Tag: time

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#33 Eeek!

“Eeek!”, the author exclaimed.

“What is it?”, was said in reply.

“I didn’t write my story for today yet”, was all she heard as he flew to his computer.

“Now what can I write about…”, he said, as visions of sugar plums and dynamite, cannons and catnip, dragons and bagpipes, and all other forms of fancy arrived into his consciousness.

“But should it be serious?”, he thought as he banished the humor from his brain. Proverbs and wisdom, wit and thoughtfulness fluttered into the fingers. Maybe he should write about how life is short, or how self-imposed problems are long, or how annoying car alarms are when you’re trying to write.

“Light-hearted fiction” he thought, as he envisioned a story entitled “99 ways to murder that guy who can’t keep his car alarm from going off during my writing”, or perhaps one called “How to get your cat to stop biting your toes while you sleep”. Oh the possibilities could be endless – or had he used that phrase before in this story? Sugar plums? No, he’d definitely used that before. At least he didn’t write “sugar plus”, which he caught just in the nick of time. Otherwise one might think he was writing ad copy for the latest sugar substitute.

“But what should it be about? I have an audience to entertain”, he mused. “Perhaps they won’t notice if I blow off one night. Maybe they’ll be too entertained with Jim the Bunny and Jabberpaw and all those dark depressing stories I’ve written in the past few weeks to notice that #33 is phoned int!”. The plan began to take shape in his mind. He’d rush to his computer and just type any darn thing that came to his fingers. His 1 or 2 faithful readers wouldn’t notice – and if they did, maybe they’d be entertained, or at least bemused.

“Well, it’s not like they’re paying anything for it”, he said as he comforted himself. He’d come up with a better, more fleshed out idea tomorrow, he assured himself. Until then, they’d just have to deal with this quickly conceived and ill-designed short work of semi-fiction!

[SSDay]

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#31 To Do List

The list grows long and short again
I wish it would be gone some days
It makes one long for the time when
I simply sought relaxing ways

But now it’s ever near me
Shorter and longer it forms
Checking items is the key
Keeping away from life’s storms.

[SSDay]

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#30 Reset

There was a time when the reset button wasn’t known to Rob. Reset buttons were a fairly new invention, only appearing within the past 10 years to the select few who could afford them, lived in a country that allowed them, and weren’t afraid to use them.

The Synapse company produced the units, under an incredibly long and hard to remember name. When they hit the street, they were called reset buttons. They were originally designed to be used in lab environments in studies of memory, learning, and perception. The premise of the device was simple. Place on the forehead of the person and press the scan button, ask them to think about earlier events, such as the task they just learned, or the person they’d just met, and lock the device in. Press the “remove” button and those memories would be gone. Technically not erased, but suppressed to great extent. They could be retrieved again, with the device’s aid, if needed. However on the street, no one ever retrieved memories. They simply axed them away for a lifetime. Soon the corners formerly occupied by drug dealers and ladies of the evening were occupied by bookish looking people, willing to “reset” anyone for a fee. Bad dates could be forgotten, as could horrendous days, and even giant events such as the loss of a loved one. It took mere seconds, and you were back to baseline. Reset, and happy.

Rob hadn’t ever entertained the use of one before his mother died. Now thinking of her death plagued him night and day. He researched what the process would be like on the Internet, and the general consensus was that he would remember his mother, and be aware that she wasn’t around, but wouldn’t specifically know where she went, or how horribly she’d died. Rob felt the slight absent-mindedness would be worth the confusion, so he sought out the nerd on the corner, and slipped him a roll of 20’s.

“Think about the events”, the man said as he put the device up to Rob’s forehead, after cleaning off the business end with an alcohol wipe.

“Ah, it’s got a strong signal – must be the death of a loved one huh? Or maybe a divorce?”, the man said as he pressed the magic button.

“All done”, he said as he removed the device and walked away. Rob was left standing there, dazed but otherwise fine. He slowly began to remember that he’d come here to have something reset from his mind. Of course he couldn’t remember what that was. Since he was at a loss for what he wanted gone, he assumed that the process had gone correctly. He walked away.

Six months later he returned. This time it was to remove the break up he had experienced with his wife. She couldn’t work through losing her mother-in-law, which of course perplexed Rob. Sure it was odd she wasn’t around, and he missed her, but he couldn’t understand why her long trip was so upsetting to Reneé. They fought, she left, and he cried. He couldn’t live with that. A roll of 20’s later, and he had forgotten all about it. He knew he was single, and that he’d had a relationship that ended, but knew not why, nor cared. It was as if the beautiful machine had simply erased away the memory, smudging around the edges of his mind as to leave a nice smooth edge. No worries, no pain.

It was around the 5th visit to the reset man that he realized he should just purchase one of the machines. It was marvelous how easy it was to live a happier life. He stockpiled his rolls of 20’s and eventually found one, and found friends willing to help him use it.

About the 20th use was the first time he realized he could use it to help him forget how often he had to use it. Use 21 felt just like use 1 – he just couldn’t figure out why he would own something and have never tried it.

And so it was, for years and years. Each painful memory pushed out of consciousness, avoided, removed. All went fine until the day he asked his son to help him. How could he have known that the boy was so mad at him for being so happy. The last thing he remembered before his mind became a twisted sorrow of existence was his son pressing the wrong button. Not ‘reset’, but ‘restore all’.

Author’s Note: A certain reader tells me that I tend to write dark stories. Sorry that this one does indeed fit that description. But perhaps in its timeless message of ‘be careful what you wish for’, one might think harder about how not only do our triumphs make us who we are – so do our sorrows.

[SSDay]

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#29 Leap Day

Jim the Bunny hopped everywhere. He hopped to his rabbit hole at night, he hopped out in the morning, and then hopped around all day. He hopped to his job as a Bunny Knitter, and he hopped to his part-time DJ’ing gigs on the weekend. He hopped repeatedly, rapidly, quickly, furiously, and furriously. The point is, he hopped everywhere.

So imagine his surprise the day in the Woods when everyone hopped. He’d never seen anything like it in his 3.75 years of life. Every animal, from Bob the Turtle to Jay and Kay the sheep, even Jabberpaw, was hopping all over the place. The only one who wasn’t hopping was Sylvester, the snake. He bopped his head up and down a bit as he slithered along, but no hopping.

“Hey Syl, what’s up – what’s with all the hopping today?”, Jim asked his snake friend.

“It’s Leap Day, stupid!”, Sylvester said with a hiss.

“What’s that?”, Jim said incredulously.

“It’s some weird day that only shows up every 4 years. Someone heard about it on the Internet and introduced it to us Woods residents about 20 years ago. We’re not exactly sure what it is, but every 1460 days or so we decide it’s time to hop around for a day. For all we know, it’s the only reason this place hasn’t gone up in a full-on forest fire.”, Sylvester explained.

“So you do something that makes no sense to you, to avoid a threat you aren’t even sure would happen, at an arbitrary time?” Jim asked.

“Yea, that sounds about right”, Sylvester said as he bopped his head up and down.

“If I wanted to that, I’d just join a religion!”, Jim said as he hopped away.

Author’s Note: Religion is great if it has meaning to you. Going through the motions, however, leads one to more confusion than satisfaction!

[SSDay]

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Encryption – It’s Not Just For The Paranoid

Recently I purchased a few external hard drives for backup purposes, and the first thing I did with them was to encrypt them using TrueCrypt. When I mention this to people, I generally get a sorta weird look. Sort of a “If you aren’t doing anything illegal [which I’m not, if you care], why do you need to encrypt your drives?”. While one could use encryption for nefarious reasons (and claim 5th amendment rights against forced decryption), there are a number of reasons why encryption of even non-sensitive data (i.e. my music collection) makes sense.

First, let’s talk about the costs of doing this. Using TrueCrypt, my product of choice (and a proven and secure open-source solution), the cost in dollars is $0. TrueCrypt is free, and runs on pretty much any operating system. The only other cost is time. On my computer, I was able to encrypt an entire 1 TB drive in just under 12 hours. To read or write files to this drive, I must mount it in TrueCrypt (Which takes about 5-10 seconds), and unmount it when I’m done (5-10 seconds). The speed of data writing/reading is a bit slower, however since I’m storing files there (and not doing video editing), it’s a negligible difference.

So those are the costs – a few seconds here and there, and an initial 12 hour investment if you want to encrypt an entire 1 TB drive (Encrypting smaller drives, or creating encrypted ‘containers’ (which look like files but act as small encrypted drives within a drive) takes less time).

And here are the benefits:

  1. Peace of Mind with Offsite Backup. You’ve probably heard before that you should keep a copy of your data ‘offsite’. This means, practically, ‘not in your home’. While online services are out there that can do this, for large chunks of data that you want to keep handy, the easiest way I know to do this is to keep a copy at your office or place of business. If that won’t work, your car (assuming it wouldn’t get burned up in the same fire that got the house), or a friend’s / parent’s house would also work. (Fireproof safes, while a good idea, shouldn’t be your only line of defense. Even if they protect the data, it might take days or weeks post-fire to get into them, so a true offsite solution maintains data security and data availability).So you have your offsite location picked out, and you have your external hard drive sitting there. Great. Now just schedule a task or calendar appointment to remind yourself to back up to it regularly, and you’re good to go – right? Well, maybe not. Most of us don’t have exclusive control of our workplaces. While we might have desk drawers that lock, or private offices, someone else usually has a key or can easily obtain one (If you don’t believe me, check out this site that will sell you any desk key you want, provided you can give them the number from the outside of the lock. Not exactly hard to get information!). Now imagine that someone gets into your desk, finds your external hard drive, and decides to power it up. Now they have access to your files, and while you might not have anything all that important in them, do you really want a stranger to have unbridled access to those files? They could peak at your resume, your vacation photos, your home movies, any backed up emails, word documents, budgets, etc… Nothing that will cause you to go to jail or compromise state security, but still – unsettling stuff.
  2. No Worries When Obsolescence occurs. So eventually that shiny 1 TB (or 2 TB, or 3 TB or whatever) drive is going to seem just as great as a 100 GB drive did 5 years ago. When that happens, do you really want to go through all the work to securely erase all of your personal information off of it? Or are you content to throw it out and let someone access everything because all you did was a quick format? If the data is encrypted in the first place, it’s never in danger or in need of secure deletion, provided the key is unretrievable by the finder.
  3. Got company data worth legal action over? Have you ever signed a Non-disclosure agreement? Ever read the fine print about what a company could do to you if you ‘leak’ out any of their information / databases / lists of customers / etc…? No one intends to break a NDA, however one of the most unfortunate ways one could be broken is through unencrypted hard drives. If you’re storing company backups with your own (because, say, you’re the IT guy at a small shop and it’s just easier to have a copy of the backup for piece of mind), then you need to secure it. Otherwise, bad things could happen.
  4. What’s the downside, exactly? So I’ve just made three good arguments for keeping your data secured. I told you that it takes me about 5-10 seconds to open my encrypted drive, and that read/write speed isn’t greatly impaired (If you’re encrypting a system partition, you might take care to use just 1 level of encryption with TrueCrypt, such as simply AES, since it’s secure and reasonably fast). So really, what is the excuse for not using some form of encryption? Remember, if someone gains access to your data, you can’t simply tell them “Sorry, I was ignorant and too busy to secure this stuff – can you please delete it and give me a second-chance?”.

So there you have it – some very good reasons why you might want to take a bit of time this week and encrypt your backup hard drives. It’ll give you some piece-of-mind, if nothing else.

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#26 Flash

It had been 6 months since the day when Mark found the list in an old hoodie he was putting on for the first time that September. It wasn’t too remarkable – just a list of chores for the day, 11 months ago.

call insurance agent
buy eggs
call Kelsey’s school
drop off Jo’s car
print resume

Mark paused as he recalled the day he wrote the list. He’d just been in an accident the day before, hence the call to his insurance company. Jo was having her boss over for dinner, and needed the eggs. Kelsey had been caught smoking in the bathroom at school, and her principal wanted to speak to her father. Jo’s car was acting up, and he was tasked with getting it fixed. On top of that, he had been told a few days earlier that his temporary assignment, which he hoped would be made permanent, was ending. He’d have to get his resumé out there once more. It was just another rough day after a series of rough months in the life of the 43 year-old divorced father of 1 troubled teenager, who was trying to make it work with his fiancé of two years. The previous 6 months had been hard on her as they struggled with her parent’s deaths. Kelsey could care less, but Mark had grown to think of Jo’s parents as the ‘good’ in-laws he’d never had with his first wife.

But all of that was before he got the call that changed everything. He remembered that his phone rang while he was buying the eggs listed on the note. He could barely hear the voice on the other end as he stood in the supermarket, and he didn’t recognize the number. Finally after a few moments of exchanging whats and huhs, he figured out it was Jo. She was at the doctor’s office, and needed him to pick her up. He didn’t understand – she had his car while he drove Kelsey’s old beater. Why couldn’t she drive home? When he reached the doctor’s office, Jo’s doctor took him into her office. They exchanged pleasantries, and while they talked for at least 30 minutes, Mark couldn’t remember anything after he heard the word “cancer”.

She hung on for 5 months, but it was aggressive and it took her. Today, six months after the funeral, he found himself thinking how 11 months ago, dozens of tiny annoyances kept him aggravated and upset.  In a flash, all of that changed. Somehow during her struggle, he found a job that was sympathetic to what he was going through, allowing him to start a few weeks after the funeral. Kelsey came out of her ‘rough’ period and tomorrow he was scheduled to drop her off at school. It was hard without Jo, but he was getting through. He crumpled up the old list and threw it out as he replaced it with the shopping list of things to buy for Kelsey’s dorm. Life wasn’t less hectic now, but given the alternative he experienced in those 5 months, he was happy to have a mile-long list.

“Ready to go, Dad?”, Kelsey said as she came bounding down the stairs. “The stores might be crazy busy today!”.

“Yep, I’m ready for anything”, Mark said in reply.

[SSDay]

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#22 Jim the Bunny Learns to Knit

Jim hopped through the forest with a giant grin on his face. He’d just grabbed a bunch of files from Jabberpaw, and had covered his internet tracks by paying off Sylvester the snake. Now he just needed to get home and load up his found files.

On the way, he tripped, since he wasn’t the most coordinated bunny in the world. In doing so, his Lucky Rabbit’s Foot USB drive fell off of the tuft of fur he’d attached it to, and it fell into the mud puddle. For the next 3 days he spent most of his time trying to remove all of the mud from the contacts so that he could read the drive once more. This was annoying, so he decided he needed to buy a cover for his drive.

Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t sell covers for Lucky Rabbit’s Foot USB drives. Jim was in a proverbial, thankfully not actual, pickle. His only solution was to make one. So that’s how it came to be that he hopped over to the sheep flock, and found Kay the sheep.

Kay was well known throughout the Woods as the premier knitting expert of all of the Animals. She used only the best yarn, which she stole off of her husband, Jay the Sheep. Jay had the best wool in the Woods, when he had a chance to grow it before Kay shore it off.

Kay was impressed to see Jim hop up.

“Here to learn to Knit”? She asked.

“No, I just want a cover for my USB drive”, he responded. Kay always wanted to teach people to knit.

“OK, that’ll be $400”, Kay responded without batting a sheep eyelash.

“WHAT?!?”, Jim’s bunny jaw dropped. Prices had gone up considerably since the last time he’d worked with Kay.

“Well, Jay’s charging more for the raw materials, but really the bulk of the price increase is that I’m just too busy to help you these days, Jim”, she said with a grin, “You see, I’ve become a world famous knitting sheep”.

Jim was incredulous. He’d been a customer of Kay’s for years. She’d knitted his tail cozy, his carrot-shaped shopping bag, and his winter coat.

“Can’t you cut me a break?”, he asked.

“Well, I might have a solution”, she responded.

So it happened that Jim the Bunny was compelled to learn to knit, to become Kay’s assistant, in exchange for a custom lucky rabbit foot’s USB cover. Initially reluctant, Jim was at least consoled by the regular pay. Plus he was able to trade his knitted work for access to Jabberpaw’s extensive media library. The bear might have been a loaner, but he did enjoy custom sweaters.

[SSDay]

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#16 Take It Away

The old library sat unused, the new one sat next door. The old library was the site of many a hot debate by impassioned undergraduates inspired to succeed as they were the first to attend college in their family, the first to be able to sit around all day and think as opposed to work. The first to be given that sort of freedom. The new library’s claim to fame was that it sported a coffee bar, and lots of big plush chairs near power outlets.

The old car sits on the used car lot, abandoned by it’s owner. They had been through good and bad, and many jury-rigged fixes in place of regular maintenance. He had driven it down to fumes numerous times, praying that it could make it just a bit farther to the next gas station. It had been where he got his first traffic ticket, and made out with his future-wife. Now the new car sat in the garage,  and he felt he’d earned it through years of hard work. But it never felt the same.

The old computer waits for the child to play with it. It’s the location of the first article she wrote, and where she slaved over her resume that she used to get the position she loved. It’s the computer that held the games which she used to relax after a long day studying. It’s the computer that traveled the 2 hour commute during her first years of working here. Now the new computer purrs and moves about quickly, she seldom thinks of the old clunker.

The old lover feels the sting of the rejection, and sits lonely with the old friends, and the forgotten family. They wonder aloud why they were abandoned, why they were cast aside as useless by the person they once knew. The replacements never see their predecessors, they are too busy enjoying the time with their new friend.

It’s fine and well to take away the old and replace with the new when progress demands. But one should carefully consider the consequences, directly proportional to the sentience of the object being replaced.

[SSDay]

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#14 A Valentine’s Day Poem

The flowers were shaking, as I walked to the door
My senses were confused, they were torn
I was about to meet a girl, for the first time in person
Yet I was calm, not anxious or scared.

Time passed, we bonded, and we longed to take the next step
I became We, and We found peace with each other
We decided to be together forever, eternity, for always.
Still I was calm, not anxious or scared.

Now it’s been nearly 13 years, my love.
We’re in a pattern of love and respect, we finish each other’s thoughts.
We anchor ourselves against the rock we built.
Calmly, not anxious or scared.

[SSDay]

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#13 Attention to Detail

He had a keen sense for details, and she hated that about him. As they walked along the beach, he might interrupt the sunset to comment on the missing screw in the “swim at own risk” sign. As they stood at the train station, he’d point out the open plastic weather flap over the bolt on the read out. And as they fought over how to deal with delicate issues, he was prone to correct her grammar, or her handwriting.

He hadn’t always been like this. Several years ago, right after their 4th anniversary, he had lost a job. He was fired after a long battle with a manager who disliked him, and while the reasons were never really known, in his mind the origin lie at a mistake he had made on a presentation, years before his termination. After his termination, he fell into a deep depression, and while therapy had helped him get back to a functional state, the obsessive need to attend to every little detail kept him from fully embracing his former life.

She had handled it gracefully for the first few years, she had even entertained him, by turning it into a bit of a game, to see who could out nitpick the other. But after a year she had to admit it wasn’t fun for her, and it didn’t seem much relief to him. Instead, it honed his skills. She tried ignoring the problem for awhile, and finally she lost all patience and held it in outright contempt. The man she loved taken prisoner by the obsession she loathed, and she knew that given a few more years, she would either leave or go insane.

It so happened that she went for a physical exam at his urging one spring, as he had become a preventative health nut, looking to check off a list of the optimal ways to keep oneself in shape. They found a tumor on her neck, no bigger than a walnut, and the decision was made to remove it. It was the easiest way to deal with the problem, and while the doctors were fairly certain it was benign, he insisted that they be sure.

It required her to stay in the hospital for one night, for observation, after the surgery. He vowed to keep watch, and she let him mostly so that she wouldn’t need to answer a thousand questions over the telephone regarding exactly how she was doing. He kept everything in line for her, organized her paper work, kept track of her personal belongings, and made sure she got everything she needed. At night, they attached her to some monitoring equipment, and he heard the subtle tone every five minutes, as a light flickered on at one of the indicators.

“Nurse, what does that mean”, he asked as she entered the room.

“Oh Mr. Smith, that light goes on when we haven’t hooked up a certain sensor. Your wife doesn’t need that sensor tonight, but without it the machine will emit a small tone and light up on that spot” she said as she gestured.

“Are you certain?”, he asked. She stared at him in amazement. She had been working there for 10 years, and had been using this particular piece of equipment for five. She knew it would do this, she knew why it was doing it, and she also knew he was of a nervous disposition. She reassured him, but was firm. “I’m certain it’s fine Mr. Smith, your wife will be OK”.

He sat there all night, watching her sleep, and watching the light. He had resolved himself to the fact that nothing he could do would make the nurses stop the beep and light – they were fine with it on, his wife didn’t find it disturbing, and the world wasn’t going to end with it’s presence. He would need to put it out of his mind.

At about 2 AM, the light turned off and the tone stopped. He thought “Perhaps it times out after 6 hours of inactivity”, but kept vigilant incase it would return. He was not surprised when it did, about 10 minutes later. But this time, it was different. The tone was more shrill, and the light was slightly to the left of it’s former position. He raced out of the room to the nurses station and told her.

“It’s fine Mr. Smith, that has to be the same light – there aren’t any others on that end of the machine”, she reported. He couldn’t accept that. He’d lived with one detail out of order for hours now, and another could not be tolerated. He began searching the hallways, interrogating every person he found with a badge about the machine, while periodically checking on his wife. Finally, after about 30 minutes, a doctor took pity on him, and went to her room with him to check.

“Mr. Smith, it’s just like they told you – look, the light is the same, and I can show you the page in the operators manual for this machine that explains why the light and tone persists”. The doctor was incredibly kind about the confusion, showed him the manual, and suggested he get some rest.

“You must have nodded off for a few minutes, and when you noticed the tone again, it seemed different due to your lack of sleep”, he said. Mr. Smith was tired, and in no capability to protest at this point. He stayed there the rest of the night, asleep in a chair.

The next morning, his wife woke him with a sharp command and stern look.

“I hear you had half the hospital going crazy last night about that silly light”, she barked. He meekly told her his side, but she would have none of it. “I know you mean well, but this is crazy. We need time apart. You can go home, I’m going to my mother’s” she said.

Weeks passed as he languished at their home. She seemed more and more distant, more sure of her decision to leave. She was the only thing holding him together, and without her, he knew that the obsession would own him, he would end up committed, and his life would be reduced to rubble.

Suddenly, there was a knock at the door. He looked out the window and saw her standing there, papers in hand. This was it, she had come to show him the end of their marriage on paper, he would not be able to convince her otherwise. One night he had let his obsession go too far, and now he would pay for it.

He opened the door but could not hold back his tears, as she walked in and asked him to sit.

“I need to show you this”, she said as she opened the large file. To his surprise, it was not filled with legal papers, but with medical X-ray images. He saw the walnut sized lump, and saw that the papers contained were a lab report.

“When they analyzed it, they found out it wasn’t benign”, she said. “In fact, it would have grown pretty quickly, and within a few months, been inoperable.”. He was shocked. His obsession with details had saved her. Maybe not that night in the hospital, but if it hadn’t been for the same motivations that haunted him that night, she wouldn’t be sitting in the house today.

“I think, with some help, I can learn to be there for you, like you’ve been there for me”, she said. She showed him the card of a psychologist that she had been seeing. “I don’t think I ever realized how much the obsessions you have were driven by a need to protect me, and us”, she whispered. They collapsed into each other’s arms on the couch, and for the first time in years, no detail seemed out of place.

[SSDay]

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