Sunday, December 29, 2013
New Year’s Regenerations
This year hasn’t been an especially good one for me, and, as you’ve probably noticed, this blog went practically untouched because of it.
Almost right from the start, things became very stressful, as we adopted our newest four-legged family member on Jan. 5, and I struggled to….
Hey! What give me that back!
 |
| Merlin |
Ifz hez thinkz it was stressfulz, jus imagine howz it waz
for mez! I’z had to brakez in TWO newz peopuls!
— Merlin
— Merlin
Get your paws off my keyboard!
And get down from my chair!
Bad Dog!
Now where was I?
Oh yes.
Talking about my dog.
Well Merlin, a half black Lab, half pointer, is the youngest dog I’ve ever had. He wasn’t quite two when my wife and I rescued him, and although he is one of the sweetest, most good-natured dogs around, he turned our house and our lives upside-down for the first few months we had him. He came to us with not much in the way of house manners, wasn’t potty trained, barely knew any commands and had a penchant for escaping from our yard or house, very quickly earning himself the first of his many nicknames — Houdini.
Then just when he was beginning to get the hang of being a well-behaved, family dog, I got sick.
Very sick.
In late April I cleverly managed to get pneumonia.
But not just any pneumonia.
Because I don’t do things half-way, I managed to get double pneumonia!
I wrote about that experience after I got out of the hospital and it was the last time I had the strength or motivation to do any real writing this year.
It took me until August to fully recover and get my strength back. Prior to that it was all I could do to get up and go to work each day without getting totally exhausted and needing to take a nap. Some days I even got so tired from taking a nap, that I needed to take a nap to recover from getting up from a nap!
Needless to say, I was excited to finally feel like myself again, and looked forward to spending those hot, dog-days of summer floating around my pool in my “floaty” chair, listening to my iPod and writing.
But this year my hopes were dashed, because the summer in the Northeast was quite cool and rainy. As a result, I didn’t get much pool or writing time in.
Instead, I turned to one of my other favorite leisure-time activities – woodworking and DIY-ing.
I had a whole list of projects I wanted to get to this year and was all set to begin them in the spring when I got sick. Now with my “woodworking season” more than halfway over, I spent all my free time over the next three months in my garage-workshop banging out those projects.
The good news is that I managed to finish all but one of those projects before the cold weather arrived in November, forcing me to close down my shop for another season.
(Note to family: If I had that 20’ x 20’ foot HEATED workshop
I’ve been asking for for years, I could have finished everything!)
I’ve been asking for for years, I could have finished everything!)
About this same time, one of my beloved aunts died and the sadness that surrounded that occasion further sapped my will to move from the couch.
Of course, because I’m Jewish, and we Jews need to feel guilty about something or our lives won’t feel complete, I began to fret about this lack of motivation and the fact I kept putting things off. Even things I liked doing, like writing.
However, I didn’t have the motivation to do anything about it, until Christmas day, when, ironically enough, I was lying on the couch watching the “Doctor Who” Christmas special: “Time of the Doctor.”
(Admit it you were wondering
when I was going to get around
to relating this to something geeky, weren’t you?)
to relating this to something geeky, weren’t you?)
I found the show especially appropriate to my mindset, as this year’s episode featured the title character’s regeneration.
Now, for those few of you unfamiliar with this once cult-classic, and now uber-popular BBC sci-fi TV show, “Doctor Who” is about a time traveling alien who can change not only his entire appearance but personality when his body is injured or dying. He was only supposed to be able to do this 12 times, and Christmas day’s episode saw the 11th actor to play The Doctor handing off the role to someone new.
This “regeneration” and change of roles happening so close to the end of the year got me thinking about New Year’s resolutions.
It occurred to me that New Year’s resolutions can be more
than just those annual empty promises we make to ourselves. It our chance to be
like “Doctor Who” and regenerate, completely changing ourselves.
I’m not talking about running out and getting massive
amounts of plastic surgery to totally change our face and bodies.
(But would getting a little more hair on the top of my head be too much to ask?).
While there certainly are a lot of things I’d like to change about myself, the one I thing I’ll concentrate on this year is my tendency to procrastinate.
I let stress and my long illness during the first part of this year eat away at my motivation to do anything more than what was absolutely necessary during the second half the year. I kept telling myself I didn’t have the energy to do something, so I’d put it off. Even things I like doing like writing got put off.
But no more.
Starting Jan. 1, 2014, I’m going “regenerate” and become less of a procrastinator and stop putting things off, including my writing.
Now I know that one of the surefire ways to ensure a New Year’s resolution fails is to set unreasonable goals. So I’m not going to promise you I’m finally going to finish my novel that’s beginning to make George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series look like a short story, nor am I going to promise that I will post something new to this blog every week. What I AM going to do is make sure I put up a new post at least once a month, finish a short story I’ve been working on for a friend and maybe get even get a few more chapters written for my novel.
Will I succeed?
I don’t honestly know. Only time (and Time Lords) know. The rest of you will just have to stay tuned…
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
When time-traveling, always remember a doctor…
 |
| The second, fourth and tenth Doctor always ready to handle a medical emergency. |
Science fiction is replete with ways to travel through time.
 |
H.G. Wells Time Machine may be a Steampunk fan's
dream, but there's no room for a doctor.
|
But if I had my choice of how I got to travel through time, I’d choose an old, beat-up, British Police Box, piloted by a lonely, eccentric old man with the coolest case of Multiple Personality Disorder – er, I mean, Dissociative Identity Disorder – in the universe.
By now you’ve probably figured that I am referring to the TARDIS from the long-running BBC TV show “Doctor Who.” Sure it’s impossibly bigger on the inside than it is on the out, and style wise it alternates between looking like a ship made of cast off cardboard packing materials to a place constructed completely out of spare parts.
So why choose the TARDIS?
Because of the guy who flies it. His name is derived from the word we use to describe our healers: doctor. And in the 50 years he has been gallivanting around time and space on out TV sets, he’s shown he knows his fair share about medicine.
As I post this blog, I am still recovering from a pretty bad case of double pneumonia. You don’t hear much about pneumonia these days except around cold and flu time when doctors recommend you get vaccinated against both these diseases. Everyone thinks pneumonia is a minor illness now. Sure it used to kill millions, but with the invention of penicillin we’ve licked it! Today people think it’s no worse than a bad chest cold.
 |
Okay, so this DeLorean comes with a doctor, but would you
trust a guy who steals plutonium from Libian terrorists to
treat you when your sick.
|
I can now tell you from first-hand experience that it’s not. It’s every bit as bad as it ever used to be.
And the most insidious thing about pneumonia is how quickly it sneaks up on you before almost totally incapacitating you.
On the Friday they captured the Boston Marathon bomber suspect, I came home from work with a mild-to-strongish headache, which I assumed had been triggered by my spring allergies. By Monday the headache had gotten worse enough that it actually drove me to see my doctor without anybody having to talk me into it first. By Wednesday I had to leave work early because my simple headache had grown about a thousand times worse and been joined by chills (and probably an intermittent fever), a cough that was bringing up mucus, fast heartbeat and as you’d expect, exhaustion.
By Friday I was back at my doctor’s office and was sent home with some antibiotics. I gave these new drugs some time to work, because for a while in the mornings I’d feel a teeny-tiny bit better. But by the end of the day, I’d feel even worse. By Tuesday I knew something was really wrong and by the time I actually got to see my doctor instead of one of his assistants, he knew I had pneumonia almost right away and admitted me to the hospital.
 |
| The Taredis may lack style, but at least
it comes with it's own doctor!
|
Well it gave me a lot of time to just lie around and think about thing
s. Things like what the town I live in looked like 100 years ago and what might have happened to me if I had caught pneumonia back then.
Among the time periods I’ve always wanted to travel back in time and experience was the era that began just prior to World War I and ended with the beginning of Prohibition. I always considered this period the real “start” of the 20th Century. In 1900 the United States was still primarily a nation of farmers. But right around that 1912-1914 mark something happened and America “turned the corner” and quickly began heading down the road that would make it the world’s leading industrial giant. In those few short years, America blossomed into the “modern” country we now recognize.
Part of this fantasy was walking down my current home town’s main street and seeing it appear not so radically different than it appears today. By 1914-1915 automobiles were already beginning to replace the horse, so I’d still see cars outside the shops and homes along Broad Street. They’d just be Model Ts instead of SUVs, minivans and sedans.
Also since electrification followed the railways out in the suburbs and my town used to be a major rail stop between New York and Philadelphia, it follows some of the many houses built in our town at this time were built with electric in mind rather than gas. Hence the electric poles would be there and perhaps even a few of the electric street lights I take for granted each night.
Even the fashions worn by my town’s men-folk wouldn’t be all that utterly unrecognizable. Sure their cardboard collars looked formal and stiff, but the business suits they wore weren’t really that radically different from what my dad used to wear to work each day when I was growing up in the 1970s.
I guess I thought experiencing this time period would be like walking through those old-timey sepia-toned photos we see in books about the second decade of the 20th century. And I guess that’s the fault of time-travel shows like “Doctor Who.” They seldom dwell on the darker-side of time travel, instead focusing their time on the fun and adventure of experiencing a bygone age.
We aren’t often reminded that the “good old days” came with things like the Pneumonia Pandemic of 1918 that killed 600,000 people in the United States and more than 25 million people worldwide. In 1918 there weren’t any antibiotics yet, as the discovery of penicillin was still 10 years away, so people who caught it, either burned with fever until their bodies developed an antibody to the virus, or died. Given how I felt during those first 14 days before I got to the hospital, I can easily understand why so many people died, and it wasn’t a pleasant way to go.
So fellow time travelers, you can keep your Steampunk flying chairs and fancy sports cars.
I’ll wait for the time machine that comes with its own doctor any day of the week.
Friday, February 8, 2013
“Help me Obi-Wan. You're my only hope”
 |
| Back in 1977 stand alone holographic projections were just a dream. But now a company called iO2 Technology has turned that dream into a reality with their new "Mid-Air" holographic projector. |
 |
Did "Star Trek's" Communicator (left) inspire the design
of 1996's StarTACflip-phone? If not, then it's a pretty damn big coincidence. |
Next came the Tricorder, another “Star Trek” invention, which was a hand-held device used by the crew of the good starship Enterprise that was part computer, part scanner and part data recorder. If that doesn’t sound familiar to you now, you must not use a smart phone. There is even a free App for Android phones called “Tricorder” which uses your phone's real sensors to detect magnetic and gravitation fields and shows you environmental and geographic information. Add the multi-mega-pixel video and still camera on most models and a good sound-recording app and you’ve got a device that would even make Mr. Spock raise an eyebrow and utter “fascinating.”
 |
| It's obvious that Steve Jobs was a closeted "Star Trek" fan. How else to you explain how similar the iPad (left) looks to the PADD devices from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" (center) and "Star Trek" the original series? |
But in my lifetime, I’d never thought I’d see any of the technology from the original “Star Wars” trilogy make it into the real world. After all, “Star Wars” was really more science fantasy than science-fiction, with space knights and laser swords and all that.
But the aforementioned e-mail proved me wrong.
Among the approximately 25 trouble tickets, 15 network traffic notifications and a dozen or so other business-related e-mails in my work inbox that morning was a message with this this subject line: “Help me Obi-Wan. You're my only hope.”
Naturally I was intrigued by the subject line, and since I recognized the sender, I opened the message immediately. Inside was a link to a company called i02 Technology, which appears to have a research and development division in a galaxy far, far away, because the link directed me to a page featuring the firm’s latest product under development: a “free-space” holographic projector that can be used “for full-size telepresence.”
If you are wondering what all that techno babble means, take a look at this clip from “The Empire Strikes Back” and you’ll get the idea.
According to the i02 Technology website, their new holographic projector “can be used under normal lighting conditions” and allows users to “reach out and truly grab, walk through, and engage real-time projections. IO2 systems allow life-size people to be displayed in free-space, and larger systems for greater sense of immersion.”
But what I really want to know is if they can shrink it down and integrate it into what should be their next obvious product, the Astromech droid. After all, you never know when you’re going to have to send an emergency message to a retired space knight after you’ve stolen the plans to some monstrous battle station.Even without an R2 unit, I’m anxious to see if this technology catches on and becomes affordable for the everyday person. If it does, then it means today’s video conferences will become as passé as making music mix tapes to play on your Walkman.
Just think, in a few years’ time, instead of your boss – or evil Sith Lord (who in some cases may be one-in-the-same) – video chatting with you to make sure you haven’t screwed up the plans for galaxy-wide conquest, you can behold his or her giant maleficent presence as if they were in the same room with you.
Which makes me think I should start practicing kneeling and humbly asking “What is thy bidding, my master?” right now.
Friday, January 25, 2013
Netbooks: The end of an error
Or perhaps it was the rise of the Ultrabook, an extremely
light-weight, thin, fully-functional laptop, that finally did in the tiny, underpowered
netbooks that were all the craze just a few short years ago.
But whatever the cause, as of Jan. 1, Asus and Acer, the
last two companies to make netbooks have ceased manufacturing them. Dell announced
it was through making netbooks back in December of 2011.
"Thin and powerful is where
it is at for us," said Alison Gardner, Dell's
marketing director, in an interview with
the online blog, The Verge She said the company was switching its focus over to developing higher-end,
premium mobile laptops like the Dell XPS 14z.
According to a recent article in England’s Guardian
newspaper, “Asustek and Acer were the only two
companies still making netbooks, with everyone else who had made them
(including Samsung, HP and Dell) having shifted to tablets. Asustek and Acer
were principally aiming at southeast Asia and South America - but of course
those are now targets for smartphones and cheap Android tablets.”
 |
The Asus Eee PC 701 was released on Oct. 16, 2007
and
featured and Intel Celeron Mobile 900 Mhz
processor, 512 mb of memory and a 4 gb
solid state hard drive.
|
Netbooks first burst onto the market back in 2007 with the
arrival of Asus’ Eee PC which was advertised as being highly portable,
affordable and having a decent battery life. Suddenly every PC manufacturer was
making its own version, but many users who bought them – including my wife –
were disappointed by their performance. They found them slow and kind of clunky
and it was hard to see everything in your Windows Start Menu or on your desktop
because it was squeezed down onto that tiny 10-inch screen.
By comparison, today’s ultabook laptops have bigger screens,
are just as light and portable as netbooks and offer a similar battery life,
but they are nowhere near as sluggish. On the other hand though, they do cost a
fair bit more than the netbooks did.
Yet manufacturers insisted that netbooks didn’t need all the
horsepower of regular laptops because they were mostly for browsing the web, checking
mail and doing things on the Internet, hence the term netbook (Internet + notebook).
But then in 2010, Apple came out with its first generation
iPad, which not only allowed you to do all that, but was even lighter, more
portable and faster than the netbook. By the end of the year, other
manufacturers began selling their own Android-based tablets and soon interest
in netbooks began to fall drastically.
A year later, tablet sales overtook netbooks, and as the Guardian reported, netbook shipments fell from 39.4 million in 2010 to 29.4 millon
in 2011, a 25 percent decline. In 2012 that trend accelerated with another tech blog citing netbook sales
falling by 34 percent over 2011.
So it should come as no surprise that the last two netbook
makers have finally decided to throw in the towel. It was an interesting
experiment and I’ll be curious to see if the current tablet craze mirrors the quick
rise and fall of the netbook.
Friday, January 11, 2013
Dog Daze
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| Our new family member, Merlin, getting used to his new bed and surroundings. So far this is the only good picture we can get of him because he's afraid of cameras! |
A lot has happened since my last regular posts.
A minor project to keep our upstairs from freezing in the
winter turned into a major garage/workshop renovation.
Hurricane Sandy swept through New Jersey and although it
thankfully did no damage to my house, it did knock out our power for months and
months. (Okay, it was really only about a week, but it seemed like months and
months to a tech-geek like me.)
Major changes at work have meant I've been putting in a lot
of overtime which has left me little time to do more than sleep and eat.
 |
He might be camera shy, but our new dog
Merlin, loves to be hugged. In fact that's the
only way we can get photos of him.
|
We adopted a new dog.
That's right, my wife and I are once again puppy-parents!
Regular readers of this blog may remember that we lost the
last four-legged member of our family about 15 months ago ("Still Tuggingat our heartstrings"), and
that his passing stuck me very hard. We only just started looking for a new dog
about four months ago, but had no luck.
Each time we thought we had found the perfect pooch for our
now two-person pack, the dog was either already adopted, wasn't the breed, type
nor temperament we were looking for or the animal rescue organization said we
weren't fit parents because both my wife and I work and their dog couldn't be
left alone during the day.
To say that we were both becoming a bit frustrated by the
process is an understatement, and I was now beginning to think we just would
not be getting another dog again. Fifteen months is a looonnnng time to go
between pets and I was already becoming very accustomed to the freedoms of not
having one. So when my wife asked me last Friday night if we were going to look
for dogs again on Saturday, I said yes reluctantly.
It's not that I didn't want a dog. I just didn't expect that
our visits to the local shelters would turn out any differently than they had
in the past. In fact, I was ready to call it quits if we didn't find a dog by
that day.
So of course, you know what happened.
After checking out a few more places and yet again coming up
empty-handed we happened to pass our local country store, which sells lawn and
live-stock supplies, and my wife noticed that they were having their monthly
pet adoption event that day. So just for the heck of it we turned in, and
that's when we saw him.
They were calling him Abe, and he was a little 2-year-old
black Lab mix who kept pulling himself up on top of the puppy playpen to be
petted by anyone who passed by.
I can't say that it was love at first sight. But he was
cute, affectionate and seemed rather calm. We took him for a walk and my wife,
who's a good judge of dogs (not to mention husbands!) gave him the thumbs up.
Then she asked me the question, which a few months ago I
would not have thought twice about.
"Do you really want a dog?"
Strangely I hesitated.
I missed having Tug around and love playing with and being
around our neighbor's dogs. So why now was I so unsure?
Was it because I had been suckered into briefly fostering
another Lab mix this past summer who turned out to be a little terror? Or was
it because suddenly it hit me that my carefree "childless" days were
over?
I think it was the latter.
As I said, 15 month is a long time to go without a pet and I
can now understand why some people go right out and get another dog immediately
after their last one has died. It's very easy to get used to not having to
worry about running home to take care of your dog or cat and doing whatever you
want, whenever you want. The idea that I was giving all that up for at least
another 12 years terrified me.
In fact, all of last weekend I kept second-guessing myself,
wondering if I had made a terrible mistake. I kept thinking about all that
new-found freedom I had given up and was scared of all the bad things this new
dog would do until we eventually got him trained. I think now for the very
first time, I understand what new fathers go through when they either learn
their wife is pregnant or the mix of emotions they feel when they hold their
first newborn child.
But now just after a few days, I've fallen back into my old
"doggy dad" routines and my fears are all but gone. Thankfully our
dog, whom we've decided to call "Merlin," has proven to be pretty
well-behaved and seems just as laid back
-- if not more so -- than all our other dogs combined.
I'm sure there will be a few challenges with him down the
road. But for now I'm happy to hear the pitter-patter of four paws on my floors
again.
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