It’s been an inordinately busy week. I’ve been spending my days slogging through work, interviewing with another company (shhh), and visiting my wife in a cardio thoracic ICU nearly every night. My wife is recovering from two small strokes that she suffered either during or after surgery. The main effect is aphasia which means she struggles with verbally expressing thoughts. This is painful because my girl is a talker and is brilliant at relating something that happened in a story and I hate to watch her struggle. That said, the doctors have said that the recovery process from this can take a very long time and she’s improved dramatically from yesterday. It’s difficult but it doesn’t feel like the end of the world, just a change. I’m okay with things changing and generally uncomfortable with catastrophe. I know she is having a terrible time being stuck in her head and I need to be better about filling the silences. I have a feeling we’re both going to have to adapt on a level that neither of us is accustomed to. I’m just happy she’s awake right now.
These are some things I noticed today:
1. To begin with, most Apple hardware has an unpatchable vulnerability stemming from the T2 chip and the outlook is not looking great in terms of mitigating this issue. I’m sure there is some amount of karmic retribution here but I’ll settle for vague analogy about putting all of your eggs in a single basket. I’m typing this on a vulnerable machine in the spirit of living dangerously.
2. Tangentially related to Apple, this brilliant person adapted an iSight into an acceptably modern camera by packing the pretty shell with a Raspberry Pi and doing some 3D printing to piece it all together. The responsible mad scientist also created a GitHub repo for all of the necessary components in case you want to play along at home.
3. My son’s school was scheduled, rather optimistically, to resume in person learning next week. We just received notification from the district that they’re now pushing that date out until late November. I really and fervently hope that when our idiot in chief runs out of steroids and dies that we, as a country, start to take this a little more seriously and listening more carefully to scientists when they try to warn us about killing ourselves. I am completely in support of calling everything off until we have a safe and effective vaccine. I have enjoyed hearing about attempts Trump’s fundamentalist supporters have made to square up their fervent belief that their draft dodging, adulterous fuck boy is somehow the torch bearer of Christianity while having his morbidly obese life saved by a treatment utilizing stem cells. At some point does your brain just throttle itself and eventually turn off?
4. My ballot arrived in the mail today. I look at voting like an act of exorcism. I’ll fill it out tomorrow and drop that shit off. Make sure you do the same even if you disagree with my politics completely. You owe it to yourself and everyone else in the ragged remains of a country to participate in this so-called democracy.