This New Yorker magazine article discusses at length the idea that we as responsible people need to discuss, well ahead of any illness or disease, the qualities of life that are important to us. Unless we face our own ends now, when they are still abstract and manageable, we won’t (most likely) be able to overcome the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that will arise when we are suddenly faced with them later; and the lack of preparedness will be hugely costly in terms of emotional suffering for all involved later.

It is not an easy read, not one that will leave you feeling upbeat or satisfied. But it is a vitally important one, and one I recommend you all take the time to complete.

02. I have only seen or talked to my brother twice in four years.

03. I have been to Germany twice so far this year.

04. So far this year I have read 36 books.

05. After a 15 year hiatus I have started riding my bicycle again this year.

06. I commute 8 minutes (each way) to work when driving.

07. I commute 20 minutes (each way) to work when bicycling.

08. Twenty-seven years after I completed my Bachelor’s degree I am starting a Master’s degree.

09. Every year it takes longer and longer to write these lists. This year’s was started on April 12th.

10. I now own three bicycles.

11. Our car is a hybrid and we average about 40 ~ 42 mpg.

12. If I live to be 98 I am now middle aged.

13. Ever since the Bicentennial I have wanted to live to see the Tricentennial.

14. I’ll be 116 years old on July 4, 2076

15. My cello repertoire (including single string, five-note pieces) is 35 pieces now.

16. This web site, which I created, is now over 14 years old.

17. In addition to corn I now eat cooked carrots. My mother would be so proud.

18. I have had the same cell phone for over 4 years.

19. I have had nine jobs since graduation from college.

20. After Illinois, I have lived the longest in Kansas.

21. I have, or contribute to, six web sites.

21. I have ten email addresses.

22. I can now read music.

23. I still haven’t been to Alabama.

24. Our household has 5 laptops, 4 desktops and one iPod Touch.

25. The Winne-the-Pooh stories are still my favorite childhood books.

26. I can count to twenty in three languages.

27. I can count to one hundred in two languages.

28. I don’t know how high I can count in my cradle language.

29. By the end of this calendar year, I will have traveled outside of the United States ten times.

30. This calendar year alone, I will travel outside the US three times.

31. 18 months after having Lasik surgery on my eyes, I required trifocal glasses to see properly.

32.  My favorite new sandwich at Panera is their Cuban – without the pickles, please.

33. I believe that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

34. I prefer Twitter to Facebook.

35. I am a “see you later” person. As opposed to a “I’ll be in touch” or “It’s been nice talking to you” person.

36. The older I get the spicier I like my food.

37. I can now say things like “Twenty-five years ago…” and have it mean a period of time when I was an adult.

38. I have read Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon once every year since it was publish in 1999.

39. I don’t remember my dreams but I do remember Christmas when I was two and a half.

40. I have studied, and hold rank in, two martial arts.

41. I am the fifth generation in a row in my family to be married twice.

42. My middle name, Hanford, is my great-grandfather’s middle name. And his father’s given name.

43. After losing 57 pounds 3 years ago, I’ve regained 15.

44. I’ve had my left earlobe pierced twice.

45. I’ve had 5 surgeries (involving a scalpel) and 6 procedures (involving an endoscope).

46. The song Suite Judy Blue Eyes always reminds me of summer and the swimming pool.

47. I prefer Coca-cola and Macs to Pepsi and Windows.

48. I’ve had a beard since 1998.

49. Today I am seventeen thousand eight hundred and ninety seven days old.

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 .

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.

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.

View 3.30.2010 Ride in a larger map

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.

The first computer interface I ever used was a thermal paper terminal with a 1200 BAUD acoustic coupler built into the back. It probably weight 40 pounds and was terribly slow even in the mid 1970s, but it opened up an entire universe for me and quite literally changed the course of my life. I have been “in” computers ever since.

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.

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.

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.