Tag: technology

Salazin – Seven

My conversation with Salazin brought creeping memories of conversations with Dad. I played the part of Salazin, then, bearing good news. Dad was the skeptic.

It was about his new truck. I’d made my first million, thanks to Salazin. Dad was retired from the military, paying the mortgage, working two jobs, and driving a Chevy pick-up that leaned to the left when it was going straight. The engine sounded okay, but its interior was squalid. Dings and scratches pockmarked its blue and white body. It seemed like it always needed new tires, too.

So, hey, wouldn’t it be nice of me to buy Dad a new, loaded truck?

Do y’a think?

Proud and excited, I went to his house and was there when the new Dodge truck was delivered. “Come on, Dad,” I said when the truck pulled up. “I bought you something.”

Mom was looking out the window and talking about, who was that? Realization struck her. Her blue eyes went wide.

Dad isn’t dumb. Hearing the noise, he’d probably begun to guess what was going on. He was reading his Sports Illustrated. He didn’t move.

“Dad?” I said.

“In a minute,” he said without looking up.

Mom gave him a look. Then she looked looked at me with a weary head shake of frowns and an eye-roll.

“Your son brought you a gift,” Mom said.

Dad kept reading.

Mom said to me, “Let’s go outside.”

We went out. She asked questions. Her reaction pleased me. “He’ll really like it,” she said as she walked around the truck. She didn’t sound convinced. “He might not show it, but he’s really proud and impressed by what you accomplished.”

Sure. Dad was suspicious about my wealth. He didn’t buy the story of Salazin’s stock picks at all. He was certain I was doing something illegal like selling drugs, I guess.

I’d also bought a vehicle for Mom, a Cadillac. She was still driving this ginormous Olds Tornado. Red with a white Landau roof, I swear the front end was in a different time zone from the rear. It got terrible gas mileage and bounced along the highway in search of new shocks.

Her Cadillac was arriving now. “Here’s your car, Mom,” I said.

Gasping and smiling, she turned and hugged and kissed me, saying, “Thank you, thank you, but you didn’t have to do that,” as Dad finally emerged from the house.

Magazine in hand, he stood on the porch looking at the scene. He looked like he was chewing something. He looked at the Caddy first. Then he looked at the truck.

“It’s American,” I said, to point it out. Because of Grandpa Diehl and World War Two, Dad didn’t like buying anything from the Japanese, Italians, and Germans, especially a “big ticket” item like a truck or car.

“Who’s that for?” he asked, looking at the Caddy.

“It’s for me,” Mom said. “Look what your son bought me. And he bought you a truck. Come and look at it.”

“I’ll look at it later,” Dad said. “Thanks.”

He turned and returned to the house.

I felt crushed. As Mom tried softening the blow wtih soft touches and words, I said, “It’s a good fucking thing I didn’t buy you a new house, like I was going to.”

She said, “I like this house.”

She looked at her blue and brick ranch house. “I wouldn’t mind a new house.”

Smiling at me, she said, “But we’d better talk about it a while, first, okay?”

I didn’t answer. I never did buy them a new house, but I bought Mom a new townhouse after Dad died.

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The Password Is

It was a fascinating read about Passwords, with many intriguing links.

First, it shouldn’t surprise anyone, but people wanting to crack passwords study passwords. They buy up databases of stolen passwords, and when possible, link them to their owners, and then use the information they’ve gained to look up the owner on the Internet and social media to learn what they can. They’re not targeting these people to hack them; they’re targeting them to understand demographic patterns.

Second, people continue to use words or personal information as passwords. Cracker programs and applications have databases that automatically look for words first. Match and done, cracked. Naturally, they also look for names.

from Mark Burnett, xato.net, via https://wpengine.com/unmasked/

Third, more scary, but not surprising, is that password crackers are also including the “Leet” (or 1337) methodology so many employ. It isn’t surprising, because it’s commonly known and used (because it’s been around for a long time), so of course anyone trying to crack passwords will include that information in their processing.

Fourth, the thinking behind websites and applications about how password strength and password entropy is weighed varies. Zxcvbn (recognize the pattern?) in a remarkable post compared multiple sites and gave the results for the same passwords. Intriguing.

Returning to the Unmasked article, they also used Full Contact’s Person’s API to go through seventy eight thousand passwords to find rich and famous people. From that, they selected forty passwords that were matched to see if they could be cracked, and how long it took.

Most were too easily unmasked. That’s one thing to remember: if you’re targeted, your password can probably be cracked, but it’ll take time. Thieves typically aren’t targeting most of us because we’re not notable or wealthy. So taking the time to create challenging passwords can help remove you from the list of low hanging fruit. That’s the same reason for frequently changing passwords. Yes, it is all a pain. It’s also why you shouldn’t use the same password — or easy variations — on multiple accounts.

A Github developer, whose password had an entropy of ninety-six, was hardest to crack.

 

 

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And Another Thing

Someone asked me if I could tell them where there’s an “ATM machine” nearby. 

WTF? Really? What do you think that M in ATM stands for? Money?

That kicked in a memory stream. I remember when ATMs first came out.

Yes, I am that old, children.

(I also remember when cable sprawl began, and when we started having color televisions, microwaves, and all the kinds of satellite things we now have. Get over it.)

We thought ATMs were great. Before them, you had to park, go inside, get in line, and take care of business, or drive into a line, if there were drive-through tellers, wait, and take care of business. Whichever option you chose, waiting was involved.

There was a forty dollar limit on what we could withdraw from ATMs back then. Forty dollars was a lot more money in that era. A tank of gas cost me less than ten, or maybe just over ten, dollars. Coffee – hello? – was a dollar a cup. Believe it, children.

Banks touted ATMs as a wonderful invention. It would save them so much money, and they would pass all those savings on to you through increased interest rates on your accounts and certificates of deposit. You could get your money from any ATM. Isn’t that great? Yes, it was wonderful!

Then, the banks and credit unions started complaining about the unanticipated costs. There were lines at the ATMs because there were longer lines in the bank, because they’d cut back on tellers to reduce overhead. The number of ATM transactions started to be capped. Going over that number meant you’d be penalized.

Then came the networks. Networks were formed to share the costs and reduce the burdens – for the financial institutions. What it meant for you was that if an ATM wasn’t in your network, you’d be charged for the luxury of using that machine to access your money. Piss me off?

You betcha. We were always wandering around towns, looking for ATMs and asking, “Is that one in our network?” Everyone had their eyes peeled for ATMs, crying out, “There’s one!” Then we’d aim the car that way. Yes, children, this was before ATMs came to be in other businesses, or stores. This was also before debit cards.

The ATMs typically had a list of networks that the institution belonged to. You’d need to figure out if one of those networks included your institution. If you couldn’t find one, you could be charged, with good ol’ Bank of America (who else, right?) leading the way in outrageous fees. Eventually, the banks and credit unions were forced to warn you if you were going to be charged, and accept that fee before going on.

Of course, the reverse of this was not having ATMs, but depending on your bank and credit union by writing checks, or going in, standing in the lobby for a while, and withdrawing some funds. That wasn’t fun, either.

So, even with my complaints (I am Michael, hear me complain), the ATMs are a lot better than the way it was. Just remember to heed the unspoken warning, “User beware.”

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The Air, the Fitbit, the Writing, the Dreams

Our outdoor air sucks. Need more?

Smoke from wildfires is filling our air. The Air Quality Index leaped to one hundred fifteen last night. DANGEROUS. It hasn’t been hot, only into the nineties. We open the house at night to cool it off, and then close the blinds and windows during the day. Opening the windows last night sent us into coughing fits as wet smoke smells wafted in. Eventually, we donned masks.

Today isn’t as bad. The A.Q.I. is in the fifties, and officially, moderate. Visibility remains down. It’s like a white-out beyond a a few hundred feet.

All this wildfire smoke has reduced my Fitbit activities. Walking is way down, to five miles a day average. It’s not as critical as many other issues resulting from wildfires. None of the fires are directly affecting our community. We feel for all those being evacuated in those areas, and appreciate the firefighters’ efforts. If this stuff is terrible for me, a guy in his early sixties who considers himself in good health, those with emphysema and other respiratory issues must be deeply suffering.

I took to the Orson Scott Card method for visualizing and organizing the novel in progress. O.S.C. talked about just drawing places, like a city, and then adding details. With each detail and area added or defined, entertain questions about why those areas and details exist. I’ve done this exercise before, with excellent results. I wasn’t disappointed this time.

I had been editing the novel’s first draft. Halfway through that process, I perceived a problem. A new ‘greater arc’ was required as the solution. I could be wrong, but this is how I decided to address the issue. It’s essentially an epic. I like epics. Bigger is better.

This was decided over a four day period. Then, after deciding it was necessary, I went on a reading sprint. I finished reading two novels, and read two others, in five days. I also read fiction stories and news articles online. This reading stimulated my writing juices and invigorated my writing dreams. I found myself re-committed to who I was, and what I was doing. It’s a matter of taking a deep breath, turning on the computer, and putting the ass in chair, and the fingers on a keyboard.

This new arc takes place on a planet where technology fails. An outpost is established using outdated technology. Suddenly, it’s like living in a frontier castle. I loved that difference in direction from my usual challenges of visualizing the far future and other intelligent races.

I drew the outpost on my computer, and brainstormed about how the lack of technology affects them, and solutions and work-arounds. The team living in the outpost are hunting for people, but can’t use their suits or vehicles. They fall back to horses. Having horses adds more problems and dimensions.

So do the powerful windstorms endured on the planet. That’s why the outpost becomes a castle; something stout enough to survive the windstorms are necessary. That’s the iceberg view of all the scenes, problems, and challenges realized. I don’t want to give away more. Drawing and brainstorming in this manner was a catalyst to my imagination. I scrambled to capture ideas an create an event timeline. It resulted in *shudder* an outline. 

As an organic writer, the outline overwhelmed me. Suddenly, there it all was, this part of the novel mapped out in all its complications and key events. I could imagine, see, and hear them. Writing them was required. It’s daunting for an organic pantser. I decided I would scramble to write key scenes and moments, and patch them together with bridge and pivot scenes, and build the story in layers, much like I used to do when oil painting, or writing a business case, or analyzing data.

I think that whatever opened my creative floodgates also turned the dream valves to full open. I had six remembered dreams last night. Friends from my past were featured. My wife also made an appearance. Of course, maybe it was the eclipse opening the dream and creativity gates. Who can say?

Trying to capture details this morning diverted personal resources already earmarked for other activities. I resorted to dream summaries. The dreams were wild. Once again, my muses were prominently featured. They were attempting to guide and assist me in different manners. Sorting the chaos was a fascinating exercise.

Having your muses show up in my dreams injects high confidence levels. I felt empowered and emboldened when I awaken. Yet, being me, the confidence evaporates to more normal levels by midday. Having your muses and some higher beings populate your dreams and offer encouragement has a good thing. I’m certainly not going to kick them out.

Time to write like crazy, at least one more time. How about you, writers? Have you seen increased creativity? Maybe it is the eclipse.

Or maybe it’s the coffee.

2

My New Toilet Bowl Cleaner

Well, I did it. After vowing I wouldn’t, I bought a robot toilet bowl cleaner. It was several hundred dollars, but I don’t like cleaning the toilets. Neither does my wife, so we shrugged, and slapped down the plastic.

It kind of looks like a gray plastic daddy long-legs, with less legs. Called Rotoboc – Robot Toilet Bowl Cleaner – it weighs just five pounds, and it isn’t large. That didn’t alleviate my doubts about its skills, plus the cleaner bulbs cost fifty-five dollars for a package of twenty-five, shipping included. You can only buy them from the website at this point. Naturally, they come in scents. In a way, the bulbs remind me of modern home office printers; the printers are inexpensive, but those ink cartridges are expensive. It’s one of my pet peeves, so I felt it necessary to mention.

Using the Rotoboc – I call my Rooty — is easy.

  1. Lift the lid and seat. The Rotoboc sits right on the rim.
  2. Extend its five little legs to cover the bowl and set the Rotoboc on the rim. Don’t worry about centering it.
  3. Insert the cleaning/disinfectent bulb into the receptor.
  4. Fill the water tank with a pint of fresh water and insert into position.
  5. Select the mode. There are two: cleaning, and disinfecting. Disinfecting takes longer.
  6. Press On.

After Rooty comes to life with a few beeps and lights, it says, “Good morning,” in a female voice that reminds me of Glenn Close. Then it centers itself with a few hums.

So, from what the website tells me, the fresh water is used to inject the bulb and mix with the cleaner/disinfectant. First, it puts down a little spray head into the bowl, and sprays, while rotating, like a lawn sprinkler head. The sprinkler head withdraws.

Then it sits there counting for a while, five minutes, if it’s only cleaning, twenty, if it’s disinfecting. Next, brushes are extended down into the water like landing gear coming down on an aircraft. They go into the water, and then around the bowl and under the rim. While that’s happening, another small arm comes out and grabs the rim. Giving squirts as it goes, it begins rotating the Rotoboc along the rim, cleaning it while the brushes are at work below.

The whole device is quiet, emitting a gentle swishing sound when its working, with a white noise background hum. Green lights on top tell you its progress. Basically, there are five green lights. As a stage is completed, that light goes green. When all five lights are green, it’s finished. The Glenn Close like voice announces, “Done,” with a flourish of tinny trumpets.

If something goes wrong, a red light on top illuminates, three dongs are issued, and it says with a calm voice, “Error.” Then it gives its error number for your convenience. Nothing has gone wrong in the month we’ve been using it.

Afterward, you pick it up, fold Rooty’s little legs back in, and put it into its white case for the next time. The case has a recharger for the batteries, and is plugged into the wall. We store the case under the sink. Whoever built our house decided to put an outlet there, so we were good to go. I’d say that would be a problem for many people, though.

As I say, so far, its’ been a good investment. I can’t see hotels buying them, but they’re great for a household like ours. I predict a lot more will have them by the year’s end.

Hopefully, the bulb prices will start coming down, then.

I hear they’re coming out with one to clean the bathtub, too. I’m dubious, but I am thinking about it.

3

On This Day

On this day in 1990, the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird set record. Flying over the continental United States, the aircraft averaged 2,144.8 MPH, and required one hour and four minutes to travel from Los Angeles, California, to Washington, D.C.

The aircraft has since been retired, and they’re no longer flown.

 

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“Here we go, beast.”

Writing a novel is often an exploration for me, a visit to new, uncharted realms. Sometimes I get a little lost.

I completed three chapters yesterday. They’d been written in parallel. One of them was part of the five chapters being written in parallel.

That’s how it is. The novel in progress reminds me of math involving nonlinear equations that I once briefly encountered. They involved solving simultaneous equations and polynomials. I don’t remember much more except it struck me as a fascinating way to encounter and express relationships and awareness.

Besides being nonlinear, the novel is asynchronous, part of the idea of asynchronous epiphanies that evolve throughout the novel, something borrowed from asynchronous learning and asynchronous computer functions. This sometimes gives me a headache. The novel is and is not chronological, an apparent paradox that adds a challenge to writing it, because it may appear chronological, and I naturally revert to thinking about it in terms of a chronological approach. (I imagine readers reading it, and asking themselves, “What?” And I laugh….)

All of this was born out of the ideas that something is possible until it’s proven impossible, the alienation and isolation that develops with technology and how it affects our personalities and thinking, colonization of other planets, and how often our thinking mirrors computer operations (or is it the converse?) and work on asynchronous levels. That gave a rise to thinking about how reality works, and the creation of the chi-particles. Chi-particles have imaginary energy and mass and travel faster than light. I also throw in some soap opera, just to keep it interesting.

Along the way with all of this, I keep playing with the ideas behind reality, as to whether we create it, or it creates us, or if it’s a symbiotic process that depends upon one another. Symbiotic may not be the right term. That’s supposed to apply to biological entities, but then I think, can reality as we experience actually be a biological creature, but then that diverts me back into notions of God and creative intelligence.

Anyway, finishing those three chapters brought me back up to a specific intersection of storylines that required me to bring other chapters and storylines up to date so all may proceed. That necessitated delving back into what has been written to re-calibrate and orientate myself and my characters. I needed to read what had already been written in specific areas and review notes.

Reading what was written turned out to be a surprising and rewarding journey. My writing and its characters, setting, and stories surprised me. They distracted me from my main task of figuring out what happens next, yes, but it was enjoyable to read material written months ago and find out that it’s decent writing. Of course, it’s my child; what else would I think?

Here I am now, re-calibrated and re-oriented, quad shot mocha in hand. “Here we go, beast,” I tell my computer. “Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.”

Five hundred pages done; how many more remain?

3

Those Characters

As I wrote about my dreams and my personal life today, I drifted through thoughts about my characters. I’d worked hard to develop each to be unique but each has their own hook.

Handley, the space pirate, is embroiled with inner disappointment and dissatisfaction with who she is and what she’s become. She wants more but doesn’t know what she wants. She thinks herself brave. Physically, she is brave. Morally, she’s a coward.

Pram, the colossus and employed terraforming supervisor, is self-assured and relaxed. The changing situation challenges him in ways he never expected to be challenged, which leads to self-inspection and growth, but also causes a hardening against trusting others.

Brett, the footloose fourth-waver, hates dying and being resuscitated, regenerated and resurrected, but he also dislikes life. His alienation had been growing throughout his life. He’d never noticed because he’d taken refuge in memory and sex. Both are artificial, external constructions that are extensions of his personality; they’re not real, but they’re safe. Eventually, as it happens so often, his familiarity with them and they with him breeds a contempt that drives him to actively seek a change. Even he’s unaware of how the depths of his needs.

Philea is a trained scientist. She loves her math, her physics, her learning. People aren’t a need nor desire. She’s enamored with the puzzle of the situation. ‘Doing right’ is secondary to ‘finding answers’.

Forus Ker, a Travail, is the most complex character on the surface. He changes the most as he actively seeks to understand himself and develop his skills and talents while embracing the role his people (or destiny – or is it a God?) has thrust upon him. He never wavers from trying harder and doing more.

Then there are others. Monads, who believe in their manifest destiny and are contemptuous of others in their species and in other species who don’t recognize and accept their superiority. There are the Sabards and the complex role they’ve established for themselves and the altruism they consistently demonstrate. And there are the other Travail, who have come the farthest in grasping how wrong their understanding of existence is and how little they truly understand.

On some days, before I begin a new section, I need to consider which character is in the lead for those scenes, and what they know and when they know it, and then, the overarching characteristics and behavior that drives their decisions and actions. Few of them are pure in their intentions. Sometimes their emotions (save Philea, so far) dictates behavior counter to their best interests. Other times, especially with Handley and Forus Ker, they’re following orders that they don’t understand, but which they decide they must do.

Then, as other characters, are space, time and technology. Things break down, evolve, or dissolve with sudden revelations. They are also considered as each new scene is begun. Sometimes I realize that I’ve overlooked one aspect or another and go back to rewrite on the floor. I feel like I’m looking at sprawling mosaic that’s telling the history of a complex encounter. I slip in to get the closer look necessary to see, hear and explain to the reader what’s going on. But once in a while, I get trapped in the mosaic and find the need to extricate myself and gain distance once again to see the other parts.

Once separation is established and clarity is recovered, I take a deep breath and go back in.

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Personal Windows

Friends, prompted by curious, started grilling me about some of my past life the other night. Those were my super-secret military days.

Since their questioning, I’ve drifted along currents of wonder about living amidst change and how small our windows of knowledge truly seem. Change is fast and constant. The military commands I worked in thirty years ago no longer exist; the weapons systems introduced during my career are being retired. Bases have been shuttered. They’re trying to retire the nukes I once controlled (a good thing, in my mind). God knows what’s going on in space.

I ended up in a medical start-up after my military career, first in sales operations, running customer service and spewing out reports about sales trends. We were part of a nascent business, per-cutaneous transvascular coronary angioplasty, moving into stent delivering systems for coronary applications and radiation therapy to cope with re-stenosis. After that, I moved on to another company in search of ways to cope with chronic total occlusions.

Life found me in Internet and computer security in my next phase, and then onto analytics. Whatever. I drifted through choices, jumping through windows when the opportunities arose, and was fortunate to have someone on the other side of those windows to pull me in and show me around.

The windows in our lives are always so small. They open and close so quickly. Technology accelerates the speed with which the windows open and close. For examples, consider how we now conduct war versus how it was conducted in decades and centuries past. Consider how we make, experience and enjoy music, and how we entertain ourselves. Yet, each window and moment is treated as though this is a permanent solution. Consider the plight of the coal industry, for example. They think it can be legislated back but technology and market forces have moved past them.

We, as humans, can only see and understand so far, and we argue and debate about what we see, what it means and what we need to do about it. Yet, each person’s life is defined by their personal windows. These are shaped by their culture, heritage, education, genetics and personal experiences, yes, but they’re also shaped by much larger forces. We often barely glimpse the shadow of such forces.

Sometimes – no, hell, often – I think we’re going around understanding the world backward; we believe reality shapes us, and we investigate how we shape it.

Maybe we shape reality. Maybe there is no past or future, there is only the window into Now.

Jump through it and keep on going.

 

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