AceOfSpuds: Technology, Life and Art ...blogged by Richard Berlin

Have you no shame?

I was reading my wife's copy of Brain, Child and hit a reference to a fabulous blogger (who is going on my blogroll as soon as I finish this). Her pet subject is infertility--something I unfortunately know about firsthand--and that reminded me that I've been meaning to speak up about it in this space.

We need to do something about the shame that surrounds infertility. We need to do something about the lack of medical coverage for it in this country, too, but that's not going to happen until we upgrade the inability to conceive from an embarrassment to a disability. Heart attack and cancer survivors wear their scars proudly, and we with fertility issues ought to be doing the same, dammit.

When my wife and I struggled with infertility, we agreed not to make things even worse by the act of keeping it to ourselves; as the saying goes, "You're only as sick as your secrets." We were determined to be well. We spoke freely about it. In response many people privately confided to us that they, too, had fertility issues. The "privately" part is proof of the stigma surrounding it, I think. At one point I discovered, astonishingly, that within my project group of less than ten people, three of us had test-tube babies. About a dozen couples that I know personally have revealed fertility issues to me; I imagine there are more who have not.

Babies have come to my extended family in all kinds of ways: clomid, insemination, IVF, surrogacy, adoption. There is that one oddball sister who concieved the "old fashioned" way (and even indentifies the date of our niece's conception as the weekend of our wedding) but so far she's the exception rather than the rule. We've tried not to hold that against her; but I have to confess, when you're doing daily injections, ultrasounds, several blood draws a week, 5 AM visits to the surgical suite--all the time hemorrhaging cash--well, it's hard not to be jealous of people who only need privacy and a bottle of wine!

More later...I have a rehearsal for javaone in just a few hours so I need some 'Zs.

Posted at 11:58PM Jun 26, 2004 by AceOfSpuds in Infertility  |  Comments[1]

More on stock options

The Mercury News has a front-page story on the rally. My wife drew my attention to it as soon as I walked into the kitchen this morning; she was appalled by its tone. I'll attest that everything he says in the article is true. E.g. it was well-organized and well-funded, right down to the buses and the free pizza (which, as I mentioned yesterday, was responsible for feeding the homeless along with the rest of us.) It's true, this rally didn't look like a sixties war protest--although I do have email from the wife of a co-worker, claiming she was working on raising her hubby's bail money--but I'm betting most of the people at the rally can't remember the sixties. And it's not because they were there. As became clear when Peter Giles asked for a show of hands--of people looking forward to their 50th birthday--for most of us there, the sixties is more about Sesame Street than Ashbury Street.

It's particularly interesting to me that the Mercury News allowed this mostly-negative article to run, given that the editorial board of the paper came out in opposition to expensing options. I guess the editorial workings of a newspaper will remain a mystery to me.

Posted at 12:15PM Jun 25, 2004 by AceOfSpuds in General  | 

Down with FASBism!

Today was Reality/Rally in the Valley, the "protest" event coinciding with the FASB roundtable on expensing options. For those who missed it, here are a few pictures courtesy of my Nokia 3650. (It takes quite decent snaps if the light is good...I just wish it had a zoom!)


Some sign wavers turned out en masse. I don't know whether they got any press coverage, but they did make it hard for me to get good pictures from that side. So I moved in order to get this:


I believe that's Peter Giles, president of the Tech Museum, in the white hat.

Some crowd shots:








I immediately noticed this (sculpture?) and was curious about it:


Once I walked all the way around it, I recognized that red box as a "Sunny Boy" inverter; I have two of them hanging on a wall outside my house. So this must be a work in progress. When finished I'm expecting to see photovoltaic panels in all of the holes. That would give it a maximum generating capacity of more than 2Kw of electricity, although since the panels face in all directions I think they may have traded off maximum capacity against consistent output. In any case it's very cool to see; way to go, Palo Alto!

And I can report one good thing that has happened already: for one afternoon, at least, stock options fed the homeless. (Picture omitted to keep me out of trouble on the off chance I'm wrong. :-))

Posted at 08:16PM Jun 24, 2004 by AceOfSpuds in General  | 

Happy Father's Day!

My father sent me a note last night which said:

    Your files are attached and ready to send with this message.

    Take a look at this.  What is your take?  And What, then, 
    was the contribution of Vin Cerf,  a deaf man widely credited 
    in Deaf circles with starting the system.

    Dad

    <GT1=3584.url>

The only attachments I ever get from Dad are photographs. He is a scientist, recently retired as a lab director, who still lives much of his life on the road with a Windows laptop. So my "take," as it were, is that virus writers were getting much more clever.

Dad's field is hearing research. I'm very proud of him; in his career he has directly or indirectly helped many thousands of people avoid or cope with deafness. He's not without his detractors--mostly, it seems, people who believe that his desire to cure deafness equates with a genocidal intent toward the Deaf community--but the grateful far outnumber the hateful, and Dad's attitude towards the world has consistently been one of service. Most voicemail greetings say "Leave me a message." His has always been "Let me know how I can help you."

A virus couldn't have known his profession. It also could not have known that most of the email I get from him is forwarded jokes, or stuff about his second career. On the other hand, the reference to the deaf community seems genuine.

Having read "Computer Power and Human Reason" I knew that all it took was some clever pattern matching: find something that looks like a significant reference and copy it. I once helped a friend debug a "Doctor" program that used this technique; it kept track of family members mentioned, foods, etc. and would insert these where appropriate. When it worked, it worked astonishingly well. (When it didn't, a missing check for uninitialized variables led to hilarious exchanges like

    "Earlier, you spoke of your NIL."

    "My nil is none of your business!"

    "OK.  Then tell me more about your NIL."

    "I told you, it's none of your business!")

So, had a cleverly-written virus invaded his "Sent Messages" file, figured out that the signature he uses with my address is "Dad," and scraped a sentence (or at least a fragment) about the Deaf community to lend additional credibility--all of it designed to trick me into clicking on the attachment and executing some vileness? Toss-up. Since I use a Mac at home and a laptop running JDS at work, I figured I was reasonably safe, and clicked on the attachment. It redirected me to

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5217598/?GT1=3584

so the message was genuine. And the question he was asking was one of paternity: Who is the father of the internet?

I took a few minutes to collect links for him, and recapped the contributions of Vint Cerf (TCP/IP and the Internet ) and Tim Berners-Lee (hyperlinking across machines, i.e. WWW). There were many others. Having been unfairly passed over for recognition a few times in my own career, I'm leery of leaving anyone out. But I wasn't handing out accolades, just answering a question about these two men and their differing contributions to something we now take for granted. Hard to believe that the Macintosh existed for nearly a decade, and my employer's workstations even longer, before anyone could browse the web on them!

So, to the men who made it possible for my father to ask his question; my mother to become a champion online-shopper; my wife to advertise and run a business on a shoestring and never worry about her data (thank you Salesforce.com ); and me to prattle on about it; let me be among the first to say thanks, and "Happy Father's Day!"

(And to the women, my apology for not having a blog in May...and a belated "Happy Mother's Day.")

Posted at 06:56AM Jun 18, 2004 by AceOfSpuds in General  | 

Which haystack did I put that needle in?

The other night I was playing the bass (a statement that anyone who heard might debate, but no matter) when my wife, an accomplished violinist, offered a suggestion as she hurried through the room. I considered ignoring her, on the grounds that there might be a difference in technique between violin and bass, but since she gave me a dire warning about avoiding an(other) RSI, I thought I'd better check.

My beginner's books don't cover the subject of vibrato (much less the subject of "imitating a 'cello," which is what I needed to learn how to do) so I turned to my old friend Google. Now, I consider myself an expert Googler; I frequently find things within the first minute or two that previous searchers didn't. So I confidently typed in

       bass technique vibrato

Unsurprisingly--since "bass" is a word that the Google help page uses as an example of something that's going to need some narrowing down--that gave about 13000 hits. Up front were mostly pages about guitar or electric bass playing; how someone sounds on a recording; books or videos on how to play; etc. I tried adding the phrase 'how to' only to see at the top of the page

  "The following words are very common and were not included 
  in your search: how to [details]"

The [details] link explained that if I want to keep that phrase I have to put a "+" sign in front of it. It didn't work. I guess I should submit that as a bug report to Google, although I'm tempted to leave it as an exercise for their web crawler. :-)

I went into advanced search, started eliminating things, and eventually found a few links that were semi-useful. But it bugged me (still bugs me) that even with a search engine as powerful as Google, I had to work so hard for my information. With all of the information my fellow bloggers are adding on a daily basis, we are going to need to be able to sift it a lot more effectively than that!

I tried the search again on http://kartoo.com (an interesting experience if you've not tried it). My result was not great--I'm not an expert kartoo-grapher--but at least I wasn't overwhelmed.

If you've read this far, and you know a better way, I'm sure you're going to share it (because, to quote The Bard, "'tis charity to show"). But in researching this little note, I made a fascinating discovery: GOOGLE IS NOT COMMUTATIVE.

I typed in the terms in a different order,

    bass vibrato technique

and found a very useful link I'd never seen with the other search, on the very first page:

    http://www.uvm.edu/~mhopkins/string/?Page=bassvibratomov.html 

I didn't expect this, since they're theoretically just keywords, and the pages that are found are supposed to contain them all. (Well, actually, I didn't expect this because I hadn't read the Google help page in its entirety; although not prominently featured, it does say "Keep in mind that the order in which the terms are typed will affect the search results.")

So, it was news to me...and now that I know about it, I'm sure it will help me achieve new heights of Googling. Sadly, it is not going to help my bass playing, especially not by performance time next Friday. Life is so unfair.

Posted at 04:56PM Jun 10, 2004 by AceOfSpuds in General  |  Comments[2]