Rusty's Blog

Woke up feeling guilty this morning for TJ’s death. And got to thinking about it. First of all there is no shortage of reasons that God may desire to punish me. (If you are a staunch atheist feel free to skip this message. I’m actually OK with you choosing your own path, others may not be, but that’s others.) From the perspective of god wishing to punish me, I feel I have no shortage of sins worthy of punishment. But I got to thinking about it, and no. God would not punish me by killing TJ. My understanding was that she was under the impression that he had plans for her.

My pain is not him punishing me. Or at least in this case it is not. He may be punishing me already, with other issues, but that’s a different story.

At the very worst, God could be punishing her for choosing me as her partner, but that begins to sound to me like rationalizing my own guilt.

I don’t pretend to understand why god does what he does, or allows the things to happen that he allows. It could just be that he can only act in our world through the random chances that exist at the quantum level. At that level possibilities are pretty much endless. He could have freed expansion joints on the 35W bridge before them locking up caused it to collapse under strain. Or he could have triggered a change in TJ’s immune system that would have eliminated all of the cancer in her body. I think however that such work is what he is looking for us to understand how to do for ourselves.

TJ once pointed out to me that under her understanding of what god could, or could not do, anything that he did in our realm, opened the door for others to do the same within our realm. If he cast stones from the stars on our enemies in a battle, that means that Satan or Satan’s agents would have the ability to cast stones on us from the stars as well. That maps well with my understanding of how technology works as well.

Technology is not on it’s own good or evil. Zyklon B was developed as a pesticide which was widely used to rid buildings of rats, mice and other pests. It was only after someone realized that it could also kill humans during WWII that it’s use in the death camps was developed. On it’s own Zyklon B is neither good nor evil. However because of the way it’s been used, it will never be looked at the same way again.

High explosives are well recognized as deadly weapons of war. However we use far more high explosives every week in the mining industry than we dropped as bombs during WWII. And the products of the mining industries where those explosives are used include the gravel in the aggregate of the concrete of our roads and many monuments, through the gold in the microprocessors in our watches and phones. Again, High Explosives, are neither good, nor bad, but their use may go either way.

So if quantum level changes are OK for God to work within, then they are also OK for his enemies to work within as well. And there’s a lot of things that happen at the quantum level that evil could do. It could be evil tripping quantum states that causes Cancer to start. Quantum level changes are very probably the progenitors of memory and changes in our memory. We already know that these can be affected actions at a higher level, (within our grasp as a matter of fact) as has been shown by the installation of false memories under hypnosis, via leading questions worded to create those false memories.

So Yes God could punish me through killing TJ, (or allowing her to die), or he could have punished TJ for choosing me, but I’m far more inclined to think that the emotion of guilt that I feel is part of the grieving process. and no I don’t think I’m at fault. God does what ever God does, for whatever reason he or she has, and I’m pretty sure that God does not hang such emotional baggage on us through grief, beyond giving us the grief to learn from and grow around. Hopefully as a result we become better people, learn to care more for those about us, and apply effort to solving problems that may have lead to our grief. But as painful as this process is, it is not a means of punishment.

For those who need a refresher on the seven stages of grief:

1. SHOCK & DENIAL-

2. PAIN & GUILT-

3. ANGER & BARGAINING-

4. “DEPRESSION”, REFLECTION, LONELINESS-

5. THE UPWARD TURN-

6. RECONSTRUCTION & WORKING THROUGH-

7. ACCEPTANCE & HOPE-

I have to admit that at the moment I’m mostly past step 1. I’ve had flashes of step 3, but the long exposure to TJ going through all she did has inured me for the most part to step 2. Oh, I’ve been angry with several people. Myself for not being able to do more. Her at some level for letting things get to where she was. The people she worked for (faceless forever I hope) for firing her just as she realized something was wrong. The state of Medicine that there was nothing they could do. On the other hand if it wasn’t for the cancer, we probably never would have gotten close. Oh, I probably would have remained infatuated with her, but we were both realists enough to know that who she was before the cancer would probably have remained, and it’s unlikely that I would have been involved with her.

So yes, I’ve been through the Anger, the pain, and guilt, and as someone who looks at these not as distinct uncompromising differentiated steps, but more as a collection of emotions related to different aspects of my relationship with TJ, which will strike me from time to time until they are all worked through.

At the moment I’m looking at some level of depression setting in. Some of it has been there since the realization that there was nothing the medical community could do set in. But more of it is hitting now as I consider the things that I need to do, and part of me wants to have TJ at my side as we go places. The closest I’m going to get for much of that though is to bring Emmitt along with me. And yeah, it’s not going to be the same.

How long does the hurt last? In her book, that question is asked in relation to someone close to a character dying. The general consensus appears to be that the pain goes on for the rest of your life, but that it becomes tolerable in about 2 years. That of course varies from person to person. Where on that scale I am, I do not know.

Our relationship may have been brief. From our first date, to her passing was 2 years and 5 months. Which if we were in our 20′s might seem forever, but since she just turned 50 this year, really isn’t all that long related to our experiences. That said, we had both committed ourselves to each other for the rest of our lives. She believed that it was far more likely that she would outlive me, and we never really discussed what I should do if I outlived her. But since those plans are part of steps 6 and 7, I’m not going to worry too much about them today.

For now it’s time to put back together a daily routine, and start to act human again. With enough acting, I’m hoping that the roll will set in, and I’ll forget I’m acting. Hopefully along about the time I’ve completed this process.

I need to do two things to consider the radio installation complete.Well, maybe 3.

Item one. I need to pick up some battery lugs for the battery leads to give the radios power. That will be a trip to radio shack, or a hardware store. Simple crimp on fork connector should be fine. those need to be crimped on, and then power attached.

Item two. The antennas need to wired up to the radios. That’s a trip to Radio City to get the right connectors, and solder them on. (Remember to talk the soldering iron, (butane) solder, and the co-ax stripper (well and yes a wire cutter, but if I’m doing this on the same trip as I take to Radio Shack for the power lugs, I’m pretty sure that I’ll have the wire cutters with me.co-ax stripper is a different matter.

Item three. I still need to get the head for the ID-800 fixed in the truck. I was looking at the head on it’s remote head wire, and I could very easily set it up as an overhead control, however I’d really much rather figure out some way to use the cup holder as a mount. the big advantage is that I can add a hook to ‘hang’ the mic up when I’m focused on driving. For the moment both the head and the mic are sitting on the hump between the drivers and passengers seats. I don’t think that’s a reasonable long term place to keep them.

There will be some clean up tasks. The APRS rig needs a couple of things done. Cable cleanup. re-program the TT4 to indicate that it’s a truck, to-call should use primary ‘k’ for most normal status. For Skywarn, need to set up whatever the code is to indicate I am spotting on the alternate configuration, and rig up a switch to my console some place that lets me switch into and out-of SkyWarn Spotter mode. (It would probably be a good idea for this to be a toggle that’s lit when in spotter mode.) Once the tracker is programmed, need to secure it to the top or side of the radio, and extend a switch (possibly) to the console. I need to pick up some high temp cable wrap for the power cable under the hood. Also I need to replace or repair a cover for one of the seat belts. By the time I figured out how I was supposed to open it, I’d already broken it. In two places. I have the epoxy that should take care of the job. We’ll see.

I still have to decide on the third vhf/uhf radio, and some day I’m going to need to get the Kenwood TS-480SAT mounted. That’s going to need a different antenna mount though. And I may just set up that mount with a vhf antenna for vhf on a commercial radio, we’ll see. Also in the future, would like to get the TT4 set up with the second serial interface and use it to control a display for tracking where I, and others are. In theory this should also be able to send skywarn related information. For that and other messages I’ll need a keyboard as well. And that suggests I’ll need to wait a bit. (And no using that while driving. Ok, if I can build a chording keyboard onto the steering wheel, I might be able to do that, but it might be easier to do Morse code…)

Time to get a load of laundry into the washer. A convention to get ready for today…

One more project under way. I’ve gotten a major step in getting the radios into the truck completed. The antenna’s have been mounted and the antenna wire has been run to where the radios are going to be mounted. Or at least the two I have immediate plans for anyway.

I’m a little bit disappointed in the antenna mount kits. The were labeled as being NMO mounts with PL-259 ends to attach. Well, the ends that were included in the kits are not PL-259s. Before I wire one of these in, soldering and all, I’m going to make a stop at Radio City to make sure that I can find an adapter for it to plug into a SO-238. That or get actual PL-259 ends for RG-8X co-ax.

That said, the next major item is to get power run. I’m probably going to have to pick up another pair of fuses for connecting at the radio, but once I have that in, it’s simply a matter of getting the cable runs to the two radios, with a set of Power Poles to provide connections at each point.

Once that’s done, I will need to mount the radio for the APRS, and I can get that on the air.  And I can start keeping track of where I’ve been driving. I’m kind of a fan of that in as far as I’m a ham who does SkyWarn. Speaking of SkyWarn, I’ll probably add one mini mag mount antenna and a third radio to the mix. If I do, I have to put a diplexer at the APRS radio (the antenna is already a dual band antenna) and run the uhf through a separate cable to a radio at the front seat that I can tune for a local repeater that will allow me access to the NWS in case I need to work SkyWarn net control while mobile. (I hope not, but better to be prepared I think.) The radio also has a vhf input, which would allow me to monitor the NWS vhf frequency, but unless I’m going to put in a commercial radio for that channel I’m not going to be able to talk on it. So for now a Hershey Kiss mag mount out the drivers door, either on the hood, or the roof of the truck should do the trick. If I do end up with a commercial radio, I’ll look for something a bit more capable than a Hershey Kiss antenna.

The other radio for the front seat is going to be my ID-800 set up. Of critical importance is going to be getting the control head set up where I’m going to be able to control the functions while driving, but where it won’t be quite as obvious that it’s there. I’d like to mount it above the rear view mirror, but I’m going to have to do some testing to make sure that the location is clear of obstructions to mount the control unit, and that the head unit cable is long enough.

Well, time for me to head up and get some sleep. More than a few things to get done this afternoon and evening.

I’ve been using an android phone for tha past couple of years. I started with a G1 just over 3 years ago, then about 2 years and 8 months ago I upgraded my phone to a Nexus One.

There are some things that I have to admit that I like very much about the Android platform. In fact I’m using it both on my phone and on my Nook Color. It is included in a few other things, like the base of the Nook Color, however that’s a fairly restricted edition, and from what I’m seeing the Nook Tablet is in much the same boat.

I’ve considered replacing the ROM on the Nook Color (NC) more than once, but I keep coming back to the question of do I need to? And frankly it looks now like I don’t have to.

About a year ago one of the developers on XDA Net found a way to get the developer edition of the Honecomb edition of Android to run from a uSD card on the NC. I’m pretty sure that the main reason that the NC does boot from the uSD slot is that it allows the support team to boot the platform to a known state so that they can do diagnostics of the hardware, check the internal memory, and if needed restore the e-reader to a known good OS if perhaps a corrupted OS was received over the net some how.

That said, a side effect is that you can run a full OS from the slot, and while some people use that feature to root the e-reader, running Honeycomb, and various cyanogen mod on the tablet does work.

Unfortunately there are issues with the Honeycomb developer edition. Google decided that they were not going to release the source code as they had for earlier versions, so development ultimately stalled, and some stability issues were left in place. Additionally because the source code was not available, developers could not do things like comment out features of the OS that were related to hardware that the NC didn’t have, such as a camera, or a cell phone radio. And it’s neigh onto impossible to add drivers for hardware that is included in the NC, but which isn’t part of the base hardware load for the target platform of Honeycomb, such as bluetooth.

Given all of that, the Honeycomb release did work well enough that well over 90% of the time I used my Nook Color this last year I was booted up into it.

I did consider trying to move to an SD release of CM7, however I did run into some of the various issues with different uSD cards. In short if you want to run an OS on a NC from the uSD slot, it’s a good idea to use a SanDisk Class 2 or Class 4 card. There are good reasons to use a Class 10 card in some devices. They are great for moving large files around. (Think RAW images on a dslr.) However they are really bad for small block transfers, say getting or updating configuration files.

So about 6 months ago the follow on to Honeycomb was released, and there was some question as to whether the source code for it would be made available. After all, if one release wasn’t viable, would the next one be? Google has historically released the source code for each edition of Android 30-90 days after they release the binary code.

The follow up to Honeycomb is ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ or ICS. One of the limitations with ICS is that it HTC and Google are not going to push ICS to the Nexus One. Installing it would tie up too much of the internal memory, and make it almost impossible to run any applications on top of it. That’s not a usable setup, and hardly a place where Google wants to showcase the system to new customers.

About 4 months ago, Google did release the source code for ICS. “Great!” you say. “Now compile it and push it pretty much everywhere!” I’d say you don’t understand, but it’s not really quite that ieasy. Actually one could do that. And I’m sure that there are people who did, but there’s a problem with doing that. The code from Google is expecting to run on hardware that Google knows about. If you want to run it on other hardware, you need to figure out where in the code what you want to run it on can be supported. And if there is hardware that is missing that you want to get around, you need to allow for that as well.

And at this point you have to go back to the various people who have been working on various alternative distributions of Android that they’ve been customizing from earlier releases of source code. The thing is that these people do understand the difficulty of building supportable code. They really do want to know what’s working, what isn’t, and if possible why what isn’t working, well, isn’t. One of the things that they realized early on when looking at the ICS code is that a lot of it was stuff that was minor revisions from what they had been working on before, That part they already understood, and didn’t want to start making major changes to. The were also seeing that some of the stuff they had been fighting with for the past several years was being addressed in the new code from ICS. So they started working their way through that, and applying what they were learning to the code base they already had.

One of these teams was the group of developers working on Cyanogen Mod. They had gotten to the point where they had released their version 7 of the platform, and this is the code base they were building on. At a raw comparability level between what’s running on my Nexus One, the CM7 code package is very close to the same base. However what was released as CM7 will run on hardware that the code Google distributed as part of 2.3 (the current version on Nexus One) won’t run on. And arguably even on the Nexus One the CM7 code very possibly will run cleaner. They have been developing the base for a longer period of time, and they really do have a pretty good idea of what they are doing.

What the Cyanogen Mod team are doing is starting with a raw CM7 code base they are patching it with fixes from the ICS code base and incrementally work through that to develop CM9. (CM8 would have been the Honeycomb equivalent, but since Google didn’t release that code, it was skipped.)

In the past month there has been some movement in the CM9 release process. In short CM9 has essentially gotten to the ‘Alpha’ stage. There are still a lot of things that need to be worked out, and it’s hardly a stable release from the perspective of a commercial perspective, but it is working, and most of the varieties of bugs that would cause customer hardship have been worked out. And it looks like the release version of ICS.

Now I’m not going to advise anyone who’s really concerned about their Nook Color to go out and install ICS. Could you? Sure. But like I say the developers are not recommending it, and I certainly won’t either. They do however want other developers to start working with the code they have gotten through and start trying it in more ‘real world’ conditions to start shaking out more of the bugs. That way they can identify what is still at issue, and what can be worked around. It also gives the developers the chance to try different installation mechanisms.

I like the fact that I really do have a pretty much stock Nook Color. It’s running the Barns and Nobel release of Android, I can read books, watch videos, and do a bunch of other stuff with it with the stock OS. That said I don’t want to make major changes to it.

On the other hand I want to see what else I can do with it. It’s possible to do a lot more than the stock OS provides. But if I go and load up the Nook Reader software and it stops working, having the option of shutting down, restarting and loading the B&N software on the B&N os means that I can eliminate B&N as the cause of the problem that I’m seeing. When I upgrade to a Nook Tablet, I would like that same option. I don’t know that I’ll get it, but I would like to do that there as well.

So we’re back to the uSD based OS. In the past month there have been a couple of releases of CM9 for SD boot. and one enterprising developer realized that some of the apps he used ran better under CM7 than under CM9 and decided that he would rather set up a uSD card to support booting both CM7 and CM9. He then released his code.

I’ve instaled it on a 32gig uSD class 4 card from SanDisk and it is working well for me. And that brings me back to where I was earlier. Phones.

I’m looking at my options and I’m not liking a lot of what I’m seeing in the cell phone industry. I’m paying over $130 a month for two android phones on the T-Mobile service plan, and last month we used all of about 100 minutes of talk time. Most of what I use my phone for I can start doing on my NC with CM9, and I’m expecting that will improve in the next few weeks as CM9 gets closer and closer to a final release. Google Voice indicates that it will install on my NC with CM9, so if I can get my bluetooth headset to pair up I can use it to place calls, and when I don’t have wifi service I can still use the contacts list to pull up phone numbers and such. So I’m left wondering what do I need an android phone for?

Well there’s the camera. And you know what they say, any camera is better than no camera when you need to take a picture. But I can get a camera on a feature phone. And there really isn’t a need for me to pay $65 a month for that feature. What about the wifi hotspot? Well, I can get a wifi hotspot from Virgin and pay $20 a month to get service away from home. In fact I do have one of those, so there isn’t much of an incentive to stick with a $50 plan. And I’m not sure that the 500 MB plan is all that bad either. After all most of the time I’ll be using the home connection, and nothing works for me at work. Most of the time where I would need non-home wifi I’m doing a quick search for something, or perhaps getting directions, which means I really don’t need unlimited access.

So I’m down to well, you need a phone. Ok. I sent or received 2 text messages last month, and the pair of us used less than 100 min of cell phone service last month. Both fall well within a $20 / 3 month plan.

So really for me I don’t see a good reason to stay with T-Mobile at this point. Time to look at something else.

Not saying you should. Though if you decide that this is a good time to re-evaluate what services you need, that works too.

-Rusty

I’ve been getting spam e-mails of late, from a spam bot I’m sure, suggesting that it’s from some woman who’s ‘just a few minutes away’ though I’ve seen suggestions of up to 45 minutes.

Really? By what measure?

Being generous, we’ll suggest that ‘a few’ means not more than 5. After all I’m male, and we mails are all too often willing to exaggerate things that measure ‘a few’ of something. If you are going to be pedantic and suggest that ‘a few’ is 3, you’ll have to make some adjustments for numbering. Have fun. So, ‘a few’ minutes becomes not more than 300 seconds. (5*60) The speed of light is 300,000 kilometers per second. 300*300,000 becomes 90,000,000 kilometers. The distance from earth to the sun is about 93,000,000 miles, and the ratio of miles to kilometers is about 3/2, which means that a few minutes means that you’re within 2/3ds of the distance to the sun, or that distance in any direction from the earth. I guess you’re not on Voyager 1 or Voyager 2. Ok, a quick check of this is the knowledge that light takes about 8 minutes to cross the space from the sun to the earth. So far no human has reached a distance more than 5 light seconds from the earth, but as a bot you could very easily be on a satellite or probe at a Lagrange point for earth to the sun, one of which is on the far side of the sun, and thus would be a bit difficult to communicate with. And the 254 hop tcp timeout becomes an issue as well, I suspect that if I were to send e-mail back, it would bounce from there.

Ok, so a few minutes at the speed of light probably isn’t what was ment.

Well, how about a reasonable lower end. A few minutes of walking. I walk at about 3 miles an hour, meaning that a few minutes is probably under a quarter mile. So a circle that is ‘a few minutes’ from me is about half a mile in diameter, and about 1.5 miles around. More interestingly it’s about 0.2 square miles. Robbinsdale (where I live) has an average population density of just under 4,000 people per square mile. Multiply those two values, and this _woman_ is one of about 800 people. Well, and the ratio of men to women here is just a bit skewed towards men, so _this woman_ is one of under 400. I’m going to say for the moment that that population might be a bit small for the number of _women_ who’ve been sending me e-mail suggesting that they are interested in me.

So we’ll have to reach out a bit. How about within a few minutes of driving? That seems a bit more reasonable. Robbinsdale has an area of a bit over 8 square miles. If I’m obaying the speed limits, signage, and other rules of the road, ‘a few minutes’ gets me out to about a mile and a half. That gives me a circle of just over 7 square miles, or a bit over 28k people. Again with the slightly less than half of those people being women, that’s about 14k women. If I spent 1 day for each of these 14k women talking with them, and getting to know her, it would take me about 42 years to complete the task. Of course the twin cities has been loosing population over the past decade, and that trend may continue, so let’s be conservative and go with 40 years. I’m hoping that you find someone more interesting in the next 40 years, for all I know I’m not going to be much of a conversationalist before that timer runs out.

but wait, what about those suggesting 30 min, or 45 min away? Well, for the speed of light, that puts you in a sphere up to just under 6 AU in diameter. If you are always within 6 au, then that means that you’re orbit from the sun must  be within 5 au of the sun. If you are willing to allow that at times you may be more than half an hour away, we can stretch the sphere out to 7 au from the sun. That puts all of the inner planets and Jupiter (5.2 au orbit) into play. But as mentioned before, 30 min of delay for light speed is a really annoying issue, and not likely to lend itself well to a stable relationship. I’m never going to be comfortable with predicting the appropriate timing for a joke if I’m trying to read your expression.

And half an hour to 45 min of walking doesn’t change much from driving 5 minutes, so we’ll have to consider the possibility that you’re one of the women within 45 min of driving for me. Now there are a few places in Hennipin county that I don’t think I can drive to within 45 min, but then there are a lot of people in some of the neighboring counties where I probably could drive to. So let’s consider the population of Hennipin County. There are some 191,000 females in Hennipin County. My current life expectancy doesn’t suggest that I could meet all of them in my lifetime even if all we did was speed date. If we limit it to unmarried women, we need to eliminate just over a third, or some 60,000 females. I’m not sure exactly what the curve is by age, but since I’m not fond of bars, I’m going to guesstimate that I can eliminate another 1/3 of the population as under 19. leaving about 60,000 women to try that meet them all. At one a day that’s over 180 years. If I live that long, I sure as heck hope that I’m still as good looking as I am today. Which probably isn’t saying all that much.

The thing is, within a few minutes of me right now, even if I were to be crawling on my belly, is a woman I love dearly. We have plans on getting married, and I really have no intention of changing those plans. My experience is that she is not likely to share either. So as pleasant as I find the though of spending time with some of the women I’ve met over the years, it’s not going to happen. I’ve found who I want to spend my time with.

Fortunately for you, there are a few alternatives for you to find a guy in the area. Good luck.

It’s said that life loves to kick you when you are down. And especially loves kicking you in the teeth. The truth I’ve learned is that it really doesn’t care if you are up or down, and is just as happy kicking you in the shin, arse, up the side of your head, or when it wants to punching you in the gut or solar plexus. Granted it seems to enjoy kicks to the balls, but it seems to reserve that most especially for those of use who leave them hanging between our legs.

The odd thing about all of that is that when people feel most like they have been kicked in the teeth, is probably the time when the fewest of them really shouldn’t have expected it. Life really does telegraph these things at times. Nay, it even sends a letter in advance and lets you know that there are alternatives. But all to often we walk into the low hanging, fast moving, bridge with only one abutment.

For me there were some really great things that I think happened today. I’ve an interview coming up that very well may turn into something wonderful. I happen to think that I got quite a bit done today in spite of myself, and looking at my blood sugars today I’m actually reasonably happy. Oh I’d really like those morning numbers to be better, and I’ve an idea for that I’ll try tonight, but all in all, my day was not too bad.

As you look back on what I’ve just written, I’m pretty sure you’re looking at the lead in and saying, “Ok, what’s the down side? How were you kicked?” Well to get there I’ve got to cover a bit of history. Some of this I’ve written about before, so if you feel it’s redundant, you’ve my initial appologies. I’ll ask you to bear with me, and we’ll get to the good stuff.

About twenty seven years ago, I met one of the most beautiful women in my life. We had a fast forward romance, I got her pregnant, she married me, we had a daughter, I got her pregnant again, we had a son, and she left me. Oh, there are a lot of other things that happened, but this is the cliff notes version. I don’t think I held a grudge against her when she left, but for the next oh, 20 years, give or take a bit, I either lived alone, or when I had custody of them with my children.

Life was good! Or so one would think. The reality was that most of the time I was pretty miserable. I’m a guy, frankly that means I don’t take rejection all that well.

I did continue on as best I thought I could of course. I finished my Bachelor of Science degree. Worked in a factory. Worked for a telephone company. Worked for a marketing and loyalty company. Worked for a bank. OK, I still do work for that bank. But all of that time I was pretty much on my own. I dated a couple of women along the way. At least I like to think that some of them were dates. But over all I felt I was on my own. It’s that sense of rejection creeping in there.

Along the way, I met many very beautiful women. A lot of them turned out to be married. A few were already on anti-depressants, and a few I suspect probably should have been. But several were women who very possibly things might have worked out with. Though I was carrying around a bunch of baggage of my own that got in the way.

I read up on various seduction processes. Chatted on line with people about them. Participated in e-mail conversations through mailing lists, and even met a few others interested in the topic in real life.

Along the way I met someone who I grew to like a lot. We chatted from time to time, and she let me read some of her writing. Good stuff I think, and I hope that it will take her places that she can’t presently imagine. We were friends, though what she was looking for in a guy, and what I had to give at the time, really wasn’t a good match.

That all changed. Or at least the last couple of things did. As I say I did learn some things. I happen to think that I’m a better writer than I was 20 years ago or so. I learned to write poetry along the way, and learned as well why I probably shouldn’t. I wouldn’t say that I’ve become a social maven, but I don’t think I’m as close to being a social pariah as I’ve felt myself to be. And I’ve learned, or re-learned how to be a bit more aggressive in some things, though that’s an ongoing project.

The woman I met, who’s writing I did, and do, enjoy, was diagnosed with Breast Cancer. About 4 years ago. And we ended up falling in love with each other.

And while Diabetes will probably kill me, it’s beginning to look like I’m going to outlive her.

The current median lifetime from diagnosis of Stage 4 breast cancer is 56 months. 4 years and 8 months. We’re getting very close to that point. And there are both positive elements of where she is, and negative. But in less than 2% of the population of women diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer live beyond 10 years. So far none have lived beyond 19 years from diagnosis. That’s not to say that it’s not possible. In the past 4 or 5 years, the life expectancy has gone from 26 months to 56. More than doubling.

One of the stories in the book “Think and Grow Rich” is of a man on death row. He’s been convicted of a capital offense and is going to be put to death the next day. Whether it was Napoleon Hill or someone else who interviewed him, doesn’t really matter. The observation was that of all the people on death row, including all of the guards, this man was the most relaxed, calm and at peace with the situation. He explained that from the moment he had accepted that he was going to die, he realized that there was nothing to be concerned about with it. He could enjoy the present. He didn’t need to worry about what the future might bring. War over ideology or territory didn’t matter to him.

The difference between that man and you or I, is simply that he knew what day and at what time he would die. while I know several people who are working on living forever, we haven’t reached that point quite yet. And somehow I don’t really expect we will reach that point within my fiancé’s lifetime. I’m not convinced that we will within mine either. While that doesn’t mean we won’t reach that situation, I’m pretty confident that the best we will see is perhaps another doubling of average life expectancy post diagnosis for Stage 4 breast cancer.

And perhaps she will be in that rare 2% who stage 4 cancer goes into remission for. Yes, I think that would be wonderful.

But I’m not going to put a date on when I will die. And for the foreseeable future, I’m not going to do that for my fiancée either. But she’s written her living will, and I’ve signed on to the clauses she’s requested. And should the time come for me to make that decision, I will. That time is not today however.

Today is for living. We may not have an infinite number of days together here on earth, but we do have today. And every today that we have together I wish to make the very most of. Yes there will be down days, and not so great days. But that need not be today, and I don’t have to let the expectation that those days will happen, prevent me from enjoying the very best of what few days God has granted that we have together.

I love you Tia Jeane (TJ) Starbuck. No matter what happens, for the best, or for the very worst, I love you.

It’s an old joke, Computer languages once we got beyond machine code have been steadily advancing towards a human language. Where it actually started I’m sure that different people will disagree, FORTRAN may have been the first scientific language, and COBOL the first Business language, but some of the early compiled languages were A and B. After a while C was developed, and people liked it enough that it’s still widely used, along with languages derived from it, like C++, C–, C# and Objective C. There were several developers who wanted a really easy language to teach people, and give them a way to interact with the world, so they developed Logo which controlled a Turtle. And a few people disliked that and came up with BASIC. And for the truly dreary APL was A Programming Language.

Somewhere along the line people decided that they needed to memorialize people in computer languages. First up was a mathematician and poet, Philosopher and Theologian  Yes Pascal. It held the distinction of being a language that was easy to teach, and met Dykstra’s maxim that real computer languages should not include a GOTO command. Oh, someone decided that was too arbitrary and found a way to include it, but it really wasn’t taught. In time it got out of school and went on into the general population and because it had started being a truant, the educators came up with another language they could teach the same skills with, but without the attractive name, Modula-II.

Along about this time the Military started looking for a language to standardize on. After looking through several languages, it was recognized that the very first programmer should be memorialized and they settled on a lady friend of Babbage (the first computer designer) who’s graceful and semi-unclothed image was gracing the walls and doors of college computer science departments around the world. Ada.

After a while some developers decided that these languages were kind of blah. They wanted prettier languages. So they developed Perl. It’s a great little language, with the singular distinction of having the policy “There are several ways to do that.” I won’t make any declaration on this being good or bad, it just is.

Someone looking for a way to program for all of the various computer platforms that existed at the time came up with Java. In reality it is a portable C derivative, but it has an exciting name. In fact the name was grabbed to apply to a scripting language used by web browsers to go things like blink words, and show menus, called JavaScript.

When developers got tired of trying to figure out which way they should write a program in Perl, and were really tired of having to justify that decision in comments, they got to work on a language that would go in and do just about anything. It could work with libraries of code written in C, It slithered just about everywhere and could consume just about any problem. So of course it’s called Python.

Of course at the same time, there were developers who liked what Perl could do, but also had issues with the fact that it couldn’t settle down, and created a language called Ruby. From what I understand, it’s not as hard to learn as the name would suggest.

Lately languages have gone somewhat sideways on the evolutionary tree. I’m not sure it’s a better language than python, but it’s newer, and sounds like it has a much warmer infrastructure. It’s called Squirrel.

While languages have been going up the evolutionary tree, computers have been advancing fairly rapidly as well. I’m expecting that the next few major languages in the evolutionary tree will be Diamond for those looking for something hard. Businesses who can’t escape Cobol but need something newer so they will have something like Cobol Over Wans. Then there will be pet languages in the vein of Python. First the domesticated Squirrel called Ferret, then that will branch into both Cat and Dog. Developers in each language will be completely unable to talk with each other in a civil manner.

Obviously we are working our ways towards a Human language. The thing is, I think that the Human language will not be for people to communicate with computers, it will be for computers who will by then have taken over to communicate with humans.

I’m no where near done, but obviously I do have some functionality back up and running. Looks like I have some updates to do, and I’m going to be moving databases and web services around in an effort to improve reliability and security. So there is likely to be situations where my pages are unavailable.

We’ve all seen them. At least I think we all have. That digital clock in the corner of the screen at the launch of a rocket. You may even have one on one of your digital watches. A countdown timer.

Occasionally it’s nice to just have something that lets you see time counting down for x minutes.

As a matter of fact I do have a need for one myself from time to time. Oh, I could probably scratch one together for my android phone, but when I want a timer that will stay on screen a bit longer than that, I really don’t think I need the accuracy that I might get that way. If the timer drifts a couple of seconds over a 10 minute or 30 minute interval, I don’t think I’m going to notice.

So if you have a linux box, or even can ssh to one, here’s a fairly simple countdown timer as a command line, then as a shell script.

for A in `seq -w 14 -1 0 ` ; do for B in `seq -w 59 -1 0` ; do clear; echo $A\:$B; sleep 1; done; done

#!/bin/sh
# a 30 minute timer that counts down to 00:00
for A in `seq -w 29 -1 0`
  do for B in `seq -w 59 -1 0`
    do clear
    echo $A\:$B
    sleep 1
  done
done

To spruce it up a bit, you can use ansi color escape strings to change the font and background color, and if you want a timer you can see from across the room, install the sysvbanner package and replace the ‘echo $A\:$B’ with ‘banner ${A}\:${B}`.

For the ansi codes you will need to edit the script and add an echo line before the one with $A\:$B (or it’s replacement with banner) that reads something like ‘echo -e ^[[1\;31\;40m` to set the colors to red text on black.

If you don’t need it, or don’t think it’s a useful idea, that’s fine too. Though if you simply want a clock/calendar of the same sort, there’s an idea as well.