In the summer of 2006 I joined a kendo club in Overland Park, partly out of a long standing interest in kendo and partly out of a need to workout and lose some weight. In early August I pulled a groin muscle in my left leg. Badly. Well, the original injury wasn’t that bad perhaps, but I foolishly tried to workout anyway and ended up with a nasty pull.
The resulting limp was so bad that I developed some compensation injuries elsewhere. The worst of these was in my lower back. The pain was unlike anything I had felt before. One night it was so intense that not only did it wake me up, I could move - I was unable to roll over or get out bed.
A long sequence of events followed culminating in a visit to my regular physician. She ordered a set of x-rays and pronounced me as having severe degenerative disk disease or arthritis. We all lose some height as we age as the disks in our spines compress and collapse with age, this is known as degenerative disk disease even though it isn’t really a disease. Severe just means it happens sooner than normal or in a more accelerated fashion.
A month or so of physical therapy followed leaving me with a set of about 15 stretching and strengthening exercises to perform on a daily basis. I followed the prescribed routine for about a year, laying on my yoga pad nightly, and my back, on the whole, was much better.
However, having words like “severe” and “arthritis” banded about with regards to ones back make you timid about lifting and worrisome about anything that might cause you pain. An ill-considered lower back massage that left me on the floor in agony, and a brief muscle spasm for no apparent reason one other time, have left me cautious around my back.
On Friday last week I saw a new chiropractor, Dr. Mike. After hearing my story he took a couple of x-rays of my lower back and then went over them with me. The spacing between my lumbar vertebrae all look uniform and good. There are one or two small bone spur indications, but no evidence of severe anything, much less degenerative disk disease.
Having lived through two or three really bad episodes of lower back pain I know that I need to be careful about my back, but hearing, and seeing, that my back is mechanically in better shape than I previously thought was nice. My hope is that once the chiropractor gets me tuned up that the bicycle riding and walking we do will help to keep my properly aligned .
Recently I was profiled and, as a result, treated differently as I as leaving Walmart.
I’m an introvert and as such do not readily engage with people I don’t know. Retailers who employ greeters to say something to every person who enters or leaves the store put those of us who are not wired for comfortable social interaction on the spot.
Typically when I enter Walmart I try to avoid having to interact with the greeter. If there are other people entering at the same time I will position them between myself and the forced cheerfulness of the “Welcome to Walmart!” The situation at Best Buy is more egregious as their greeter is basically behind you once you are fully in the store and his or her greeting forces you to stop and turn around to acknowledge it. Walking through that greeting always makes my skin prickle - in spite of being introverted I have been socialized to respond when talked to. Couple the resulting on-the-spot awkwardness with the frenetic energy in Best Buy and you understand why I only rarely venture into the store any more.
I digress.
After going to Walmart for a couple items late one evening recently, I was headed toward the exit when the greeting wished me a good evening. I wasn’t in a social mood, and really didn’t want to have to accept another well-meaning but intrusive verbal interaction with a stranger. So I didn’t even look at the greeter. Instantly she shot off her stool and intercepted me at the door. Her demeanor had changed from were-all-friends-here to anger and suspicion. She demanded to see my receipt, asking the question so fast it came out as, “Ineedtoseeyourreceipt!” I had to ask her to repeat herself, and she even more emphatically said, “I NEED TO SEE YOU RECEIPT.” Her manner was aggressive and her entire attitude was accusatory.
I showed her the receipt for the mild, orange juice and cat food and kitty litter I had bought and paid for at the register immediately in front of her greeter post, and she made a big show of verifying that all four items in my cart were on the receipt. After discovering that my lack of response to her “Good evening” didn’t mean that I was steal the Walmart crown jewels, she thrust the receipt back and me and said “Okay.”
Just because I choose not to talk to people, just because I am not social, just because it was late and I was tired and grumpy, just because I didn’t act in the prescribed Walmart way, I was profiled as being suspicious and potentially up to no good.
While I think that proper behavioral profiling performed by well trained professionals may be the best way to determine if someone is actively engaged in activity they shouldn’t be doing, I think that improper understanding of human traits and actions results in misunderstandings like the one I experienced at Walmart while buying cat litter. My experience is nothing compared to what anyone who appears different has already experienced. My experience at Walmart is nothing compared to what our government has subjected millions of travelers and visitors to our country to in the years since 2001.
But, my experience is a cautionary tale that merely telling everyone to be suspicious and to report unusual behavior isn’t enough and isn’t right.
Today I purchased a brand new bicycle for myself. Earlier in the week we had gotten one for Sibylle. Rather than cross post from our site to this one, go ahead and click through to read about bicycles built for us. In the meantime, here’s a picture of my new bike.
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For the first time in too many years to remember (or think about) I got my bicycle out and rode more than just around the block. The last time I seriously rode a bike was probably in the early 1990s, call it 18 years ago. I flirted with the idea briefly in the Autumn of 2005 but was so far out of shape then that riding was painfully hard.
Since then I lost 57 pounds and regained about 15. From a low of 193 I am now hovering around the 207 ~ 208 mark. Too much. Watching what I eat isn’t enough. Sibylle and I are in the process of joining a local health club and we have been looking at bicycles so we can ride around our neighborhood. With warmer days ahead and Sibylle’s teaching schedule which leave me a “free” hour a couple days a week, I am hoping to ride my bicycle more this year, perhaps even commuting to work on a regular basis. Every calorie burned is that much less weight hanging around my middle. The 50 pounds I lost before was largely assisted by a summer of kendo in the park. Working out in 100º temperatures twice a week burned through lots and lots of calories.
At the risk of jinxing all of this good intention, below is a map of the first 4.5 mile ride of the season for me. At a blistering 10.8 mph.
The high school I attended back in Decatur Illinois, Dwight D. Eisenhower High School, was fortunate enough to have a BASIC computer programming course. Through a time-sharing arrangement with a local manufacturer we had access to a mainframe computer via a couple of Teletype terminals.
I happily spend hours coding, entering, debugging, and eventually running my programs through these terminals. Each had a large roll of yellow paper and a paper tape spool. With the terminal set to “off line” mode you could enter your program into a local buffer, and then cause it to be listed on the paper tape. Once you had a complete program captured on paper tape you connected to the mainframe (online) and let the paper tape reader input your program to the computer. This was faster than typing the program yourself while connected and therefore spending money. Each connection minute was billed as was each CPU second used.
After spending my Junior year learning all I could from the teacher I spend my Senior year helping to run the computer “lab” such as it was. Two Teletype terminals and an optical scan card reader. Somewhere in a box in our garage I have a couple, maybe three, paper tape spools with now fossilized programs listed on them.
This reminiscence was triggered by seeing the following image this morning. Part of a larger article about The Art of Unix Usability by Eric Steven Raymond. This is my second computer interface.
With Sibylle in Germany for a week I’ve been watching a lot of movies to fill the time. At only a dollar a movie per night, Redbox has figured prominently in providing new material to watch. With several Redboxes in town and the ability to checkout their inventory online, I’ve been able to pick and choose movies I wanted to see.
Among them was a documentary called It Might Get Loud. It’s a conversation with Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White; three generations of guitarists. I throughly enjoyed the film but there was one moment that defined the whole thing for me.
Jimmy Page was talking about wanting to get a particular sound, a sustain, and how someone developed for him a pedal that gave him that sound. To demonstrate he played the opening of Whole Lotta Love in front of The Edge and Jack White. Both other guitarist were smiling and Edge stood up and moved closer to watch. It was amazing to see one of the premiere guitarists in the world, someone that most aspiring players would give their left ahem to play like so totally entranced by another guitarists playing.
You always hear about the people world class performers or athletes admire, but you rarely get to see that admiration so clearly and openly.
This movie was mind bending when it originally came out in 1982, and it looks like the sequel will be just as good if not better. I may have to swallow a handful of pain killers and brave the insanity that is the current 3D movie craze to see it on a big screen.
One of the many responsibilities that Sibylle has shouldered in the wake of her mother’s death has been managing the financial portion of the estate. Working with the local bank and the account manager there, Sibylle was able to figure out what automatic payments occur each month, and general was able to get a sense for what upcoming payments would need to be authorized.
We were able to establish online access to one account which will allow us to do some banking from here in the States rather than relying on phone calls, email or the postal service. The account security has a slightly different approach than any bank I’ve worked with here in the States. In addition to an account username and password there is a transaction number.
The bank mailed to our postal address a sheet with 100 6-digit numbers. Any transaction we want to perform online, transferring funds, making payments, et cetera, will require one of those numbers. During the process the bank’s system asks for a specific 6-digit number, say #38. As the account holder you are expected to have access to the “TAN” sheet and therefore can lookup the corresponding TAN value and enter it upon request. Each number is only used once; in fact the sheet has room for the date the number was used and the purpose. The bank keeps track of how many transactions, and therefore how many TAN numbers have been used. When you have used 80 of the 100 a new sheet is automatically sent to you. And you have to activate that sheet using one of the remaining TAN numbers from the previous sheet.
In effect this is a one-time pad form of encryption. As long as we are the only people with our set of 100 6-digit numbers, no one else can do anything with our account even if they were to somehow discover the username and password. While it seems lower-tech at first than images and other confirmations that American financial institutions use to protect your account, I think it is less susceptible to fraud and attack. You’d have to break into our house and find the TAN sheet before you could do anything to that account.
One of the things I appreciate about traveling to other countries is seeing how they address and handle situations differently. The use of a TAN sheet with online banking is a much better solution, I think, than what we have here in the States.
On a whim, when purchasing plane tickets to Germany in January, I signed Sibylle and I up for Delta Skymiles accounts. We like to visit Europe and try to use Delta for those trips and it seemed like a good idea to start benefitting from our loyalty.
The miles for our flights in January appeared on both our accounts beautifully. Following the death of her mother we returned to Germany in February and again I used Delta for the flights and our Skymiles accounts. While in Germany I needed to change the return dates and therefore accessed the Delta sight and discovered that her miles had not updated like mine had. Her flights weren’t all showing up properly.
Now that we are back in the States I decided to call Delta to see what was going on with her Skymiles account. It all has to do with her name.
In September 1962 the birth registrar made a clerical error. He (or she) reversed Sibylle’s first and middle names on the form, and she (or he) misspelled Sibylle. This was never a problem and Sibylle herself wasn’t aware of the situation until she applied for a passport in her teens and had to sign her legal name, reversed from what she knew and misspelled.
Fast forward to today. Delta not only tracks your trips by your Skymiles account number but by spelling and appearance of the name on the ticket. I registered her account using her first initial and the correct spelling of her middle name, Sibylle. However that doesn’t match her passport which matches her clerically erred birth certificate, showing first name and middle name reversed, the middle name misspelled, and then last name. Nor does the Skymiles account name match her driver’s license which shows birth certificate first name, middle initial, and last name.
Delta is willing to untangle her Skymiles account and credit her with both round-trip flights to Germany but only after seeing a copy of the passport, receipts for the tickets purchased, and a request from us. They claim it usually takes 72 hours to update an account. Sometimes as long as a week. Sibylle is considering a return trip to Germany in two weeks to work on her mother’s estate some more. I’m sure that this new set of flights will further complicate her Skymiles account.
As we move more and more of our daily interactions onto computers, and as service providers work to eliminate fraud, situations like this will become more common. Accuracy in entering data (both by individuals and by organizations capturing the data) will be critical. Just having an account number won’t be enough. It may become increasingly complicated to prove that you are really you.
Since December 2005 I have been using Mint to track my web site statistics. Out of the box it provides a good look at who is coming to your site, how frequently, and to which pages. Better still, Mint is extensible through plugins called Peppers. Pepper-mint, get it?
Periodically the base package and or some of the Peppers have updates available. Updating isn’t too difficult but it does require paying attention to details. Since your site is a live, dynamic thing, you want the outage of your statistics tracking to be as short as possible when updating. The ideal way to accomplish this is to rename the folders you are about to upload to your Mint installation from there real name (“default”) to an alternate name (“default-new”) so the new stuff can coexist with the old stuff temporarily.
Once you’ve uploaded all the new pieces (each renamed to end in “-new”) then you go through a two step renaming process. “default” to “default-old” and “default-new” to “default” Since renaming is a much faster operation than uploading, the span of downtime is very short. The final step is to remove the “default-old” package as it is no longer needed.
All of this worked perfectly yesterday, except that I was lazy and didn’t remover the old package from the last Pepper I updated. This meant that the directory contained both “locationsplus” and “locationsplus-old”. Seemingly a minor point. The Mint page loaded and everything seemed to be working. Later I went to my Mint preferences and the page didn’t finish loading. After a few minutes of poking around I discovered the Pepper folder with what were essentially two copies of the same Pepper. Once I deleted the “-old” version the Preferences page loaded properly.
The moral of the story is to follow all the steps, and not just the ones you like.