elainegrey

I woke up with the alarm, a pillow muffling the soft music. I wasn't coordinated yet and my hands trembled as i looked and reached for my glasses. I thought a minute about worrying about it, but ( then i did some research. I've decided i won't worry until it persists longer into my waking day. ) Anyhow. I really didn't mean to remember long enough to be curious about it. I was going to write about my sore throat. This being "under the weather" business since Thanksgiving is getting tiresome. I assume it's just different colds, one after the other, and being tired.

I was happy to find i could take decongestants without being driven wild by the drug. I was pondering why this would be so and decided that since there's about twice as much of me now than when i was in college and high school, the dose may be more appropriate.

The entertainment for the morning was watching the videos and reading about comet Lovejoy's encounter with the sun, and that it survived. How fascinating! I wonder how many folks are designing solar probes this morning with the proof of survival zooming away from the sun?

I feel terribly behind in all Yule preparations, except (1) i've started the artwork for the 2012 card and (2) i've bought the cards for my staff. I'm glad we decorated just after Thanksgiving! That worked. The solar powered diode lights outside, though, have been a disappointment. Maybe i'll bring them back out for the summer.

I made the mistake of switching to a new mail client while sick. I suppose, though, that being sick, i was annoyed enough to figure out how to get the settings all "right" so deleted mail would disappear and junk mail filtering would return. The software is $30, which is $5 more than the plug in i purchased to make the default Mac Mail.app usable. When i upgrade to Lion (the most recent Mac OS) i did not want to be tethered to Mac's vision of everyone living with an iPhone and iPad and iPod and IWhatsit. I'm glad i've switched (to Postbox) but it is disconcerting to go through a change to a fundamental part of a daily routine.

Why you care is that i have not yet figured out how to sort mail upon arrival, thus the comment notifications mingle with all sorts of other stuff.

So there's a chance i've figured out what was eating the household bandwidth. I think Mobile Me (Apple's "cloud" solution) was failing to synchronize correctly with my work laptop. My personal machine has 1.26 GB received, 1.99 GB sent over 8 days uptime; my work machine has **39.82 GB** received, 5 GB sent over 17 days. I had disconnected my work laptop from my personal account right before the reorg in May, and i knew that i hadn't had one application synchronize correctly since then. It seems it was in some failure mode where it must have been repeating the download of the same couple hundred megabytes (yow, the backup of my address book is 250 MB?!) over and over and over..... Insanity in software.

--==∞==--

Another thing i did after work today was make camping reservations at Manresa State Beach. The sites are fairly booked up, and the available nights at Manresa are in conflict with potential Quaker responsibilities and the last Friendly N's dinner. Since we were just committing to two of the three dinners, i am fairly OK with missing the dinner. (When i could take a week and when i could camp were somewhat constrained.) I can't miss the other event if it comes up, but i decided i was OK driving back to Palo Alto if i needed to clerk that event. (And Christine suggests i could see if folks would be willing to meet another day.)

It was a bit stressful to make the decision, but Manresa is a "walk in" campground -- so we know we won't have big RVs and people with portable houses but more simple neighbors at Manresa. The other state beach had a campsite that wouldn't conflict with the potential clerking event, but i have a fear of huge RVs rumbling by, generators running, portable airconditioners.

--==∞==--

Christine had to meet up with someone from Ohlone College at an Adult Ed facility (also, a high school) in Santa Clara, so i rode along with her in the after work traffic. The high school was right next to a Discalced (shoe-less, says Wikipedia, but maybe sandals) Carmelite Monastery. The sky was so blue, the sun so bright, the vegetation so lush: i took a stack of photos with my phone's camera. Some were mostly of vegetation escaping over the monastery wall, but there were some high school scenes (ghostly empty on the summer afternoon) and a passion fruit vine, where a stinkbug was dining away on the fruit.

Life between now and the 4th: work work work. I'm trying to give myself little breaks, but looks like mostly long days for a bit.

We had rain yesterday: it was wonderful! Christine was out in it and begs to differ, but memories of long rainy summer days, sitting on the porch, listening to rain fall in the pond, the heavy foliage of the south east glowing green in the gloom.... I was almost able to imagine it had been hot and that this was the relief of rain.

I even went grocery shopping in the rain.

I'm slowly identifying wildflowers from the hike and polishing photos.

My need to respond to queue is no shorter.

The home network is not getting bits moved around promptly and that's making me grumpy. I've downloaded two large files here at the office, after struggling for days. I'm using the tools to evaluate my network and upgraded our wifi access point to something with better security (we'd been meaning to do that for ages). I'm grumpy with our bandwidth provider (and am looking at Sonic.net).

I'm mad at CrashPlan (my cloud backup provider) because they wouldn't confirm whether captured traffic was to them. I'm mad because it's like having hired a furniture storage company, and when a truck shows up with guys to get your sofa, you call and ask the company if their truck has the license plate of the truck outside your door. "Oh, no, we can't tell you whether that's our truck! Woo-woo security woo-woo!" Now i can let the truck take the sofa and follow them to see where they go, and if they go to the storage facility, i can be confident i was not ripped off. But nothing's been secured by this! And i'm out the time i had to spend following the truck! Similarly, i can fiddle with my backup software and get the IP ranges it sends data to and verify whether or not the IP is indeed CrashPlan's. But if they think they are protecting anything by not disclosing their IP address range, they are clueless about security, and i don't want them keeping my data.

Rant rant rant. That's me.

The privacy folks found that Yahoo ads are tracking folks who visit my Grey Cat blog. Yup, probably five or six years ago i probably put some tracking code on there. I'll root it out.

Itching continues. I slept quite late this morning. Christine went out with a friend to her checkup yesterday while i was on one of many conference calls: that seems to have wiped her out. I feel conflicted about not feeling well, as if it were something i had a choice about. The weeping welts on my fingers and the rashes everywhere are at least evidence that it's not "just in my mind" (except, except, and insert the nasty cycles about the power of the mind and stress and so on here).

We watched the pilot for Twin Peaks last night. I wonder about the wardrobe for the teens and it reminds me of the wardrobes in Buffy: not exactly what people were wearing at the time, but some cross of contemporary and other periods that pull a sense of timelessness to the wardrobe. Are there any Buffy-Twin Peaks scholarly articles about the clothes? In watching early episodes of Highlander the dated wardrobes really stand out.

In technology issues ( i picked up my replacement EVO. (Android OS notes) )

What a pleasant bit of morning internet interactions! When i was at the She's Geeky conference, i received an invitation to the "official" Diaspora seed. Diaspora is a privacy aware social networking platform that is being developed to challenge Facebook. The neat thing about being an early adopter in this bit of stuff is that i met one of the developers and she met me, and so when i complain or critique, i she listens. I'm getting more involved with bug filing and interaction design.

It's a type of professional development i welcome.

On the other hand, it seems everyone is playing with Diaspora this morning -- and i need to get to a committee meeting!

--==∞==--

Rango was delightful, surreal, and existential. There were some aspects of the film i pick at as if they were scabs: there's part of the characterization of the leading lady that bugs me as problematic on many levels, and the stereotypical native American portrayal was -- i think -- intentionally stereotypical with a nod to the inappropriateness. Once i get past these issues (which are such common issues that i'm only just learning to see them as issues), i loved the film. I just read about Carlos Castaneda at Wikipedia: i read The Teachings of Don Juan in high school and only have the fuzziest memory of the book. I joked last night that Castaneda should have a writing credit on Rango, but the mysticism in Rango does not seem to be the mysticism of Castaneda. Instead the questions of perception and reality are quite concrete: who are you?

* http://www.diamondbackonline.com/diversions/existentialism-for-kids-1.2044243
* http://io9.com/#!5765694/captain-jack-sparrow-becomes-a-lizard-with-an-existential-crisis-in-rango

--==∞==--

I came home early, exhausted. I rode my bike on the trainer outside for a little bit, then napped. Napping is not a particularly easy thing for me, but i needed it. After dinner and a TV show, i tried to prepare my desk for the work day, but was in bed by 9. I didn't get up early today, either.

As an index of mental health, i could consider my lost item list. It now includes: [1] my black mesh crochet bag with a skein of really nice wool bamboo blend yarn for a mother's day gift (last seen 29 Jan), [2] bluetooth headset (last seen 3Feb), [3] retractable micro USB cord (last seen 7 Feb).

I think it would be cool to create a data mining tool for semi-structured data. Once upon a time there was a tool called Zoe that actually made an effort to datamine your email for you. I don't think i'm likely to do it myself, though. And i can imagine the challenges.

On the other hand, one of the interesting developments in the identity space is the idea of personal data banks. The proponents are imagining a regulatory space that requires businesses and services that collect data about you to make that data available to you in a machine readable format over a secure method. Your personal data bank, then could collect your data in one place, controlled by you. If you wanted to keep it secret, you could do that. The bank metaphor points at "keeping it in your mattress." But if you chose to "loan" your data, you could do that.

A corporate impetus is that the telephone companies are forbidden to datamine your telephone transactions. If, however, they were able to give you your phone transactions and then you were able to choose to share back, the phone companies would be able to enter the similar economic spaces as Facebook and Google.

I can imagine making a choice to share a great deal of my data with Kayak. (I've grown to trust them more with my travel data than TripIt and find them more useful than Dopplr.) Kayak could mine, say, the aggregation of my communication records, my address book, perhaps even data collection that shows interests (Amazon purchases, search histories).

An automated data mining system might start with the address book, looking at where my contacts reside. It might augment that with phone records to identify places i make phone calls. If the bank was smart enough, it might be able to take other communication records (email, chat logs) cross that with the address book, and geo-locate other places i communicate with often and provide that to Kayak. Kayak then could notify me when there are good travel deals to places i communicate with frequently. That could be useful.

Let's say, then, that Kayak starts working with conferences and shows. My Amazon interests would show an interest in crochet; google searches might show an interest in Agile development practices. Kayak might be able to alert me that in the Orlando metro area (where i have extended family) there's an Agile conference and a yarn show, and here are the good travel deals for the time period around the show. Kayak would know what my travel preferences for flights would be, and wouldn't show me flights, say, that left the west coast after noon (although might provide me with information that i could see other deals at some link).

The point is that Google and Facebook have this sort of information to mine already. The Personal Data Bank folks are advocating putting it in individuals' hands and allow us to change the mining from "stalking" to both a place where the individual has control and where the data can be more valuable to the companies.

Feh.

Having a migraine yesterday has put me in a bit of a pout today. I'm going to need to do some work today, and the bright clear sunlight seems sinister.



I still feel pretty distracted by my tech tools stuff, which i take to be similar to loosing myself in genealogy: i'm in a recovery mode for the week's intensity. ( continuing blather about tech stuff )

This post is via Chrome, ( and for some reason, i have tons of noodling about geeky tech stuff to share. )

There's more i could write but i have burnt the afternoon. I've a doorway in the meetinghouse to paint and dinner out with a friend. Then tomorrow is working like mad documenting stuff, then a committee meeting in the messy apartment.

So it goes.

Fortunately, being curious about networking protocols is more easily resolved than being curious about colonial ancestors. ( more networking geekage. )

I'm "playing" with Wireshark on my home network, partly to resolve what might be broken in all our pieces.

Is anyone aware of the difference between UDP and TCP/IP and willing to answer newbie questions like, "it seems my network router is making a port mapping request to my laptop and my laptop is logging that the destination port is unreachable. Is this because our wireless access point is dying or what?"

ETA: Oh wait, it's the laptop that wants to do this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAT_Port_Mapping_Protocol

So, it's some happy apple thing that my Linksys Router is saying no to. That's OK.

There *will* be more questions....