The DNA of a Computer Guy

I wholehearted believe that the most saved people on this planet – the ones who have gone through the most suffering and temptations and endured the darkest situations – are without a doubt, computer guys.

In my mind, this is a fact.

I arrive at a client’s place at 4 pm to install a network printer, an absolute necessity for their business; even worse, their existing printer is on its last legs and doing weird things. I’ve installed printers hundreds of times and so I plan to knock this place over in an hour, from start to finish, and leave a hero.

Unbox the printer, set it up, connect it to the network and set something called a static ip. The static IP is like an unchangeable house address – needed because all the printers print to this address, and if it changes problems ensue. Estimated time to set the static IP: 3 minutes. Set all the PCs to print to the printer: ten minutes each max, times six PCs, so we’re talking an hour, leaving time to shoot the breeze with the boys.

Me with the Old Printer…

I set the static IP. Of course, we have to check to make sure it works, and at a PC I ping the printer. This means, I issue a command that says, “Hey, printer, are you out there on the network at this IP address?” If all is well, the printer responds, “Heck, yes I am, how are you?” Can we all then say: “Life is good.”

Printer is pinged, but does not respond. It is not found on the network.

Where is the printer?

The printer is beside me but apparently not on the network. Well, it’s time to check all the obvious possible issues. Is the stupid cable securely plugged into the printer? Did I type the right IP address? Things like that.

I do all the above and all looks good. Let’s try pinging again. I do. No printer.

At this point, we embark on a huge, worse-case scenario that boils down to: why can’t I see the stupid printer on the network, and what could possibly be wrong? To make life even better, the owners son (who has great sway) is watching my every step, every keystroke entered and is wondering what is wrong and asks, “Can I print now?”

“No, you can’t print now,” I say and I continue with my troubleshooting.

“What could be wrong?”

I start to explain, that the static IP address for some reason is not being recognized by other devices on the network and quickly lose him. It’s like when my mechanic tries to explain what happened when my car’s front end keeps shaking, and how this is attached to that and how this wears down and effects that, and in the end you have a shaky front end but it can all be fixed for $300, as long as this other thing isn’t worn at all.

“Oh,” he says. “Could it have something to do with the computer beside it? We could never get that to print to the old printer.”

“No, it’s not the PC beside it!” I say. By this point I have lost my spot in my troubleshooting sequence and try to find my way back to what I was trying to determine, when fortunately he leaves the room.

We try this and that and there are different ways to setup a printer – some very much less ideal than simply having all the PCs print over the network directly to it – and every way we try leads to failure. An hour and a half has passed and all the employees have left, so it’s just me and the owners son in the building now, and I find him and ask, “Is it ok that I stay? Do you have time?”

“Yeah, that’s fine,” he says. “I’ll just be here watching basketball.”

Here is a PC in the back office, where he can lean back like a big boss with his feet up and watch some game, and luckily he is in one room and I am in the other. That helps.

But not much, because everything I do is fraught with failure. Two hours have passed, and we’re not much farther than we were when I hit the door. There is a time to valiantly fight, and there is a time to valiantly give up, and I choose the latter.

“I’m going home,” I tell the owners son, still watching a game.

“It didn’t work out?” he asks.

“No,” I say, admitting defeat. There is success as a computer guy, where the balloons fall and someone cuts the cake, and there is abject defeat, where the question is, “Does this guy know what he is doing?” I am in the latter category with this job. But I must explain: it could be much, much worse. Being responsible for losing 15 years of data because you didn’t properly setup the backup system – that is much much worse. That is grounds to shoot dust in your face, swear at you with many bad words, get the pitchforks out and run you out of town.

So it could be worse.

I take the printer home and mess with it, when my mind is clear. I find a way to put it on my home network but I have to say: this printer is weird, and I’ve never had to do what I did to get it to work the way it should. It’s like that in a computer guy’s life. When it should work, it doesn’t for reasons inexplicable, and when it shouldn’t work, it suddenly does. A simple job can end up taking hours, and a complex job can be surprisingly quick. No one knows what lurks in the day of a computer guy. It can be anything.

That’s why we computer guys have been tried and tested more than other mere mortals. We have fought bigger lions and scaled higher mountains, and we have Kryptonite somehow embedded in our DNA that allows us to handle insurmountable situations – situations that involve what mere mortals can only hope to comprehend and fix, that is: issues with computers.

Will anyone disagree?

On Radiation Treatments

I am being asked questions about how my radiation treatments are going and, in general, how am I doing.

The treatments are going well, and I’m doing great.

Getting radiation treatments is like getting a haircut every day. With both you drive to the place where the “event” is to happen; wait your turn reading outdated magazines or playing on your phone; hop into the chair\lie on the table when the barber\technician motions to you; be still when the ear lowering\tumor shrinking treatment begins and stay still through the entire process. Ten minutes later, you’re done, and back to home you go.

The The Varian Clinac iX machine that delivers radiation to my side

The differences are as follows: during radiation the music is bad, as I have to listen to country music – something I don’t have to endure at the barbers; I don’t have to tip the technician after my radiation whereas I do the barber; insurance picks up most of the radiation tab but doesn’t when I get a haircut; and with radiation I come out looking middle-aged and 57 as always, though with a barber I walk out a new man.

That’s about it.

I think I am more philosophical when getting radiation, though. I lie there on my stomach with my body in a tailor-made cast so I can’t move and think about where my life has been and where it is going while Betsy (my name for the radiation machine) moves her appendages around me and every once in a while makes a buzz, buzz and buzz sound. It has been a good life and full of surprises and adventures, twists and turns (and here there’s another Buzz!), and I have a very hopeful future because I believe in God who can do miracles, but I sometimes wonder how I got here on this table with a multi-million dollar machine zapping me at the age of 57 when life could have been all rainbows and unicorns and puppy dogs and sunshine.

I’m normally not so philosophical at the barbers. They usually want to talk to me, so I make small talk with them about the weather, kids – and dogs is always a great subject if they have one. We always start the conversation in the same way, with them asking how I want my hair, and I always say, “Four on the top and two on the sides.” I don’t know what that really means, but when I go home my wife always says my hair looks nice. If I’m in an especially angry mood at hair, I say, “Three on the top and one on the sides,” and when I come out I’m all ready for summer.

But I really can’t think about philosophy at the barbers as well as I can at Radiation, unless I get a barber who is having a bad day and doesn’t want to talk. It’s just how it is. Sometimes, though, I do get one in a good mood who makes sweeping statements about existence while running the razor over my head.

“Death and taxes,” he says. “Isn’t it always the case?”

(This is philosophy for a barber.)

I agree: those are the two constants in life, something akin to a number in a huge formula that never changes, though everything else around it changes.

“You bet,” I say, and try to encourage him in his lot in life, which is cutting heads. “The thing is to be happy in it all.”

“Happy! How can you be happy when they take all your money and spend it on stupid things?”

He has a point, but still.

Back to my radiation (which this blog is about), I always thank the radiation technician when I’m done and sometimes make a joke. “Another happy customer,” I say, and they laugh.

I am a happy customer, especially if the tumor in my side is shrunk and I can once again lay on my left side when sleeping. When you are a side sleeper life is digital: left or right, so when I’ve exhausted the time on my right side I have no place left to go, as God only gave us two sides. But that’s another story.

Another day has passed and I’m on the table again, listening to country music with Betsy zapping me, and think, “Is it possible that the rainbows and unicorns and puppy dogs and sunshine are in this very room, if only I had eyes to see it?” Ah, yes, I think it is so.

The only question is: will my barber agree?

Dog Days of Winter

It can be a problem when one of the little ones that God has given you to care for is bored and, because of that, starts to act out.

We have this problem now.

The odd thing is, it’s not with any of my kids but with our puppy, Winston.

It has been a long winter for this pup and a long winter for all of us, and this long winter keeps going on and on. It can be compared to the wrath of God, or something in the universe that is seriously short-circuited that has caused there to be four – yes four – nor’easter snow storms in three weeks this March.

Again: Four.

You go outside now and strangely the birds chirp and there are buds on the trees, but it’s still cold out and sometimes you see a patch blue in the sky above, so by faith I believe that spring is coming. We live by faith and not by sight, so I am hanging onto faith at this point.

Back to the dog, he is only a pup trapped inside part of our house, and he is capable of being good but is smart enough to know when a treat is involved or not. When it is, then he is really obedient, but otherwise he’s lazy. What does really obedient mean? It means when we say come, he comes and when we say crate, into the crate he goes. Lazy in contrast means when I get up to put a dab more sugar in my tea, he jumps up into my chair and when I return refuses to budge – despite all my “Down, Winston, Down” – and he does not get down but looks at me with those big eyes like, “I’m comfortable here, you know!” Then I force the issue, taking him by his collar and pulling him out but guess what: he fights me. He will not get down, and now I am moving the chair across the floor but not him. Understand, he’s a big boy, and it’s not like pulling a chiwawa out of a chair – no, it is not.

This is no way to train a dog, but I’m tired and fatigued from my latest zapping and am a bit miffed that the animal jumped in my spot in the two seconds my bottom was absent from it. So I really just want him to obey but like a child he has decided not to, as there is no treat involved, and we are stuck: me the big human with the big brain and he the big dog with quite the will.

This is where dogs are good for ones personal salvation. Get a dog if you want to be saved. That’s my advise.

I used to say of the cats, “The difference between having cats and kids is that if the cats misbehave, you can just put them out but you can’t do that with kids.”

It’s true, and I can add dogs into the above, but not really, because when this dog is out he chases the chickens in a blaze across the yard, over every hill and dale until somehow he can be tricked into returning to us, so what I am saying is that you just can’t put him out like you can a cat.

I think that when and if spring comes all will be better, and out the door he can go penned in with his technologically awesome electronic fence, never to be hit by a car or to chase a stray three roads over; how great will it be! There will be spring and blue skies and nature will wake with birds chirping in the morning and slowly the trees will explode with green, and one day there will be leaves, flowers and bees buzzing in the yard.

That’s then, and now is now, so for now we have a bored dog and no spring, with snow across the land, and we just have to believe that nature will take its course, and for the good.

My Stand On Facebook Part II

We can say this: cancer has softened me and given me new thoughts about many different things, and made a better man of me all around.

Thus, I am considering posting on Facebook doggie pictures and pictures of meals I had at nice restaurants (places I rarely frequent) and pictures with amusing words underneath (meams is what they call them, my teens tell me) – strongly considering, mind you, not doing – and turning away from my ways of being a stalker to being a poster. As a stalker, I would look at others post but not post myself; watch but not participate; be incognito, never shown.

How did this radical transformation happen, you ask? I will tell you.

I lowered my standards recently to take selfies while at Niagara Falls with my beautiful wife. Not just any selfie, but a selfie standing in front of the falls lit in soothing blues and reds behind us. Even my pathologically hard heart had a technological awaking, as all that beauty could be advertised to the world with a click, and why not?

From there I found myself thinking I might post a picture of our new black lab-boxer dog on Facebook. Where were these thoughts coming from? Suddenly they seemed acceptable, almost normal. Note that I hadn’t yet clicked the Post button, but it is a slippery slope I was treading on, and the direction was downward.

So, like an exhibitionist, I plan on exposing all the cuteness in my life for the world to see. This is what cancer has done. You ask: does cancer change your life, and I am here to tell you it is so. For proof, just look at your Facebook feed tomorrow. I will be there.

Note: here is My Stand of Facebook Part I.

Can We Talk About Something Less Boring?

Cancer is many things but at this point its plain old boring.

Let me explain.

We are on the fourth go-around with this stuff and the fact is that everything that we are doing now – or will do re #4 – we have already done in one way or another, and all the discussions are about the same old thing just that the paint is a shade different, and all the running around to this scan\test\scope or that radiation\surgery\chemo – the sum mass of the entire mess – is old and, as I said above, boring.

“Oh, your cancer has come back! I’m sorry. How horrible,” is the response I get when I tell people we’re at it again.

I don’t want to minimize the concern, and down the road it is potentially life-threatening, but for now the cancer is slow-growing so for me this is what I find horrible: driving to the cancer center, scheduling another radiation appointment at the cancer center, driving home from the cancer center, having the robot call me about my appointment at the cancer center (and would I hit #3 to confirm), looking at my Google Calendar and seeing a lot of appointments at the cancer center.

Get the idea? At this point I am one with the cancer center in a zen-like way; it’s astounding.

I ask: where is the excitement that came when I was diagnosed with cancer in 2007 and when it re-occurred for the first time in 2014? Cancer used to tilt the hum drum tempo of life, like a pin-ball machine tipped radically left-ward, whereas now the cat barely opens an eye when we tell the kids.

“Dad,” one of my sons stopped me last time we were just about to announce it to them, “Do you have cancer again?”

“Yes,” I had to admit.

They wanted to know a bit about the details but the big question at the time was: did we have hot sauce, as some of them are really into their sauce.

We can put all this into perspective. For me, getting a scan is like getting a haircut. Talking to doctors, you might as well think of it as visiting the neighbor next door. And radiation? It’s like having my podiatrist fix an ingrown toenail.

We’ve been at this eleven years, mind you, and some might think it odd that your stomach is behind your heart (that’s where mine is) but after awhile, the placement of that little organ in the funny spot is no longer the spice of life, but more like table salt. I haven’t laid flat in eleven years, and some find that odd but I rather think those who sleep horizontally are just weird. Lets just say we’re well past being shocked at the way we must always sleep – tilted, as if on a roof top. These days my little friend on my left side – that pesky little tumor – well, he’s just part of the circle of life, like Simba in Lion King; like generations coming and going, we go from one medical crisis to the next.

If you want to add spice to your life, just get a dog. Now there’s a subject that is worth writing a blog about.

Managing Cancer

We are now in the second stage of the epic battle against a real villain: esophageal cancer.

In the first stage – which lasted from 2007 to the previous month – we battled like one of the Marvel Superheros against it and mostly won. We first blew up his lair (an operation that cut out 60% of my stomach and half my esophagus) and then used our death rays (radiation) and super poisons (Chemo) to destroy 99.9999 % of his forces. We were victorious and enjoyed six years of peace that comes from an ostensibly won war.

The enemy regrouped after this, since .0001% of his forces were still left alive from the first onslaught (though wounded), and slowly reconstituted another lair (this time in my lower left lung). Our weapons were once again brandished, and we hit him first with Super Duper Poison (Chemo of the worst sort) but when that failed against the treacherous vermin, we blew up the lair out with high explosives (another operation). He was quiet for a time but came back in the same general area a year later, and this time we made operational the extra Super-Duper, death ray (Cyberknife) and reduced him to a smoldering ruin.

And that is where we left the situation in 2015.

A deceiver of the darker sort, he began again to re-constitute from just a few troops that had survived the second onslaught but kept his base hidden, sending out scouts to rattle us out of our complacency and to shake the confidence we enjoyed (tumor marker going up). This he did for two years until we could no longer endure it, and we sent all of our scouts out to find him (CT scans, PET scans, Bone Scans, Colonoscopy, Endoscopes) but all found nothing. We checked again in the same year (2017) but found nothing and so stopped the fight.

In the winter of 2018, we found him in a remote region, one hardly traveled and rarely visited (Lower Left Chest Wall). Only now we had a problem. His entrenched position among the hilly topography made it such that we could never fully eradicate him (chest wall problematic) but, fortunately, all his forces were poorly trained and equipped (slow growing cancer), so the plan going forward is to once again use the Death Ray and poison to cut him down to size, though not able to achieve total annihilation.

So we are now managing the enemy as we did in Vietnam. Our goal is not total war and absolute conquest, but to keep him at bay, to strafe his bases when they are found (radiation), and to hunt down his scouts on every jungle path (chemo). Though not able to totally defeat him, we can look forward to having the upper hand, as he is a poor fighting force (dividing slowly) and a good many years can reasonably be had if we stay in the struggle and keep blasting.

May God be with us.

God Bless America.

On School Shootings

This little blog cannot be all fluff; at times, we have to tackle serious issues, and so we will: school shootings in America and in particular guns.

Obviously such shootings in schools and against our children is absolutely horrific. Children by definition should be protected and no one should be shot, but against our littlest ones? Dreadful is too soft a word, to be sure.

A good question is how to stop such incidents and whether to ban, destroy or severely limit the weapon used in them, namely the gun itself. If we got rid of the guns, it is thought, these shootings would stop and our children would be safe.

 

I happen to disagree with this and, no, I am not a member of the NRA. My son has a .22 rifle that I’ve shot a few times and once I shot a .44 that a friend let me try, but other than that I really have no other affinity with guns. They were fun to shoot the few times that I did, but I’m not emotionally wed to them.

That being said, I place the blame for the school shootings not on these evil guns but on our culture and what it has become. Let me tell you a little story: my wife was recently at our local school, swimming in a Rec Center pool attached to it when ammunition was found in the school locker, which resulted in lock down situation for an hour and a half, so she was stuck there. While waiting, she struck up a conversation with an elderly gentleman who said that in his day, they would bring guns to school and clean them in shop class.

Could it be true?

It is true! See here and here and here. Many schools had shooting clubs in rural areas but even New York City even had one in nearly every school until 1969.  In rural areas students would hunt before school, store their guns in lockers during school and bring them home afterward. No one thought anything about it. Guns were part of American culture, a fitting present to give a young boy on his 12^th birthday by the parents, and the only issue was to instill gun safety in the young ones coming up.

Yet with all these evil guns in the hands of our youth at the time, how was it that there were no school shootings? Not one. As a kid I never heard of one. We were never afraid. I never experienced a lock down; the possibility never entered my head.

So then was then and now is now, and the question arises: how did we get here? We had lots of guns and a gun culture but no shootings, and now we have lots of guns and a gun culture but lots of shootings. Perhaps what changed was not the guns but the type of people who were holding the guns, and what type of people were they?

If Al Quida had stormed a school and shot 17 children, it would be awful. This would be a terrorist incident, to be sure, and the Department of Homeland Security would get involved. But these shootings do not involve elements from outside of us, nor do they involve fifth columns within us, but they involve us.

So, what have we become, if we are doing these things?

These are not easy questions, nor are the answers easy, but perhaps we can say that the center is not holding – in some huge, extensional way – and much of what we are doing has to be re-thought. We can ask such questions, such as: what is the organizational basis of society going to be if it is not the family, and if we want to get back to a fairly effective organizational principle, the ten commandments work quite well, in my opinion. When a society cannot uphold any moral code or is ashamed to believe in any organizal principle except that of self-absorption and consumerism, perhaps we should walk back our trek into freedom (i.e. rank hedonism) and think again.

I am no social scientist, and I have no plans to re-make society. If I can remake myself in this short stay I have on this planet and help those around me, that in itself if a great accomplishment. But I write this because I read all about how evil guns are, and I wonder what is evil is not the guns, but us.

Puppy Problems

I may not have always hit it right raising my kids, but now as a dog owner I can make up for my mistakes and raise a canine in the right way.

The dog in question is Winston, a jet black boxer\lab puppy who has been making progress in the manners department. That’s what a good dog owner does: puts manners into the animal, such that when I say “Sit,” he lowers his haunches and sits. He sits so nicely now when I put on his leash, I feel like a dog owner who may have just arrived.  Besides this when I say “Come,” he saunters over to me on cue. This is a good dogie, or turning into one.

He has even gotten pretty good with potty training. Now, I’ve helped to train eight kids, and you would think those years would be behind me but no: now I have this dog, and training involves going outside in all sorts of inclement weather – with the snow flying under an angry, gray sky – and waiting while the dog sniffs around while I freeze, and eventually he does what he should do as a dog.

That’s where I was yesterday: standing outside biding my time on this planet with the dog sniffing around for his special spot and me daydreaming, with the leash roped around two fingers in an example of casual potty duty on an actually good end-of winter day (no snow, 50 degrees out, sunshine). Life is good, I’m with my dog and that strange thing in the sky is actually warming me.

Who knows what I was thinking, and who knows how the obedient dog flipped into a Neanderthal canine, all manners gone, when suddenly the leash flew from my fingers and Winston bolted in huge leaps and barks toward ten chickens that had innocently wandered to the other side of our garage, scavenging for food.

Who knew how I looked when ten chickens were seen Bawk-Bawking to save their skin and were figuratively thrown into the air with Winston nipping at their feathers exploding above him, barking, and what did the new rooster (Mosley) know when suddenly he had to defend his harem (in the air ten foot above him) from this black maniac.

It’s all good, and we should neither judge the dog nor the chickens to be perfectly politically correct and moral relativeism would say that neither is bad, but we should applaud poor Mosley, a mild-mannered rooster who has never attacked anyone, not even once (in contrast to Frank and more Frank and even more Frank).

This poor kind-hearted animal threw himself into the fray courageously to protect his harem, which we can interpret as being either noble or sinister (but this is after all the animal world), and so he threw himself between the dog and his chicks – which, of course, made him a target for the dog.

And a target he was.

Next thing I know, Mosley is flying through the front yard, and Winston is flying right after him, all the while Mosley is clucking to beat the band at 90 miles an hour and Winston – like a race horse – is only a step behind and sometimes less, nipping at the bird’s feathers as he runs.

I run in hopeless pursuit.

These animals are fast, and I yell like a good owner, “WINSTON, COME.” They are now in the neighbors yard, with insane clucks heard to the hills, and am at least able to get in in the general area, being a human being with a big brain but poor speed.

They fly past me and into the backyard, and I follow yelling “WINSTON, COME,” as if the animal is going to stop and listen and walk back to me, panting, looking for a treat. By the time I reach the backyard, they are gone around the other side of the garage, and I am alone.

I run to the front yard, still yelling as if it mattered, and my oldest son is now outside as is my wife. We are all running around, yelling, and Winston and Mosely are running around while we are running around after them, and the neighbor across the road comes out and hears:

Cluck-cluck!

“Get him!”

Bark, bark, bark!

“Over there!”

“Winston, COME,”

More cluck-clucks.

In the end, his leash gets caught on some branches in some thickets to the left of our yard. I am first but my wife is right behind me, and I get Winston’s collar and take him to the ground. “NO, NO,” I yell into his dog face. He is panting, his tongue hanging out of his mouth, and his eyes unsure, as if he might have done something wrong.

The rooster is completely stiff. He is laying on the ground with his head down, having had ten heart attacks in three minutes. It is not easy being the head of a harem. Take note.

And me the dog owner? While on a one of my walks the other day, I made the animal SIT when a car came down the road. The car slowed and the passenger’s window came down. “I’m impressed,” he said then sped away.

Those were the days when my pride in my dog parenting was at its height. Now I just hold the leash tighter. You can give these animals all the manners in the world but underneath, you still have a dog.