20040701

World has gone to hell while I was away

We flew the entire family to Buffalo recently to celebrate the inlaws' fiftieth wedding anniversary. When Grandpa picked us up from the airport and brought us home, we saw that Grandma had a yellowish cast to her skin, and was exhausted.

They had hired a caterer, limo, DJ, and whatnot, and invited about 50 family and close friends to see them renew their vows, but Grandma looked and felt, well, bad. She usually calls it a night well after midnight, but the night we got there, she was conking out at 9PM. Not like her. She was worried that much of the last-minute preparations had yet to be done the next day but could not go on. She promised to see a doctor the following morning.

Bile duct blockage and a gall bladder to be removed, is what the doctor determined. She was hospitalized that evening. Barbaloot and her sister spent hours calling the guests, florists, caterer, DJ, limo, and hall, to tell them the event was off.

Not to be deterred, she and Grandpa renewed their vows in the chapel at Kenmore Mercy Hospital on Saturday evening, with all ten grandchildren in one place.



She's had her gallbladder removed, the day we flew back to Colorado. She's home too, and recovering well.

Upgrades

The mission-critical G4 has received an improvement---its original 350 MHz processor has been replaced with a 1 GHz aftermarket processor. Noticeably faster, under $300. Installation was simple.

I had to backup a drive and update the boot ROM before installing, which took some time.

Barbaloot approves of the upgrade, after seeing a Harry Potter game spin up. Downside: the original HD, running OS 9.0, was upgraded to 9.2.1 so I could still boot the G4 with it after the CPU upgrade---the CPU is not compatible with OS earlier than 9.2.1. Now that the original HD is on 9.2.1, it won't mount the later (default boot) drive, where OS X sits. OS 9.2.1 asks whether I want to initialize (Apple for format) the later drive. So I might as well have not bothered with the OS upgrade on the older drive.

Toad at five months and some

He's eightieth-percentile height, thirtieth-percentile weight. In summary, he's just like his mother's father. He smiles generously.



It's getting closer for Walter and charming Mrs. Indenver to bring theirs home, isn't it?

20040629

Pack, not herd---call for papers

Interesting development at Winds of Change, a call to formalize distributed defense concepts.

What skills, tools, and organization do citizens need to respond, if we've proved that centralized defenses---like those that fumbled the WTC/Pentagon attacks---will fail? What's the TOE?

Don't forget search and rescue, optimized for building collapse (San Francisco earthquakes, NYC skyscraper collapses, NJ train wrecks).