An anniversary remembered

Four years ago, I lost my father; a dear friend and good man. Though I don't cry for him and seldom think I'm missing him, I do experience something special and deep when I visit his grave site. Today, on this sombre anniversary, I visited the grave with my sister, and listened as she read two beautiful, moving poems.

On a day as beautiful as today, I wish he was here, sitting in my backyard, playing with the grandchildren, greatgrandchildren and dogs. He would have enjoyed that. Lord knows I would have too.

Who knew?

For those who don't know, I provide computer security services for a living. I cringe when I run into people who insist on using Internet Explorer because it's conveniently bundled with their new PC - and I do the best I can to convince them to go with Firefox. No browser is perfect, but I certainly have more faith in that choice.

Anyway, this morning, I was trying to get my wife converted to Firefox. It was only when I told her how much faster the browser was that she relented and gave permission for it to be installed on her PC.

After it was installed, and IE favourites had been converted to Firefox bookmarks, I tried to load her standard homepage - a customized iGoogle page with various gadgets. Everything worked properly except for one gadget, a pretty flash presentation of an aquarium. Even after downloading and installing the latest flash plug-in for Firefox, the video would not play.

Finally, I right-clicked in the empty black box and viewed the properties. I was absolutely shocked to see the flash plug-in on Firefox asking for permission to connect to the laptop's webcam and microphone. I have no idea how long my wife had been using the aquarium under IE, but suffice to say it is no longer installed on her iGoogle page.

Score yet another victory for Firefox's superior security.

Mother's Day comes and goes

Mother's Day this year was pretty decent. We had a family lunch at my sister-in-law's home, and the company was pleasant. Perhaps the only sour note to the weekend (though not the actual day itself) came when I discovered that I had lost my hard-to-replace sunglasses.

I've begun to retrace my steps from the weekend, though I don't hold out much hope of finding them. It's a real bummer, because they were manufactured as a matched pair for my glasses and I really have a difficult time driving in daylight without them.

On another front, we're nearly completed with renovations to our home. This set of renovations was my big "mother's day gift" to my wife. She's been wanting to do it for quite some time, but I had resisted until this month. By the end of this coming week, the renovations should be completed.

Hardy Heron is hardly worth it

I've become quite partial to Ubuntu over the past year or so, having initially installed a copy of 6.06 LTS that had been in my possession for a dog's age. When 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) arrived, I waited a while to upgrade, but eventually took the plunge.

I liked what I saw, and eagerly upgraded to 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) very soon after its release.

So this week, when I heard the call of the Heron, I dove in head first. It took a while to do the upgrade, what with the swarm of early adopters hogging the download bandwidth. Two nights ago, I was finally able to make a good connection with an authorized mirror, and let the installation process proceed overnight.

Boy, was I sorry!

The first clue that I was in trouble was when my system got stuck on a plain background screen (the cream coloured screen that shows up when you're logging in). I thought the install was just slow, but nope; it was definitely a crash.

The message I got was that the video driver firmware was not capable of dealing with the new version. But I at least thought I'd be able to proceed to a stable operating system. No such luck.

After much fussing, I abandoned any hope of being able to recover my 7.10 installation. Since I didn't have any important files saved on the Ubuntu box, I decided I'd just do a clean install. So, with much reluctance, I did a clean install of Ubuntu 8.04.

Nothing went wrong during the installation; and it completed with no troubles or error messages at all. Then upon rebooting after the installation, that's when the trouble started.

I again received a message that my video drivers were not acceptable, and Ubuntu threw me into limited support mode. Maximum screen resolution was a miserable 800x600, and Ubuntu was unable to identify my graphic hardware or my monitor.

What's worse, is that when I booted from the 7.10 Live CD, Ubuntu was able to start up in 1280x768 resolution - which is the resolution I used when Ubuntu 7.10 was still on my computer. Why a newer version of Ubuntu would be unable to recognize my video hardware and monitor when a prior version had been able to do so is completely beyond me.

You'd think I had learned my lesson, but it gets much worse from there. I'll wait until tomorrow to post that story.

This is MY KIND of news!

Obesity aids in illness survival

Sharon Kirkey, Canwest News Service
Published: Monday, March 10, 2008

Fat people have a survival edge over skinnier people in the face of critical illness, new research shows.

In the latest example of the phenomenon known as the "obesity survival paradox," American researchers found that while critically ill obese patients spend more days on mechanical ventilators and in intensive care units than thinner ICU patients, they're more likely to survive.

And there are several theories as to why: One holds that an abundant supply of fat tissue acts like a factory, churning out chemicals called adipokines that help fight inflammation and infections such as sepsis -- overwhelming bloodstream infections that are the leading cause of death in an ICU.

In addition, during severe illnesses, the body breaks down muscle protein and glycogen, the body's primary source of stored energy. Obese people may be better able to cope because of greater nutritional reserves.

"With the increased rates of obesity, we're seeing more and more morbidly obese patients in the intensive care unit," says lead author Dr. Folu Akinnusi, of the University of Buffalo's division of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine.

"We thought, if they were at increased risk and likely to die, we needed to do something, we needed a different kind of intervention to try and reduce or stem that wave of increased mortality."

Instead, they found the opposite to be true. Akinnusi hopes the findings will make doctors think twice about "subconsciously writing off the obese."

"A lot of times, people have less of an expectation" that they will survive, he says. "If we know they're not at greater risk then you're very likely to give them as much of a chance as everyone else and do the most you can for them."

The study is the latest to show how the very condition that causes multiple health problems -- including high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke and diabetes -- may protect people during serious illness or injury.

Other researchers have found that obese people with kidney failure, heart failure and chronic obstructive lung disease do better than skinnier patients.

No one is suggesting obesity is a good thing, Akinnusi says.

It's been a bad winter

I don't get sick very often. But when I do, it's usually a doozy! This winter, I've been seriously ill twice with flu-like symptoms. I say "flu-like" because like every year, I got the flu vaccine before the bad weather started. In January, I had a period of nearly three weeks when I was either completely incapacitated, or in various stages of recovery.

Now, this past week, I visited a client who was sick, and three days later, I've come down with it myself. Yet another bout of serious congestion, vomiting, inability to sleep, and inability to enjoy food.

In three days, I've dropped nearly 8 pounds of weight (water weight, most likely) and feel like hell. I've missed a day of work, and those days when I did bother to work, it was a substandard effort.

Finally, I was planning to have my mom over this weekend to celebrate her birthday, but the way I'm feeling (and the likelihood that I'll be passing it on to my wife and son), I don't think I'm going to follow through on that plan.

Happy New Year

January is nearly over, and I'm just getting around to my first post of the new year. In my last post, I mentioned that I had taken on a new challenge in designing a new feature into my synagogue's website.

That project has been successfully completed, and it runs flawlessly without any human intervention. In fact, some people have been so impressed by it that they've suggested the idea be commercialized. A new domain has already been registered in anticipation of this, and a partnership of sorts has been formed between me and someone who is better at the marketing end of things. Commercializing the product and some initial concepts about how it could be done was actually his idea, so it seems fair that he be included in any potential gain.

On other fronts, my son has completed his first semester at University, and his marks were promising. Also promising was that his portfolio of work earned him a spot in the university major of his choice. We're very proud of him.

Our daughter in Hamilton has been accepted in a college program designed to upgrade her current professional designation, and she started classes this month. She has shown a great deal of initiative getting into this program, and we wish her success in her quest.

Switching focus yet again, we've had significant changes in the family dynamic, vis-a-vis pets. For the past year, we have been living in sin, having made a conscious decision to defy the local bylaws by keeping more than two dogs. Around Christmas time, we took a trip across the border and saw a beautiful little dog that we wanted to adopt.

But, I opened my big mouth about having more than the legal number of dogs, and our adoption request was denied. For more than a year, we had anticipated the imminent death of our oldest and frailest dog. In fact, when we got our "third" dog, it was in anticipation that the oldest dog was near death. Anyway, about three weeks ago, she came down with another serious ailment, and that was the last straw. She was euthanized earlier this month. Immediately afterward, we visited a local breeder and put a deposit on a cocker spaniel puppy.

This would have brought us back to the three dog level, and one of those dogs, our beautiful purebred Black Lab, was deemed too large to be retained. We tried to sell her, but there were no serious offers, so we ended up surrendering her to the same no-kill shelter from which we had gotten our third dog last January.

So now, we're down to the legal two dog limit. We are left with smaller dogs than we've had in a while - the cocker/lab mix that we got last year, and the cocker puppy that we've had for the last two weeks.

Well, that brings us up to date. Any bets on when I'll post next?