People Adam May or May Not Know Personally

The main item on yesterday's schedule was, oddly enough, a family shopping trip. Well, 3/4 of the family, anyway. The flower_cat wanted a new purple laptop-bag/purse for her new EeePC, and the chaoswolf wanted a new Windows laptop capable of running Adobe CS3, which she needs for school. The Wolfling had determined that there was a Lenovo at Micro Center that fit her needs, and nolly had suggested either Staples or Office ?Depot? for the bag. Along the way, the Cat wanted to drive around the neighborhood of the Baycon hotel and locate the nearest restaurants. So off we went.

Micro Center is located within Mission College's ring-road, and it's off Great America Parkway only a few blocks from the Santa Clara Convention center, so we hit that first and backtracked to MC, spotting restaurants along the way. There's nothing within a short walk of the hotel, unfortunately, but it's only a short drive. About 20-30 minutes' walking each way, if you want the exercise; I probably will.

The Cat had never been to Micro Center, so she had fun exploring (and rejecting their entire collection of laptop bags, none of which were purple) while the Wolfling bought her lappie. The Cat bought a little laptop stand that looked as though it would hold the EeePC off of upholstry and keep it from burning up, so that was OK. End of part 1.

There was a Staples on the way home. No purple bags, though we did get a dark-pink beanbag laptop tray in case the stand didn't work out. End of part 2. We continued toward home, intending to drop off the Wolf, until I mentioned that there might be something at REI. The Wolf immediately pricked up her ears, and we quickly changed course.

No joy at REI, either, though there were a couple of Timbuktu bags that came close. Sort of a muddy purplish, with a broad stripe of either beige or pink. Gack. But there was an Office Max next door...

Score! Buxton Reno tote; rich dark purple; big enough for her present purse, the Eee, accessories, and so on. Big win. End of part 3.

Came home and verified that, indeed, the little stand held the Eee just fine. The Y.D. immediately claimed the beanbag tray -- "It's pink!" Verified that the bag's handles are -- just barely -- long enough to go over the handles of the wheelchair.

Went out for my walkies around 6pm, when it was pleasantly cool. Leftovers for dinner.

... so a couple of days ago the Wolfling comes to me in a mild panic saying her Window box won't boot after installing a game. It said something like "no OS found", which sounded a lot like a damaged MBR. Ugh.

After determining that she could get by without it for a while, I dropped the priority on the project and made sure I knew where my Ubuntu live CDs were.

This morning after breakfast I went upstairs, turned the machine on, popped the game disk out of the drive it had been left in, and replaced it with Hardy Heron. Booted perfectly, though there's clearly a fan noisily singing its swan song someplace in there.

Looked at the results of fdisk -l -- odd, the main drive seems to be intact. Mount it. Looks OK. There's also a random flash drive plugged in in back. Shut down (popping the CD in the process), pull the flash drive, reboot. No problems.

Best guess is that something on the game CD made the BIOS think it was bootable, but it wasn't.

I'm not a professional system administrator, but I play one at home.

Jacob Robbins; NIH Scientist Known for Thyroid Research (From The Washington Post, May 16, 2008.)

Jacob Robbins first set foot on the eighth floor of the Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health in 1954. Claiming one of only two working labs available to him in the year-old hospital, he immediately launched what would become groundbreaking work on the function of the thyroid and the treatment of thyroid cancer, particularly cancer caused by exposure to radioactivity.

On May 12, Dr. Robbins died of cardiac arrest -- at the Clinical Center, not far from where his NIH work had begun 54 years earlier. He was 85.

"He died surrounded by the work he treasured," said Griffin P. Rodgers, director of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, or NIDDK.

I'll miss him.

It occurred to me rather suddenly last night that here I am, a 61-year-old, notoriously reclusive and socially inept computer nerd, attempting to dispense avuncular advice on relationships, marriage, and psychology over the internet. And in person, I might add.

This strikes me as highly improbable, totally out of character, mildly amusing, and more than a little mind-boggling. I feel a little as though, after many years of playing an assortment of jesters and other fools, I have finally moved up to playing Polonius.

This meme has been making its way around LiveJournal, and since I haven’t updated in awhile, I decided to play.  So here goes:

What were you doing 10 years ago? 
Finishing up my junior year of college, studying for the LSAT, hanging out with my best friend Arielle (who is still my best friend), reading and writing a lot.  

What are 5 things you need to do today?

1. Dress fitting for my sister’s wedding
2. Read
3. Write
4. Take a nap
5. Figure out how to put the pictures from my niece’s bat mitzvah onto a disk from my computer (how come everyone knows how to do this except me?)

What are some snacks you enjoy
So many . . . cheese and crackers, just plain cheese, cling peaches (the kind that come in a jar), berries, pigs in blankets, guacamole, coffee ice cream, chocolate chip cookies, brownies, ritz bits with peanut butter, spoonfuls of peanut butter . . . 

What would you do if you were a billionaire?
Be a full-time writer, buy an apartment, take care of my family, take care of my friends, donate a lot of money, travel, set up college scholarships for my friends’ kids, buy some great shoes a la Carrie Bradshaw . . . actually, I don’t think I want to be a billionaire.  Being a multi-millionaire would suit me better.

What are 3 bad habits?

1. Going on the Internet when I should be writing
2. Snacking at night
3. Worrying what people think of me

Name 5 places you have lived.

1. San Mateo, CA
2. Riverdale, NY
3. Boston, MA – just for a year
4. New York, NY – the west side
5. New York, NY – the east side

What are 5 jobs you've had?

1. Baby-sitter
2. Teaching Assistant (actually I was probably grading students’ papers 10 years ago)
3. Lawyer
4. Underwriter for law firms
5. Writer (best job ever)

I tag: 

amanda_berlin

(I'm posting this one because it looks as though several people on my flist could use it. I'm doing fine right now, thanks.)

There are two links here, and they're related only because they both touch on the way a relationship can change after it's over.

The first is this review of a book called Death Benefits: How Losing a Parent Can Change an Adults Life--For the Better.

Death Benefits demonstrates through powerful stories (including the author's own revelatory experience) how parent loss is the most potent catalyst for change in middle age and can actually offer us our last, best chance to become our truest, deepest selves. Safer challenges the conventional wisdom that fundamental change is only for the young; and that loss must simply be endured or overcome.

I probably ought to get this one, but I don't really need to: I can easily believe it. Sometimes you need a whack on the side of the head with a very big cluestick, and that's about the biggest one you can get. That cancer screening you've been putting off? Do it now.

The second is a little more problematic: The Emotions of Grief During A Breakup (via Wikipedia). In particular,

When the person is alive and there was a breakup, this is often when people will try to open up communications with the ex. Recognize that the urge to search is part of the grieving process and you should not act on it. When you are pining and searching, you are in a temporary state and anything you say now can and will be held against you at a later date.

(Emphasis mine) This is probably good advice, sometimes. If you want or need to make a clean break of it, if there's pain or anger or hatred on one side or the other, if you've broken up before and can't seem to stay away from one another, yeah: I can see it.

But if the objective is to stay friends, to cool a too-intense relationship down to a level that you're both comfortable with, it's probably best to keep talking. In many cases, you'll both be grieving, though perhaps to different degrees. Help one another work through it. As friends.

(I'll note as an aside that you'll need to give one another space and time. Call or IM when you have news, or to congratulate your friend when they post happy news in their LJ. Not every day. Maybe not even every week. Drop back to email, perhaps, and the occasional LJ comment. Don't go for dinner and a movie -- that's really courting disaster. Meet for lunch on a weekday when you both have things to get back to at 1:00 sharp.)

As a friend, realize that you want your friend to be happy. Not with you as their lover, apparently, but happy. Stay interested in their life. Help one another through it, as best you can. Be glad you're still friends.

(Added 17:00) Let me just restate something from the last post on grieving: "getting over" your loss does not mean "forgetting about it". Your goal is to come to terms with it, whatever those terms happen to be; to "get over it" in the sense of getting over a challenging obstacle, so that it's safely behind you and doesn't keep getting in the way of your life.

Possible-Probable, my black hen
Lays her eggs in the relative when.
She doesn't lay eggs in the positive now,
Because she's unable to postulate how.

  Look, another school play about the heroes of the American Revolution. How sweet.
  We've got George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Paine. Famous guys who did important things.
  Wonderful. Just wonderful.
  Of course, you're missing part of the story.
  In fact, you're missing about half of it.

Sybil Ludington was sixteen years old when she rode forthy miles through a rainy night to spread the news of a British attack and round up four hundred militiamen to fight back. (Remember Paul Rever? His ride was only sixteen miles long.) Deborah Champion smuggled messages and money to George Washington—a two-day ride through enemy territory. When stopped by the British, she fooled them into thinking she was an old lady on her way to visit friends.