I have spoken at some length about my family.  They are truly wonderful and a source of much of my joy in life.  Adding to that are my friends who enrich my life with perspective and the occasional knock-down-drag-out conversation ending with, “I can’t believe you are really that stubborn.” [Please note that absence of an admission of error in that statement.]

Acknowledging that I am truly blessed by the rich associations that I have, I wish to move on to a thing for which I am thankful.

Caffeine.

Ah, yes, my intrepid friend who helps me battle the urge to be idle.  The magic molecule of twitch.  My thoughts are drawn to you today as I have been experiencing a bit of the down side of she for whom I am most thankful.

My wife has had bronchitis since last Wednesday.  In all seriousness, this truly sucks for her.  She can go about 30-90 minutes without having a full on, “Hey, is that my spleen?”, coughing fit that lasts anywhere from 10 seconds to a couple of minutes.  Very few things will disturb my slumber but when my wife is in pain, it wakes me right up.

In short, I haven’t been sleeping too much lately.

Forward to last night and between the jacked up sleep schedule that four days off of work with a sick wife gets you and taking the kids to school, I ended up with a little over three hours of chopped up sleep last night.  Oh, and I HAD TO GO TO WORK!

“It’s OK,” I think, “I can take the Stay Awake I keep in my desk!”

Now, for those of you playing the home game, please pay careful attention to the box.  Yes, campers, you read it right, 200mg.  In the past, when I have taken this, I have needed to push myself after a good nights rest.  Not, repeat, NOT after having just spent four days on the newborn sleep cycle concluded with a three hour romp for good measure.

Needless to say, I was, and remain, a bit loopy.

So, at approximately 1100, I downed the first tablet of twitch.  At 1130,  my arms began to tingle a bit and I could tell that it was really beginning to work when I couldn’t shut up between belching liquid inferno.

“Food!  Must have food to quench the burning!”

For those of you having trouble keeping up, caffeine and sugar are a pretty good combination because the sugar is rapidly consumed by the twitching which brings the consumer, hereafter referred to as TttTwITCH, back down as there is no more energy to consume.  Unfortunately for TttTwITCH’s coworkers, he has brought protein foods to work, ensuring a long-lasting low burn of calories so that the entire office may suffer at his hands.

LONGLIVECAFFEINE!

Not quite capable of putting these facts together, TttTwITCH decided that he was running out of juice around 1400 and had a meeting that he needed to be alert for.

Engage little-yellow-thunder the second.

It’s about ten to midnight now and I think I have managed to force two yawns since I came home at 1630.  You see, at 1630, I felt like I was going to fall asleep standing up.

At 1730, I had dinner.

At 1745, TttTwITCH was back in the house.

That my wife resisted crushing my skull tonight is a tribute to her patience.

And that’s why I love her and am thankful for her above all other blessings.

With that in mind, I want to address the volume of discontent to be found on the Internet.  I am amazed at the amount of discussion on the ills of society to be found in the blogosphere and other Internet sources.  It is amazing to me how so many people can be concerned about the ills of society and only contribute complaints.  I suppose this is a natural outgrowth of our increasingly self-centered society but it distresses me greatly.

So, here’s the point.  If you are in a position where you expend energy on grousing about a situation, focus on a way to fix it.  Don’t try to solve world hunger, just go out of your way to feed some one.  Volunteer in a soup kitchen.  Take a homeless guy a plate of food from your last dinner.

In short, DO something.

Something constructive.

If you complain about the ills of society, yet refuse to engage in repairs, you are a hypocrite.

Do not be offended.  We all wear the hypocrites hat from time to time.  Just go be a non-hypocrite.  If you choose to complain about being called a hypocrite, it does not fix the condition, it just makes you a disagreeable hypocrite.  And, let’s be honest, we’re just adding adjectives at this point, you should just get busy and work on fixing the problem.

For those of you that believe the only way to fix things is with money, you are missing the point.  The biggest impacts I have seen on the lives of young men I have had the opportunity to work with comes from the little things.  Sitting down to play a game of chess, talk about music, talk about the weather or even  playing baseball under a full moon!

Nothing shows someone their value more than giving them time.

I have to remind myself what a choice blessing it is that I have found something that both allows me to make a difference and have a good time.

I hope everyone can find something similar.

A big thanks to my benefactor for leaving it in place!

When last we met our intrepid adventurer, he had spun a tale of ambiguity and things that come forth from the mouth of babes.

As we approach nine months of silence, we find a number of new items consuming our subject.

First, as always, my family.  There has been quite a bit of turmoil and joy at the same time in my family this year.  So far, it has seen a large amount of strife with my father, followed by an awkward reconciliation [which has worked out very well, if not slowly], my wife being diagnosed with Fibromyalgia, my step mother undergoing treatment for T-Cell Lymphoma [again] and the passing of two great people, my Aunt Alice and Uncle Albert.

Second, I have started back to school.  I want to finish my degree.  Of all the things I have not completed, this is the one thing that keeps nagging me.  I sure could use to save the money and I seriously doubt that a degree will affect my career. That said, it will be nice to finalize this and to get it done in Information Assurance and Security is just icing on the cake [this was not an option when I was going to school before].

Finally, surfing is still a large part of my life.  I love it.  It really helps me cope with the day to day drudgery of things.  I laugh more easily, find myself less flustered and all around enjoy spending time in the water.  The buddies that I have made as a side effect surfing have been great.  If you ever hear me sounding like the below, please feel free to club me.

I must admit that it feels odd to not be evangelizing something or having a specific topic.

Maybe next time. Hopefully it won’t be another nine months.

Not to be left alone in the boat, The Boy looks to Girlie-Girl and declares, “So does she!  And Daddy, too!”

Striving quickly to keep from being left out of the fun, Girlie-Girl says, “And Momma’s got bags too.”

Unable to constrain myself, I look at my wife and say, “Yes, but we call those fun-bags.”

Fortunately for me, Momma wasn’t chewing at the time and I was saved from a spray.

I’m just waiting from a call from school with the teacher talking about how Topher commented on her’s or another teacher’s “Fun Bags.”

I really need to work on that brain to mouth filter.

• Yes, I voted.  I always do.
• No, I won’t tell you my vote if you don’t already know.
• No, I won’t ask you what you voted.  Ever.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen people get so involved in the legislative process.

Scores of new voters have turned out to vote for different issues and to truly put “The Process” to the test.

That is truly wonderful.

Unfortunately, in the press to win the day, both sides have managed to polarize people who would normally be quite happy to associate with each other.  Hurtful accusations fly across all of the various media channels as people in and out of the spotlight pontificate on the rights, abuses and motivations of “those people” depending on what side you’re on.  Both Yes and No on 8 sites have “fact” lists that  directly contradict each other.

Madness. 

If I vote Yes, my choice of labels are (aside from the normal idiot redneck labels):

• bigot
• hypocrite
• intolerant
• liar
• racist
• many others revolving around my desire to reinstate slavery

If I vote No, my choice of labels are (aside from the normal anti-homosexual labels):

• anti-family
• liar
• sinner
• and so forth (actually, I’ve not seen a good number of these, please comment)

How is it that people who would normally encourage debate on any topic suddenly become overwhelmingly
intolerant when these issues play out in the public space?

How can people claim to be enlightened and tolerant and then engage in name calling?

I’m truly disappointed at several self-claimed enlightened people for becoming the thing they condemn
claim to dislike most.  Demeaning someone or calling them names for voting their conscience in some hope
that they can intimidate them into changing their mind is a horrible thing to do.

Shame on you for becoming what you despise.
Shame on you for reducing yourself to useless name calling.
Shame on you for trading in your intellectual privilege.

Go pick a bar fight if you want to argue that way.

Combine his enthusiasm, willingness to teach and loan me a board with my long standing fascination with the sport and you have the exact combination to get me in the water at 0630 on a Thursday morning before work.

Wow!  What a way to start the day!  Even though what I was doing in the water can only be described as entertaining the real surfers, it was wonderful.  I can’t think of a better way to kick off my day.

After about half an hour of paddle-paddle-splash and then a couple of failed attempts at sitting on the board – which, by the way, would appear to have been my buddies favorite part of the show since he was willing to take a slapper in the head to watch me careen over like an upside down buoy – I was exhausted.  I’m not even sure that I actually made it for half an hour.

So, wiped out, I paddle-paddle-splashed my way towards shore and caught a couple of long board belly waves on the way in.  I hung on the sand for about another twenty minutes watching my buddy surf and then he came in and we left.

We left the beach and went to the coffee shop for some coffee and hot chocolate.  We hung out for about another thirty and then went into work.

I’m hooked.  I’m going again this week even though I’m still sore from last time.

Hopefully I’ll get to hang one this week.

No, really.  I must have something wired backwards in my head.

My internal dialogue goes something like this:

“Oh, look.  That’s a fire.”

“I bet it’s hot.”

“Oh, I doubt it’s nearly as hot as that OTHER fire we saw the other day.”

“You think so, eh?  How could we test that out?”

“I’d just stick my hand in there.  To make it scientific, count the number of singed hairs in a two second exposure.”

“Right!”

I suppose writing about it only puts me into the raving lunatic camp.

*sigh*

At the end of the day, I suppose the really marvelous thing is that people still come to me for advice with fire.

“Hey.  Nice fire there.  How hot do you think it is?”

“S’not that hot.  Look, here.  You can just barely make out the blisters forming under the blackened skin….!”

Enjoy!

I will apologize up front here as I’m tired and this is mostly just a
way to get past being pissed off at VZW for not watching out for the
customer.

I have a Treo 700p and it was cloned Friday night, just in time for the
weekend. If you’re wondering how to tell if your phone has been cloned,
it’s really easy. Call yourself from another phone. If you get no
indication whatsoever of that call happening, including voicemail
notification, you’re in trouble. If you periodically get through, it’s
likely due to the other phone having been turned off and your phone is
termporarily winning.

I just went through the process of getting my phone back from being
cloned. The most awesome part of this is the complete lack of support
that VZW gives to prevent the inconvenience of having your phone cloned.

The sequence of events:

1. Drive to Vegas for a weekend conference on a Thursday
2. Friday evening, no calls or text messages are getting through to my phone
3. Sunday, while driving back, I have eleven (11) voice mails with no evidence of a missed call or that I might have a voicemail.
4. Sunday night, contact VZW help (611) and find out that:

A) support will try to help you and tell you they believe that
your phone has been cloned. Once they believe that your phone
has been cloned, they will tell you that something is wrong
with the device and you should hard reset it.

This will do you no good, whatsoever. However, I’m pretty sure
that they have a pool running on the other end of the phone to
see how many customers they can stroke out by zapping all of
the data on their phones “on accident.”

B) The cloning and fraud department at VZW only works M-F,
0500-1800 PST. Obviously, this is because your phone can only
get cloned during banker hours. *SIGH*

C) Nobody at VZW can actually look at your account and tell you if
there are weird charges on the bill. In my case, there was no
indication of misuse during the episode and the one phone call
that I did get from the DR was from a local area code.

5. Monday morning, call VZW cloning/fraud department. I had to speak to two separate people to complete my phone transaction.

The first person was very kind and genuinely wanted to help me but
was an idiot. “Yes, Mr. HalfDime, I’m going to send you a text
message with the URL you can use to update your phone firmware
with.”

“But my phone has been cloned.”

“Right. Did you get the text message?”

The second person was pissed off to be alive. They cut me off
every time I started to say something and then seemed to think
that it was obvious that doing a complete restore from backup to
the device would not overwrite the settings just downloaded from
Palm.

Anyway, the information that you will need to get your phone uncloned,
or that you should use to keep from having it get cloned in the first
place:

1. Go here
2. Follow the directions on updating your phone firmware.
3. After the 35 minutes it takes the software to install, call cloning/fraud at the number below:

Cloning/Fraud Dept.
888 483-7200
Hours: M-F, 0500 – 1800 PST only

4. They will “verify” your phone via the following process:

• Dial #2539 – Authorization from verizon host, they send programming to phone.
• Turn phone radio off
• Tell support person when it’s off
• Turn phone radio on
• Tell support person when it’s on

NOTE: It’s very likely that over the air programming ( *228, option 1 )
will not work at this time since your phone has been flagged in
the system as being cloned. It may take a day or more for this to
clear. However, updating roaming ( *228, option 2 ) works.

After updating your phone, the firmware version displayed for the phone
firmware is Treo700p_-1.10-VZW.

According to a treocentral article on the interweb [0] and the Verizon
tech, this flaw is due to there being no AKEY shipped with the phone
firmware and has been known for quite some time. It’s just now coming
up in numbers as it’s been discovered at large. Most of the phone
numbers are being cloned to the Dominican Republic.

The importance of the A-Key is described well by this quote:

“Security of the A-Key is critical in a CDMA system. Over-the-Air
provisioning uses Diffie-Hellman algorithm, making it the best choice
for A-Key programming from the alternatives mentioned above.
Diffie-Hellman algorithm is used for secure key exchange between two
entities so that a third party cannot deduce the value in the process
of exchange.” [1]

What this basically boils down to is that all the information required
to clone a phone is being broadcast unencrypted over the air for anyone
to partake of with very little effort.

Thank you so much, Verizon.

Adding insult to injury, not only did I lose use of my phone for an
entire weekend because my phone got nabbed on a Friday night and VZW
fraud/cloning works banker hours, but I had to perform a 90 minute hokey
pokey to get the new software installed, call back to VZW and then do
the hokey pokey, turn the phone off and on with VZW on the phone.

–HalfDime

[0] http://discussion.treocentral.com/showthread.php?p=1477412

[1] Over-The-Air Provisioning in CDMA, Rohini P.P., Gemplus Technologies, October 2004
http://www.cdg.org/resources/white_papers/files/Gemplus%20Over-The-Air%20Provisoning%20in%20CDMA%20Oct%2004.pdf

I am not perfect and am not what you would call a typical member.

That said, I had an experience two weeks ago that made me laugh so hard that I was light-headed by the time I could slow down my laughing enough to breathe right.

Church is broken down into three parts and in the last part, I meet with the young men that I work with every Wednesday evening (and camp with once a month, but that’s another story).

During the last meeting, we were talking about General Conference, the semi-annual world wide meeting of the church. The meetings are held the first weekend of April and October each year.

The question asked of the boys was, “When is the next General Conference?”

To this, the boys looked at each other for a couple of seconds. When nobody was able to answer, I provided a subtle hint, “It’s in a month that begins with an ‘O’.”

Let’s pause here to identify the calendar that I’m speaking about. I can imagine that you’re familiar with it but here we go:

1. January
2. February
3. March
4. April
5. May
6. June
7. July
8. August
9. September
10. Obedience
11. November
12. December

If you looked carefully, you’ll have picked out the boy’s answer.

Yes, Obedience it was.

Of course, this wasn’t funny enough, the other leader in the room had to pipe up with, “No. That would be Ramadan.”

If you’re wondering, this didn’t help me get any air.

All of the boys took turns noting how red I was turning.

It was awesome.

My blog is withering under my hand.

I’m wondering at the things that I have to say and find myself doubting the validity and relevance.

So very often I find myself thinking, “That would be a cool thing to put on my blog,” only to be lax and not write down the idea stub or later discard the idea as being non-relevant to those who would read it.

So I’m going to ask you, my dedicated reader, what would you like to see here?

What topics do YOU believe I should commit to the intartubes?

— OK. Enough of that. On with the show. —

As I’m wont from time to time, I wonder about the things that have transpired in the past. My past really. I can’t dwell too much on the choices and actions of those before me other than to try to avoid their gross errors.

Far too often, I find that I speak without thinking about the true consequences of my words. I admit that I’m rarely out to cause harm. Most often I find that these things come about from my love of seeing people smile. This doesn’t necessarily ease the impact had on someone that believes my intent to be otherwise.

The other outcome frequented by this problem is that folks may consider me to flippant or an idiot. If flippant, then trust cannot be engendered in our relationship because it’s possible that they believe that I’m incapable of a serious answer. If idiotic, well, that’s just bad.

Overcoming this dilemma is indeed difficult for me. I have a really hard time making life more serious than it already is. Life has a way of being serious when it needs to be all on its own. If I add drama to the mix just because I choose to, I’m not really helping anything, I’m just being dramatic. I’m really not a very good actor, so drama just makes me look foolish. Reference my earlier comment about being considered an idiot.

So what does this all have to do with time? As time has passed, I’ve become more an more comfortable with who and what I am. Not necessarily confident in myself so much as accepting of the things that can be considered merits and flaws of my character.

I realize that there are things about me that are considered socially good and those that are socially notsogood.

As time goes on, I’m hopeful that I will be able to change the things that I find to be broken and garner acceptance in others for those things that I may not do “according to the book.”

To me, time seems to be a warm friend guiding me towards all that is beautiful.

I pray that I can help others along their path and learn from them at the same time.