Snowdrops

The developers didn't do much, if anything, with quite a large chunk of property next to the parking lot.  (Well, except for weeding out the sunflowers which I had tried to keep alive, by hand watering, during the hottest part of the summer.)

There is an area not too far from our property where people seem to have dumped quite a bit of yard waste.  In the late winter, there are clumps of snow drops, crocuses, daffodils, and other bulb based flowers.  So, last year, after most of them had died back, I had taken note of where the flowers had come up, and went and dug until I found some bulbs.  I took a few bulbs from the edges of a number of different clumps, and then planted them behind my car's parking space.  Predictably, the landscapers didn't do anything in this area, except dump another layer of mulch on it in the late summer.

So, the fact that these plants have survived the neglect, as well as an exceptional (for this part of the world) cold snap of two weeks duration, is the reason that I have been so chuffed about the little green shoots that have been showing up.  And, yes, I can now confirm that the earliest of the green shoots were, in fact, snowdrops.  I am reasonably confident that another clump of shoots, in a slightly darker green colour, are likely crocuses.  I think there is at least one Narcissus in the area, and possibly also a hyacinth.  So, as silly as it may seem, I am absolutely delighted that there is a bed of these hardy early spring flowers behind my (and only my) parking space.

MGG - 6.18 - Gloria - health (1)

I really don't know what to title this one.  "The Beginning of the End?"  Yes, this marked a significant change in Gloria's health, but most of it really wasn't related to her death.  Yes, it kind of marked the start of my career as Gloria's caregiver, but she always *had* had health issues.

Number Two Daughter was moving house, so we were babysitting the kids.  We took them to a movie.  They wanted to see the new Transformers movie.  Which was in 3D.  And was also around three hours long.  Wearing 3D glasses, for so long, is somewhat disorienting.  Coming out of the theater, and crossing the parking lot, Gloria slipped on a patch of slimy mud that had been the bottom of a drying puddle.  She went down.  She didn't get up again.  When I got to her she was in an awful lot of pain.

I drove her, and the kids, to the hospital.  We called Number Two Daughter, who came and got her kids.  It turned out that Gloria had broken her shoulder: shattering the top of the humerus into four pieces.

It was, of course, extremely painful.  As with any joint break, it took an awfully long time to heal.  In the initial stages of healing, Gloria was in the big armchair/massage chair that I had won at a trade show, very early in our marriage.  It allowed her to sleep in a semi-reclining position, and ensured that she didn't roll onto her shoulder during the night.  However, Gloria was not able to manage to get out of the chair by herself.  So, during the night, when she needed to get up to the bathroom, she had her cell phone with her beside the chair, and would call me on the house phone, so that I would wake up, come downstairs, get her out of the chair so that she could go to the bathroom, and then put her back in the chair, and go back upstairs to bed.

It was her right shoulder that was broken.  While everyone was extremely sympathetic to her plight, and her pain, when they went to comfort her, all of them, universally, patted her on her right shoulder.

She went to a physiotherapist over a period of about a year.  The physiotherapy seemed to help a bit at first, but then she hit a plateau.  We went back to the doctor, who eventually got more medical imaging of her shoulder, which determined that her rotator cuff was torn, and therefore physiotherapy was contraindicated.  Her right shoulder was somewhat restricted after that.

While it can't be said that this problem caused the further medical problems, this was the beginning of a long string of surgeries and medical issues.

Gloria had had problems all her life with IBS, Irritable Bowel Syndrome.  She also had a hiatus hernia, which caused gastric reflux, frequently seriously painful.  Her stomach and gastrointestinal problems seemed to be getting worse.  And then one day, she seemed to have heart or lung problems, so we went to emergency.  It turned out that the hiatus hernia had opened up sufficiently that her stomach was actually in her chest, where it is not supposed to be.  It was impeding her heart and lungs, because of the stomach occupying the space that they should have used for normal movements.

The hospital did surgery on the hiatus hernia.  However, there are two ways that you can do this.  One is to completely open the abdominal wall, and do the surgery with the abdomen exposed.  The other way to do it is a kind of keyhole surgery, using four holes, and special manipulators through the holes to reposition organs and sew up the diaphragm.  This was the choice of surgery in Gloria's case.

Gloria has always had problems with wounds taking a long time to heal.  In this case, the even the small surgical holds that were used for her diaphragm surgery, reopened after the surgery; a process known as dehiscence.  We went to the ambulatory care clinic, which we tended to refer to as the wound clinic, and, revisiting two or three times per week, had absolutely wonderful care from the nurses who viewed, cleaned, packed, and explained all the processes, in caring for the wound over a period of at least three months.  Finally, on one visit to the wound clinic, when Gloria was not feeling very well, the nurse treating her on that occasion said, "Congratulations, your wound is finally healed.  Now go straight to emergency, because you're very sick!"

So, we were back at emergency.  In this case, the problem was not determined right away, and so Gloria was admitted to hospital, and I went home.  During the night, the nurse who was on shift where Gloria was, was someone that we knew.  She knew that Gloria tolerated an awful lot of pain, and that if she was complaining of pain that it must be extremely painful, and so alerted a doctor, and insisted that Gloria be seen, since something was obviously seriously wrong.  I got a call at 7:00 in the morning.  The doctor had determined that the previous surgery had completely let go, and the surgery would have to be done all over again.  They transferred her to the Vancouver General Hospital, and did the surgery with the abdomen fully open, rather than trying to do the keyhole surgery again.  The surgery, in this case, took at least eight hours.  Gloria ended up in the post recovery post-surgical board with at least a dozen tubes and wires running in and out of her body.

It was a while before Gloria could go home.  And then the wound dehisced again. So it was back to the wound clinic, for another three months, to get that wound healed up again.  In this case, when Gloria went home, she had one tube still running out of her stomach, left there to stabilize her stomach in a position where an artificial scar would be formed inside, anchoring the stomach in position so that it wouldn't move again.  I had to clean her tube and wound twice a day, in order to prevent infection.

And then, roughly a year later, while she was still occasionally visiting the surgeon to make sure that her internal organs were settling into place properly, she got an inflammation around the surgical site.  Again.  We went back to the General, seeing the doctor, who sent us over to the emergency ward, immediately, to have this inflammation lanced.  It turned out that there was a piece of surgical suture, that had been in place from either the first or the second surgery, which the body had finally infected and rejected.  So, once again, it was back to the wound clinic, for another three months of sessions two and three times a week.  We were getting quite familiar with the wound clinic staff by this point.

Sometime after (and, once again, there was no causal link), there were some troubling indications, and Gloria was sent to an oncologist.  In pursuing the situation with regard to the cancer, it was also determined that there was a problem with her thyroid, so she was seeing a thyroid specialist at the same time.  Nothing was ever really determined about a specific problem with the thyroid, although she was put on hormone replacement medication, a synthetic form of the hormone that they thyroid normally produces to give you energy.  So, once again, two things were going on that seem to have seemed to possibly be related, but actually had no relation to each other, as far as anybody could ever determine.

The cancer was Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.  This was diagnosed, but the oncologist wanted to get more details about it, so Gloria was referred for a PET scan.  As it happens, I went to UBC just after the TRIUMF cyclotron was put into operation, where PET scanning was invented.  So I knew something of the situation and process.  However, due to some kind of administrative mix-up, Gloria was delayed in terms of being scheduled for a PET scan, and so it was some months before she was actually scanned.

The PET scan process is quite interesting.  The process involves being injected with a sugar solution, where some of the component atomic particles have been replaced with positrons.  Because it is sugar, the sugars end up in areas that are more active than others, and, when you have tumours, cancer is generally one of the most active sites in your body.  Therefore, by looking at where positron radiation is being emitted from, you know where the sugar molecules are collecting, and can therefore pinpoint cancerous sites.  The positron scanning is paired with a CAT scan so that there is a reference as to where the emitting sites are in particular organs in the body.

As well as knowing about PET scanning, as a security maven, I also know something about border security procedures.  The technician doing the PET scanning, when she gave Gloria the injection of sugar, noted that she should not try and cross the border for the next 72 hours. Gloria found this kind of surprising, and I burst out laughing, because I knew why this was the case.  At the US border land crossings, there are extremely sensitive radiation detectors.  These detectors are so sensitive that, yes, anyone who has had radiation treatments, of whatever kind, will set the detectors off.

In the delay between Gloria's initial referral, and the final scheduled PET scan, Gloria's lymphoma had progressed from stage one to stage three.  It was an extremely aggressive form of lymphoma.  This is actually a good thing.  In the same way that a high performance car requires lots of time in the shop to maintain its operation, aggressive cancers are more susceptible to chemotherapy, and therefore, in a sense, aggressive cancers are easier to treat.  Gloria was treated with chemotherapy.  At least six sessions, and possibly eight.  I can't recall anymore.

I can recall that the chemotherapy brought her white cell count down very drastically.  In order to try and boost her immune system, she was prescribed an extremely expensive drug, which did not exactly *increase* white cell production, but did release the white cells earlier than they would normally have been released.  This meant that she did have some white cells in her bloodstream, but that they were primarily immature.  We joked about having to rely on her teenage white cells.

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Next: TBA

MGG - 5.52 - HWYD - 555-1212

OK, I might have been a little too subtle.

I posted, "My phone said I had a missed call from +1-604-555-1212.

"Can't quite put my finger on it, but I have the strangest feeling that it was from a scammer ..."

555 is, and has been for some time, a "reserved" exchange in the North American public telephone system (+1-).  No area is ever assigned 555.  For the most part, you will see all telephone numbers on Hollywood/American movies and TV shows are in the 555 exchange, since the telcos know that calls to those numbers don't go anywhere.

There are a few reserved numbers *within* the 555 non-exchange.  At one point various area codes used 555-1212 as directory assistance.

At one point I worked in telecommunications consulting, including some work with telephony, so I know these things.  I tend to assume that anything *I* know is common knowledge.  I *also* know that, these days, pretty much any call you get from a scammer is going to have a falsified number show up in automatic number identification (so-called "caller-ID).  (This is why the advice to block numbers from scammers on your phone is pretty much useless: scammers just generate random numbers, or numbers "near" your number, that they put out in automatic number identification.)  (Even I, with my *extremely* limited experience in telephony, and not being a phone phreak, know at least *four* *different* ways to generate false input to automatic number identification.)

So, when my phone told me that I had a missed call from +1-604-555-1212, I knew that that was impossible.  Being impossible, it *had* to be from a scammer.  So I figured that my colleagues in security would all appreciate the joke.

It turns out, the joke was on me.  As I knew, if I had thought about it for a minute, there has always been a gulf between telephony people, and data communications people.  And, even these days, when "the network is the computer," a lot of techies still don't actually know how the network works.  Even the data network.  So, a lot of them didn't get the joke, and went to work to help me out.  (Sorry, you lot.)

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Job 6:8-9

"Oh, that I might have my request, that God would grant what I hope for, that God would be willing to crush me, to let loose his hand and cut off my life!

MGG - 6.17 - Gloria - Gloria's Hoodie

As possibly mentioned elsewhere, my wardrobe, these days, consists principally of free clothing provided by vendors, trade shows, and conferences at which I have spoken.  This is the reason that my wardrobe is predominantly black: vendors have been in love with black for the past two decades, at the very least.  I have lots of black t-shirts, black hoodies, black jackets, and even black socks.

One of the conferences where I got swag was at CanSecWest.  However, I don't have very much of it, because Dragos (or whoever did his ordering), ordered from Malaysia, Indonesia, and other places where men are much smaller than they are in North America.  An awful lot of the swag clothing provided by CanSecWest, even when it was marked as 3XL (three times extra large) would be a medium, at best.  So, I didn't bring home an awful lot of that swag.

One hoodie that I did bring home was, in fact, too small for me at the time.  But it fit Gloria just fine.  And so she took to wearing it, and wore it quite a bit.  It was interesting when people would ask her where she got the hoodie, and what the logo was, and we then had to explain that it was clothing from a conference to which I had proposed a presentation, but it was too small for me, so Gloria wore it.

As also noted elsewhere, after Gloria died, I found that I had lost weight over her period of illness and death.  And then continued to lose weight, over the weeks that followed.  So, having been overweight for pretty much all of our married life, I figured that I should use this head start, and the fact that I was walking everywhere, to try and diet, and lose a bit more.

Shortly, therefore, I was down to a size where I could wear the hoodie again.  So I did.  I still have it, and, mostly because Gloria wore it so much, it could be one piece of my wardrobe that I would have trouble throwing away.  There were also a number of the t-shirts that I had, and still have, that Gloria would wear.  There were a number that were not big enough for me at my highest weight, but which Gloria could wear just fine.  They are now mixed in with my t-shirts, and there are only a few of them that I can specifically identify as being t-shirts that were Gloria's amongst all of mine, as I am now small enough to wear all of them, with some of them being exceptionally large.  But, as Gloria frequently noted, I never care what I wear so the fact that it's oversized isn't a particular issue for me.

I did finally get to speak at CanSecWest, six months after Gloria died.  (It was, in fact, six months to the *day* after Gloria died.)  And I was given another jacket, by CanSecWest, at that particular conference.  By that time, the largest jacket that they had available was, in fact, big enough to fit me.  So, I do have two pieces of CanSecWest swag that I can wear.  And do.

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Review of "Wicked"

This is a review of "Wicked."  The musical, not the book.  The movie, not the stage version.  Part one.  (Of the movie, not the review.)

I read the book.  I appreciated the conceit of taking a known story, and looking at it from the other side, but, overall, I found the book to be disjointed, and lacking a central point or theme.  I was somewhat interested in what was added to, and dropped from, the movie version of "The Wizard of Oz."  (I've never actually read the book of "The Wizard of Oz," although I do know some of the changes that the movie made.)  (I must admit that I'm starting to get lost in the derivative nature of this work.)

I saw the musical.  In a rather problematic situation, but I noted the changes made from the "Wicked" book, and I liked some of the songs.  So I was actually rather eager to see the movie version.

The movie version, as spectacle, is impressive.  It is worth watching, as a movie.  However, I find it odd that, with a runtime close to three hours, the character development falters, and is more alluded to than demonstrated.  If you know all the versions (and can keep them straight in your head) you can see where things are headed.  But the spectacle and production does take away from other aspects of the story.  The theme has been narrowed (and, in some places, cleaned up), but is now simply a weak version of "you shouldn't dislike different people simply because they are different," and has lost some of the depth of the "Wicked" book.  The songs have, almost all, been turned into production numbers so lavish that you are a few minutes into them before you realize "oh, yeah, I remember that song, but it's not a song anymore."

I'm still interested in seeing Part Two, whenever it comes out, but I'm not so eager anymore ...

Death Cafe

OK, *that* was marginally disappointing.

The one thing our society refuses to talk about is death.  At a Death Cafe, we can.  I attended a few Death Cafes in Delta, and found them very useful.  So I have been trying to get one going in Port Alberni ever since I got here.  A Death Cafe is not (intended to be) grief support or counselling, just a safe space to talk about death and related issues.  At a Death Cafe people drink tea, eat cake and discuss death.  The aim is to increase awareness of death to help people make the most of their (finite) lives.

So, finally, the United Church offered me monthly space for six months.  Actually, I thought that was a bit much.  I figured that people might *maybe* want to meet quarterly.  To my astonishment, the people who showed up for the first one wanted to meet *weekly*!

So I scrambled around for the entire weekend, and finally got the hospice society to open up on a bi-weekly basis.  And got the word around to all those who showed up for the first.  And got a co-facilitator, in case I couldn't make it some time.  And we had our first meeting tonight.

And precisely zero people showed up.

Well, at least the co-facilitator and I had a nice chat.

But we will still try it again at the Alberni Valley Hospice Office, 2579 10th Ave, Thursday, February 27th, 7-9 PM.  Bi-weekly, so the next meetings will be on Mar. 13 and 27.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5p1or6CMY1Xj6pQtEPoKHw

https://x.com/DeathCafe

https://deathcafe.com/

http://www.facebook.com/deathcafe

Job 24:1

Why does the Almighty not set times for judgment?  Why must those who know him look in vain for such days?

MGG - 6.16 - Gloria - Monopoly

Gloria's Dad required a big Christmas dinner, and then a, basically identical, New Year's Day dinner.  He wanted to be able to have turkey sandwiches, from the leftovers from Christmas, for the entire period between Christmas and New Years, and then to do it all over again on New Year's.  As noted, except for Christmas presents, the two events were pretty much identical.

Including the fact that, after dinner, there was a game of Monopoly.  It was a tradition.  It was also vicious and cut throat.  Not everyone participated.  Gloria didn't like it.  Her Mum didn't like it.  But the Christmas and New Year's after-dinner Monopoly games were an absolute fixture.

I do not like games.  I do not play games.  I always have an awful lot of work to do, and ideas to develop.  I find games, even solitary games in isolation, to be a waste of time.  

I have a competitive streak, which I do not like.  I do not like the competitive nature which playing games against other people awakens in me.  So I don't play games.  Of pretty much any kind.

When I joined the family, I was encouraged to participate in the Monopoly game.  *Strongly* encouraged.  Basically, they bugged me to join the Monopoly game on every Christmas and New Year's occasion.  They urged me repeatedly that this was a requirement in the family.

Finally, one year I gave in.  I played the Monopoly game.

I won. 

I was never asked to play Monopoly again.  As far as I was concerned, this was a major win.  Not necessarily winning at Monopoly, but the fact that it meant that I was no longer urged to join the Monopoly game.

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MGG - 6.15 - Gloria - Infamous Pink Binder

The Infamous Pink Binder was Gloria's wedding planner for our wedding.  Unlike most brides, she had been a wedding hostess, and so had plenty of experience and knew what to do for a wedding.  She didn't need to buy one.  She made her own, just using an ordinary three-ring binder.  Pink, of course, was her favorite color.

I still have The Infamous Pink Binder.  It's front cover has come off, and it's very tattered.  This is because it was not only the planner for our wedding, but was used, as a template and guide, for both of Gloria's daughters, and all of their friends.  It has been read and reread, and used and reused, so much that it is coming apart.  It's an excellent guide.

Gloria was an excellent event planner.  She did a fantastic job with our wedding.  I didn't think so at the time, because I wanted to help, and Gloria couldn't think of anything that I could actually do.  She had done it all.  But she was the most amazing event planner.  I have, subsequently, known people whose jobs it was to do event planning, professionally.  None of them could have held a candle to Gloria.

A lot of people thought that Gloria's crowning achievement was her parents fiftieth wedding anniversary.  She actually started planning it a little over two years in advance.  At one point during that time, she "assisted" her mother with Christmas card addressing, thus collecting their entire Christmas card list, and therefore the addresses of all their friends.  She was then able to contact all of their friends, without her parents knowing.  (Although, when it actually came down to it, she had to confess that she had done this, when she started to receive so many pieces of important mail, with news of deaths and so forth, and had to pass along those items to her parents, and let them know how she had obtained them.)

The anniversary was a fairly complicated arrangement, involving a dinner for close family, twenty-five people, and then the larger group of friends and relations.  The program for the evening, for the larger gathering, was divided into three sections, with space between for chat and socializing.  The program involved not only the traditional readings of letters and telegrams, (in this case mostly email), but also a history of the period when her parents got married, a brief recounting of the story of how they met, fell in love, and married, and a series of small plays or vignettes, for which Gloria wrote the scripts, outlining different family stories from their marriage which had been recounted over the years.  All of this was not made any easier perforce by a change of actor for the part of her father, which was required by the fact that the person originally intended to play her father suddenly could not do it.  Parts had to be replaced and rehearsed.

When Gloria arranged her parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary, we had access to one of their wedding photos which showed Sulla, Gloria's Mum, holding her wedding bouquet.  We knew what the flowers were (the species of flower was part of family legend.)  However, there was a lot of greenery involved in the bouquet, and we weren't too sure about that.  Gloria went to various florists to see if they could figure out what it was, so that we could match the greenery in recreating the bouquet.  None of them could identify it.  The picture was old, black and white, and not particularly high resolution.  As was the case with photography in those days, it was only a snapshot in any case.

I looked at the picture, and felt that the greenery looked an awful lot like sword fern.  So, since nobody could tell us what the greenery actually was, I asked Gloria if I should just go and get some sword fern out of the forest, so that we could have some greenery that, at least, looked similar to that in her Mum's wedding bouquet.  Gloria felt that this was an okay idea.

Out of idle curiosity, I went and looked up sword fern in a guide to local plants.  In the description in this book (which was written quite a while ago), it mentioned that, during the years around the Second World War, sword fern was harvested in BC and shipped, as floral greenery to florists across Canada, and particularly to the Prairies, in much the same way that salal is harvested and sold as greenery today.  So it seems very likely that we did recreate the bouquet perfectly.  It is very probable that the greenery in Sulla's wedding bouquet was, in fact, BC harvested sword fern.

In planning the evening, and the program, and structure, it was intended that the event should last until 10:00 PM. As the final part of the program for the evening, I was allowed to thank the various participants. As I was doing so, the girls yelled out from the back, "What time is it, Rob?"  I looked at my watch.  It was exactly 10:00 PM.

However, this was not what *Gloria* felt was her crowning achievement in event planning.  As the secretary to the principal of Regent College, she was there on the day when Billy Graham, and entourage, visited the college.  Billy Graham's time is was scripted almost as tightly as that of the President of the United States, and the college had been told that they had another appointment, and would not be able to stay for lunch.  During the morning, something changed their minds.  At 11:40 AM, Gloria was told that Billy Graham, and entourage, would be staying for lunch.  Gloria ordered food from a nearby cafeteria, sent some of the college staff over to get it and bring it back, found representatives of the faculty, the Board, and the student body, and arranged all of the lunch in one of the libraries at the college.  By noon.  Billy Graham's team was mightily impressed.

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MGG - 5.19a - HWYD - DISKSECURE

It's not really like I was doing anything that I was supposed to wasn't supposed to.  After all, even though I was primarily there as manager of the technical support department, given my research and background they had said that I should look into forms of security and antivirus protection for the company.  But, equally, let's face it: this really was more part of my ongoing reviews of antiviral products.

So this was a product that was new to me.  I don't think the company that had produced it had really researched the field of computer viruses very extensively.  The product said that it would protect against all computer viruses, and particularly computer viruses that were of the boot sector infector type.  It was software, so this might have been a little bit problematic.  However, others had done it before them.

One of the products that had done it before them, and extremely effectively, was DISKSECURE.  Not only was DISKSECURE extremely effective, but it was also free.  And, I knew the author.  I used disk secure on all of my own machines.  I had also installed it, for Gloria, at her workplace. DISKSECURE not only protected against computer viruses, and particularly the boot sector infector type, but it also allowed you to effectively password protect your computer, which was, generally speaking, not available with MS-DOS computers at the time.  The fact that we had used DISKSECURE to protect Gloria's computer allowed us to detect the fact that someone was trying to break into her computer after hours.

Anyway, I had installed DISKSECURE on my computer, at *my* office.  And, now I was trying out another antivirus product.

I installed the test antivirus product on my own computer.  And then, in order to make sure that it worked, I tried to infect the computer with a simple BSI virus.  And, lo and behold, the computer got infected.  The test antivirus product obviously didn't protect against boot sector infector viruses.  At least not the simple one that I tried first.  So, that was a black mark against it, and I got another (free) antivirus product to clean off the virus.

Only to find that the test antivirus product, which had not protected against the virus infection, now prevented the antivirus disinfector from cleaning the virus infection.

So, I tried to uninstall the test antivirus.  Only to find that, probably due to some corruption involved in the virus infection, the test antivirus could no longer be uninstalled.

So, to recap, at this point I had a computer with a an ineffective test antivirus product installed on it, which had not prevented an infection, so the computer was infected with a virus, but the test antivirus would not allow an antivirus disinfector to clean the virus off.

Fortunately, DISKSECURE had another trick up its sleeve.  One of the options that DISKSECURE gave you, when you installed it on your computer in the first place, was to create a backup copy of your boot sector.  And it also provided a function that would allow you to, in a fairly brute force fashion, use the backup copy of the boot sector to overwrite anything that had happened to the boot sector.  For example, a virus infection.

So I used this brute force overriding replacement to put the original boot sector back onto my computer.  And, lo and behold, the computer was clean, and uninfected, and I was back in business.  With a little extra cleaning up to do.

I immediately terminated the test antivirus, with extreme prejudice.  And, obviously, that particular antivirus product got a rather scathing review.  It was not recommended.

DISKSECURE, on the other hand, was extremely useful, in quite a variety of situations. I kept on using it quite extensively over the years.

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Sermon 56 - Situationally Unaware

Sermon 56 - Situationally Unaware

Matthew 24:50

The master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he is not aware of.

Psalm 65:8

The whole earth is filled with awe at your wonders; where morning dawns, where evening fades, you call forth songs of joy.

Military and law enforcement people talk a lot about situational awareness.  Working in security, we get to hear about it too.  The main concept of situational awareness is that you are aware of your environment, and particularly the threats and the risks in your environment.  Being situationally aware, you pay attention to the environment, and what in the environment is a risk, or what in the environment may become a threat.  You also pay attention to any changes in the environment, changes that might introduce a threat or a risk into the environment.  Being aware of the risks you can then do a risk analysis, and manage the risks and not be vulnerable particularly vulnerable to any threats.

This is a concept, as I say, that comes primarily from the military, and has been passed down to law enforcement, and then has come to us in security.  But, as I frequently say, an awful lot of security is simply risk management, and the management of any business involves two things; management of risk, and management of people.  This applies to life as well, so the idea of situational awareness is something that more people should be aware of.

As I have mentioned, I am the only pedestrian in Port Alberni.  And, as I have also mentioned, the drivers in Port Alberni are the worst in the entire world.  And, having studied the situation, at close range (sometimes literally), I think I have figured out what the problem is.  As I say, the drivers of Port Alberni are the worst in the entire world.  I have taught all over the world.  I have taught on six continents.  I have seen lots of drivers, in lots of places, with lots of different characteristics.  There are places in the world that have faster drivers.  There are places in the world that have more *aggressive* drivers.  But there is no place that I have ever been, in the entire world, where the drivers are more situationally unaware than in Port Alberni.  When driving, you have to pay attention to things that are outside the windows of your car.

So, the concept of situational awareness applies to life.  It applies to different aspects of life.  Situational awareness obviously applies to driving.  But situational awareness also applies to us in the church.

So, in respect of the Christian life, of what is it that we have to be situationally aware?  Well, not to put a point on it to find a point on it, everything.  Everything, and even more so.  We have to be aware of everything in our lives that we would normally be aware of, and some additional factors as well.

We are in this world.  We may not be of it, but we are definitely in it.  God has created the world for us to be in.  God has created us, and the world, and the entire universe, and any other universes that there may be.  And, because God created them, God must have had a purpose in creating them.  So everything that happens in our life is something that we have to be aware of.  The Bible, very often, talks about seeing God in the works of his hands: in the works of nature, in the stars in the sky, in the heavens above us, in all of the landscape that is around us, and all of the beasts that walk upon it, or crawl upon it, or fly over it.  God created all of them.  And God had a purpose in creating them.  And God may be speaking to us, through them.  So we need to listen to God.  And part of the way that we listen to God is by being aware of what is around us.  Because he created it.

That isn't the only way that God speaks to us, of course.  God speaks to us most directly, and most reliably, in his word: the Bible.  So, in addition to everything that is around us, we need to be aware of what the Bible says about it all.  How often are we aware of what the Bible says?  Of what God says to us, everyday, written down, in a kind of an owner's manual for the universe, if only we would read it.

Sometimes, of course, God has a specific verse, just for us, speaking to us and to our situation, as if God was speaking directly to us.  It just pops into our mind, and it directly addresses the situation that we are facing.  God is directing us.  But, of course, it doesn't just pop into our mind.  It pops into our awareness, out of our memory.  But we only remember it, if we have read it in the first place.  How often do we read the Bible?

Well, of course, we are all busy.  And we may not have time to take an evening off, every week, to go to a Bible study, where the Bible study might discuss possibly four or five verses out of the tens of thousands of verses in the Bible.  And of course, there is the preparation time to get ready for the Bible study, and then there is the time driving to the Bible study, and then there's the time for the study itself, and then, of course, there is the necessary socialization time.  So, yes, it might not be a completely efficient is of our time to spend two or three hours, per week, delving into four or five verses of scripture.

But, then again, it's awfully hard to find any justification in the Bible that indicates that God is at all interested in efficiency.

But, if you want efficiency, there is more than one way to read the Bible.

It's quite possible just to read it.

I recently had a conversation with a young parishioner in one of the churches in town.  She told me that it was her ambition to read the Bible all the way through.  It's a good ambition.  And I gave her a few tips.  I told her that you can buy One Year Bibles.  I know that these Bibles exist in at least two translations, the New International Version, and the Good News Bible.  I know that, because I have both of them.  And, with those One Year Bibles, you get a bit of the Old Testament, and a bit of the gospels, and a bit of the epistles, and a bit out of the Psalms, everyday.  You get a bit of a mix, so that you're not faced with chapters upon chapters of Jewish dietary law, all at one go, but you get to read through the entire Bible in one year.  In one year, you can read through the complete Bible.

In fact, you don't need one of the One Year Bibles.  If you read four chapters, every day, you can get through the entire Bible, in possibly just a little over a year.  If you read five chapters, every day, you will get through the entire Bible in slightly less than a year.  If you read ten chapters, every day, you will get through the entire Bible in five months.  And reading ten chapters, everyday, generally will take you less than half an hour.  Okay, if you are into Jeremiah, Jeremiah has fairly long chapters, and he and Isaiah, well ten chapters of them might occasionally edge you over the half hour limit.  Even so, when you get into the Psalms, ten Psalms might only take you ten minutes.  (Well, OK, except for Psalm 119.  But then, Psalm *117* is the *shortest* chapter in the Bible.)  So, on average, about twenty minutes a day will get you through the entire Bible in five months.

And then what?

Well, I just start all over again at Genesis.  It's funny: every time I read the Bible I come across a verse that I don't recall ever having read before.  Every time I read the Bible, even though I have read it over more than twenty times, I find something that sounds new.  And that speaks to me.  In my particular situation.  You'd think that, by this time, I would have memorized the darned thing.  But apparently not.

So, the Bible is something else of which we should be aware.  And aware of on an ongoing basis.

And there are other things of which we should be aware.  Possibly not things that we should build into, but we should be aware of the possibilities.  The Bible speaks of powers that are ranged against us.  That is, if we are on God's side.  There are powers that are ranged against God.  If we are for God, those powers are ranged against us.  Those powers fight against us.  Now, this is definitely not an area of expertise for me.  It's not even in an area in which I am interested.  After all, the Bible also says that we should not be too terribly interested in these powers.  We should not serve them, and nor should we ask them for help.  We should not call them up.  We should not be associated with people who try to call up those powers.  C.S. Lewis, in "The Screwtape Letters," notes that there are two mistakes that people make with respect to the Devil: the first mistake is that people are too afraid of the Devil.  After all, we do have God on our side.  Or, rather, we are on God's side, and God takes care of his own.  The other mistake that people make is to become too interested in the Devil.  So, no, I have not studied in this area, and I do not recommend that you study it, either.  It is an area fraught with peril.  And that peril is not merely physical, but spiritual.  But the Bible does say that these powers exist.  In fact, it mentions that these powers exist, and warns us against them, many more times then it mentions homosexuality, or abortion.  Combined.  So, it would be foolish not to be aware of the possibility.  Not terrified by it.  The Bible does not provide us with details, and God probably has a reason for that.  But we should be aware of the possibility: not terrified, and not too terribly interested.  But aware.

One more thing of which to be aware: you.  What do you need?  What drives you?  What do you want?  Why do you do the things that you do?  No, you can't just copp out and, with Paul, say, "wretched man that I am!"  Be aware of what traps and triggers you.  Be aware of what builds and fulfills you, and "think on these things."  We seem to go to great lengths *not* to be aware of ourselves.  We aren't supposed to think about ourselves.  That's selfish, and selfishness is bad!  Therefore, we reject thinking about ourselves.  But God thinks about you.  God loves you.  So, while trying not to go *too* far down the path of self-centredness, maybe you can try and see yourself as God sees you?  Something, some*one*, to be loved, and protected--and trained up in the way we should go.

Be aware of everything around us, even mundane things, which don't seem to be spiritual, but which may be.  For example, when we find that someone is in distress, the right thing to do is always to help them, if we possibly can.  "If we possibly can" covers a lot of ground.  So, anytime we see that someone is behaving oddly, even just seeing that someone is behaving oddly may indicate that they are in distress.  Maybe we can help.  Even just listening to their distress can help.  Be aware of these opportunities that God is giving you.  All too often we are busy, or find this person annoying, or this person just doesn't fit with our particular preferred life.  And so we decide to make ourselves situationally *un*aware.  We decide to deliberately ignore what God is showing us.  Because what God is showing us is an opportunity to help.  But it also means that it takes away our time that we would much prefer to spend watching television, or going out for a meal, or chatting with a friend, who isn't in distress, and so our chat is unlikely to demand anything of us.  And we can get off by saying well, we didn't know!  And there's a verse about that, in Proverbs ...

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/09/sermons.html

MGG - 6.14 - Gloria - Webmastery

Gloria always considered herself as not very knowledgeable about computers.  That was because she was always comparing herself to me.  In comparison to pretty much all of her co-workers, in all the various jobs that she had; in education, in industry, in government, and in business; Gloria, in whatever office she was working, very quickly became the person to go to for help with computer operations.

Even before she met me, Gloria was the person who determined the new computer that was to be purchased for Regent College.  She was the one who specified what was needed, and she was the one who had final refusal over the various proposals from vendors.

At one point Gloria was approached by an assistant manager, who noted that he had just deleted all of the boilerplate files that the staff were used to using as templates.  Gloria informed him that she was pretty certain that those files could not be recovered, because of the process that he had followed in doing the deletion.  Gloria, to double check, contacted me, relayed the process that had been followed, and I confirmed that, yes, she was absolutely correct, there was nothing that could be done: those files were gone.  Subsequently, the assistant manager came back to Gloria, and said that he had found a workaround.  He had found a listing of recently used files in one of the programs, and they would simply use those.  Gloria explained, as gently as she could, that that list was simply a list of pointers, and did not mean that those files were, in fact, still available.  (Gloria checked with me about that, as well, and I confirmed that she was absolutely correct.)

But what I, personally, found most impressive was that Gloria was asked, by the Vancouver Women's Musical Society, to take on the society's website.  The board felt that all that needed to be done was to keep the website up to date, by entering new information as it became available, and therefore this was simply a clerical function.  In fact, what they had asked for her to be, was their webmaster (or webmistress), and that this was a fairly technical undertaking.

I worked with Gloria on her initial review of the site.  Gloria was concerned about the different font sizes, font typefaces, and font colors, that had been entered into the site over a number of years.  An awful lot of the extraneous font information have resulted from people simply copy and pasting from MS Word documents, directly into the website.  The web content management system had tried valiantly to make sense of all of this material, but nobody had ever either planned what the website should look like, or looked at what was happening as they simply threw pieces of documents into the web pages.

In order to show Gloria what had happened, I taught her how to use the HTML editor (HyperText Markup Language, the building block of the Web), and taught her what some of the HTML meant.

Gloria had always loved the Word Perfect word processor.  She loved the control that it gave you, and the fact that when you turned on a printing or publishing feature, you had to turn it off again.  She took to HTML right away, loving it because of the same mindset behind it: when you turned on a change, you had to turn it off again again.  Logical.  She loved the control that gave her, and very quickly realized what she had to do to clean up all the hundreds of old, extraneous, redundant font commands that were buried in the HTML and all of the various web pages.  She became, essentially, a web developer.  She knew more about HTML, and could use it better, then an awful lot of the web developers who style themselves as such.

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/02/mgg-613-gloria-hand.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/02/mgg-615-gloria-infamous-pink-binder.html

Last place

It is not necessarily true that you always find what you are looking for in the last place you look.

The usual explanation of this truism is that when you find what you are looking for, you stop looking.

The thing is, you can look everywhere and still not find what you need.

Sermon 57 - Leaven

Sermon 57 - Leaven

Matthew 13:33

He told them still another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough."

Hebrews 4:10

God rested from his work.  Those who enjoy God’s rest also rest from their works.

It was communion Sunday.  He said he was going to preach on communion, and on bread.

I am always disappointed when someone says that they are going to preach a sermon on communion.  And particularly when they say that they are going to preach about bread.  I always get excited when that is announced, because it is an opportunity to talk about yeast.  And then they never do.  I don't know whether this is because ministers are, generally speaking, men, and therefore don't bake.  Or whether it's because most ministers went to theological school, and didn't study anything about biochemistry.  Whatever the cause, talking about bread, and talking about communion, is an opportunity to talk about one of the most interesting things that God has given us, and then they never do.

We use yeast to make bread.  Bread is pretty universal as a foodstuff.  Almost (but not quite) all cultures have come up with some kind of bread.  We say that Jesus is the Bread of Life, referring to how necessary he is for our life.

Yeast is used to make bread rise.  Bread is, basically, a structure of membranes of the cooked bread dough, surrounding holes that mean that the bread is tastier, and also easier to eat.  But there are ways to make bread without yeast.  There is, for example, egg bread, where the holes are essentially made physically.  You beat eggs into a froth, the froth has holes, and you mix the froth and the dry ingredients together.  We can make soda bread, in the same way we make cakes, not using yeast.  We use baking powder, a chemical which, when wet, and heated, releases carbon dioxide and making bubbles.

The rising, in both bread and cakes, is due to carbon dioxide.  But the processes are quite different. Yeast is, when it's been reconstituted with water, and given a little sugar, and warmed up, living.  Baking powder is just a chemical.  If you keep it, sealed tightly enough, in the cupboard, it will never go bad.  If some moisture gets in there, it will probably release the carbon dioxide, and so it's not going to be as effective, but it'll never go bad.  It'll never grow mold.  It can't.  Mold can't live on it.  There's nothing there for the mold to eat.  Just a chemical, that's going to release carbon dioxide if it gets wet.

But yeast is different.  Yeast, in the right situation, is living.  Which gives a rise to the joke: what's the difference between Port Alberni and sourdough?  Sourdough has live culture.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Yeast is a type of fungus.  Fungi are pretty great.  They give us tasty and nutritious things, like mushrooms, and they give us really bad things, like black mold.  (Actually, I guess some of the mushrooms can be pretty bad as well.  As Terry Pratchett said, all mushrooms are edible.  *Some* mushrooms are only edible *once*.)

Actually, yeast isn't just one thing.  It's not one species of organism.  It's a whole family of organisms that do pretty much the same thing.  As a matter of fact, there are quite a few different organisms that can be used as a leavening agent.  The yeast that you buy in jars, or in envelopes, just happens to be a particularly convenient variety.  It's a variety that eats, and produces carbon dioxide, at a particularly fast rate.  And it's also a variety that you can dry out, and store,  and conveniently transport, and sell in those little envelopes which will stay viable for a number of years even stored in your kitchen cupboard.  But it's not the only type of yeast.

And in fact, when we were talking about communion, the wine is also a product of a very similar process.  It's probably a different type of yeast.  As a matter of fact, different types of yeast get used in making different types of beer.  Different varieties of yeast will give beer a slightly different flavor.  It's possibly similar in wine.  A lot of different factors go into making beer, and a lot of different factors go into making wine.  And, in fact, depending on the process that you use, sometimes you let the carbon dioxide build up in the wine, as it is fermenting, so that it carbonates the liquid.  This is how you get sparkling wines, and champagne.  So, yeast is involved in both of the elements in communion.

(Unless, that is, you are a Baptist, like I am.  We, of course, don't use wine.  An awful lot of Baptist Churches have, mostly in the past, frowned upon the use of alcohol in any form.  So we tend to use grape juice.  And, now, there is a tremendous theological issue among Baptist churches, since Welsh's Grape Juice is no longer available.  What the heck are we going to do for communion now?)

But let's get back to the bread.  The leaven, that is mentioned in the Bible, was not of the dry, packaged in little envelopes, type of yeast.  Not that that type of yeast couldn't have been included in the mix: it probably was.  But the leaven that is talked about, particularly in the Old Testament; the leaven that is used as an illustration of corruption; is probably an awful lot closer to what we now know as sourdough.

I worked with sourdough for many years.  Recently, an awful lot of people have started experimenting with it.  Lots of people started sourdough cultures, and experimented with it, during the pandemic.  An awful lot of people did a lot of fancier cooking than they would normally be used to, because there was nothing else to do, and everybody had to stay home.  So, they started experimenting with different types of cooking.  And, a lot of people started experimenting with sourdough culture.  You can start your own sourdough culture.  You just mix up some flour and water, or flour and milk and water, and leave it exposed to the open air for a while, and, hoping that it doesn't actually grow visible mold on it, you then cover it up, and let it start fermenting, and bubbling, and increasing away.  It is possible to do this.  Spores of yeast drift around in the dust in the air.  Number Two Daughter did it.  The thing is, it takes a while.  It takes a while for the population, of different types of yeast, to settle in on the optimal variety that will, number one, raise your bread, number two, not grow visible mold, and number three, raise your bread quickly when you need it, and grow enough in the few days between when you make loaves of bread.

Just as a side issue, it's probably easier to get sourdough culture from somebody else.  At least, as long as you're not all locked up in your own houses, during a pandemic, and you can go and get sourdough culture from somebody else who's got some.  But even at that, your culture is probably not the same as the sourdough culture even from the person that you got it from.  It depends how often you make bread, it depends on whether you are making bread, or biscuits, or pancakes, and it depends what type of flour you use, and whether you add milk to your culture, and a few things like that.  You are going to get used to using sourdough culture, but the culture, itself, is going to get used to you.  The population of yeast in your culture is going to be a population that is best suited to the way you use the sourdough culture.

There is another aspect to bread.  This aspect doesn't refer to unleavened bread, because it refers to the bread rising.  But then, we've been talking about yeast, and leaven, so far.

When you are making bread, you mix it into a dough.  And then you beat, and fold, and stretch, and pull, and fold over, and beat down the lump of dough.  Bread making, if you have a sufficiently strong table to really work at it, is excellent therapy if you are angry.  You can imagine that the lump of dough is the person, or the problem, that is distressing you.  You can just beat the ... well you can beat, and roll over, and fold, and squish the dough as much as you like.  You cannot over-beat bread dough.  The more you beat it, the more the proteins in the flour mix together into chains.  Those chains make the thin membranes of bread that cover the holes that the carbon dioxide generates, stronger and more able to withstand the rising and the baking process.  If the bread dough membranes are not strong enough, then the membranes will break, and you will have bread which, instead of having lots of little holes in it, has a few very large holes in it.  This has to do with physics and something called surface tension.  And because it has to do with physics, almost none of you will be interested in it.  But it's a fact, just like the fact that the more you beat the bread dough, the better the end result bread is.

Anyway, when you have sufficiently worked out your frustrations, or when you are just plain tired of beating up the bread dough, you cover it, and you let it rise.  This period of rising is known as resting.  And I recently saw a meme, traveling around the Internet, as memes do, and it said this about the term "resting" as used to describe bread when it is in this resting and rising phase.  If you want light bread, you let it rest.  For quite a long time.  Generally at least a few, and sometimes several, hours.  And so, this person said, when it looks like they are doing nothing, and that they are just resting, that they are, in fact, bread.  And bread is better for a good, long rest.

And that is something that we should sometimes remember: we have to rest, to rise.

And, having pointed out all of this, I have to admit that none of this is relevant to the bread that was actually used at the Last Supper.  Because the Last Supper was at Passover, and at Passover they ate unleavened bread.

The story of the Exodus tells us that the Israelites had to leave in a hurry, and their bread hadn't had time to rise.  But there is another aspect to yeast, or sourdough, or leaven that is a theological point, and that has given rise to the modern tradition, as Passover, of having a game where the children search all over the house trying to find any yeast, and making sure that it is discarded or destroyed.

Yeast, as I said, is a fungus.  It is a living organism.  If you have sourdough culture you have to make sure you use it, and feed it, regularly, because it is alive.  And, because yeast is a fungus, some varieties of it can cause infections and other problems.

Because of all of this, leaven, in the Old Testament, became a symbol of corruption.  This is probably why Jesus warned against the leaven of the Pharisees.  They had corrupted the intentions of God's Law.

Jesus also used this in a different illustration.  And, like He so often did, He turned the idea upside down.  He said that the Kingdom of Heaven was like yeast.

Just think about that for a second.  Think about it the way a Jew in the first century would have heard it.  What do you mean that this symbol of corruption is the Kingdom of Heaven?  Are you saying that God is corrupt?

And Jesus goes on to show what leaven does.  It's alive.  If you put it, even a small amount, into a huge pile of flour, it is going to start eating that flour.  And growing.  Until the whole pile is just one huge pile of leaven.

The point being that God's message is not just a story printed in words on a page.  It's alive!  If you let it, it will take this dead pile of cereal dust, and turn it into a living force.

OK, you can go for lunch, now.  Have some bread.  And think about it.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3oguUslGkpVxkiFlCjxeAj

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/09/sermons.html

MGG - 6.13 - Gloria - hand

I watched WALL-E again last night.  It's being a while.  Gloria and I enjoyed it and watched it multiple times.

Unfortunately, the copy that I got from the library here, in common with a great many library copies of children's DVDs, has frequently being taken out, dropped, and probably even stepped on.  The surface is a haze of scratches, and quite a number of them are extensive enough that a great many sections of the movie are just not available.  I'll probably have to go around to the second hand stores here and see if I can find a copy.

I've always liked WALL-E.  It's a romantic comedy, and one of the few "situation" comedies where the situation is extreme enough for the humour to actually rely on the situation, and not the foolishness of the characters.  And it's also refreshing that all of the characters (with the exception of Auto) are, essentially, good (and even Auto is not so much evil, as limited).

I like the love story.  The fact that the beautiful, capable robot falls for the lumpy and aged trash collector resonates.  So does the tenderness with which he cares for her during her hibernation (and which she eventually discovers).

I hadn't, in a sense, forgotten the hand holding, but I had forgotten how extensive, and important, it was to, and in, the movie.

Hand holding was oddly important to Gloria and I.  In the first place I had never had a girlfriend, and had never had anyone to hold hands with.  In the second place, I discovered that I was a very tactile person, a fact which had been hidden by growing up in a very non-tactile family.  Gloria used to say about the early days of our marriage that I held her hand so much that it was like I was afraid of her getting away.  We held hands a lot, and probably a lot more than most couples.  One counselor remarked to us that it was obvious that there was nothing wrong with our relationship, and when we queried why it was so obvious, she just noted that, every time we were in her office, we were always holding hands.  We held hands in the car, when I was driving, and while I don't like driving, and get frustrated by it, and Gloria while Gloria was occasionally nervous by how aggressive that I got in those situations, she eventually found that simply touching my hand meant that I calmed down, and started driving more rationally.

So holding hands was very important to us.  And in Gloria's final days in hospital, I held her hand a lot.

And I don't have anyone to hold hands with anymore.

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/01/mgg-612-gloria-editor.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/02/mgg-614-gloria-webmastery.html

Government versus business

Javier Milei has famously said that his contempt for the state is infinite.  A great number of populist politicians, in recent days, would probably say something along the same lines. This is one of the standard tenets of conservative, or right-wing, politics: government is best which governs least.  The idea is that government is inefficient, and should be minimal, at best, in order to allow for business to maximize productivity, and therefore, in theory, prosperity for everyone.

As a security professional, I know that this principle, while appealing to very many, needs to have serious limits placed upon it.

For a number of years I held the certification known as the Certified Information Systems Security Professional.  As professionals, of course, we are primarily involved in supporting business.  After all, very few individuals can afford to hire us, and so the people who pay us are businesses, and therefore, we owe some fealty to the hand that feeds us.  But there is that troublesome mention of security.

Those of us in security, and particularly those of us who hold the certification, know about the security triad.  These are the three pillars of security.  They are not universally acknowledged, nor are they complete.  But it is an important principle to understand about security.  Security consists of multiple components, some of which are inherently in conflict with each other.

The triad is officially designated as confidentiality, integrity, and availability.  Confidentiality and integrity are, primarily, about control.  Businesses like control.  So they concentrate on confidentiality and integrity, and especially confidentiality.  But there is that troublesome mention of availability.  Now, to a certain extent, availability is about control.  Or, rather, it is about *pretending* to control things that you actually cannot control.  You cannot plan for disasters.  At least not completely.  You can plan to have systems and tools in place to enable you to weather some kind of storm, or to wait out a disaster.  But you very seldom know when that disaster is actually going to happen.  We do not actually have control of these things.  We just pretend that we do.

But, the thing is, that discussion of availability, and the ability to be resilient in the face of some kind of disaster, almost inevitably brings up the topic of safety.

Safety, very much like privacy, is actually a pretty nebulous concept.  One person's safety is another person's unwarranted interference.  But, the thing is, governments are not in the business of, well, business.  Governments are in the business of safety.  Governments are there to keep us, all of us, safe.  Governments are in the business of keeping us safe even from government.  And certainly from other governments.  Governments are in the business of keeping us safe from people who think that they should be able to lord it over us, or take things that we consider ours, or attack us, or even take our lives.  That is the purpose of government: to keep us safe.

And, as those of us who have seriously worked on this issue of availability, or business continuity planning (as the businesses tend to look at it), or emergency management (as the government specialists tend to look at it), at any rate as all of us who study this field, whatever it may be called, know that resilience is inefficient.  As a matter of fact, efficiency, which capital is businesses prize above everything else, is antithetical to resilience.

As evidence of this fact, I offer you the pandemic.  For decades, or even centuries, businesses have been pursuing capitalist ideals, and productivity, and efficiency, above pretty much everything else.  And then along came the pandemic, which pointed out, in rather drastic terms, that efficient systems are fragile.  When you have a completely efficient system, if something goes wrong, if anything goes wrong, then the whole system just collapses.

It's efficient, but it isn't safe.

Creativity is allowing genAI to make mistakes

Art is Art is knowing which ones are so dreadfully awful that they are too hilarious not to keep.

AI generated art and/or images can be impressive.  But the systems are definitely not yet ready for prime time.

Admittedly, I may have a way to go in learning the art and craft of "prompt engineering."  (Just saying that indicates a problem with the image generation systems.  If you have to put enormous effort into learning *how* to get the systems to generate acceptable images, then how does that support the contention that genAI/LLMs are a great tool that will make our lives better and easier?)  Herewith are some observations and comments on my forays, so far, into the genAI image creation systems.  (Some experiments and observations on the text systems can be found here, here, here, here, and here.)

About a year and a half ago, I tried out a little joke that I called Gnomaste.  That was on DALL-E (now called OpenArt).  So, I decided to see how much the technology had improved:

It definitely *looks* better, but, if you look at the feet, you will notice that they aren't quite right.  And that was the *best* of the three systems that I tried.  I gave a similar prompt to OpenArt, and got:

Once again, check out the feet.  And, in this case, hands.

Now, these aren't too bad, if you are willing to overlook some minor details.  But when I started to ask for more complex images, things got weirder.

Yes, I have to admit that I have strange ideas.  But, when I tried to get the earth and the moon colliding, the systems couldn't even get near it:

This is Meta AI, which won the first round, and, yes, you can see an earth and a moon included, but nothing indicating a collision.  OpenArt and Qwen didn't do any better:

I have always liked the Norris "It's only money" cartoon, so I thought I'd try a tribute.  I asked if to add the caption, and found (and later confirmed) the OpenArt won't do that at all:

But, even absent the refusal to do any captions, 1) I asked for two figures: where did the third come from?  2) OK, I asked for emaciated, but, skeletal?  3) OK, skeletal makes it hard to show facial expressions (with no faces), but they aren't even *looking* at the chest!

Meta AI wasn't *too* bad:

but Qwen gave me the first indication of what *I* consider a serious problem:

asking for text to be incorporated *really* throws the systems into a tizzy!

When I asked for another joke, with only simple text, Meta AI *did* come through:

although "ornate" seemed to translate into "South Asian."  But both OpenArt and Qwen had problems even with text this simple:

I tried something a little less morbid, and the results were *really* disappointing.  (Maybe I should just stick to being weird, dressed, and grieving?)  I once found a tattered image (which got further degraded by me taking a shot of it with a cellphone) which had a very lovely thought associated with it.  So I tried, with all three systems, and with four different variations on prompts, and failed to get anything remotely acceptable.  OpenArt, predictably, refused to include a caption.  Qwen started bad:

and just got worse.  Meta AI was the best of a bad lot:

but even the *best* of what it produced has serious problems:

So, I asked them to produce an image to kind of illustrate the problem:

and even *that* is a horrible mess!

OK, yes, adding a caption is not really image generation.  And there are fixes, and relatively easy ones.  It just seems very strange that "memes," in the social media rather than the original sense, have been so *much* a part of social media and online content, that failing to allow for them is something the AI devotees have never considered ...

And, even *without* captions, sometimes the AIs just can't count:

... and sometimes they can't count *arms* ...

(Actually, with the caption that I have in mind, this *could* work ...)

MGG - 6.12 - Gloria - editor

Psalm 19:12a

But who can discern their own errors?

I'm not being fair to Gloria, of course.  She doesn't have the opportunity to stop me, and correct me, when I've made a mistake.  And, I know, even dictating this, and even more so editing it, very roughly, to take out the worst excesses of Gboard and my stumbling dictation, that Gloria would do a far superior job of editing it.

Over the years, since I published my first book, people have asked me how you write a book.  The first thing I tell them is that, once you have actually written the book, that's the easy part done.  I also told them that, if you intend to be a writer, when you find a good copy editor, you marry her.  That's not a fair comment either, since when I married Gloria I had no idea that I would actually be writing books.  I also didn't know how much I needed editing.  Fortunately, in the time between we got married, and the time that I started to write my first book, I had learned first, how much editing my writing needed, and second, how great an editor Gloria was.  Not just a copy editor.  She was a terrific copy editor.  She was also a structural copy editor. She is a grammatical copy editor. She is a stylistic copy editor.  She was a developmental editor.  There are at least seven different types of editors, and Gloria epitomized every one.  I dedicated my first book to her, and I said in the introduction, that if it wasn't for Gloria I would never have written a book.  That is, quite literally, true.  I needed her support.  She even supported me by taking my handwritten scribbles, mostly illegible (you will recall from my teaching reviews), and typing them into text, where I could work on them.

She supported me at every step of the way.  When my first book got to the copy editing stage, Gloria copy edited their copy editor's notes.  Her help was invaluable, and I truly mean that.

(During the time that I was doing book reviews, again supported by Gloria, one of the books was on writing and editing.  Gloria, when she typed up my reviews, would make suggestions about how I should be modifying what I wrote, and, since the book was about editing, I asked her if I could just leave in her comments, in the final review.  She agreed.  I sent the draft review to the author, and she responded.  Some of her responses were to Gloria's comments.  So I asked the author if I could include *her* comments.  She agreed.  The final result is http://victoria.tc.ca/int-grps/books/techrev/bkbugwrt.rvw )

I dedicated "Cybersecurity Lessons from CoVID-19" to Gloria.  I did not realize, at the time, that it would be the last book that she would ever edit for me.  I don't know if this memoir will see publication.  I don't know if I can do it without Gloria.

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/01/mgg-611-gloria-admin.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/02/mgg-613-gloria-hand.html

MGG - 2.6a - Teaching - You owe us pocket money!

In the dim and distant past, at one point when information technology jobs were a bit thin on the ground, I was teaching at a school for immigrants.  I'm not sure if it was exactly a visa school, but, if not, it was pretty close.  Even though it was backed by a well-regarded institution here in Canada.

The students were primarily there taking senior grades in high school, or the early years of university or college.  I, of course, had been hired to teach the computer program.

The students were all of Chinese extraction.  So, early in the new year, Chinese New Year was a big thing.  All of those of us who were instructors had been given our *own* instructions to have some special feature related to Chinese New Year.  We had also been warned, if only tentatively, about the issue of New Year's money, and had been given a supply of red and gold envelopes, and instructed to put at least a penny in each.

One of the assignments that I had given the students was to write a program that would render a Chinese character, of their choice.  I was already involved with security research, although I am not sure how far I had got in my study of cryptography, and the differences between encryption systems in alphabetic languages versus those that were based on idiographic characters.  However, I was definitely not going very far into that field with these particular students.

At any rate, because of the assignment in regard to Chinese characters, on the appointed day I had prepared a bit of an introduction which I thought might alert them to what was going on.  I had prepared an overhead foil.  (Yes, this was in the days before PowerPoint had corrupted the world.  Power corrupts; PowerPoint corrupt absolutely.)  I had an enlarged version of the four characters for New Year's: the ones spoken as Kung Hei Fat Choi.  They were in a line on the foil, but I had used pieces of paper to mask out everything except one character at a time.

In English, there are holidays, and there are phrases that are associated with those holidays.  Certainly uncovering even the first word in one of those phrases, around the time of the holiday, would alert people to the fact that this was the phrase, and probably everyone would just blurt out the phrase, even if only the first word was showing.  Even if you did it letter by letter, in English, you probably wouldn't have to uncover too many letters in order for people to get the idea, and blurt out the phrase.

This didn't happen with the class of Chinese students.  I uncovered the first character, the one pronounced come Kung, and asked them what word it was.  They told me the meaning, and the multiple meanings that it could be translated to in English, but there was no mention of the full phrase, and nobody seemed to note it.  So, I covered the first one and revealed the second, the one pronounced Hei.  Once again I asked what the character meant, and we had some discussion of that character and it's meaning.  Still no blurting out of kung hei fat choi.  No mention that it was part of a phrase that was commonly said at this time of the year.  So I covered the second and revealed the third.  The same very ordinary discussion, and nothing more, and the same thing happened with the fourth.  Even having gone through all four characters, in sequence, nobody mentioned anything about Chinese New Year, or the full phrase.  Then I removed the coverings entirely, and the full phrase was revealed.

Immediately, all the students in the class became extremely excited.  There were cries of joy!  And one of the students (the one who tended to be most vocally active in the class) burst out "Kung Hei Fat Choi!  You owe us pocket money!

I was, of course, prepared with the pocket money.  The staff at the school had not mentioned the term "pocket money," and so I was unaware of the phrase, but certainly understood the idea.  But, having had such a non-reaction over the individual characters being shown, and discussed in class, I was completely unprepared for the excited reaction on the part of everyone in the class.

I assume that there is some difference in thought processes between those whose first language is an alphabetic language, and those whose first language is ideographic.  (I am currently studying the Nuu-chah-nulth language.  Certain characteristics indicate that, despite having an alphabet, it is, in fact, a syllabic, rather than alphabetic, language, and there are some interesting distinctives in the language speakers' approach to their own language.)

Some aspects of culture are inherent in language?  Or some factors of language are imposed by culture?

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/02/mgg-26-teaching-online-from-paradise.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/02/mgg-27-teaching-robs-universal-classroom.html