I told the story recently of the passing of my Grandmother and it occurred to me afterwords that while I’ve done a pretty good job of honoring my promise to my Grandmother Fisher to tell the stories of my Grandfather’s life (and subsequently of her life) to my friends over the years, I’ve not recorded them here. So here’s one of my favorites about my Grandmother Fisher. A mischievous sense of humor tends to run in my family, to some extent on both sides but especially on the Fisher side, and this is an example of that.

For many years over the course of my childhood my sister Kirsten and I would travel to Ohio for a week or two each summer to spend time with our grandparents and extended family. Both sides of the Family, Hamilton and Fisher, had their roots in Ohio - the Fishers in Akron and the Hamiltons in Wooster. We’d divide time between the families.

One year when we went out, when I was around 11 or 12, the Fishers picked us up at the airport and brought us back to their house. When we got to the house my Grandmother began to complain that she wasn’t feeling well and disappeared into another room while my Grandfather brought us into the den and settled us into easy chairs. As we chatted my Grandmother came in. Suddenly she clutched her hand to her chest and exclaimed something about really not feeling well, then leaned over and upchucked into my lap.

!!!

I looked down to find this large glistening mass of putrid green… stuff. It looked more like snot than anything else. I nearly leapt out of my chair, but meanwhile I noticed both my Grandparents were cracking up, exclaiming about the look on my face and how they’d pulled one over on me and so on. I prodded the stuff in my lap and discovered it was cool to the touch and concluded that whatever it was it wasn’t harmful.

Long story short, it was a kids toy that I had never heard of. I think it was called Slime, though I can’t recall. I do remember that it came in a small trash can, and that the following school year it was all the rage and ended up being banned from our classroom because of all the hi-jinks folks were pulling with it.

My Grandparents Fisher were fond of pranks of this nature. This is my second favorite of all the ones they ever pulled, and the best one my Grandmother pulled.

So as I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ll be posting stories about my grandmother by way of remembrance. Here’s my favorite. My youngest sister Lindsey was born in our house on Seaview Avenue with the help of my Grandmother and a midwife. It had become clear that Lindsey was on the way late one winter afternoon and the family was gathered around waiting for this to happen with some anticipation. I played missile command on my Atari 2600 for hours as I waited, and ultimately ended up going to bed. This birthing business takes too long, I remember thinking. Late that night or very early the next morning came an insistent tapping at my door. It was Granny, as excited as a kid on Christmas, come to wake me up and summon me to watch the birth of my sister. It suddenly occurred to me, sleepy eyed and groggy, that I wanted no part of watching a birth take place, especially not one involving my mother, and I began trying to beg off. There was this wonderful moment of a clash of emotions between my grandmother and I - she simultaneously so excited that she seemed about to bounce out of her shoes and at the same time crestfallen that I wasn’t sharing her excitement and interest, and me, embarrassed and sheepish and trying to mask it behind a sort of sleepy irritation.

Granny ultimately gave up and me and bounced back upstairs after admonishing me for passing on the chance to witness something of such significance to the family. At a guess, this incident barely registered with her, but it’s stuck with me all these years. It is the only time I can recall seeing Granny positively giddy with excitement over something.

Wiz-War is this relatively simple to play fantasy-themed boardgame where each player has a token representing their wizard and one representing their treasure. Players hold a hand of cards which they draw from a deck, and the cards enable movement and the casting of all manner of spells. The goal is to either steal the other players’ treasures or kill off the other players. It’s something of a cult classic, in part because of the whimsical and humorous cards and in part because it’s very hard to obtain a copy and the game’s been out of print for a long time. As it happens I own a copy, but if you’d like your own, all you need is a color printer and the materials found on Jeff’s custom wiz-war site.

Long, long ago at the dawn of the public use of the internet, I convinced my employer to let me play with community building tools. One of the ones we brought online was ThePalace, a cross platform graphical chatroom with avatars, audio, an emote system, and simple games like chess and checkers. We brought it online in an attempt to interest the local community in the kinds of resources we were building (I worked for a family owned regional media company), and to a small extent we succeeded in getting local community participation, but for a complex set of reasons we mostly ended up overun with sometimes rowdy Australians. In a great example of what a small world we live in, several years after this one of them ended up in my office looking for work. He’d met his wife online and emigrated to the US, and this all came out during the interview process.

Anyway I mention all of this because today I happened across Hive7, and immediately thought ‘wow, it’s The Palace all over again!’ It’s worth checking out even if you have no real need for a browser based graphical chat system, just so you can admire what they’ve accomplished with a shedload of javascript. One word of advice though - bail on the first room as soon as you can. The number of people that tend to be congregated there will bring your browser to its knees, but there are several rooms and the interior tends to be less crowded.

Also note you may need to use Firefox to check this out - safari may choke on the javascript and opera definitely does.

I’ve talked now and then about how poor the broadband offerings are in the US compared to overseas. Check out this brief news item on betanews covering Comcast’s rollout of 16Mbit service in select markets in the US. Markets which just happen to be locations where Verizon is rolling out their high speed FIOS service. By way of comparison, in most markets cable companies are offering at best 5Mbit and in many markets they are still only offering 2 or 3Mbit service. What’s driven Comcast to offer 16Mbit? COMPETITION. Local communities should stop offering monopolies to the cable companies because lacking competition, they’re not going to provide better services. The lack of ubiquitous symetrical high speed broadband in the US is leaving us at a competitive disadavantage compared to asia especially, a competitive disadvantage that will reveal itself over the next decade or so as they become the innovators in the network space we invented. You can see tangible evidence of this stuff already happening in places like South Korea.

This stuff really really pisses me off. Republican leadership in Washington has only been hurting things since the FCC has been bending over backwards to give the network providers what they ask for, even letting them sneak out of prexisting arrangements. (anyone remember that the FCC declared that AOL had to open its IM networks more than 5 years ago, for example?). Meanwhile I can only push things back up my pipe at 20k/sec, which is 20% of what I used to get from Time Warner back when they first rolled out broadband service in Portland, Maine in the mid 90’s. So in 10 years or so, my upstream is actually an order of magnitude lower than it used to be. Meanwhile my cable company is running tv ads promoting the use of my cable modem as a video phone to chat with my grandmother. Right. In the parallel universe where the south korean telco is providing me unfettered bandwidth and not playing at being a media congolmerate. Fuckers.

Anyway, that’s a bit of an angry ramble, but I’ll close with the observation that there is hope for us, at least on the east coast in Verizon territory where I am, since Verizon intends to push FIOS out to all customers eventually. (though at a guess it will take them forever to reach me in western MA. Good thing we’re bringing in Internet 2 to my place of work).

Check out the Pasteboard Recorder, a great little free utility for those using OSX. It stores a configurable number of the last things you copied to your clipboard and can handle many data types, not just text. I’ve been using it quite a bit since I got my new laptop, and it makes a handy blogging tool for when you’re working to collect a set of links that will be used in your weblog post.

(Pasteboard Recorder is a universal binary for those of you who’ve made the transition to Macintel)

First I did something very dumb - about a week and a half ago I hopped on my rowing machine in bare feet. I didn’t notice the strap which holds my feet down cutting a hole in my big toe, so I got off the machine with a bleeding foot. One of the really crappy side effects of the diabetes is how slowly I heal, especially in my lower body (I have a puncture wound on my leg from 2 years ago which is still healing, believe it or not) and now I have a cut on my foot which is keeping me off my rowing machine. Hopefully it won’t take 2 years to heal. Meanwhile though, I have an inability to exercise problem (I’ve tried the rowing machine - even with cotton padding on the wound, the rowing machine causes it to re-open and bleed).

Enter the solution - the second dumb thing I’ve done in a week or so. I live about 5.5 miles from work and there’s a paved bike trail that connects my house to campus. I decided yesterday to see how long it would take me to walk it, and Soolin and I set off at a little before 10. Keep in mind, I hike pretty long distances with some regularity in the warm months, but aside from a short 3-4 mile hike in early February, I haven’t done anything since almost getting trapped in the Tongue Mountains this fall. So I set out, and 1:15 later at was at my office door. Not bad, I think. I headed into Amherst, got some coffee and rested for a half hour or so, then headed back. By halfway back I was feeling sore in my hips and especially in my feet, and by the time I got home I could barely walk. Today my left heel is so sore I have to walk on my toes, which makes me look ridiculous.

The conclusions: First, I’m an idiot, and should have started the hiking season with something a little shorter. Second, I need more comfortable shoes. (I wasn’t wearing my good hiking boots since it seemed foolish to burn out their tread on a flat paved path). Third, aging sucks! Since when is my joint system so feeble?

Still, as soon as I feel sufficiently recuperated I’ll be doing that hike again, this time to get me to and from work on a weekday, Soolin in tow. I also want to get a trailer for my bike so I can do it with Soolin in the trailer and only spend 15 minutes getting to work instead of 1:15. The other cool thing is that two of the three major shopping centers in this area are connected to the trail system, meaning I can peddle over and do my shopping that way once I have the trailer, or for small trips I can just use one of my backpacks.

ok so, snatching a few minutes after a late lunch here to post since I’ve been ignoring my site. I’m busy as sin, there’s a lot on my plate and not a lot of time to get to it all here at the new job, and then on the weekends I have to head back to NY to deal with my responsibilities with the cottage and house per my old lease. A few quick things by way of an update on what’s going on with me:

I’m finally somewhat moved in and unpacked, including actual furniture. Dave’s guest accommodations are back in business after several years off. Want to come visit beautiful western Mass, sample the local restaurant scene, or go hiking in Vermont? I’m taking reservations now.

There’s actually something better than Trader Joe’s: Whole Foods. Their website sucks and doesn’t do the store justice, but they have a real full line butcher shop the likes of which I haven’t seen since I was like 10 years old, a superb sea food department, a bulk foods section which takes up the equivalent of an entire aisle in a large grocery store, excellent takeout (indian, vegetarian, gourmet deli styles are all available), tons of organic produce, a huge wine and beer selection (and I’m not talking coors and schlitz here) and gourmet foods from all kinds of cultures. It’s absolutely fantastic. The downside is my weekly food bill has gone up more than $60 a week because of my shopping there, but man am I eating well.

Amherst has $2 breakfast and $3 lunch for staff. I can’t feed myself for even close to that. The food’s not quite as good as it was at Bowdoin, but it’s decent, and they have broccoli every day instead of only occasionally. Lots of food service lunches for me as a result.

I’m only 5.5 miles from campus, the weather’s warming up, and there’s a bike trail between me and there. I’ll be biking to work shortly, and walking sometimes.

I was really worried about heating the new house. Based on current gas prices it looks like it will run me $3-500 during January/February, but this is without me doing anything about the un insulated windows (no storms, no nothing). This is actually better than I expected and only a little more than I was spending in NY in my three room cottage, and now I have a 6 room house with 9.5′ ceilings.

I love the new house. It sucks to be on a major road again but I’m right next to a bike path and having 20+ acres behind the house to run around on with Soolin is great. Plus have I mentioned elbow room? ELBOW ROOM! And comfortable furniture. And hardwood floors which are MUCH easier to clean Soolin detritus off of.

That’s it for now. I’ve one more post I’ll make today. I’m still trying to figure out how to deal with getting myself back onto a regular posting schedule. Over lunch at my desk isn’t cutting it now since I’m usually off at the cafeteria.

My Cousin Lea pointed me at the obituary that was printed in the local paper for my Grandmother. If you’re interested you can find it by searching the obituaries at poststar.com. I’m going to reprint it below for posterity’s sake, since newspapers have terrible issues with maintaining access to online content in the long term (I should know, I worked for them for ~6-7 years, and by way of example, try looking at the aforementioned poststar.com for content that’s as old as, say, this website, which has more than 6 years worth of stuff tucked into it).

== original obituary ===

LAKE LUZERNE — Laura B. Yule, age 82, of Allison Drive, died Wednesday morning, March 1, 2006, at Glens Falls Hospital.

Born on July 24, 1923, in Stamford, Conn., she was the daughter of Oliver and Wilma (Traub) Hoyt.

She was the wife of the late Arthur Yule, whom she married Dec. 25, 1942.

Laura moved from Long Island to Lake Luzerne in 1992.

She enjoyed reading, gardening, needlepoint, European travel and was a history buff.

Laura is survived by her four children: Jeffrey Yule and his wife, Veronica, of Syosset, N.Y., Candace Hamilton of Northport, N.Y., Jonathan Yule of Lake Luzerne, and Melissa Simon and her husband, Dan, of Lake Luzerne; 10 grandchildren: Scott Yule and his wife, Jenny, Justin Yule and his wife, Mimi, Lynette Yule, Susan Foreman and husband, Jack, David Hamilton, Kirsten Weck and heer husband, Brian, Jesse Hamilton, Lindsey Hamilton, Lea Simon and Christine Simon; four great-grandchildren: Nadine Foreman, Sabrina Foreman, JT Yule and Isabella Weck; one sister, Madelon VanSteenbergen and her husband, Paul, of Guilford, Conn.; one brother, Leonard Hoyt of Bethel, Conn.; and several nieces and nephews.

At Laura’s request, there are no funeral services or calling hours scheduled.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in Laura’s memory to the Double H Hole in the Woods Ranch, 97 Hidden Valley Road, Lake Luzerne, NY 12846.

Arrangements are under the direction of Brewer Funeral Home, Inc., 24 Church St., Lake Luzerne.
Published in the Post-Star from 3/2/2006 - 3/3/2006.

Yeah, so it’s technically not friday yet, but I’m so consumed with work during the day these days that either I post it now or it doesn’t get posted. Check out the free download of the commercial game S.W.I.N.E. over on gamershell.com. It’s a somewhat cartoony real time strategy game with decent graphics, a pretty good physics system, and solid if unremarkable gameplay. I liked it a bit better than the 70% it’s got over on gamerankings. But even at 70%, it’s free, what have you got to lose. Plus it’s got network play, not that any of you losers ever dare to challenge me.

(pc only, sorry mac and linux folk)

If you’re a heavy web user, chances are high that you have a gazillion and one accounts and logins to various web services. Unless you’re a system admin or have training in computing security, chances are you’re also only using a couple of passwords across all of those services. Chances are also fairly good you’ve never had an account hacked and so you’re going to ignore what I’m about to say, but trust me: this is a bad thing. Here’s a model for you to consider using instead of just recycling the same old passwords over and over again. If you’re on a mac, go grab ciphsafe, and if you’re on a pc, go grab keepass. Each contains tools for automatically generating passwords of configurable levels of security, each endeavors to make it easy for you to copy and paste said passwords into whatever form you need to dump the credentials into, each is tiny and uses almost no system resources, and they’re both free. Now start using it. If you’re like me and use many different computers, go one step further. If you don’t already have one, buy yourself a cheap thumb drive and attach it to your keyring. Store the data file for the app on the thumb drive, and use file encryption if you’re on the mac to protect that file (keepass on the pc provides tools for protecting the data file in the application). Make sure to also make a backup of the data file on your primary computer periodically as well.

And if like me you have logins to sensitive stuff you really don’t want folks to be able to get into, use the ultra high security password generator. (yeah, I really use that for some stuff, and yeah I know it’s basically overkill but what they hey, I’m copying and pasting).

[update]

Discovered that there’s a linux/mac port effort underway for Keepass which you can scope out on the project page. It’s not quite ready for non-geeks yet (you have to grab the source from their subversion repository and compile it) but if you understand what I just wrote by all means go for it.

I won’t dwell heavily on this since I’ve done it any number of times in the past, but futurepundit has a pretty good piece talking about new research that further implicates fructose in the obesity and diabetes epidemics we’re undergoing in western cultures and the US particularly. The one bummer outcome of the research from my perspective is they also tied increased uric acid levels to the problem, and the high protein diet I eat increases my uric acid levels. I just can’t win, by the time I’m 60 I will be eating a diet that consists of green peppers, hearts of celery, and 4 slivers of almond a day.

There are some ugly rumors going around about my reasons for leaving Skidmore and taking a new position at Amherst, and enough is enough. I’d like to state for the record that the fact that there’s a Trader Joes in Amherst MA had no impact on my decision to move to the region.

(but I’m pretty damned psyched about it)

In a sad and odd bit of synchronicity, Grannie, my last remaining grandparent, passed away around the same time I was driving out of Saratoga Springs last week. She was in her 80’s and had been increasingly ill over the last several months, so this was not really unexpected, but we were all hoping she might rally. It’s pretty scary to see how quickly things can go south in the elderly - I used to joke about Grannie being built like a tank, and it was only a few months ago that she and I drove down to New York together. She was in great shape at the time, still completely on top of her game mentally and no signs of infirmity physically - in fact she spent a week in august with my mother during that trip working on an elaborate backyard garden they were giving to my sister as a wedding gift. Given how badly things can go towards the end of life (Grannies’ mother, for example, spent somewhere around 10 years institutionalized with alzheimer’s) I think Grannies’ passing came pretty close to the best that one could hope for compared to the horrors one can end up with, and I’m glad for her in that regard.

Grannie was my first child care after my sister and I emerged from the hazy wilds of Canada and my mother’s stewardship, and she had a profound impact on my early upbringing. She was a pretty strict task master and didn’t have much patience for my nonsense, but she was not an unkind woman and she had a great sense of humor and liked to laugh. I can’t recall her ever having to physically correct me, despite her being from a generation where that was common. With Grannie it was the sharp tongue and an assurance that my folks would hear about whatever I’d done (and given that my dad had few compunctions about physical correction back then, this was something to be concerned about ;-).

She loved to garden and each of her houses (3 of which I can remember fairly clearly and 1 I’m a little hazy on) were surrounded by elaborate and carefully tended gardens, including her last house. When I was a kid monkeying in and about those gardens was cause for trouble and so of course it was something I liked to do, little imp that I was.

Grannie was equally interested in interior decorating and she spent tons of time on projects. If I had to characterize her tastes I think (not being a student of design, mind you) that I’d say Quaker was her cup of tea - she favored somewhat austere, uncluttered rooms and simple furniture.

Grannie was an avid reader and I discovered to my pleasant surprise that we shared some common tastes - she read a lot of history and was also fond of some of the historical fiction I also enjoy and we had read quite a bit of the same stuff. She was also pretty interested in politics and spent a lot of her time watching cspan. She was a liberal and had nothing good to say about the Bush regime.

My grandfather died while I was in High School and Grannie spent roughly 20 years as a widow. My uncle John lived with her for a good bit of that time, both while she was still on Long Island and then after she moved upstate to be close to my Aunt Melissa’s family. For a lot of those years she took care of children, both the various progeny of her extended family, and (I’m pretty sure) kids she took care of just because she enjoyed children (and possibly for the income too, I’m not really sure about that). While I lament the fact that my grandfather passed relatively early compared to Grannie, I also think it was one of the cooler aspects of her life - she basically got to be her own gal and pursue her interests for 20 years of her life. Not many of us can say that, and if she missed Arthur in the beginning, certainly by the time I got out of college she seemed to be enjoying herself.

One of the coolest things about moving to Saratoga Springs a couple of years ago was reconnecting with family I hadn’t seen much (if anything) of in years. I’m not much of a socializer so it wasn’t like I spent a ton of time hanging around with Grannie, but I did get to go on a couple of long car rides to NY with her, including one where it was just the two of us and she related a bunch of stories from her early life at my prodding. This was stuff I had never known and I’m glad now that I got to spend that time with her before she passed.

One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my life was during the funeral of my Grandfather Fisher shortly after I graduated from college. I was the only young male in that branch of the family (my mother’s family had only girls, and they in turn had only girls aside from me) and so it passed to me to stand with my Grandmother when they closed the casket. To say she was distraught is to do the word a disservice - my Grandmother Fisher had known my Grandfather since she was in elementary school, and they had been married for over 50 years. She did not want them to close the casket and she was close to losing it, and I sat there trying to think how to help her walk away from that. What I ended up saying was that as hard as it was to accept it, he really wasn’t gone, that Dick lived on in our memories and in the stories we’d tell of him and the smile and impish sense of humor that we’d remember. I don’t flatter myself so much to think that what I was saying to her at the time was what helped her turn her back on his remains - if anything it had more to do with a soothing voice and an offer of comfort - but I’m not a religious guy and I really do believe that, and I’ve tried ever since to make sure I try and honor that by telling my favorite stories to people I know of the loved ones and friends I’ve lost over the years. This post is my first pass on doing that now for Grannie. I have a few others socked away that I’ll relate on here as time passes.

I’m ashamed to observe that I have no pictures of Grannie in my gallery - I actually did have quite a few, but they were all from a visit Lisa, Samantha and I made to Long Island some years ago when Grannie happened to be there visiting my mom, and I ditched the Lisa galleries some time after we split up. The Grannie pictures went with them. I’ll dig through my archives and get some posted over the next few days.

Just a brief post here to announce I’m back, settled somewhat comfortably in my turn of the century farmhouse in western MA, with internet access and having started the new job. So far all is well, mostly fantastic in fact. Almost all my stuff is still packed up, and I have no furniture to speak of yet beyond my computer desks and a futon mattress I bought when I got here, but I’m really happy to have elbow room again and Soolin loves the endless acres of farmland back behind our house. I’ll begin posting again regularly over the next several days. In the meantime, there’s the first photo of the new place.