Body Parts

Life Is A Roller Coaster

I thought, after New Year's, that I would be returning to blogging shortly. Alas. In December, the roller coaster cranked higher and higher on the elevated track with holiday pleasures, rewards, and good news. In January, the ride was definitely down hill and nearly off the tracks. But I think we've reached the bottom of the ride and the little train is slowing down at the gate for us to get off. In December, both my children and their chosen ones came home for Christmas. My daughter announced her engagement and her fiancee flew out, after several days of delay due to the fierce post-Christmas day snow storm in the East, to meet the family. My son, with his wife, was here for the holiday for the first time in years. And my wife's niece and her new husband and baby were here twice. I cooked three dinner parties in a week. Each memorable. Each joyous. The season ended in early January when my son called with the wonderful news that he and his wife were expecting their first child, our first grandchild. Then January descended.  My daughter's grandmother--the mother of my first wife--died at ninety-nine years of age. My daughter flew back from New York for the sad occasion, which was, despite her grandmother's age, unexpected; her grandmother was weak but not suffering from a major disease or illness. Early in the morning, according to the attendant in her assisted living home, she complained of difficulty in breathing, then simply expired. Several days later, I had to take my wife's mother, eighty-four years of age--my daughter's surviving grandmother--to the nearby emergency room. She was in ER for two and a half days, then in the hospital for two and a half days. She could not be left alone at any time, as she was delusional and repeatedly attempted to tear off the monitor lines and the tubes attached to her trying to leave. My wife's brothers came to help us attend to her at night. Within a few days we all were exhausted. On her fourth day in the hospital, I came down with stomach and intestinal flu. I was in bed for two days, more or less on my own, and I was exhausted for the following four days. After my wife's mother returned to her assisted living home, our labors lessened, but vigilance was required. My wife had to spend the first night back with her mother, because her mother was so weak as to fall down repeatedly. We hired a night nurse to stay with her until her strength returned. Affairs have finally calmed down. And my thoughts return to my past times, including blogging. I read days of unread blog posts this evening and enjoyed the observations of my conservative community on the parade of political follies. But in truth, it was a relief, nearly liberating, not to pay any attention to the news and to politics and to President Obama for over a month. All of America does not spring out of the nation's capital and all that is worth saying does not spring out of the Presidential mouth. Indeed, most does not. It is good to be reminded of that. That is the perspective that will probably stay with me for a few weeks, as I return to the keyboard make my observations about America's headlong rush to the future.

Texting Began in 1959

In high school senior year study hall when I wrote a note to Sandra Wicher telling her she was beautiful and asking her for a date; no wait ...

texting began in 1934 when my father, writing the first of only 9 letters he would write in his life, wrote a note in high school study hall asking my mother out; no wait ...

texting began in 1823 in Plymouth School when ...; no wait ...

texting began in the early 12th century when Abelard wrote a brief letter to Héloïse, praising her beautiful cheeks and her knowledge of the classics; no wait ...

texting began in the late 5th century BC when Socrates passed a note to a friend asking him to invite the illiterate slave boy to his couch for a philosophical dialogue ...; no wait ...

Death Struggle With AdvancedVirusRemover Virus and the Light of Victory

On Sunday, my work computer was infiltrated and taken over by the awesomely menacing AdvancedVirusRemover. I was at a java script script source, clicked to download the text file of a script, and the virus, apparently trojan.fakeAV, rapidly entered my pc and replicated. As soon as I saw the first message pop-up I knew what had happened. I tried to close my browser, then get task manager up to end processes; but to no avail. Then I dove under my desk to pull out the computer plug; but the receptacle strip has six plugs in it, and I couldn't take the time to trace them back to their appliances to figure out which was the pc's plug. So I scrambled to the back of the pc and disconnected the ethernet cable that feeds the dsl internet connection. Then I rebooted the machine and began 36 hours of effort to try manually to remove the virus files, register entries, and so on. I failed. I was defeated. I wasn't near despair; but I was worried about my nephew's experience with fakeAVremover. He had to wipe his hard drive clean. I thought about several weeks of unbackedup design work on my new website (my new website that has kept me away from blogging and from Facebook and from new movies and and ...). So I decided to go to my antivirus provider, Symantec Norton, for help. I contracted for virus removal. My case "escalated" to higher analyst, M.N. That was impressive. She took over my pc by remote control. She said that it usually took 45 minutes to one hour to remove AdvancedVirusRemover. It has taken two hours. But when I saw her get control of  Command Prompt and Regedit, a half hour ago, I knew M.N. had won! She has rebooted and the virus is gone.

I have never surrendered my pc, in twenty-six years of using pc, starting with my DEC Rainbow running CP-M and UNIX, to remote access and control. It was an interesting experience to watch her--M.N. is a woman--take control of the computer, move the screen prompt, open and close files, examine lists, run anti-virus programs, and execute and delete applications. I have no idea where MN works--perhaps at a console in India, or a small partitioned desk in Buffalo, New York; wherever! But her operation of the screen placed her presence just across my desk from me. Was she working at a phantom pc opposite me, staring remotely at my screen, analyzing, and fixing? Talking to me via message boxes? And messaging on one occasion, when waiting for me to type in my password into the login form, by painting letters on the blue screen apparently from the back of the screen. From her perspective, did she have to scrawl in mirror script for me to read it? It seemed no less miraculous than if god's finger was writing on my office wall, from the other side of the wall. M.N. my Warrior God.

Twitter link re-established

Turin's post titles are automatically forwarded to Twitter. You're pretty excited, aren't you?

Twitter Used To Organize Political Demonstrations

A Moldovan woman has been charged with organizing "flash mob" anti-Communist demonstrations using Twitter and Facebook. Story here.

Serious Twitter

I've figured out how to use Twitter and have used it enough in the past few days to develop some facility--but not much!--in typing on the little cell phone keyboard.  Now to figure out a use for it that is of interest to a general public. Don't touch that dial!

Tooting Twitter

I've been amused by "Doonesbury"'s poking fun at Twitter. But I don't take the comic strip as a prophet of the future. I opened a "shroudedindoubt" (http://www.twitter.com/shroudedindoubt) twitter site because its millions of users worldwide are a better harbinger of its usefulness than Garry Trudeau. Technology takes off in unexpected directions when you put it in the hands of a free society. The telephone was originally designed for business use; Bell couldn't imagine that it would be used for social calling and residential use was initially discouraged. The radio and television were developed for commercial use with the notion that "serious" programming would be broadcast; with this vision, one ended up with the BBC and its stately (I would say, Stalinist) vision of "entertainment". No one expected the cell phone to be adopted so quickly for use in automobiles; but women, commuting alone, realized its use for emergencies and carried them for safety. And terrorists, alas, have discovered cell phone texting as a vehicle for coordinating de-centralized attacks. Blogging was derided as giving loose reins to ranting, uninformed opinion; but in the end, blogging reinvented political pamphleteering and enlivened democratic political dialogue. Facebook was dismissed as creating a vast singles bar for the unmarrieds to hook up. How Facebook is one of the leading medium for family reconstitution and relation hunting among genealogists. Now Twitter. Expect its users to invent new unexpected uses for it. I became convinced that it would be an important device when it was used by phone-twitterers on the ground to report what was happening during the Mumbai terror attacks. Let's all listen.

Tweet

http://www.twitter.com/shroudedindoubt

Testing SnagFilm

I read about SnagFilms (SnagFilms.com) in The Wall Street Journal and am testing a SnagFilms widget in this post.

Update. Clever. High quality image. You have to have really wide bandwidth to play the film in streaming form; otherwise you have to download most of it, then watch.

Photoshopping Iran's Missile Launch Photos--Fun with Farce

Danger Room has photoshopped Iran's photo of a missile launch. Great fun. Get the view.