Category Archives: technology

ending entropy

Posted on by
2

Entropy is a term used to define (among other things), a process of deterioration of a system.

In terms of technology, my life seems to be one big process of entropy. My old desktop died a slow death over the past several months. Last week, I totally fried the new laptop that I inherited from my once husband. (That frakkin’ Vista!) Now I’m on a old little laptop that does not hold the wifi settings that I need to get online. It’s only a matter of time with this machine as well. How do you end entropy?

I think the first thing for me to do is cut my losses. and not spend any more time and money trying to fix messes of machinery that have aready joined the slide into infinite entropy.

I have to start over, with an inexpensive CPU with XP that can keep me online. If I ever have enough money to get a new laptop, it will be a Mac. That’s a big IF.

And then there’s my mother, whom I somehow have to rescue from the entropy of her care by my brother. I’m leaving tomorrow, driving into what I know will be a battleground for what’s left of my 93 year old mother’s demented life. She deserves better than she’s getting.

She fell yesterday, and the doctor wanted her to go to the emergency room, but that didn’t happen. I want to take her there when I arrive tomorrow. It could wind up a fierce and legal battle if things do not change to her benefit.

Took a sleeping pill to calm me dowm.

TOMORROW’S ANOTHER BATTLE FOR FREEDOM AND INTEGRITY AND SELFLESSNESS.

will the real author please stand up!

Posted on by
1

Sometimes you get a viral email that you wish were true.
Today I got one about someone who supposedly went on vacation and ran into John McCain. The email is falsely attributed thusly: “Mary Kay Gamel is a literature and classics professor at UC Santa Cruz.”
I emailed Mary Kay Garnel, and this is the response I got from her:

I have received thousands of emails and phone calls about the Turtle Island account.

I did NOT write that account, forward it under my name, or ask for it to be widely distributed.

I have never been to Turtle Island (which costs $2000/day), have never met Senator McCain, was a classics major, not an English Literature major, and never eat pancakes.

I regret the misinformation which is circulating, but it is not my doing, and I protest the misuse of my name.

How I think this happened: on 16 September I received this account 3rd-hand and forwarded it, with full email trail information and the name of the purported author (whom I don’t know), to several friends with whom I discuss politics. It was further forwarded, and at some point the trail was deleted and I was misidentified as the author. I suspect whoever did this thought that my name and contact information would make the story more credible.

Snopes.com is investigating the account; current status “undetermined.”

This is NOT an organized effort on the part of any political candidate.

I hope you will pass this information on to anyone interested in this story.

And finally, the story itself isn’t necessarily false. But we’ll never know unless the author herself comes forward.

MKG

I AM ENDING THIS POST WITH THE TEXT OF THE VIRAL EMAIL AND SEND OUT A CALL FOR THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR TO STAND UP, TAKE OWNERSHIP, AND VERIFY WHETHER OR NOT THE ACCOUNT IS TRUE.

MY HOLIDAY WITH JOHN McCAIN
It was just before John McCain’s last run at the presidential nomination in 2000 that my husband and I vacationed in Turtle Island in Fiji with John McCain, Cindy, and their children, including Bridget (their adopted Bangladeshi child).
It was not our intention, but it was our misfortune to be in close quarters with John McCain for almost a week, since Turtle Island has a small number of bungalows and their focus on communal meals force all vacationers who are there at the same time to get to know each other intimately. He arrived at our first group meal and started reading quotes from a pile of
William Faulkner books with a forest of Post-Its sticking out of them. As an English Literature major myself, my first thought was “if he likes this so much, why hasn’t he memorized any of this yet?” I soon realized that McCain actually thought we had come on vacation to be a volunteer audience for his “readings” which then became a regular part of each meal. Out of politeness, none of the vacationers initially protested at this intrusion into their blissful holiday, but people’s buttons definitely got pushed as the readings continued day after day.
Unfortunately this was not his only contribution to our mealtime entertainment. He waxed on during one meal about how Indo-Chine women had the best figures and that our American corn-fed women just couldn’t meet up to this standard. He also made it a point that all of us should stop Cindy from having dessert as her weight was too high and made a few comments to Amy, the 25 year old wife of the honeymooning couple from Nebraska that she should eat less as she needed to lose weight. McCain’s appreciation of the beauty of Asian women was so great that David the American economist had to move his Thai wife to the other side of the table from McCain as McCain kept aggressively flirting with and touching her.
Needless to say I was irritated at his large ego and his rude behavior towards his wife and other women, but decided he must have some redeeming qualities as he had adopted a handicapped child from Bangladesh. I asked him about this one day, and his response was shocking: “Oh, that was Cindy’s idea – I didn’t have anything to do with it. She just went and adopted this thing without even asking me. You can’t imagine how people stare when I wheel this ugly, black thing around in a shopping cart in Arizona . No, it wasn’t my idea at all.”
I actively avoided McCain after that, but unfortunately one day he engaged me in a political discussion which soon got us on the topic of the active US bombing of Iraq at that time. I was shocked when he said, “If I was in charge, I would nuke Iraq to teach them a lesson”. Given McCain’s personal experience with the horrors of war, I had expected a more balanced point of view. I commented on the tragic consequences of the nuclear attacks on Japan during WWII — but no, he was not to be dissuaded. He went on to say that if it was up to him he would have dropped many more nuclear bombs on Japan. I rapidly extricated myself from this conversation as I could tell that his experience being tortured as a POW didn’t seem to have mellowed out his perspective, but rather had made him more aggressive and vengeful towards the world.
My final encounter with McCain was on the morning that he was leaving Turtle Island. Amy and I were happily eating pancakes when McCain arrived and told Amy that she shouldn’t be having pancakes because she needed to lose weight. Amy burst into tears at this abusive comment. I felt fiercely protective of Amy and immediately turned to McCain and told him to leave her
alone. He became very angry and abusive towards me, and said, “Don’t you know who I am.” I looked him in the face and said, “Yes, you are the biggest asshole I have ever met” and headed back to my cabin. I am happy to say that later that day when I arrived at lunch I was given a standing ovation by all the guests for having stood up to McCain’s bullying.
Although I have shared my McCain story informally with friends, this is the first time I am making this public. I almost did so in 2000, when McCain first announced his bid for the Republican nomination, but it soon became apparent that George Bush was the shoo-in candidate and so I did not act then. However, now that there is a very real possibility that McCain could be elected as our next president, I feel it is my duty as an American citizen to share this story. I can’t imagine a more scary outcome for America than that this abusive, aggressive man should lead our nation. I have observed him in intimate surroundings as he really is, not how the media portrays him to be. If his attitudes toward women and his treatment
of his own family are even a small indicator of his real personality, then I shudder to think what will happen to America were he to be elected as our President.


If you got this email, please don’t forward it as attributed to Mary Kay Gamel.

where we are

Posted on by
Reply

I don’t know where you are, but, thanks to my (not so local) geek wizard I am on the verge of being good to go on my desktop; he will finish up his tweaking tomorrow. He has my wholehearted recommendation to anyone who has computer trouble. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a saint.
Where we all are is a little more than 30 days away from the decision of our lifetimes and a little more than an hour away from an event that is certain to affect that decision.
And we are a couple of weeks past an event that certainly should have been more publicized, as 1400 Alaskans held an anti-Palin demonstration in Anchorage. Be sure to look at the photos!
And we are about a month past the day when Eve Ensler, the American playwright, performer, feminist and activist best known for “The Vagina Monologues”, wrote a Huffington Post article about Sarah Palin that ended as follows:

I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.

If the Polar Bears don’t move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, “Drill Drill Drill.” I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent. I think of pain.

Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?

I have a feeling that the majority of the people voting for the McCain/Palin ticket will be male. Most women, I think, can see right through the perfumed smoke-screen of her informal (and uninformed) charm.

my world’s in shambles

Posted on by
1

No, it’s not the stock market crash, it’s the crashing of both my desktop and laptop. I am typing this on my desktop in Safe Mode, which might disappear at any moment, as it has been doing over the past few days. I wind up with my desktop screen devoid of any icons. All I can do then is shut it down manually. And then wait and then try again. In Safe Mode.
My tech guy in Albany ran all kinds of diagnostics remotely. Three Trojans and a few other infections showed up and were deleted. I guess there’s still more that he can check out remotely, but only if the machine cooperates and displays the icon I need to click so that he can get in. We’ll try again tomorrow. After I take my car in for a long-overdue servicing. Keep your fingers crossed that the trip to the service station doesn’t result in a crash as well.
And now my laptop has decided to have a glitch in how it starts up — it just keeps shutting off and turning on and shutting off before anything can load up.
After making a terrible showing all summer, suddenly my tomato plants are budding like crazy — just in time for frost to shut them down.
Chances are I won’t be posting for a while, since I probably will have to take both computers in somewhere to be fixed on site.
I’m really in a bad, bad funk over this.

is it the beginning or the end?

Posted on by
2

So, will it be the beginning of a deeper understanding of how it ALL began, or the end of life as we know it?

GENVEVA, Switzerland – It has been called an Alice in Wonderland investigation into the makeup of the universe — or dangerous tampering with nature that could spell doomsday.

Whatever the case, the most powerful atom-smasher ever built comes online Wednesday, eagerly anticipated by scientists worldwide who have awaited this moment for two decades.

The multibillion-dollar Large Hadron Collider will explore the tiniest particles and come ever closer to re-enacting the big bang, the theory that a colossal explosion created the universe.

In case you’re wondering how it’s supposed to work, here’s a little piece of informative entertainment:

If we make it through Wednesday, our next major worry will be election day — which could mean the end of America as we know it (or rather would like to know it, again) if the GOP candidates win.
While much of the American press seems to be perpetuating the conservative infatuation with perky Sarah Palin, in other parts of the world, a more critical analysis is prevailing. From Australia’s Canberra Times:

…. Palin is just a representation of a new dynamic that’s tearing across the political fabric all around the world. She’s the conservatives’ answer to the new ”post-political” challenge that Obama represents. However, it’s worth noting that she still evokes old-style political responses, and that’s all the people who will turn out to vote just to make sure she fails. The big turn-on among Republican voters will be reciprocated by the angst she arouses among others who have a visceral opposition to her.

From the beginning, Obama’s candidacy has challenged this binary divide. He triumphed over Hillary Clinton by appealing to a new constituency. He positioned himself as representing a new way forward; using new formulations to overcome the seemingly intractable political impasses of the past. In the US, where voting is not compulsory, this still offers him a remarkable chance of becoming the next president. If he can retain the faith of the young and those who want change, he’ll win. The key is to be able to mobilise these people, and keep them enthusiastic long enough to cast their votes.

Palin’s supporters, on the other hand, are a known force. Although her style is a surprise and she seems new, she is just an evolution of a much older political formulation. She divides the world into republicans and democrats. Obama is attempting to move beyond these old concepts and appeal as someone who will deal with the underlying issues.

Of course, the Republicans don’t want to campaign on the issues. Don’t confuse them with the facts. They know what they believe.
Oh well, maybe after Wednesday,if matter and anti-matter cancel each other out, none of that will matter.

CrossLoop: you don’t have to be there to be there

Posted on by
2

Uh oh! Your computer is acting up again, and you’re not a techie. If only your daughter (or son or grandson or granddaughter) were there it would get fixed without a hitch. If only there were a magic wand that would just make it all work again.
Taking the “you don’t have to be there to be there” of today’s communications technology even further, there is a way to get a tech expert into your computer without either one of you having to leave your desks.
When an octogenarian in New Hampshire wanted to finally learn to use a computer, his grandson, a graduate student in California, set it up while he was home on winter break. The computer set up was easy; what was harder was showing his granddad how to do the things on it that he would decide he wanted to do, since they would be thousands of miles from each other.
Long cross-country telephone conversations was one way. But the grandson found a better way — a program called CrossLoop, where a free download offers a way for computer wiz grandson to get into his grandfather’s computer remotely. That way he could actually demonstrate to his grandfather how to do what his grandfather wanted to do, from Googling to email.
There’s even a video demonstrating the simple process on both sides.
This is what the CrossLoop site says about how it works:

CrossLoop is an easy-to-use desktop sharing tool that allows any two people anywhere in the world to connect live via computer. When both users install CrossLoop (a free and secure program based on TightVNC), one can easily connect to the other. From there, you can see and control everything on the other persons PC, making remote troubleshooting remarkably easier. For a complete walkthrough on setting up CrossLoop, continue reading.

You say that you don’t know anyone with the tech savvy to help you? Well, in that case CrossLoop has way to connect you with someone who can — and you will pay a service fee, of course. Even so, it’s got to be easier than hauling your computer in to a place for service or having someone local come to your home and spend hours trying to figure out what’s wrong.
I have been using a similar fee-for-service for years. It’s much less expensive, and I’ve never been disappointed.
(I know, you would think that I could hook up with my son b!X remotely through CrossLoop. But he’s a Mac person, and I have a PC. And he’s not really a techie.)
For non-techie computer users like me, a program like CrossLoop can save you a lot of aggravation trying to figure out, for example, why your Microsoft Word program keeps locking up.

Floating on the Fringes of the Spiral

Posted on by
Reply

The World Wide Web is usually visualized like a spider web. I experience it as a whirlpool, an eddy, a vortex that spirals me into it. I ride on the fringes of the spiral, a mere droplet among the rushing currents. But I hold on, managing just enough surface tension to keep connected. But never part of the major flow.

For example, there’s this new “friends network” that one of my blogger friends sent me an invitation to join. Wotthehell. I did. But I was curious to see how he got connected to it and who his other “friends” were. And, as the strands of the spiral wound farther and farther outward, I saw the names of other bloggers I know who are also connected in that strand that must have started somewhere, with someone. The first cause, so to speak. After spiraling out about as far as I could go, I’ve decided it might well have been Joi Ito, whose session I attended at the “free” day of BloggerCon held at Harvard last fall, and who has established himself as a consummate virtual community builder.

I don’t know what I think I’m doing eddying around with techies who are way out of my league. But, again. Wotthehell. I’ve got nothing to lose.

Actually hanging around even on the fringes gives me a certain credibility in this blog world. The other day, at the suggestion of Blog Sister Jeneane, I was interviewed by someone developing an article on women and blogging that she hopes to sell to a magazine. I found myself explaining things to her that I never even realized I knew about how these spiraling connections work; I had just absorbed them from all of the stuff washing around me as I hang on for dear life in this wordy whirlpool.

And in the process, I bump up against cool people, like Adam Lasnik, a techie and a Lindy Hopper. (Ah, if only I were thirty years younger and lived on the West Coast; hey, I’m might be aging, but I’m not dead yet!)

Blogs as by-ways.

Posted on by
4

Traveling the super-connected Internet superhighway is a lot like driving our high-speed interstate road systems, so asserts Diane Cameron, a local newspaper columnist, in last Sunday’s Times Union. (Warning: The TU only archives for seven days, so the link to her piece won’t work after that.)

She writes:
If you really want to see changes in the geography, culture or climate that make up the United States, you have to take the pokey slow roads.

There’s a parallel here for the Internet, our information superhighway. We’ve developed the habit of zipping around to search for info without ever leaving our desks. You can Google your way to facts and data and deals, and think you’ve learned something. But that’s often as bland and indiscriminate as spending five days seeing five states distinguished only by their rest stops and speed limits.

So, in the context of that analogy, it seems to me that weblogs are the by-ways that we can meander to find out what it’s really like out there in the global hinterlands. Unlike the fast food of IRC, weblogs give you a chance to savor the peculiar spices of the locale, take in the sights. Sometimes you have to kick your way through the garbage, but by the time you leave, you take with you a definite sense that you’ve been somewhere unique. If you leave a comment to show that you’ve been there, you’ve left your own footprint in the sands of that local history. Now that’s connectivity.

Ken of ipadventures recently posted some good stuff about “connectivity.” big picture and little picture, from global signal to personal access. Near the end of his post he says:
What we seek is a signal. A connection. The network isn’t about technology. It isn’t about business. It isn’t about profit. It’s about connections. End points are people and people connect, Sometimes we connect with machines to gather information. Often times we connect with other people because we share some link, or bond, or passing interest.

As I looked around the attendees at BloggerCon last Sunday, I couldn’t help think that I was probably the oldest one there — certainly the oldest female (who were definitely in the minority). As I experienced Joi Ito’s session on “Community” (and it was an “experience,” what with an IRC chat — that included people in the room as well as others — happening on the screen behind Joi as he RSSed and Wiki’d and Wifi’d and excitedly shared information that went completely over my aging head) I couldn’t help feeling that I was creeping along in the right lane while the rest of the traffic sped by me on that superhighway. I’m never going to catch up.

After the blue-haired boy in the straightjacket and his handlers stumbled out of the “T” last Sunday, their seats were taken by a couple of older teenaged girls who were instant messaging on their digital cell phone. I can barely program my non-digital cell phone to do one-touch dialing, and I need my magnifying glasses to see the screen anyway. My engine is stalling. I’m pulling over to the shoulder.

Joi Ito talked about how people with instant messaging no longer have to make long range plans to get together. Now you can instant message all of your friends, see who’s available to do something and meet-up spontaneously. Fast and faster and fastest. It seems to me that it’s all about connecting without really CONNECTING.

This technology is for the young and fast. The ones who grew up with with eye-bytes of MTV, with the machine-gun conversations of IRC, the get-there-quick-and-don’t-ask-questions information superhighway.

I’ve copied Diane Cameron’s entire column into an extension to this entry because she brings up implications for education that I think are crictical.

Me, I’m staying on the slow roads. I’m enjoying the by-ways of blogs, where I can linger and converse and find out what it’s like to really live somewhere else (big picture and little picture).

Continue reading →