died.

Then my Mac Mini started having slow connections due to a bad wireless card. I got that fixed, too.

The slowdown continued to get worse. It got to the point that I could play one or two games of Freecell between pages on multi-page sites. Freecell is a time-waster for me, something I use when I would otherwise just be staring at the screen, waiting. I'm not an expert. I'm not very fast at all, partly because I add extra problems to make it more interesting. For example, I try to arrange the suits in alternating black and red on the playing field, which is totally unnecessary but uses up lots of time.

So I called Cox. They sent out a technician today. The old Toshiba modem was, indeed, worn out. It was dropping connectivity frequently for periods of several minutes at a time. It was replaced with a new cable modem.

Two new problems were also found: the Yoggie power connection was loose, causing it to drop out; and the Apple Time Capsule wouldn't revert to DCHP, requiring that it be reset to factory configuration. But now I can get stuff off the net at a reasonable speed again.

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Breakfast All Day

am0@livejournal.com — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 06:40:48 GMT

Father's Day, like my birthday, tends to get overlooked. Part of the reason for the neglect is that both Mother's Day and Fathers Day are good days to sell perfume, a vocation shared by both Delia and Cathy. Having my birthday come in the middle of December, one of the hottest sales periods of the year and when Delia, at least, is likely to have worked so hard she is totally exhausted, contributes to its neglect.

This year, work has been scarce. Delia and Cathy have been much more relaxed and in better health than in years past. They both wanted to take me to ... breakfast or dinner. Both of them had some work but it would be short and not oppressive.

We can rarely agree on anything the first time around. Delia wanted to work first, then celebrate; Cathy wanted to go from her work to partying with her friends.

Cathy wanted to take me to D.Z. Akins, one of my favorite restaurants; Delia wanted us to go anywhere but there because she considers their fare expensive and greasy.

I suggested a compromise: Delia could go to work while Cathy took me to D.Z. Akins for breakfast, then we could all go for dinner elsewhere. Delia, always the thrifty one, thought I would be getting too much of a good thing and decided to go with us for breakfast if we would skip going out for dinner. That worked for me.

Delia set out in her car, so she could go directly to work after the meal, and Cathy took me in her truck. Cathy decided to try a short cut but couldn't remember the name of the street she wanted to use, delaying us enough for Delia to arrive well in advance. When we got there, Delia was standing in an otherwise empty parking space, effectively reserving it for us. She also saved us a place on the waiting list, the restaurant being crowded.

Our wait was long enough that my back started to hurt. I sought a place to sit and all I could find was a bench outside. After a few minutes, Cathy followed me out. A few minutes after that, Delia called to say she had grabbed us a seat inside. I sat with Delia while Cathy looked through the gift store. Eventually we were summoned to a table.

I knew what I wanted, chicken livers (which totally disgust Cathy), so I didn't need to consult the menu. We munched fresh pickles until a waitress noticed us and offered to bring coffee. I then waited for Delia to decide what she wanted, in consultation with Cathy. She finally decided on a chicken liver omelette. Cathy mostly got a collection of side orders.

They had made a minor change in what a dinner dish like mine included, so I was able to get a matzo ball soup. I like matzo balls, so I jumped at the chance. I'd had their matzo balls previously and had found them small and tough; this one was large, soft and flavorful. The small bowl had room for the baseball-sized matzo, three strips of cooked carrot and a whole lot of small, short noodles. I usually had little problem finishing an order of chicken livers, but not after consuming a giant matzo. Still, I had to try.

Many places overcook liver, as my father had when I was growing up (his liver had approached shoe sole leather in both texture and taste). I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my livers were cooked perfectly and were juicy. There were a lot of them, too, and they were large.

I had known to order french fries instead of the cottage fries that are standard. Delia, seeing the profusion of giant fries on my plate asked the waitress if she could get french fries instead of what she had, so the waitress brought her a big plate of french fries in addition. Delia then embarrassed us by repeatedly asking if she would be charged extra for them, not understanding the negative reply.

I'm not afraid to admit I can't eat a whole serving of something. I felt comfortable when Delia and Cathy started complaining they were stuffed, so we got boxes to transport the surplus in. All Delia had left were a couple of pieces of liver and her cottage fries, which she hadn't touched, so she threw them in the box with my stuff. Being greedy, though, she also packed away a few of the fresh pickles from the crock on the table.

Heading for the exit, I got behind an old man who, even when he was moving, moved so slowly, slowly taking many short steps, that it was like watching the hour hand on a clock face. I gave up and sneaked out a side door, leaving Delia and Cathy to settle the account. It took them a while but I had found a nice place to wait, with both breeze and shade.

Cathy needed to drop off a package for shipment at Staples and wanted to make a visit to Sam's Club, which she had avoided most of the year. We went up and down every aisle, more for the exercise than to see everything. Cathy picked up a package of fresh baby spinach and about $120 worth of "other stuff she needed". I picked up some grape-sized golden tomatoes, a bottle of peculiar salad dressing and a three-can package of menudo.

As we neared the cash register area, my left knee gave out. I gave Cathy my card, told her to call me when it was time to sign, and went to the food court area to sit and, hopefully, recover. As it turned out, though, my left leg continued to bother me well into the following day.

When we got home, I sat while Cathy put stuff away. She left for her work. I didn't stir except to go to the bathroom once in a while. After a couple of hours, I got my restaurant box and nibbled on the french fries and the cottage fries. Delia arrived while I was snacking and she chewed me out for continuing to eat, even though considerable time had passed. She, it turns out, was still full from her breakfast. A few hours later, to a barrage of criticism of my eating habits, I finished off the livers.

My breakfast had lasted me all day.

Tacos

am0@livejournal.com — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:23:29 GMT

We had tacos for lunch, but they weren't your average tacos.

Cathy took Delia to an Hispanic market near Grossmont Center. The market had a special on their roast pork: for $10, you got a pound-and-a-half of roast pork that you can pull for yourself, a quart of beans and a quart of rice, corn tortillas, sauces, cilantro and halved limes. There were three sauces, which could be labeled hot, hotter and hottest (100, 300 and 1,000 Schofield Units, at a guess). Cathy pulled the pork and chopped some onion. We did not add cheese, sour cream, guacamole or tomatoes, nor did we miss them. Well, the guacamole would have been nice.

Place a tortilla on your plate, add pulled roast pork, add hot sauce, add cilantro and onion, squeeze on a few drops of lime juice, then roll it up and munch. Cathy and Delia each had three, but they also ate beans and rice; I had five tacos. I avoided the beans and rice because of problems I've had lately.

The two of them also bought some tasajo (smoked brined beef strips), which Delia and I both declined, and some chicharones. These weren't your ordinary denatured chicharones: light, fluffy, low-fat and tender. This was the hard crust of skin, meat and fat that were on the outside of the roasted pork. They were accompanied by roasted Mexican onions and roasted jalapeños that were about twice as hot as the hottest of the sauces, hot enough that I needed a couple of spoonfuls of yogurt to calm my tongue.

I used to complain that the jalapeños sold locally have been cross-bred with bell peppers to reduce their fire while allowing them to appear as real jalapeños. Most were mild with a few that had a little bit of bite. These were the real thing, hot enough to bring tears, make the nose run and burn the tongue. Cooking usually seems to reduce the fire of peppers but roasting with the seeds inside seems to enhance the spiciness.

We had almost half of the pulled pork and tortillas left over, as well as about half of the three sauces, and we ate very little of the chicharones. They should make a good breakfast tomorrow.

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New Television Programs

am0@livejournal.com — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 22:28:26 GMT

I am attracted to two new programs on television, Royal Pains and Primeval.

Primeval is a British science fiction series. The basis for the series is that anomalies, portrayed as areas of bright shards floating in the air, permit travel through time. Where an anomaly opens up, creatures from the past or future can enter our world. While we are ill-equipped to deal with dinosaurs and giant worms, we are even more poorly equipped to recognize changes that happen as a result of stepping into the past or future through an anomaly. Such changes happen, according to the story line, and our lack of ability to deal with them is mentioned but not belabored.

The various monsters are well portrayed and the computer graphics are superb. Somebody has done a lot of research to get things right.

The cast seems quirky to me but that may just be because they are British. They are appealing people, for the most part.

Royal Pains is a medical series.

Okay, I watch House because of its many connections to Sherlock Holmes. It's fun to try to spot connections to the fictional detective in the stories, especially the more obscure ones. For example, the character Sherlock Holmes was based on a doctor, Dr. Bell, and Dr. House is once given a very rare book supposedly written by Dr. Bell.

I expected Royal Pains to be some kind of sitcom about doctors. I watched it despite many misgivings. Its story line concerns a doctor fired from his position for allowing a very rich man to die while he was trying to also save a poor man, the doctor then becoming the darling of the Jet Set living in the Hamptons.

A few years ago there was a science fiction series, Babylon 5, that featured some very well characterized alien beings. The very rich, highly eccentric people portrayed in Royal Pains remind me of the beings from Babylon 5. They seem like real people but are obviously different in a variety of different ways, everything but visually.

Hank, the doctor who is the central character, combines the observational ability of Sherlock Holmes (or House) with the inventiveness of McGuyver. I don't find him all that interesting, at least when compared with the quirky billionaires.

The pilot episode was much better done than the second episode. I hope they can maintain the enchantment.

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Dream Fears

am0@livejournal.com — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 21:46:49 GMT

I tend to have vivid dreams and sometimes I dream the same thing over and over. I use my dreams as the base for many of the stories I write.

Tuesday morning I woke with the clear memory of a dream of falling in the tub while showering and hitting my head, at which point the dream abruptly stopped. Wednesday morning I had much the same dream but confusion about the fall being an accident was added.

Diabetics tend to be more aware of death, and of possibilities for suicide, than the regular population. I have had reflections on suicide many times since it was determined that I suffer from diabetes, a subject I hadn't given much thought before. The older I get, the more I think about death.

The dream returned on Thursday. The fall didn't seem like an accident. I was exploring the idea of arranging a fall so my head would hit very hard. Friday and Saturday were much the same. The dreams ended abruptly in each case.

I had showered on Monday, before the dreams started. As the dreams continued I became increasingly reluctant to shower again. By Friday it had become obvious that I needed to shower but I was unable to force myself to do so.

I didn't mention my anxiety to anybody. They were only aware that I was in need of cleansing my body.

I showered Saturday afternoon without mishap. I mentioned my dreams to Cathy afterwards. There were no more dreams on Sunday, so I mentioned them to Delia at breakfast.

My family and I have a history of having dreams greatly influence our lives, particularly when they seem to come true in some way, as they sometimes do. I have also dreamed of former lives and, possibly, of future lives. It is more common for me to dream I am young again and working with people who I know have died or people who have had a great influence on my life. The dream I woke from this morning, Sunday, was of working on a ranch or farm with Bob Eggleston, a man I had worked with in Panama who I believe died of colon cancer a few years ago.

I feel I have real reasons to fear my dreams. But I mustn't let them rule my life.

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Computers Die.

am0@livejournal.com — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 00:34:06 GMT

Computers die. They are not designed to last forever.

Parts that move are far more likely to die than those that don't. Of the parts that don't move, frequently failing parts include diodes, resistors and capacitors.

There are things you can do to limit the damage and inconvenience resulting from a major failure: redundancy and back-ups are good for protection.

I've been running two computers with different operating systems. One of them makes hourly back-ups. The other one could have shared the back-up capability if I had told it to. The one with no back-up had its hard drive freeze up intermittently. Then the other machine lost its ability to talk wirelessly to the Internet.

Both machines were down, the second failing before the first could be completely restored.

The machine with the bad hard drive, let's call it Winnie, was being used to read unimportant email and to print envelopes. It contained music I had painfully ripped, over several weeks, from my CD collection but now rarely played. All these functions can be performed on its counterpart, which we'll call Minnie. I haven't been particularly concerned about recovering Winnie. I'm contemplating replacing its operating system with something else, something not made by the same company. Even though it has an operating system like the one it had when it died, it mostly just sits there. I rarely turn it on.

Minnie, on the other hand, is a workhorse. I use it for everything from the trivial (Freecell) to the vital (income tax preparation).

It took two days for the experts to find what was wrong with Minnie and to repair it. Like Winnie, Minnie was returned with a bare operating system.

But I had back-ups.

I tried to restore Minnie from the back-up. The instructions were vague but stated I could restore everything from a single file to the entire system. I tried it. Not having instructions, I just guessed what to do from the prompts presented. It was rather like playing one of those old Dungeons and Dragons games where you have to guess what action to take, trying many alternatives in order to guess the secret combination that would result in winning. It got old very fast.

I called the experts. The first one misled me completely. The second told me, correctly, that I would need to have the disk from which I installed the operating system in the drive, then directed me in the simple sequence I would need to follow to begin recovery. With the disk in place, I had to restart the machine and hold down the 'C' key until asked what language to use. He didn't tell me I would need passwords I had almost never needed and couldn't remember. I even had trouble remembering where the passwords were written down (on my Palm handheld).

I managed to start the recovery process. After about ten minutes the recovery program said it would take another four hours. I went off to watch television, checking once in a while. Recovery finished in just under three hours. Everything seems to be working again except that I can't print anything on my printer. There were about 500 messages waiting to be read. Minnie is once more happily making back-ups every hour or so.

If I decide to rip my CDs again, I'll do it on Minnie. Or I'll just play them on my stereo, if I can find it and find a new place to install it. I'm a bit short of space, though. Maybe I'll just give the little stereo away. I don't listen to music much any more, especially on radio; I now find commercial interruptions highly annoying. I assume I can find most or all of my CDs and I can get a cheap storage container that doesn't take up very much space.

So I'm back in business ... in a limited way. I can communicate with the world again and I can resume writing my stories. Once a year I can do my taxes. I can play my PySol Freecell game when waiting for some process to complete.

It's almost like being back to normal, except for the bitter taste in my mouth.

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Under Attack

am0@livejournal.com — Wed, 27 May 2009 22:41:05 GMT

Yesterday my network was attacked. Hundreds of sites did portscans and attempted to establish Trojans in my network. The attack was so heavy it amounted to a Denial of Service. My Mac Mini started having problems before Cathy's laptop did.

I cut the power to the Yoggie Gateway, then restored power after a few seconds. The reset and reload took about ten minutes. I still had trouble reaching the Internet but I could look at my Yoggie status. The system logs showed several kinds of attacks from a great variety of sites. The attacks were obviously coordinated.

Response time gradually improved to the point that we hardly noticed the attacks but the logs showed that the attacks continued all night long. None of the malware got through, though, as far as I can tell; that is, the Yoggie system reports say there are no infections.

Repairing Old Computers

am0@livejournal.com — Sun, 24 May 2009 04:49:40 GMT

My old Compaq computer, purchased years ago when I wanted to copy a bunch of old VHS tapes to DVD for viewing, seemed to have a virus. It became increasingly hesitant about running. I had added memory in January, hoping to speed it up, but it was becoming slower and slower.

Always one to throw good money after bad, I decided to have it fixed instead of replacing it. That is not a very sound strategy. New machines with significant improvements are becoming more affordable almost daily.

One option I seriously considered was to get a Shuttle box that I could use as the basis of a new system. I mostly work with words, not media, so my demands weren't great. I would like a new Shuttle with a bunch of memory and a DVD writer. I could even use the DVD drive from the old Compaq. I could get by with the on-board display on most basic Shuttles.

I would probably install Windows XP Pro on such a system, then load WUBI and use Ubuntu. The Compaq has been fussy about running WUBI/Ubuntu but I thought I wouldn't have any problems on a new machine.

Shuttles are small, low-power devices. A low power processor, like those found on netbooks and cellular phones, wouldn't be out of place.

I may eventually get another Shuttle, but this time I decided to have somebody remove the viruses I thought infected the machine.

The day after dropping the computer off for cleaning I received a phone call: I had a bad hard drive, not viruses. I asked them to replace the old 120 gigabyte drive with a new 320 gigabyte drive and to copy over as much of my data as they could. I didn't really need 320 gigabytes but it only cost $10 more than 160 gigabytes, which I also didn't need. I only had about 70 gigabytes of programs and data to begin with.

They said I could pick up the computer today, Saturday. I skipped breakfast and rushed over.

When I got there, the computer wasn't ready. The Compaq wouldn't allow any drivers for a drive as big as 320 gigabytes. They had tried three 160 gigabyte drives. Each seemed to install well but wouldn't boot. They finally found a 160 gigabyte hard drive that would boot after Windows XP was installed and tried to copy over my data.

It was going to take a while. There were several restaurants within a stone's throw: a Carl's Jr., a Rubio's taco place, a Chinese barbeque place and a natural foods place. The technician recommended the natural food place, Picasso Naturals, so I went off to break my fast with a very good chipotle chicken sandwich on a rye bun.

Now the old hard drive became fussy. Every time it warmed up, it stopped running. They could copy about ten minutes worth of data, then had to wait half an hour for the drive to cool off. They estimated that recovering my data would cause me labor charges between $300 and $500. It wasn't worth that much to me. I paid for the new hard drive and for the labor they had wasted, then left.

As before, I can use the repaired computer to do the few things that still require Windows drivers. I can use my chameleon system to copy, little by little, from the defective drive to a new drive, then copy that to the repaired system. With my entire network protected by my Yoggie Gatekeeper SOHO, I can remove all anti-virus software and all anti-spyware software from the repaired system, freeing up loads of space.

Tomorrow. If you're tired, put it off until tomorrow. I'm tired and in pain.

It will be a project. I'll pull the two machine KVM and install a four machine KVM I bought last year, then hook up all three machines (the Mac Mini, the Compaq and my chameleon). The space the Compaq occupied for so long has been occupied by a fan and a bunch of other stuff; it will have to be cleaned up. I have about three months of accumulated email to download. And Delia will be here with interruptions galore.

Eventually I'll get it all to work. But repairing old computers isn't worth it. It's better to just replace it all and forget about any data you haven't backed up.