Category Archives: Technology

PAD 1/30/13 – Burning Down The House

Posted on by
Reply

“Your home is on fire. Grab five items (assume all people and animals are safe). What did you grab?”

I would rescue these items from my house:

  • Important Documents Folder
  • Backpack of Data
  • Messenger Bag
  • Antiques
  • Family Photos

These are things that I cannot easily replace. Everything else would be a matter of homeowners insurance. While much of the things I would rescue, such as the Important Documents Folder may not be exactly irreplaceable it does hold some things that I have an emotional connection to, the real physical things that I have earned – like my High School Diploma and my Bachelors Diploma. I am sure I could get reproductions of both, but these are originals and they are important to me. Antiques may surprise people, that I have some which I do, and that they are on my list. Some things, even if they aren’t worth very much have an irrational value because they are physical threads leading backwards through time to people I never knew but revere because without them I would not exist. I list them as “antiques” because I do not want to cover what they are. They are important to me, and that’s good enough for me. I’ve taken the concepts of readiness that I did for my professional life at work and extended them to my home. There are some habits that I have like placing certain things in bags, like a backpack where all the hard drives are kept and my trusty Messenger Bag which stores the lightweight but vitally important objects in my life, like my Nook HD, my iPad, my Laptop, that sort of thing. Photos of family would be rescued as well. Again, almost everything can be reproduced but I am guilty of ascribing extended properties to physical objects in an irrational capacity. Photos are just chemical marks on paper, but these are of my loved ones, my family, and so they are more than the sum of their chemical marks, in many ways they carry a piece of that family member with the photograph. Looking at my family in photos brings their memories back and help me return a part of their existence to my life through the blessings of memory. Very much like how the Prophets discussed the flow of time to Benjamin Sisko on Deep Space Nine – “You exist here. Why?” and I like the idea of memory in this way, that the past, present, and future all exist at the same time. Our consciousness and bodies move forward in time, but parts of us exist in other times and we can access those by the act of remembering. That the sheer act of remembering in a way helps us to return to when our loved ones existed with us and so, they can again, in a fashion.

If people are safe, and my pets are safe, and these objects are safe then the rest can burn. I think that over time this list will get smaller as some of these objects are stored in places where disaster cannot strike like safety deposit boxes and the like. More and more of life, I think, will end up being digital and stored on the cloud – so much of the material that is digital becomes proofed against loss, against burning, against flooding, against everything.

Saving your bacon with Dropbox

Posted on by
Reply

Several days ago at work I had someone approach me with a terrible tale of woe. They were helping a graduate student with a technical problem and wanted some guidance from me. The graduate student had a USB memory stick that had their entire academic production stored on it and they didn’t have backups anywhere else. This student went to Wal-Mart to print out pictures that were stored on this memory stick and when they had returned to Walwood they found that the memory stick no longer worked.

Then I got involved when the staff member helping this graduate student came to me with proxied panic about the data that this graduate student had lost. I plugged the device into my iMac thinking that at least the Mac would be able to display some sort of basic block device even if the filesystem was corrupted or damaged somehow. The USB memory stick was very old and my Mac noticed the device but refused to even display the block device details – so while the controller was apparently working, the channels further along towards the flash memory chips was not working as expected. There was nothing I could do to help the graduate student or the staff member and I felt just terrible. That there are no backups just made the panic more present and awful.

What could the graduate student do to mitigate this? The answer is in the clouds. I told the staff member that it wasn’t enough to simply tell graduate students that they should get some sort of cloud infrastructure to put their information on, but that they had to be stronger about it. That they had to insist that all students get some sort of cloud infrastructure to store their data. The cloud infrastructure that I prefer hands down is Dropbox. I use Dropbox and I love it, but when I tried to extend Dropbox services for the University I ran into some legal issues which pretty much precluded me using it – but none of that would preclude graduate students from using the system.

What is it about the cloud that drives me to it so strongly? It takes away a huge issue in one firm slash. The question of backing up your data. Using the cloud effectively abstracts away storage from the user, takes it elsewhere to be handled by people who spend their entire time only considering the proper storage and backup of data. Dropbox relies on Amazon S3 for primary storage and it’s Amazon that does the backups and the media shifting and everything that if you were to read an older “protect yourself” blog post would encourage you to do yourself. Instead of relying on you to do all the heavy lifting, which lets face it, we all want the benefits of that protection but sometimes getting to that point can be daunting, having it abstracted away makes a lot of sense. If there is a problem with Amazon S3, then the Internet has a bigger problem and if that’s the case, I would argue that Earth has a problem and that singular condition trumps the conditions of your backups because there are other more important things to consider. Now, please note that I am not directly advocating loading your data into Dropbox and then ignoring secondary backup completely, but for the majority of people out there, I do believe that Dropbox and Amazon S3 is enough to ensure your data security and persistence enough to stop here. Nothing stops anyone from duplicating their Dropbox contents on another storage medium but only those who are really invested in technology really need to move beyond what Dropbox provides.

I think every student should get a Dropbox account. The basic one is free and you can store up to 2GB and Dropbox has several ways you can win more space, such as referrals and such. For the panicked graduate student there is little that can be done beyond perhaps using a data recovery service such as the one I had previous experience with, Secure Data Recovery but the price tag on recovery with them is very expensive. You only use their services because you have to, and it’s a blessing that they are there, for when shit hits the fan.

I also think as a sidelight to this, that people invest in a diversified storage layout, especially when using public systems like those at Wal-Mart. Flash drives are very cheap now and it’s easier to kill a cheap throwaway “sacrificial lamb” than it is to watch your entire life disappear in a puff of logic from an overused terminal and it’s possibly damaged or shorted-out USB port. It is also my strong professional recommendation that people put lifespans on the devices they depend on. USB Hard Drives should be replaced after five years, no matter how long they have been running or not. USB sticks should be replaced every six months. Flash technology is not bulletproof, these devices degrade over time and it’s best to be safe and not sorry and if it costs a little extra or seems wasteful, then my argument is, so be it. Better to waste money on devices you don’t need then have to spend a thousand times more to recover data from a device that you errantly depended upon for far too long.

If I were in the academic sector at my University I would take this threat very seriously and as a value-added service to the student population I would find some way to set up a “University Cloud” storage system, and open-source variant that provides the same functions that Dropbox provides, alas, I am on the wrong side of the aisle on this, so all I can do is load my good ideas into my professional trebuchet and lob it over the walls of the ivory tower. Maybe someone will read this and it’ll spark something. Just some cursory searching on the network has led me to some possibilities:

Thanks to Quora for this list

Above and beyond everything else, when your life is becoming more and more digitally based it becomes a new vital thing to protect yourself from loss. The maxim “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is more relevant and important than you may have originally considered. Don’t end up being pushed up against a wall, protect yourself, backup your digital life!

Administrator’s Eyes

Posted on by
Reply

Working in IT in Higher Education for the past 14 years has taught me many key survival tactics. Life in Higher Education is special because of the unique specialness of the needs that many of my coworkers have. I don’t want to call anything specific out, I’m not here to hurt anyones feelings.

One of the first things you learn is that no matter what the patina is that people do their level best to project, right underneath it is some of the most kinky, clever, sneaky freaks you will ever meet. I hate to be picky but there is quite literally a 10 out of 10 chance that the truly kinky will be the boys. Perhaps this is higher education, perhaps not, but gentlemen, you are filthy. Damn.

When I started working in my profession I made some basic decisions which have saved my bacon more times than I care to even contemplate. First and foremost of those is cultivating “Administrator’s Eyes” which is the very state that I enter into when I help anyone with their technology. I started it as a habit and now it’s become a perception-altering meditative practice, nearly. When I am helping a client (I don’t call them customers, that’s inappropriate, they are clients) and I am sitting down where they normally sit I will focus my entire attention on the parts of the screen that contain only those pieces that enable me to render assistance. I do not let my eyes wander. It’s not out of some lofty sense of propriety that I picked up over time but more specifically battle-earned knowledge. I cannot, I will not handle the kinky freakish things that my fellow human beings get themselves into. Often times people will say “Oh, certainly nobody does that in a professional setting!” and I point them to teenage boys that spend way too much time in the bathroom with flimsy Scientific American magazines that appear to be on their last legs to keep their covers from falling off… these boys grew up into men and being a boy who grew up to be a man, I can say with authority that the only thing that honestly changed was that our hair started to thin or fall out.

It’s a habit that I recommend every IT professional adopt. It saves you from social embarrassment, even by proxy, and at the core of it stands this central question which each one of us in the IT field must eventually answer: “Can you handle the answers?” This is the first thing I consider before I even allow the questions to occur to me. Almost always the answer is no. A huge orchestra-blaring no. I can’t handle knowing anything. I can’t handle knowing usernames, passwords, websites, or anything at all beyond the thin border of a web browser. It’s not that knowing would endanger my professional life, but it would change my relationship with my clients and I simply cannot risk that. I have relationships that I must preserve, beyond everything else. I cannot perceive porn webpages, anything blah-Tube, even if it’s just online banking, trips to Amazon.com, or the stray Solitaire game being played. I have a deeply rooted and vested interest in knowing as little about my clients as I can manage beyond their presentation to me in the professional setting at work. It really is self-preservation. I do not perceive anything that would naturally be upsetting to anyone else so that the material in question does not change the fundamental relationship between IT professional and client. I suppose in a way, medical doctors take a “Do No Harm” oath, and I suppose I am advocating for IT professionals to take a similar oath “Do Not See”. Help with getting whatever it is up and working properly with sample data or bogus Lorem Ipsum if you can manage it, and even if you can’t and you have to look directly at the entire screen, once you engage the habit of “Do Not See” hard enough you might be able to pull off maintaining this state of blissful ignorance the entire way through your day.

This is something I encourage in all my assistants and people who work with me on IT tasks. I try to impress upon them that their coworkers may not be as pure as the driven snow and that through the adoption of Administrator’s Eyes they can learn a way to avoid the awkwardness that comes when you accidentally stumble onto a terabyte of stored data that people ought to keep at home, under a blanket, probably with a hot shower at the ready. It saves you from ever having to ask yourself that most torturous question “Can you handle the answers?” because I know I cannot. Therefore not only do I not ask the questions, but I don’t even consciously perceive anything that would lead me down that dark alley.

If there are any IT admins that read my blog, what are your thoughts on Administrator’s Eyes? Do you agree or do you think differently? Please comment here or on Facebook, I would love to know, as long as you’ve washed your hands in hot soapy water for a count of twenty. 🙂

PAD 2/5/13 – Call Me, Maybe, Maybe Not.

Posted on by
1

“Describe your relationship with your phone. Is it your lifeline, a buzzing nuisance, or something in between?”

I’ve never understood why people exclaim that their mobile phone is some sort of yoke or control collar that was tied to them. You don’t have to attend to it, even if your company pays for the device. Then there are people who think of mobile phones as possible risks to their privacy. For those who are that paranoid I often get to laughing, “You really think that anything you are fretting about is a risk?” You can’t conduct business without leaving a huge paper trail behind you. Instead of fearing all of that, I say that people should revel in it, nay, wallow in it. What are you protecting?

For me my iPhone is an indispensable intellectual swiss army knife. I use it for many things, work, personal, pleasure, business, you name it. It’s my camera, the loom of my social network and the device where I play Letterpress. I am addicted to it, and I am perfectly fine with the notion of being addicted to a device. I’m addicted to alcohol so what the hell am I protecting? Some image of myself that never existed? What I can’t understand is why more people don’t see the value as I do.

My iPhone is still a phone, and that I suppose will always be true but the device has become much more than just a plain old telephone. Voice is full of noise, errors… problems. English demands so much and then the immediacy and interruptibility of vocal communications just add to the pile of unpleasantness. When you get a call it’s a moment transfixed and pinned to the ground. Someone is imposing their will upon yours, taking up your time, ignoring your flow and your tasks and imposing theirs on top as if the previous did not matter. This isn’t so much a problem with an iPhone as it is a gripe I’ve harbored for a very long time about the more general telephone technology that we all use. Telephones are a lot like walk-up service at work. Knocking on my door, ringing my phone, either of those demands that I entertain a very expensive intellectual interrupt so that I can put whatever it is that I’m working on into a wait-state so that I can switch mental contexts and engage in either a face to face conversation or a telephone conversation.

Just the presence of this technology alone is bothersome, but the language brings even more awkwardness. There is no chance to plan and consider what you are about to write, no opportunities, really, to proofread and revise before sending. The pressure of speech, body language, and freudian (jungian?) slips abound. English, and the culture that surrounds it like a cloud demands a proper greeting, a discussion with turns, and a proper closing. That’s how you are supposed to conduct yourself without seeming rude, insolent, or impertinent. All of this would be fine if it wasn’t for the fact that normal human beings are fleshy water-filled bags of error just waiting to pounce. Modern discourse doesn’t value listening so people tend to talk at each other instead of talking to each other. You can’t get a word in edgewise and because you value the other person you are talking to, you let them just trample on. This creates a self-reinforcing reward for future verbal tramplings. After a few conversations it’s not really pleasurable any longer, it’s a battle. Then there is the proper closings. You don’t want to seem cold or rude so you attempt to close the conversation with some sort of closure marker like “thank you” and sometimes these events don’t actually take and you end up sending multiple passes of closure invitations to the other side. You go from feeling bad about being curt and rude to feeling bad about appearing to be mentally defective.

I have said in the past, and I will say time and time again that text beats voice all the time. Especially for technologically-tied workers like myself. When I am at work, or engaged in any activity really, I often times find myself within a flow. It’s texting and iMessage and IM’ing and email where you can strike a new playing field. Text is planned and groomed, opening and closing control symbols are cliché and common as dirt, so they aren’t a problem, and the way these messages are propagated does not necessarily break flow. In many ways, these technologies are more polite forms of communication. “I need your attention, but it isn’t life-or-death and so, since I value your time, energy, and flow I will send a queue’able message that you may defer until you are ready to accept it.” and I have said time and time again that text communication is much more respectful and gentile than face to face communications or telephone communications.

What about family calls? Yes, this is a point at which all of my arguments fly right out the window. Nothing, not even flow is more important than your family, so for that there will always be a need for telephone technology in the world. I would argue that actually FaceTime technology, which is video-augmented telephone calls are superior to plain-old-telephone-calls because there is so much more there. You see the other person, something that usually takes airfare or a long car ride to accomplish. The level of information in a FaceTime conversation I would argue is far higher than in a basic telephone conversation – you can see body language, facial expressions, so much more than can be carried by voice alone.

At least for me, my family can FaceTime call me, or call me on the phone. Everyone else really should use some text infrastructure. The only part where any of this is flexible is who you consider family? Friends and family? I draw the line at coworkers and professional contacts. If you aren’t my friend outside of work, keep your phone calls – send me an email or a text.

PAD 2/3/13 – Writing Room

Posted on by
Reply

“A genie has granted your wish to build your perfect space for reading and writing. What’s it like?”

I’ve got the room, which is the library in the house I currently own. Right now this room is a makeshift guest bedroom with a library that has accumulated along the walls. There is a great design for a modular stackable bookshelf that really intrigues me and I imagine the library would feature this along the walls, improving on the current cheap particle-board bookcases that we currently use. I would also build these into the built-in closet in this room and take the doors off of it. In the center I would place an overstuffed leather chair with an ottoman for the legrests and behind it a floor lamp with multiple lights attached to a central body, much like this lamp. If the room was just a little bit larger I would also like a old-fashioned secretary desk to do writing and composition. I’ve written before about my affection for mixing up the traditional and the technological.

Truth to be told, if I got my hands on a Genie I’d likely not ask for these things, but instead relief from debt.

PAD 1/12/2013 – Inside vs. Outside

Posted on by
Reply

“Run outside. Take a picture of the first thing you see. Run inside. Take a picture of the second thing you see. Write about the connection between these two random objects, people, or scenes.”

2013-01-30 10.02.022013-01-30 10.02.26

These two images are from my workaday world. On the left is the view out of my office window, as the weather is quite awful outside I chose not to just dash outside. The picture on the right is inside my office and features one of my favorite things on my desk, my very evocative Edison bulb desk lamp. It’s cold outside, the weather is just beginning to demonstrate how surprisingly variable it can be, thanks in no small part to climate change. It’s not that the world will actually warm up, although it very well might just do that very thing, I rather suspect we’ll see more variability in the weather patterns instead.

Cold and Hot, as well, perhaps even impersonal and inviting. Once you start spotting dualities they can sometimes just carry you off. It’s not that there are just a finite set of dualities either, and I’m sure including more pictures would just add to this particular sense of contrast that we see here. I don’t really find the outside to be that compelling except during the spring, or I should say the true spring and not the false springs that appear now midway through winter on accident. There is more stability and comfort in the Edison bulb. This simple and anachronistic bit of technology emits a very warm yellow glow that in the early mornings and late evenings gives my office a very subtle old-world atmosphere. I’ve written before about my affections for both the bleeding edge of technology and the anachronistic throwback technology of the deep past living contemporaneously together and I will always posit that the very old and the very new belong together and that there is wisdom in keeping things that are throwbacks around because you never know when something that has been well-tested may become all important when conditions change and the newest technology cannot cope with changing environments. The classic example i use is how an electromagnetic pulse could render all my bleeding edge technology useless but my Edison bulb and my mechanical hand-wound pocket watch will continue on. This mixing of the newest and oldest makes a lot of sense and speaks to infinite diversity in infinite combinations, something that everyone should take away from Star Trek if you are as earnest about that series as I am. That respecting diversity, even when it comes to levels of technology are vital for survival because you may not have the neat whiz-bang working all the time while the older bits of tech continue to chug along. I keep a fountain pen in my bag because I trust the classics more, as there are no moving parts to a fountain pen other than it’s ink. Older items, or items that harken back to the bygone days are also important to remind you that the world still has room for elegance and simplicity and that complexity, while dazzling isn’t the pinnacle of living.

This connection between the new and the old also is playing out in another part of my life, as I am using something very new, my Day One app,  to do something that at least speaks to the past, which is journaling. I write everything in the journal and then selectively share either on my blog or on social media, depending on the level of security and privacy that my writings require. I’ve discovered that over the past few years I’ve accidentally logged every day of my life in Twitter, at 140 characters at a time and including these bits in my Day One journal is cementing my past so that years from now I won’t have to ever wonder about what I’ve experienced and when it happened, there will be a log of it. I’ve found journaling to be a very mixed bag of motives, right now I feel like a digital squirrel bounding all over collecting and burying bits of my past in a safe place – but eventually I will browse this resource and think about what has happened to me and perhaps I’ll learn more about myself or at least remember more of what it was like to be me during that time in my life. On an expanded tangent I sometimes wish I could include journaled stories from my parents and their generation. The things they experienced and the feelings they felt, shared with the younger ones amongst us. I’m very enamored of the idea of learning this way, not from prepared texts that have been curated and vetted, but from personal experience with all its rich colors and opportunities for interpretation and even its foibles and pitfalls. Much of this resembles the StoryCorps project, where the stories of the past are recorded. This is a wonderful place to start browsing, if you are engaged with this idea, and I think the power of journaling speaks to this and maybe someday I’ll get enough bravery to publish all that I have written, maybe some of it will be useful to someone else in the future.

System Hackery

Posted on by
1

Sometimes I find ways to make life easier for my coworkers, things they couldn’t possibly understand but would benefit them anyways. A few weeks ago I discovered a series of system level adjustments to the TCP/IP stack which I thought would benefit everyone. These adjustments, just in case anyone was curious and technically so are here:

/etc/sysctl.conf

kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=4194304
kern.ipc.somaxconn=512
kern.ipc.maxsockets=2048
kern.ipc.nmbclusters=2048
net.inet.tcp.rfc1323=1
net.inet.tcp.win_scale_factor=3
net.inet.tcp.sockthreshold=16
net.inet.tcp.sendspace=262144
net.inet.tcp.recvspace=262144
net.inet.tcp.mssdflt=1500
net.inet.tcp.msl=15000
net.inet.tcp.always_keepalive=0
net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=1
net.inet.tcp.slowstart_flightsize=4
net.inet.tcp.blackhole=2
net.inet.udp.blackhole=1
net.inet.icmp.icmplim=50

/etc/nsmb.conf

[default]
streams=no
minauth=none
soft=yes
notify_off=yes
port445=no_netbios

I found these files online in various sites and the ultimate goal was to find any way to make the networking work better for clients on their iMacs. Most of these settings make sense if you are using a plain Ethernet system like we are here at Western, most specifically the mssdflt setting at 1500. One setting that I think was causing some issues was net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack. This setting covers how the systems handle ACK packets in TCP/IP communications. Back in the 80’s there was a dispute on how TCP/IP should function and there has been confusion and splits between two camps ever since, and this setting causes issues all depending on which number you set it to, 0 through 3. Apple sets this feature by default to 3, and I had this turned to 0 for many workstations and then I started noticing people having problems accessing SupportPress reliably. Perhaps I was overzealous in the 0 setting, so then the question becomes, how to change the setting without upsetting people?

Of course, ARD to the rescue. I created a new list of computers at work, removed the obvious ones that shouldn’t be touched such as the primary file server and such, and for the rest I copied these two files to the client workstations. Alas, these changes don’t work unless you can reboot the stations. I was able to reboot remotely several unoccupied stations but that wasn’t a real solution. I need to cover all my bases, not only change the system so that the new settings are permanent over reboot, but that they take effect now instead of later. I was on the edge of sending out an email to the group asking them to please reboot their computers during lunch and then it struck me, why not simply ship out the adjustment over ARD? ARD can send Unix commands to connected workstations and it can masquerade as root, so, why not?

The command to find out what this setting has is:

sysctl -a|grep delayed_ack

The command to make a change while the user is online is:

sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=1

The users have no idea I’m mucking about underneath their systems, way down in the BSD bits, all from my office, over the wire, with them logged in doing whatever it is that they are doing. Now all the workstations have this change effective immediately and when they reboot they’ll get this change applied automatically as well.

I will have to sit back and see if 1 is indeed the setting that will help. We shall see.

Decameron

Posted on by
1

Influenza is a wildfire that is blazing through this state and my office. Many of my coworkers are out sick and at first what I thought was just the standard Influenza might be a few other things. WMU, through the health center and ultimately through the CDC pushed the 2012 Influenza vaccine shot which we later popularly discovered didn’t apparently take into account the strain that is blazing through Michigan and our office. I have talked to a few people who characterized this new flu as “Flu Type A”and I don’t know where they got that moniker from. I also heard that another virus, the Norovirus was blazing across the US, sourced from Sydney Australia. Are these tag-team illnesses or are we mistaking the Norovirus for the Influenza? For me it’s just idle speculation as the practical upshot is, I’m slowly being surrounded by sick people and eventually my resistance will falter, something will happen – either a surface I thoughtlessly touch or some aerosolized agent that I somehow come into contact with.

This has got me thinking about all the popular culture illnesses. Nothing as awe-inspiring as Captain Trips from Stephen King’s stories, but even movies like Hot Zone all lend themselves certain weight to the idea of control, quarantine, and the eventual lapse in vigilance. I haven’t gotten sick (knock on wood) and for that I’m very thankful, but something is knocking on the door and I don’t know if I’m doing enough to protect myself. Much of what I do is probably just a placebo, taking extra doses of Vitamin C, a dose of Vitamin D-3 (which I need anyways, and it probably doesn’t do anything else) drinking lots of hot tea (hot water can’t hurt) and regular drinks at night. Nothing comically appropriate like getting piss drunk every night, but a wee something regularly, wine, liquor, cider, beer. Does it help? It’s not hurting, so why not?

Beyond the things I eat and drink, vigilance visits me in what I do at work and at home. I often times worry that I’m starting to develop a germ-phobia laced with a touch of obsessive compulsive disorder. I know at least somewhat clinically that this activity of washing my hands before I eat (and sometimes afterwards) is only really a mental illness if I am paralyzed because I cannot proceed without cleaning my hands or it somehow impacts my quality of life. There is a small part of me that is concerned that all this handwashing, in hot water, for twenty seconds using rather aggressive soaps is just hastening my seasonal skin issues on my hands. The colder the weather, the drier the climate the more dry and cracked and bloody my hands get. My hands and my legs bear the worst of it, but my legs get a respite as I have them covered up almost all the time, where my hands don’t and pay the price. All this handwashing is just pushing them even harder. At what point will I have that breakpoint of diminishing returns? When will washing my hands mean nothing if I’m bleeding from the cracks from the angry skin on the back of my hands? What to do to cope? I’ve decided that Dove Soap’s line that caters to men, with their moisturizer as part of the soap may be my best effort. I’ve also got a pump bottle of moisturizing sanitizer however as I discovered tonight, sanitizer doesn’t touch Norovirus. Not that I’m really convinced that Norovirus is chewing through the office, but if it isn’t, then it’s on the heels of Influenza Type A.

This very story has played out before. It plays out whenever there are communicable outbreaks and the natural question pops up – at what point does it make more sense to just not go to work and expose yourself? At what point do you stop leaving the house? I laughingly call it the Decameron moment as the people in that book, in order to pass the time recount stories to each other and remain away from the city to avoid the plague. I can’t deny the pleasure of reading the Decameron back when I was in college and if it weren’t for the two other books that I’m currently hip-deep in reading, I would take it right up as it’s applicability in this particular situation is undeniable.

So tomorrow I’m going to have to come up with ways to protect myself at work. Bringing my own soap maybe to start would be okay, paper towels are still the best way to dry my hands as we don’t have any hot-air blowers at work. As for surfaces, it’s going to have to be Lysol and Isopropyl Alcohol as I can’t risk using Clorox on the surfaces at work. I know that Lysol and Alcohol will not likely damage the things at work, but I’m pretty sure that Clorox, even diluted would likely have unintended consequences. I will have to have faith that what I have, plus my nearly OCD handwashing and keeping my distance from people is enough. I have been dallying with the notion of pushing SupportPress down my clients figurative throats and only rendering help over Apple Remote Desktop in order to zero out the touching-of-surfaces vector of possible sickness. I haven’t gotten there yet, but it is something I am considering. I sometimes wonder if anyone has done a pathology survey in regards to electronic forms of communication and that impact on disease spread? What happens if we all switch to video links, phones, and email and shun contact with each other even more than we already have? In a lot of ways, each office could be it’s own Decameron, with people holed up, trying to avoid getting sick and passing the time.

I feel excellent. There is nothing wrong now, but it’s coming. The worst part is not knowing, or rather suspecting that something you can’t see is lying in wait for you and at the very best could make you miserable and at the very worst, kill you outright. Another bit of consideration is what the break-off point is for workplaces all around when a majority of staff is actually sick. At what point is going to work and accomplishing nothing cost more than just staying at home, claiming that you are sick when really, you’re just holed up waiting for the illness to burn past you?

A Good Addiction

Posted on by
Reply

url
There is an iOS game that I’ve heard before and didn’t think anything of until I downloaded it and started to play. The game is called Letterpress and it’s incredibly addicting. Each game is composed of 25 english letters in a 5×5 grid and the person who starts the game with another player is the first to go. You can select words from these 25 characters, one letter at a time and as you play the letters they are marked with your color. Your color is blue and your opponents color is red. When you use a letter the colors start out faint, but as you use letters and surround other claimed letters, the letters that are surrounded get a bolder color of whomever claimed them. All letters can be used over and over again and you get points for claiming a letter and stealing letters with weak colors from your opponent. Letters that are in strong colors can still be used but they don’t give you any points. The game ends when all letters have been claimed with a color and the person with the higher score wins.

The games themselves are tiny and quick and really fun. It’s like speed-yahtzee and it exercises your vocabulary as you try to construct words with or without really helpful bits like e’s and “ing”‘s. The app is freemium and so it’s free to play a few games but you can upgrade and play an unlimited number of games for $1.99. It’s the best iOS game I’ve ever played. It’s fair, it’s nicely balanced, and the quick game play is great fun. My win/loss is 50/50 and I don’t really care to win that much, but boy, do I love playing. The game is designed with touch, so it has pleasing sounds when you select and move letter tiles to make words and to remove old dead games you can swipe across the display and tap the Remove button and the game makes a really satisfying exploding noise and it actually explodes off the display. Another added extra is that Letterpress is a universal app, it works on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad equally well and your upgrade works for your Apple ID and then applies to all the different devices you have associated with that Apple ID. All in all I love it and I’m trying to get to word out to friends and family so they can start playing along.

Addressing Balance In The Force

Posted on by
Reply

You can’t really have a lot of negative things in your head just mobbing out all the good things that also have happened. To that end, today I have a particular real humor-based life preserver brought to me by the Apple Spotlight twitter account. Pictures are worth a thousand words, and this is worth a million billion bajillion lulz:

 

downgrade_discount

 

This pleases me.