Jodi was persistent and I finally relented to read Life of Pi by Yann Martel, a book she heartedly recommended. Boy, am I glad she is persistent! Life of Pi is about a young man in India, the son of a zookeeper, who decides that he wants to be Christian, Muslim and Hindu because he loves God and sees value in all these religions. At 16, Pi and his family attempt to immigrate to Canada, taking a ship across the Pacific with many of the zoo’s animals on-board. The ship sinks and Pi continues his travels in a lifeboat with a few other passengers. The story is really about stories, and how the telling of a good story can illuminate greater truths. Wonderful book.
Seymour Hersh has written another explosive article in The New Yorker. Hersh claims that Bush administration officials say they were involved in “the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks” because Bush and Cheney “were convinced that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preemptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations”.
Augustus Richard Norton, a professor of international relations and anthropology at Boston University, spoke about this issue on NPR’s Fresh Air.
Considering the Bush Administration’s extensive misinformation campaign in order to invade Iraq, and their stated mission to remake the Middle East, this doesn’t seem far fetched.
Microsoft released a new tool called Windows Live Writer that aims to make blogging easy. I’m testing it with this post. It supports many of the blog software packages (I use Moveable Type) and their own hosted service called Windows Live Spaces. Two of the barriers to a good blog is writing often (ahem) and having a system setup so you can jot off posts quickly and easily. We’ll see if this new tool helps me write more.
“Caring for Your Introvert” is a spot-on article published in The Atlantic, a wonderful magazine. This is me. Here is a follow up interview with the author, Jonathan Rauch.
I get lots of questions from friends and family about PCs, software and technology in general. Lately I’ve been recommending software and have promised many people that I’d send them an email with links to download the goods. Well, instead of sending out emails every time someone asks, I’ll direct them to this post. So here goes. I am becoming a big fan of open source software. Open source software is typically free to use and is usually built by a community of developers (although many for-profit companies are getting on the bandwagon). I’ve been a Microsoft user for many years and some of these suggestions are Microsoft products. But many of their products are expensive. Plus they are bloated and have features that only experts use.
Browser 
I use and recommend Mozilla’s Firefox browser. For many reasons that I won’t go into here, Firefox is a safer browser than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Plus is has cool features like tabs and popup blocker built-in. And for power users, Firefox has Extensions which can seriously enhance how you use a browser.
I use Microsoft Outlook and various webmail clients for work. Webmail is certainly cool, and the various versions are getting much more functional, but most people want a desktop client. I use and recommend Mozilla’s Thunderbird mail client. It works well, especially if you have multiple mail accounts that you want to access from a single client.
Virus Scanner
Many PCs come preinstalled with a virus scanner. Most of these provide virus database updates for free for a few months, but then require that you buy their software and/or pay a subscription fee to keep updated. Bullocks. There are perfectly free and effective virus software packages available. I use and recommend AVG Anti-Virus Free. Make sure to uninstall any existing virus and security software installed before installing Avast or any other virus software.
Spyware scanner
Virus software is not enough to protect your computer. Spyware is nasty and can serious degrade the performance of your PC. I use and recommend Microsoft’s Antispy software. It works great and runs in the background without using up to many resources.
Windows Update
I highly recommend that you keep your Windows installation up to date with the latest patches. This is easy to do. Start Internet Explorer, click Tools on the menu bar and select Windows Update. This will scan your computer and recommend updates. Install all recommended updates. Keep doing this until no more updates are identified. Then make sure Automatic Updates are enabled.
Firewall
I highly recommend running Windows XP Service Pack 2, which includes a firewall. To enable it, go to Start, Control Panel, Windows Firewall. I also think a hardware-based router that acts as a firewall is a good additional step to protect your PC from the Internet. The Linksys products are great and they can give you Wireless capabilities as well.
Desktop Search
One of my favorite tools of late is Microsoft’s MSN Desktop Search. This free download installs a toolbar that indexes all your files and gives you a quick and exhaustive search capability for all your files. Very useful. And as a bonus, it gives you tabs in Internet Explorer 6.
Office Suite
One of the most promising open source projects is the OpenOffice.org software package that is aiming to compete directly with Microsoft Office. OpenOffice is a free suite of office applications including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation creator, drawing program and database. I’ve installed it and poke around, but haven’t used it in any real way. It can open and save in Microsoft compatible formats with little problems. But the biggest advantage is cost. Microsoft’s Office 2003 Professional is $500 compared to FREE for OpenOffice.
Photo Editing
Another application that has received great reviews, but I haven’t tried, is Paint.net, a photo editing package.
Lots more
You can find an extensive list of open source software listed by category here.
Enjoy!
“66% of Americans think that President Bush is doing a poor job in his handling of the war. The other 34% of people think that Adam and Eve rode Dinosaurs to church.”
Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live
Google has a cool and controversial new service called Google Print. They have indexed entire libraries of books and made them searchable. When a search gets a hit, Google will display an excerpt of the book showing the searched word(s).
For fun I typed in “DeToffol” to see if anything showed up. Much to my surprise something did. My mom, Barb DeToffol, is in a book.
Bob Cary is a famous local Ely writer. He quotes Mom in a very short story about a Pioneer Press reporter writing about Ely’s long winters:
Barb DeToffol had just walked in the office. “If you think people have long faces up here, you’re wrong,” she said. “What we are doing on Shagawa Lake is this: We have all the resort people building big bonfires, and we are going to melt the ice off before the walleye opener.”
Very cool. Congrats Mom.
Flickr is a web service that allows you to setup a personal site to post pictures. It’s free, although you can subscribe to get additional features. We’ve posted a bunch of pictures so check it out. It would be fun if some friends and family also setup Flickr pages so we could use some of the aditional features of “contacts.” Let us know if you do.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/detoffol
www.AndrewSullivan.com – Daily Dish
Andrew Sullivan writes about how the U.S. Senate passed an amendment to a military appropriations bill that would bar the U.S. military from indecent treatment of detainees. The amendment passed by a 90-9 vote. This amendment still needs to be passed by the House, and President Bush has threatened to veto it, but it is a huge sign that many people in our government have real perspective on this issue. Scroll down to my blog entry a while ago about Gitmo for more in-depth discussions about how the Bush administration has tried to justify torture.
I was ready to leave the house for work at 7:20 AM on Monday morning. I bent over to zip up my computer bag and — WHAM — my back exploded with pain. I yelled, and continued to yell, as I went to my knees. “What’s wrong?” Jodi shouted from the other room. “MY BACK,” I managed to yell in between screams. She came running into the room with Charlie on her hip as I tried to maneuver onto my back to stop the pain. I finally got there and the sharp pain and spasms subsided a bit. I was breathing hard, looking up at Jodi and Charlie, with thoughts of life-long back problems running through my brain. I couldn’t move without major stabs of pain. After a few minutes we both knew this was something serious, so we decided to try to get me into the truck right away. I yelled as I got to my knees and then onto my feet using Jodi as leverage. I leaned heavily on Jodi trying to keep weight off my back while I shuffled very slowly outside and into the truck. Jodi got dressed and gathered Charlie’s stuff and we were off to the emergency room.
The hospital had us pull the truck into the ambulance bay so they could help me out and into a wheel chair. I hadn’t moved since getting into the truck, so moving again wasn’t fun. They brought me into the emergency room triage center to check me in. Then we waited in the waiting room. And waited…for two hours.
Finally they brought me into the emergency room. Jodi and a nurse helped me into the bed. Jodi helped me get me out of my clothes. The doctor came in soon after and I explained what happened. Now came the really painful part. He checked to make sure I hadn’t broken my back and that all my parts were moving. As I was laying on my back, he told me to try to lift each leg off the bed. I couldn’t do it – too much pain. He said try again. I couldn’t lift my heels off the bed at all and attempting to do so was very painful. Then he had me turn onto my side so he could check out my back. This was also very painful. The doctor said I didn’t need x-rays because the problem wasn’t bone or spine related. Most likely I had a pulled muscle or torn ligament or something. He said they would medicate for the pain and that I’d have to go to my doctor in 3-5 days if the pain didn’t go away. They put in an IV and gave me a serious narcotic and muscle relaxer. They had to give me three doses to get the pain under control.
Charlie was restless and we’d been at the hospital for hours so Jodi took him home while I waited for the meds to take effect. After some time (kind of blurry how long) I was able to get off the bed and take a few steps. They gave me another round of meds and after a bit I was able to walk down the hall. I called Jodi and she came back with Charlie to pick me up.
The doctor prescribed a steriod, pain medication and muscle relaxer to take at home while I healed. The drugs don’t allow me to drive and keep me feeling groggy, but they help dull the pain. Today is Wednesday and my back is still very sore. I can walk, slowly, but thats about it. I have an appointment with my doctor on Friday to see what the next steps are. I’m hopeful that by then that I’ll have recovered enough to stop taking the medications.
Oh yeah, another story. Yesterday, Jodi noticed that Charlie had something stuck to his eye ball, right next to his pupil. She tried to get it out, but it wouldn’t budge. She took him to his doctor but they couldn’t get it out either. We thought it might be a bit of glitter with glue on it from his birthday party. He probably got it on his finger and then rubbed his eye. Jodi took Charlie to a pediatric ophthalmologist this morning and they were able to get it out. They had to anesthetize his eye with drops and hold open his eye with a brace (the adult version because he’s too strong for the child version) while three people held him down. She said he was scared and cried but handled it very well. It only took a few minutes.
So, we’ve had quite the week.
