Saturday     September 1, 2007   11:16 am

Tuesday 28 Augst 2007

How do you talk to a dying person? I googled a phrase very similar to that yesterday. I was almost embarassed to have to turn to the internet for such advice. But I knew I could find something. I knew someone had taken the time to write down such valuable, painful advice.

My aunt is about 10 years older than me and she's dying of cancer. I tried calling her yesterday. When I tried calling her today I wasn't even sure she'd be alive. She weighs less than a hundred pounds. My dad had told me that she sounds great on the phone. He talks to her every day. I wish I could tell how he felt. Though his sister is dying, he's straightforward and pragmatic, but I know he cares deeply for her.

I've been thinking about this phone call for days. Trying to ponder how to speak to someone who knows that any day they will cease to exist. How do you talk to someone and avoid speaking about the future? How do you speak without getting locked into easy cliches such as "I hope things will get better", "see you later", "talk to you soon", "you should try it sometime", when you know none of those may be true?

I read a little advice and then decided not to over think it. Instead I would simply go home for lunch everyday and make the phone call until I reached her, betting on my ability to wing the conversation. When she picked up the phone and heard my voice, she immediately asked how was the wedding? It caught me by surprise. It was the first thing she said to me. So I did my best to describe it to her. She was just getting out of the shower, and getting ready to go pick up her dad at the hotel.

Having visitors has been tiring. People have been coming to visit. Her husband has been trying to keep busy. She says it's his way of dealing with it. She relies on her faith for strength. Though I'm not religious I support her in her beliefs. I told her that one of my fondest childhood memories involved her taking me to her highschool for a day. I remember her classmates giving me their spelling list and even though I was only in 3rd or 4th grade I could pronounce and spell most of the words. They were all really impressed. I was too. I remember I found it really confidence inspiring that I could impress a bunch of highschool students at such a young age just by knowing some words. She also took me to her art class where they were making candles by pouring wax into molds made of impressions in sand. It was the early 70s and everyone had long hair. I remember thinking the people in the art class were really cool.

I asked her how she felt, was she freaked out, or had reached some kind of acceptance. She said she'd been doing ok, and that she had come to terms with what's happening. I asked her if she's in pain. She said she's on morphine. Things are shutting down. She hopes she can survive the next four days because her brother is coming to visit.

We talked about everyday things. The silences were the hardest. I didn't want the conversation to end. She said she loved me. I told her I loved her. We said good bye.

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Wednesday     May 31, 2006   11:12 pm

That's what I get for writing with a belly full of wine. An entry about how proud I am of my bladder.

The person I sat next to was visiting from Harvard. One of her interests is biohacking. One of my interests is biohacking. I had met with her in my office earlier in the day, and the conversation jumped from topic to topic faster than we could finish two sentences on the same subject. It was like a continual flow of threads opening up. We could have talked for hours.

There were many coincidences. One of the things we had in common was UC Santa Cruz, though she was there a few years before me. An hour before we met, I had a lunch conversation about a language I had not previously heard of called "Ruby". As she sat down in the chair in my office, looking up, she could see an entire shelf of books on computer langauges. "Do you use Ruby?", she asked. I talked about how for years I had been thinking of biology as being at the stage where we're collecting parts, but have a difficult time predicting how to use those parts to make something new. Later in the day when she gave her talk, she introduced a web site of biology as parts, and spent time talking about systems biology from an engineering perspective. It was the second time I had had a "parts" based conversation about biology with the day's seminar speaker, and then had the speaker go on to give their talk about that very subject, as if it were a completely novel notion.

Something I found funny was that she came across as very confident and full of herself enough that only bits of conversation got through to her. Subjects getting dropped, unfinished thoughts, changing the subject midstream, that was all normal, but it painted her with an air of arrogance. So it was funny to have her over hear that I had a cat, and have her undivided attention turn to me, and see her face melt as she asked me to describe the cat.

The dinner was in the special room above the normal restaurant. It was rather noisy for a private room. There were probably 6 tables altogether. Before each course, a guy from the winery stood up and told us the history and characteristics of each wine we were tasting. All the wines were good. The mood of the small crowd was very friendly and quaint, but it was hard for me not to feel cynical that the guy is actually a salesman and tells the same quaint stories every night as if he's telling them for the first time. Maybe it's just the scientist in me wondering how someone can speak authroitatively about something so subjective as wine.

Nonetheless, the food was great. The company was interesting. The wine, 6 small tastings over 3 hours of a 6 course meal, had me happy and flying high by the end of the evening, when the owner of the restaurant was telling us stories of his travels around Italy.

I paid for it the next day with a low grade hang over.

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Thursday     July 20, 2006   12:01 am       jean       http://halonine.tripod.com/blog/blogger.html      

I had a thought about this. People that start a topic, drop a few buzzwords, and then suddenly switch topics are kind of like
name-droppers. They're like topic-droppers. They mention just enough about something to give the impression that they know
about it, but consciously or not they move on to something else before you can find out if they really know about it.

Wednesday     May 3, 2006   9:41 pm

My bladder is the strongest! I can sit for 10 hours on a trans-atlantic flight, drink two cups of coffee, a coke, and a glass of water, and never visit the lavatory until I arrive at my destination. And I'm not even trying, it just feels natural. And so it was tonight, at a wine tasting dinner. I sat with a tablefull of people, and drank wines from a famous winery featuerd in the movie "Sideways", and I didn't have to go to the bath room until every other person had been to the bathroom twice.

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Thursday     May 11, 2006   1:18 pm       neekoh      

you're better than me. i'm usually the one that would have to go three times before anyone else went once.

Sunday     April 2, 2006   10:27 am

Sunday. Sleeping late. Sun. Sex. Coffee. Late afternoon about to go out to eat when I notice one of my mail accounts has received 600 messages in just a few hours. Someone is exploiting one of my web scripts. It's the contact script again. Someone has overcome the recent modifications I made requiring a referrer and an email entry in the email text box. Both of those are easy to fake, but the fact that someone spends time with trial and error to overcome a script that only sends me mail is really disturbing.

My script has been executed 600 times in 2 hours. Just like last time, the IP addresses appear to span the globe. I count 250 unique locations. Yet the messages stuffed into the script are all very similar. Even though I've set the script to sleep for a few seconds, thinking that would trip up or at least annoy an automated spammer, it appears to have no effect.

I finally remove the script so that we can go out to breakfast (at dinner time).

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Saturday     April 8, 2006   8:52 pm       jean       http://halonine.tripod.com/blog/blogger.html      

I'm sorry to hear that you are having problems with spam. It sounds like someone is using zombie computers over different countries to access your computer. I wonder what they gain from sending you spam, though.

Saturday     March 11, 2006   10:00 am

Over the last few months I noticed a new addition to my email box. Several hundred messages per day from a single source, that appeared to be from myself.

Several years ago I had written a contact script. A little program in place of my email address on some of my web pages. The purpose of the program was to try and protect my email address from spam bots. The script would check the user agent of who was calling my web page, and if it was a well known browser, it would leave me email address in place, otherwise it would return a web form for someone to fill out, in case they wanted to contact me. The program was also configured to be a simple contact form, that could stand on it's own, as in a "contact me" link on a web page. When someone filled out the form, it would send me email with their message.

So recently when I started receiving hundreds of messages each day from my contact script, I knew something was up.

Checking the access log I see that in 17 hours the script has been executed (accessed) 1392 times. If it's from a single location I can contact the ISP and report the spammer. I check the IP address log and it has been accessed by 353 unique IP addresses! I check a few with traceroute, and they resolve to far away places like Russia and Mexico.

The last time I modified the script was April 9, 2000. I change it to be just a little more restrictive, requiring a valid referer, and a return email address, and if it gets neither of those, to wait 10 seconds before returning an error. If the asshole spammer is using a robot to access it thousands of times a day, then a 10 second delay will cost him hours of connection time.

In the first day, I count that he tried to push 6 megabytes of mail through the script. That's 6 MB of crap in my mail box that I have to pay for and spend time deleting. Never let anyone tell you that spam is cheap. On the second day, the script stopped being accessed. He must have noticed a clog in his spam pipeline.

Who is this person? What kind of life does he lead?

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