My father died 22 years ago today, about a year after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. That was only three weeks after my mother-in-law's death from a stroke on January 20th. Not a good way to start the year.

Dad introduced me to folk music, computers, and science fiction; I started out reading his books on computer design, Communications of the ACM (among others), Science, American Scientist, and the copies of Galaxy and Astounding (later, Analog) that he borrowed from a coworker. We disagreed on the relative merits of OS-2 and Linux, but very little else.

I guess after 22 years there isn't a whole lot more to be said.

Today I am grateful, mostly in retrospect, for what is past,...

• William Butler Yeats, who wrote the poem that provides the framework for this post.
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
• Bob Laurent, Chris Holosi, Naomi Pardue, and all the other filkers and friends who passed this year. I'm sure I'm leaving some out.
• Abraham Savitzky, my father, who would have been appalled at what the country he fought for has become.

or passing,...

• Lynn Savitzky, my mother, who may very well lose her final battle with cancer before her hundredth birthday in December.
• The American system of government, with liberty and justice for all. It is currently hanging by a thread.
• Knowing what we're up against. Knowing one's enemy is good.

...or to come. We'll have to wait to see whether the last phrase of that poem will be worth being thankful for. The first line may be more prophetic.

It has not been a good week. Between a synagogue mass murder in Pittsburgh yesterday, filk fan Harold Stein (hms42) dying of cancer Friday, and pipe bombs in the mail, the fact that I'm despairing of finding work in time to keep from going broke seems comparatively small, but it isn't helping either.

The fundamental problem is that I can't think of any area of expertise I have that would be worth charging consulting rates for, and as time goes on it becomes less and less likely that any of my skills will get me hired for doing it as an employee. Yes, I'm acquiring new ones. But I'm not going to acquire four years of experience in Ruby or JavaScript overnight. I'm a genuine expert at git, but I think that's pretty common. Maybe I could predict the next big thing, but my track record as a seer isn't all that good either.

I certainly didn't predict that IBM would buy Red Hat. Big Blue Hat? Nah. Does "If AOL Buys RedHat" count for a prediction? I wrote it in 2002, and it has nothing whatever to do with the current situation. I guess if Microsoft can buy GitHub...

I did manage to get some website work done, including importing quite a few older software-related posts into the blog on computer-curmudgeon.com/. I'm not sure it matters. And last Sunday I swatted the second simplex bug in hyperviewer, but I don't think tetrahedra and tesseracts have a lot of market value.

I'm blathering, aren't I?

( Notes & links, as usual )

Wednesday Clea, our guinea pig, died. She was a simple soul -- piggies aren't renouned for their intelligence -- but affectionate as guinea pigs go, and very calm and laid-back. She joined N's household in November of 2011, half a year before I did, and was eventually joined by Shona and Marieke, both of whom died earlier this year, before we left Rainbow's End. Clea and her herd moved from N's house to my apartment, from there to Rainbow's End. Clea, the last of them, moved from there to the U-District apartment and finally here on Whidbey Island.

Guinea pigs are herd animals, but Clea seemed to handle the loss of her companions calmly. I think by that time her herd included the household humans and even the cats. She would calmly move to another corner when one of the kittens reached into her cage; I admonished them more for my comfort than Clea's.

We buried her in the back yard where she can grow some of the hay she loved to eat, and later some carrots and celery. It seems appropriate.

School starts next week. N's son, j, wants to try home-schooling; I'm teaching science, math, and programming. It's a little daunting; the last time I taught programming I was in grad school, teaching Algol-W (which later became Pascal). I'm rather unsure about which language to teach; Scratch (based on Smalltalk) is an obvious place to start, but I think I'll give him a taste of Scheme and maybe Python as well, and let him decide. Suggestions welcome.

I've also spend an inordinate amount of time on the phone with OnStar/GM/whatever-they-call-themselves about the problems in their website (can't contact the car), email reports (linked to blank page), and phone app (wildly incorrect mi/kwh value). They may make good cars, but the tech support for their software is on a par with AT&T and Comcast. Maybe worse than Comcast. Caveat emptor.

( Notes & links, as usual )

It was a long year last week. 2016 is dead and buried; it wouldn't be hard to do better, but I don't expect 2017 to make the effort.

I was going to put a summary of the year here. I'm not up for it. See my previous post for a wrap-up of what I mostly didn't do. I can't think of any major accomplishments to report, except maybe living through it. That may have to do.

( Notes & links, as usual )

I'm available. I don't promise to be coherent after 11pm, but you can call any time. 408 - 896 - 6133.

(Inspired by ysabetwordsmith | Moment of Silence: Robin Williams. His death has, understandably, shaken up a lot of people.) (The userpic? Citalopram.)

The weather was cool and overcast when I first went out, and everything was wet after a night and morning of rain. But everything was bright and sunny when I went to work. I ended up taking only a short walk, though, both because it was running late and I didn't really feel like going out. A nice little percolation pond, with birds. Geese, ducks, a pair of swans, a couple of black birds I couldn't identify, a kingfisher and a seagull.

In keeping with the household network's naming scheme, the router will probably be called polaris.thestarport.org when we finally move. No idea what the apartment will be called; we'll figure that out after we get there.

The grieving finally hit me late in the afternoon as I was starting to go through my email archives. It wasn't until I was going home that I actually identified it; that's doing pretty well, for me. Alexithymia has its uses, I guess: I don't seem to feel emotions as intensely as most people. It's going to be worse packing up the house and leaving the Bay Area, but I suppose I'll manage.

Earl Scruggs died. Other links in the notes.

Good grief! I shouldn't be surprised -- this happens every time I travel, since I pretty much only post from home. So... It was a good weekend. Lots of solid rehearsal time, and brunch with Chaos on Sunday. Didn't have time to meet up with either of my cousins, unfortunately, but that will probably work better on the next trip, given some time to plan ahead. If I do plan ahead, which I'm afraid is not a given.

It was a rough trip up; I had to get a cab to the airport, the plane was late, and I left my wireless mouse in the terminal somewhere. Put in a lost-and-found inquiry, but don't expect to see it again. Next time I take my wired travel mouse; I don't like it but I'm less likely to lose it.

This was also my first trip with the tennis bag for the travel guitar. It's more comfortable and somewhat lighter than the official gig bag, but doesn't really have enough room for my shoulder bag. A large songbook is pretty marginal. Still figuring out how best to use the space it does have. And it's still looking impossible for me to travel without a checked bag if I want to take a guitar on board. :(

The rehearsal, as I mentioned, went very well indeed. We decided that I should come up for another weekend -- it'll have to be a short one, Friday night to Sunday evening, because I'm running low on vacation time -- in early January. But we're in surprisingly good shape considering the amount of new material in the set. Reminder: you really want to hear our concert at Conflikt.

Another reminder: there's a household party coming up on Saturday!

I also got my netbook, barnard, more-or-less configured with Debian Squeeze; the biggest remaining problem is WiFi. The transition from dhcp3 to isc-dhcp has caused all kinds of havoc; I just realized last night that my router configuration is probably totally wrong at this point, too. No wonder WiFi's been flaky in the house!

Sadness: John McCarthy died on Monday. He was one of my favorite professors at Stanford, not so much because he was a good teacher -- he wasn't -- but because I loved watching the way his mind worked as he worked out programming problems on the board in his LISP class. chipuni posted the perfect epitaph: a single right parenthesis.

A pretty good day, though I have the feeling that I'm being less productive than I should be. Want to be. I'll have to work on that. Um... Is working on being productive actually being productive, or am I being metaproductive as an escape from being productive?

I went out for a walk again, but turned around after only 15min or so because I was getting rained on. I must have just walked under the edge of it, though; it was still sunny and dry at work (though the rain did reach there eventually). The Monta Vista high school's LED sign said "School Cancelled Today" -- I didn't find out why until I got home. Just roll over the link if you don't want to read the story, which might be triggery for some.

In other news, Steve Jobs is dead. He died of pancreatic cancer, which killed my father a dozen years ago. He was 56, eight years younger than me.

Is it ok to feel mortal now?

An office with walls does little to prevent sound leakage from the adjacent offices when the building has a dropped ceiling. Other than that, though, it's very nice. I'll cope.

I got quite a lot of work done, but no walkies.

Quite a few links. I was saddened and shocked to learn of the death of Project Gutenberg's founder, Michael Hart -- shocked, because he was less than a week older than me. I'm feeling old now. And mortal.

I spent quite a while in the evening listening to songs by Trinh Cong Son on YouTube; Joan Baez called him "the Vietnamese Bob Dylan". He was recommended to me by our Vietnamese lab tech, Gloria, when I said goodbye to her last Friday. Go give Impermanent Flower a listen. It's worth it.