Sleepless in San Jose

Woke at maybe 2am and had trouble getting back to sleep. Brain wouldn't shut up. I'm reassessing some things, mainly about travel. (The flower_cat told her doctor about our zoo trip and he immediately wrote out a prescription for a wheelchair. His only questions were height, weight, and folding. But that's just part of it, and not even the hard part.)

About 4am the Cat woke as well; we took turns sleeping in a close embrace until the alarm went off at 6:30. Normally we can't sleep that way; I think it was just the exhaustion that made it possible. She said as I got up that I didn't even snore. She's sleeping soundly now.

Got up with my nose congested and my throat dry; I'm probably coming down with something. Make that have come down with something.

There are dry-runs all this week at work for a major technical review next week; today's is at 9am, which is an unusual starting hour for our normally laid-back California Research Center. They've also completed the process of moving the administrative staff into the offices next door, and swapping suite numbers. Starting today they'll be keeping our door locked, since there's nobody to watch it.

It'll be a little good deal less convenient, but since my office is only a few steps from the door, I was always the one who got tapped when nobody was at the front desk. So that's a win.

Every silver lining has a cloud around it, though, and right now my life is distinctly overcast.

Just in case you thought Windows was secure...

It isn't (Seattle Times)

Microsoft has developed a small plug-in device that investigators can use to quickly extract forensic data from computers that may have been used in crimes.

The COFEE, which stands for Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, is a USB "thumb drive" that was quietly distributed to a handful of law-enforcement agencies last June. Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith described its use to the 350 law-enforcement experts attending a company conference Monday.

The device contains 150 commands that can dramatically cut the time it takes to gather digital evidence, which is becoming more important in real-world crime, as well as cybercrime. It can decrypt passwords and analyze a computer's Internet activity, as well as data stored in the computer.

It also eliminates the need to seize a computer itself, which typically involves disconnecting from a network, turning off the power and potentially losing data. Instead, the investigator can scan for evidence on site.

More than 2,000 officers in 15 countries, including Poland, the Philippines, Germany, New Zealand and the United States, are using the device, which Microsoft provides free.

Not surprisingly, there is discussion on slashdot and techdirt. Fortunately, an easy-to-install upgrade has just been released that fixes the problem.

2,000 Wikipedias per year

The title comes from "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus" by Clay Shirky. Somebody asked him "where do people find the time?" to create something like Wikipedia. Wikipedia -- the whole thing, articles and edits and talk pages and translations -- represents some 100 million hours of human thought. TV watching, in the US alone, amounts to some 200 billion hours every year. That's 2,000 Wikipedia projects every year.

Shirky points out that, in the years spanned by the Industrial Revolution, "The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation." Gin, and more gin. "And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today."

The equivalent, in the latter half of the 20th Century, was television. Society is only now waking up from that collective bender. What are you doing with your free time?

I'm not watching TV much these days. Nor movies. Nor listening to radio, even during my commute. Nor even reading books and magazines. I am still drugging myself -- I'm a product of my generation, not yet completely adapted to life in the 21st Century -- but my drug of choice these days is mostly LJ. A decade ago it was Usenet. At least my current drugs are interactive.

Sometimes, my current drugs create things that last. Some of my LJ content finds its way onto my website; my songs and essays are already there. I'm working on it. I came out with a CD over the course of two or three years in, basically, the time I saved by not watching TV. I ought to try not reading LJ so much.

(First brought to my attention in this post by catsittingstill; recently seen on techdirt as well.)

Ghosts

Since it's come up in comments to a couple of recent downwhen posts, yes, there were ghosts in the bed with us last night. They made it hard to sleep.

These weren't nearly as palpable as the old woman Colleen claims to have seen on the back stairs from time to time. I haven't seen her myself, but wouldn't be too surprised to learn that Sarah Winchester has been walking her old estate, wondering where her lovely orchards have gone. The old almond tree in our back yard died years ago.

These are memories, mostly, I think. It's a little hard to tell in the cold hours after midnight. Insubstantial, but real enough. Not all were of dead people.

Yes, of course: one was a dead, close friend. Parents: her mother, my father, closer than they've been in several years. Crying calls them. One was a stillborn child, another a stillborn friendship. Some were more insubstantial: dreams and illusions. The ghost of a lost illusion is a tenuous thing indeed. One of them might have become a song, if it had lived.

I've written before of the veil between the worlds. Sometimes, on a night in early August, it's so thin that I can almost reach through and touch whatever is not quite there. Last night it was thicker and less transparent; the ghosts were fuzzy with distance and sleep, and silent.

They never speak plainly, the ghosts; last night they made no sound at all, but seemed to have something to say. I'm never certain whether to try to listen, or simply to wave them off. They'll be back, I'm sure, until we've learned whatever they have to tell us.

We lay in one another's arms and took turns, sleeping, and waiting for the ghosts to speak. They never said anything that I remember. They rarely do.