(Mostly) not a tech blog

I have death on my mind a bit right now. A victim of cancer has recently passed, struck down at a young age. Younger than I remember being. There is a poem from WWI that I have often used for comfort when examining mortality. "I Have a Rendezvous with Death" by Alan Seeger. I have been wondering why this poem eases my mind so, and now discovered what it is within me that needs these words. The narrator of the piece acknowledges his pending death. He accepts it, maybe even looks forward to it in the way one might look…

Why is free speech important? Why is spying on private speech bad? It may be that some day you live in a nation that treats all citizens equally, that actually allows freedom and equal protections. I don't, I live in the United States in the early 21st century, where we still have groups of humans that we treat as less worthy than other groups. This has been true going back as far as you can look, and will continue to be true for at least a generation or two. Because not all are equally protected, it may be that some…

"To make more money" is a miserable justification for human endeavor. More so if the desire is a transition from one middle class earnings level to some higher financial peak. I hear this often in relation to changing jobs, careers or earning college level degrees. It is based on the conjecture that generating larger monetary ingress will result in increased satisfaction. It will allow one to own a better car, bigger house or the latest Playstation One U console. It is a lie. A false premise. A misnomer propagated by our culture. If you earn enough money to keep a…

The very first computer I ever used, the venerable TI-99/4A, I have yet again. For some reason I decided it time to revisit this part of my own history and purchases a set of four units in various states of repair. This particular one, and one other, is fully functional as is. I didn't imagine that opening the box for this machine would be an emotional event, but here I am. What a magnificent artifact of my journey through life. Almost every moment of my own existence has been informed by this make and model of computer. It ignited a…

Unrelated events can sometimes be intertwined in ways only meaningful to the human mind. The Seahawks are having a fantastic season and there is much of this going around. "The Hawks win every time I wear my lucky socks" as an example. In the course of the many and varied factors that effect the results of a Football game, the logical mind knows that a pair of socks on a fans feet will not have any impact. The human mind is beautifully unlogical though, and such flights of fancy are normal. One such crossing of unrelated facts happened today. On…

Last week I spent most of a day with my Dad working on a siblings car. It was some basic maintenance work, clearing a pair of error codes the emissions controls caused the ECU to throw. It was also a rare moment in life that I enjoyed greatly. In my life as a shade-tree mechanic, I have had two phases. As Lee the Younger I had to lean on my father to teach me everything. How to use the tools, the theory of the systems, even how to fix it when you twist the head off a bolt. Goosenecks don't…

There was a miserly and angry old man, Many thought his name was quite funny. He wanted just one thing alone, he coveted gold and wanted money. Hatred and anger he felt, The coldness held him snug. Christmas did give him no cheer, Even that day to him was humbug. Scrooge was selected and elected by forces he could not perceive. His old partner Marley sent help, Spirits three for his soul to retrieve. The first ghost that came to him was as the sun and blindingly bright. The Christmases past his mind made dim, This angel of the Lord…

"If one keeps expanding himself he can never become too wrapped up in any one thing" - Thomas Elwell, 1968

A long time ago a very old man lived near the base of a cliff. He lived alone and lived a very long distance away from anyone else. He was alone in these advanced years because his wife had died ahead of him and they had no children. Every day he would make the long climb around a winding path up to the top of the cliff. Every day he would stand on the precipice and point his face to the sky. He would stand there in silence until his knees hurt. Then he would sit and dangle his…

For a few precious months I had company on my morning commute to work. Xavier interned and lived with me so naturally we drove together. Just under eleven miles in the pre-coffee part of the day. Xavier and I had this natural aptitude for absurd, weird and even offensive humor. Any time we found a thread of humor we would pull it to see where it went. Very early in our commuting partnership we found an odd and repeatable series of events. Every day at 8:35 A.M. we would cross the small bridge on Chambers Bay Road. Every single day…