Tuesday, July 10, 2018

"Is Your Balance Holding You Back"

Is Your Balance Holding You Back?

Originally published in the Summer 2011 edition of "The Blind Californian".

I work for a 112-acre community college. As a guide dog handler of thirty years, I was used to confidently zipping off to meetings and negotiating the ongoing campus construction with relative ease. As the resident geek for disability services, I often had to drop what I was doing and hustle off to a lab twenty minutes away to figure out why a student's midterm wouldn't print. As a fifty-something, I didn't pay much attention to studies proving we lose our sense of balance as we age.

Then one Sunday while washing my bathroom floor, I slipped in a wet puddle.

Suddenly I was in extreme pain, unable to stand. It took months to heal, though luckily I did not need surgery. Because I worked with computers, I could continue to do most of my job. My guide dog quickly learned to serve as a furry grab-bar enabling us to visit even the least accessible bathrooms. Our transportation for students who depend on crutches or wheelchairs helped me get to my meetings, and though my independence was somewhat diminished, I assumed I'd be back to my old fit self in a few months.

But even after I could walk well again, I developed a terrible fear of falling. Though perhaps common for seniors losing their vision, I had been a confident blind traveler since high school. Medical professionals suggested it was a psychological thing; I had, after all experienced a bad fall, even if only in my own bathroom. Using a knee brace because my leg was now weaker, was a suggestion I was reluctant to follow. And I've never been prone to big psychological issues before. I wondered if I was getting menopausal or there was a deeper cause. I requested tests and to see a physical therapist.

It turned out I was right; it wasn't all in my head. The physical therapist saw immediately that my sense of balance was compromised and my left leg's muscles were weak. The medical tests showed I had a vitamin D deficiency, because while recovering, I'd spent less time walking around in the sun. (A lack of Vitamin D compromises our sense of balance.) Vitamin pills quickly fixed the deficiency, and simple physical therapy moved me forward on the road to better balance, but Internet research showed me some scary trends. Falls are the number one cause of injury for seniors, and millions of seniors with unimpaired vision experience serious injuries caused by falling every year. The problem is that their sense of balance has declined.

The sense of balance, I also read was dependent on vision. Even physical therapists use visual clues to assist clients with relearning balance. I tried for example to take a fall prevention for senior class at our local HMO, and they refused me because they insisted that good balance required vision. I encountered this strong prejudice everywhere I turned for help.

It would have been easy at that point to simply get a knee brace and permanently ride the campus shuttle for the physically limited. How could I prove to the professionals that I believed I could regain my balance again? Despite the danger of falls, there is little advice for the senior who wants to prevent them. They can remove slippery scatter rugs and take Tai Chi, but by far the most common piece of advice is to improve lighting in the home. Nobody with severe vision loss wants to have good lighting as the only insurance policy to prevent falling! I decided I needed to banish my fear of falling before I could zip around campus safely again. Luckily we have a program to teach students how to become personal trainers. I asked C.J., the trainer, if I could become her guinea pig. C.J. was delighted. She is an open-minded teacher with advanced certifications in many aspects of exercise science. Personal trainers find athletes easy to work with, but it's hard to get experience with people who are older, stiffer, or kinesthetically challenged. C.J. taught me a mixture of exercises I could do at home and in the gym.

Under her careful tutelage, student trainers worked with me. They learned how to coach someone who is blind, overweight, creaky and injured, and such experience will broaden their resumes. I was able to benefit from the variety of these young people's teaching styles. Some of my helpers were the students with learning differences I serve in my job. They loved being able to assist me in return. And until the recent budget cuts, I was paying absolutely nothing for this amazing service.

The coolest piece of gym equipment I recommend for balance is the bosu, whose website is www.bosu.com. This is a springy rubber ball, with a flat side that sits on the ground. The exerciser stands on the ball and balances while bending, stretching, or lifting weights. The first time I was introduced to the Bosu, I burst in to tears. I couldn't imagine myself balancing on it while even holding on to the wall. At first we practiced just that. I'd stand, holding firmly to a nearby wall.

Eventually, I could stand just touching the wall with a single finger. Then I had to make it harder by bouncing up and down, flinging my arms in to the air and from side to side. I also practiced stepping on and off it and even doing slight knee bends. Due to my injury, it is dangerous for me to do deep squats or some of the other routines athletes practice with the Bosu. But stepping on and off simulated stepping down from a high train platform, and bouncing up and down helped me strengthen the leg muscles that keep my knee safe. Flinging my arms around throws off balance, simulating what might happen if I stumble on an unexpected curb. I eventually graduated to a larger Bosu which stands at the height of my thighs.

In mastering the Bosu, I discovered athletes and even their coaches were terrified to try it with their eyes closed. Today C.J. who also coaches the cheerleaders, requires they do some simple Bosu work blindfolded. Some of my students have been inspired to work harder at overcoming their dyslexia after seeing me struggle with and master balance on the Bosu.

I work out at the gym twice a week now and always do a stint on the Bosu. Even though I've tripped on many pieces of broken concrete and those evil cement blocks in parking lots, I have lost the fear of falling. My balance is undoubtedly much better than it was before I had my fall. I also suspect, after talking to many older students who both do and do not have vision issues, that a lack of confidence might be directly related to a lack of balance. If you are afraid to ride an unfamiliar bus or visit a store across town, consider that maybe compromised balance is your body's wisdom.

Your body might be telling you that you aren't safe.

C.J. and I offer this advice for blind people improving balance: start simply at home first. Use duct tape to hold two old phone books together so it makes a solid cube. Add more phone books as you advance but be sure to create a secure platform. You want it to be a bit springy but not slippery. Practice stepping on and off your phone book edifice in a clear, carpeted area, or if you feel unsure, near a strong heavy table you can hold on to while stepping. Step in different patterns, on, off, sideways, backwards. Move slowly; breathe deeply and pretend that a string runs from the top of your head to your toes.

Practice every day, but don't push yourself beyond your own comfort zone.

Sit in a chair, feet flat on the floor, knees slightly bent. Your feet should be in the position you normally assume when standing. Place your hands in front of you in any way that seems comfortable but positioned so you cannot use your arms to assist you when standing. I like to hold my palms together, touching my chin with my fingertips. This presses my elbows close to my sides, preventing them from assisting me to stand. Now stand up slowly, using only the strength in your legs. Once you are upright, lower yourself to the chair, again not using your hands to assist. Just as your rear touches the chair, but before you settle your weight on to it, stand again slowly. My physical therapist made me repeat this 25 times nonstop every morning. It gave me amazingly strong legs. Of course if you have any concerns that your legs aren't healthy, you should check with a doctor first before performing this or any other exercise.

Stand near a solid chair or counter, and holding on to it with one hand, balance for as long as you can on one foot. Track your progress by counting "One Mississippi", "Two Mississippi" etc. Log how many Mississippis you can go standing on the single foot. You will see improvement each week. Remember to do this with each foot.

Investigate local fitness centers, YMCA, senior centers and college gyms. If you are on fixed income, get creative and ask about scholarships or if you can be part of an experiment or (as I did) other people's training. If an exercise class looks challenging or inaccessible, don't give up, but try something else. I unsuccessfully tried several exercise classes before I found C.J. Don't let injuries, age, arthritis or your weight be a barrier. Not every exercise opportunity works for morbidly obese, or arthritic people, but many exercises need to simply be done more slowly and gently. Make sure the instructor or trainer has experience working with people who have your physical limitations. You can show them how to work with your visual impairment, but they need to be trained properly to deal with physical disabilities or medical conditions. Instructors should not push a client in to doing workouts that aren't safe.

Remember to do a variety of exercises and not just focus on balance. We need stretching for flexibility, aerobics for cardiovascular health and the often neglected strength training to keep the muscles supporting our joints strong. I use a treadmill at home to keep up with aerobics. I also use free weights at home, to improve my strength and keep osteoporosis at bay. When I travel, I use exercise bands. In the gym, I work out on machines and use the time to learn new floor exercises I can do at home. I always ask students to teach me new stretches.

Don't let little issues prevent you from keeping yourself healthy. I love to swim but can't fit it in to my schedule. I am ashamed I cannot walk around the gym independently, but right now I always have a student guiding me because there are too many people and obstacles to navigate. More important, I can independently walk everywhere on campus again. Neither of these little annoyances have prevented me from getting what I need to keep my health and balance strong.

Thursday, July 5, 2018

New Ways to Bond with One's Guide

The campground has many pluses. First there are few foxtails or burs. It's frequently used by cub scouts and brownies so the park service sweeps it free of forest debris.

It is surrounded by towering redwoods, keeping it shady and cool. We are several miles mostly straight up overlooking the rowdy Pacific ocean, so we have all the fog 'er' mist that comes with being on the central California coast. That means warm afternoons and chilly nights, and a tent covered with moisture upon awakening.

We have a large fire ring where we are allowed to roast our wieners and marshmallows. The barrier is over a yard high so the forest is protected from flying embers, a big concern in this fire-ravaged state. And we have friendships. About twenty of us, mostly women in their fifties and sixties comprise the local dog scout troop.

Dog scouts is just what you think, people who loved scouts and since the kids grew up and moved out we do the same thing with preparedness and patches minus kids but with dogs. You can get a community service badge, a therapy badge, a backpacking and of course a camping badge.

All these pooches love adventure and are comfortable doing things with humans. We go on ranger-lead nature hikes, visit outdoor concerts and cafes and just hang out on restaurant patios with our canines. I am the only member with a service dog.

The campground is also a preserved Native American relic. It has numerous small pits where the Indians ground acorns. These were hollowed out and lined with sharp rocks centuries ago by native tribes. A naturalist painted vivid pictures for us of Indian women squatting before these holes, chatting, singing and grinding. This, the naturalist tells us is the first factory for stone-ground grain.

Maxwell, my golden guide knows immediately to avoid the pits. He loves hiking and is careful to insure I never sprain an ankle. I feel safe running around camp holding his harness. We also have to navigate around numerous concrete picnic tables as well as coolers, stoves, the fire ring and lots of portable chairs, tents and tables brought by my friends. But Max happily powers through all the obstacles, his bushy flag-tail sweeping back and forth, his nose alive to the scents of the woods.

Now when I was a kid, a campground had an outhouse. The smell actually assisted me in finding it. But here, we have a row of huge, green wheel-chair accessible plastic porta-potties. Totally sanitary they have almost no scent. And because we are Scouts we just naturally keep them clean.

The potties are about a quarter of a mile away from the campground and due to a leaking faucet which the forest service plans to fix, the route directly to the potty is a muddy quagmire. So my friends advise me to take a circuitous route, circumventing yet more tables, coolers and chairs.

Max doesn't like mud either, which is good, because he's happy to tramp farther to get to the human toilet. But teaching him to find it on his own is another thing.

"Good potty," I croon, sliding a treat in to his eager mouth. "Find the potty," I request later, hopefully as he snuffles through the forest until a helpful friend rescues us.

Max continues to find more stoves and tables to guide around and the potty just isn't a destination for him.

At bedtime my friends suggest I wake them if I have to go. I assure them we won't have any trouble finding the potty in the middle of the night, and besides, I lie, I almost never get up in the night to go anyway. All the food has been locked in cars due to the occasional threat of bears and the regular visits of raccoons so there will be nothing yummy to distract Max, I tell my friends.

I carefully avoid drinking water before bed, spitting out the toothpaste when I brush. At 1 A.M. I awake parched, and take the tiniest little sip from my water bottle.

At 3 AM I wake with a bladder the size of Texas. I can barely move it feels so full. The more I try to stop thinking about it, the more I have to go.

Finally I pile on the warm layers, I harness Max and we slip out of the tent. It is pitch dark, and though I don't really see enough for light to help, I notice the moon is absent so I wonder how well Max can see.

"Find the potty," I whisper and rattle the food pouch, promising him a treat to come.

He charges off happily, nose in full gear. I hear my friends snoring and we encounter no obstacles so I know Max can tell where he's going. I smell the fire ring as we pass, hear the wind rattling a pot lid on one of our camp stoves. But is he going where I want to go? And speaking of going, do I ever have to.

We are climbing a slope. Oops, I know there is no slope to the potty. And suddenly we are on an asphalt road. It's deathly quiet. Following his training, Max takes me to the road shoulder, with bushes on the left and the road stretching ahead of us on the right. I think about retracing my steps, but can't remember where the road we drove on was. And I can't remember if there are two roads out of this campground or if it's on a dead end.

I halt max and pick up some small rocks and throw them experimentally to my left. I hear them cascade down what seems to be a fairly steep slope. Then I hear a large splash as they land in a pond below the road. We continue because frankly I'm not sure what to do.

Another quarter mile I toss some pebbles again. This time the slope seems less steep and I realize there are no tents below us. I hear my pebbles finally come to rest in shallow water, maybe fifty feet below. Good, I think, it is indeed safe here.

I squat on the edge of the road and make it quick. I have done this many times backpacking but never when car camping. I hope I am really far away enough from people.

Max bounces up and down. He's gotten to relieve himself with other dogs, but now his pack leader is urinating in the woods where he likes to go. The joy of over marking my spot makes him snort and spin with uncontained fervor. As soon as I pull up my pants, Max indicates he needs to go too. Off with the harness and he's circling and wagging and urinating a gallon. Why I wonder, did he save that up instead of going at bedtime like he usually does? Did he hope for a chance like this, bonding like dogs do but with his very own human in the woods?

Max is practically dancing up the road as we retrace our steps, walking on the other side, hoping we won't miss the campground. About half a mile later, Max begins pulling me frantically across the road and through a lot of very squishy mud. And guess what he's found -- the potty!

Friday, June 29, 2018

In Defense of Obsolete Technology

How quickly technology becomes obsolete, and how truly sad. Our college was gifted several boxes of hardware Daisy players from a training program which became defunct. The idea was that they could be shared with students but the only person they could find who knew enough Daisy to unravel the mess was me -- so I got them.   We have several varieties of Plextalk and Telix things and a pile of original desktop Victor Readers, plus a trio of Book ports and some clunky gizmos that I haven't yet identified.   I got boxes and boxes of them, together with power supplies, which I'm still matching up to the players, plus boxes of CDS, some were books made in-house by a college, others from Recording for the Blind. This was before a hardware Daisy player could handle books from NLS or bookshare, and the book port is the only thing with a memory card. (Daisy 2 didn't handle the digital content from bookshare -- which is Daisy 3 and NLS books are play-protected, though not copy-protected.)   Their old NiCad batteries mostly don't hold a charge -- who thought special-purpose batteries which would eventually loose their charge were a good idea anyway -- and some of them need the battery to work minimally even when plugged in. That's because the charging circuit isn't bypassed when it's connected to AC.    Gives turn of the century a new meaning eighteen years later.    The training program that used them didn't bother to save the original boxes, manuals, and  many cases the master CDS that might have come with the products. Surfing the web, it is impossible to find documentation for the original Victor Reader, and for Book Port I found a user guide but no transfer software, which is needed to make the book port useful. (Luckily I did find a copy of the book port transfer software in the box of college-produced Daisy books, but so many of these players have lost their instructions.) Even when software and drivers exist, it's often for an operating system that is obsolete too.    Thousands of dollars were spent on this stuff; I know for example that the Plextalk PTR1 was around a thousand dollars, and now I have 4 of them which nobody wanted. I have a dozen literally of the original Victor Readers, and haven't got a single one to charge up yet.     And look at the Dectalk Express, something many of us poor blind folks lusted after. I now have five of them, not because I am a hoarder, but because I just can't bear to toss them. And they used a funky cable nobody has these days, which in a completely unrelated coincidence my husband had a box full of the same cables, simply because he used to work for Dec and they were a standard connector there.   But today's standard is tomorrow's  forgotten connector; my ability to understand CTS and DTR, IRQS and I/O ports is no longer a marketable skill! Oh well, maybe I really am a hoarder!   But look at the TeleSensory Navigator, a Braille display from the 1980s. When I worked for TeleSensory and they literally threw their remaining stock in a dumpster, my sighted husband and I snuck back in the middle of the night and "reclaimed" it. Today, the Navigator is supported by Narrator in Windows 10 but you need to be kind of geeky to figure it out. Who knew I could ressurect mine again!   I guess the moral of this rambling is that you really shouldn't go throwing away all the supplementary stuff that comes with today's hot gizmo. But then again, the websites on which they depend to download content or firmware updates will disappear, so who knows if the future will want it.   My husband -- same husband restores old Digital Equipment corporation hardware. Many of his collector friends scan old manuals and put them up on sites for other collectors to download so they can configure the old computers, install software and get them running like new again. When you restore an old car, you just need gas to run; when you restore an old piece of technology you need a manual, software, and the media on which the software lived, which might be old 9-track tapes or 8-inch floppies. And you need hardware that works to run the media to get the software to boot the hardware to make it work!   Even in my current job when I try to retain all the material that comes with a new Braille printer, video magnifier  or scanner, someone usually comes along to complain that I should throw all those extra boxes out because it looks so "cluttered". They want to lock the master CDS in a cabinet which will be forgotten, or the key will get lost, or maybe only the serial number will disappear because someone threw out the box on which it was printed. I dutifully de-clutter, but when I retire, woe to the person who replaces me and has to try and put all the bits of the obsolete technology together again. They'll probably just toss it in the dumpster!   Luckily I'm happily married to a guy who gets it. When he buys the farm we know collectors who will lovingly maintain his collection of old computers from the 1970s and not throw out the manual just because its pages are gray!

Monday, September 16, 2013

My Ubuntu Upgrade Adventures with Raid

Solved the problem, but never expected the help to come from wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mdadm I run a server for our music, recorded TV, photos and the like. Back in 2007, I set up software raid by reading the software raid how-to. I didn't know what I was doing -- still don't actually -- but then, I was really even more clueless. I put Ubuntu 7.4 on the first drive, with separate partitions for boot, usr and var. Then I created a raid 5 array with the remaining drives, by basically just following the directions in the how-to. I did set it to email me if a drive failed - which a few did over the years, and every once in a while I'd monitor it with mdadm --status. It worked, and it kept humming along without too much trouble. Every once in a while, I'd back it up, and I was careful to never put any system-critical stuff on it. The /dev/md0 partition was mounted as /big, and /big was where you stuck your "big" stuff, like your entire collection of futurama videos. About two terabytes later, I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.0 and had to assemble the array by hand, but by Ubuntu 9, it was automatically recognizing the array, and the upgrade process was simply taking care of things. Guys, this is the dangerous part! When some nice helpful feature just takes care of things, and then it suddenly fails, you get to figure out why, and it's harder, if it's been coddling you all along! Last weekend, I decided to upgrade to 12.4, which I did following the release notes. At first the machine sinply froze and did not appear to boot at all. But it turned out that the "quiet" which was helpfully added to the kernel's boot command line, kept an important message from appearing, an error from mdadm about the array not working. I was able to boot with GRML and fix that. But now the server booted, gave the error, and went in to single-user mode. You could type exit, and get it to fully boot, but to get it booting without needing any interaction, I removed /dev/md0 from the fstab. I had to fix a few more upgrade glitches, but the system was back up and running. All except for the raid array; it had completely disappeared. I googled around and trawled through thousands of forum posts. I read about people who foolishly installed their entire system on a raid array and was glad I had the sense not to do that. I fooled with udev and uuids and mdadm.conf and a lot of other twisty passages which did not turn in the direction of success! I tried lots of things, and it's a waste to detail them all here. The problem was that dmesg would randomly show that the kernel had found some, but not all of the drives: [ 4.214684] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] 976773168 512-byte logical blocks: (500 GB/465 GiB) [ 4.214908] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off [ 4.214915] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00 [ 4.214950] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA [ 4.218076] sdc: sdc1 [ 4.222451] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI disk [ 4.709196] md: bind [ 7.537396] md/raid:md0: device sdc1 operational as raid disk 1 [ 7.538315] disk 1, o:1, dev:sdc1 which is what's supposed to happen, but with most of my other drives, they appeared as unpartitioned. And running mdadm --detail /dev/md0 gave output like this: State : active, FAILED, Not Started Active Devices : 1 Working Devices : 1 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 Sometimes two of the drives would come up, but that was it. Fdisk however, showed each drive with a single raid partition Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 63 976768064 488384001 fd Linux raid autodetect I had resigned myself to having to boot with GRML and back everything up, but alas, GRML couldn't see the array either. What was weird was that GRML saw *DIFFERENT* drives but not all of them! Had I lost my husband's beloved South Park collection, I wondered? In desperation I read the wikipedia article on mdadm which is where my answer lay. >A common error when creating RAID devices is that the dmraid-driver has taken control of all the devices that are to be used in the new RAID device. Error-messages >like this will occur: >mdadm: Cannot open /dev/sdb1: Device or resource busy >Typically, the solution to this problem involves adding the "nodmraid" kernel parameter to the boot loader config. Another way this error can present itself >is if the device mapper has its way with the drives. Issue 'dmsetup table' see if the drive in question is listed. 'dmsetup remove ' will remove >the drive from device mapper and the "Device or resource busy" error will go away as well. This is what programmers call a "race" condition, where two realtime processes "race" to see which one will be first. In this case, the raid detection built in to the kernel was racing to build an array, while mdadm was also trying to do the same thing. I have such a love-hate relationship with Linux -- we really should see a marriage counselor! More futzing and I figured out which file to edit for the new grub (hint it's not menu.lst) and I was able to add nodmraid to the kernel command line. At last, I finally feel like a real system administrator. I still don't understand device mapper, and I wish I had a better grasp on UUIDS, Udev, chroot and all the newest linux bafflegab. Sometimes it seems like most of the documentation, and most of what I thought I used to know has been depricated.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

The Machine Stops

"Beware of first- hand ideas!" exclaimed one of the most advanced of [the lecturers]. "First-hand ideas do not really exist. ... Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element - direct observation." -- E.M. Forester, "The Machine Stops" That short story, published in 1909 in the Saturday Evening Post still vibrates with erie echoes of a future accurately predicted. http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html to read the whole story. As I now read Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains" it's easy to write myself off as a luddite, but it's more complex than that. An English instructor once told our class that he'd read "A Tale Of Two Cities" under the covers with a flashlight when he was seven. I remember reading Jane Eyere at aged nine. But today, I can't hardly absorb anything with long descriptive paragraphs. Today I am as impatient as Vashti, the main character in the Forester story who waits fifteen seconds for her son to speak with her long-distance. "I really believe you enjoy dawdling.", she tells him. I'm unsure whether my increased ability to rapidly shift attention from one task to the next is a plus. In "The Shallows" Carr spends several chapters analyzing how the internet was not the first paradigm shift that adjusted the way we work with time and attention. In analyzing the spread of literacy, he discusses both the gains and losses of the vanishing oral tradition. I've always been fascinated by the ways in which the train changed rural America, and how the car drove the new culture even more. It's too easy to think either that enhanced multi-tasking is bringing us greater intelligence or that a more superficial view is turning minds to mush. What really got me was joining Twitter and reading through what were mostly retweets; people passing on information that I might, but probably do not find interesting. It reminds me of Vashti, always in search of original ideas, while simultaneously abhoring their creation.

Sunday, May 29, 2011

To My Future Self

* I originally wrote this the day before my birthday, about six weeks ago.
April 8, 2011. I'm fifty-three, turning fifty-four in another day on April 9th. This letter is to be read thirty years from now, when I turn 84.

If I am not here to read it, then whoever does read it can do whatever they want with it, include lining a catbox. Do you still line catboxes with paper in 2041?

I am writing this long, rambling letter to myself for one reason that's a little hard to articulate. Thirty years ago , in 1981, I was only dimly aware that history unfolded around me. I was a twenty-something social activist on welfare, living in the moment. It prevented me from showing much interest in the world and current events. And even now, I only remember the emotions associated with my young life, not what the world was really like then. Because to us things change slowly, and only seem to move quick in retrospect, the world of 1981 seems very much like the world of today.

But 1981 wasn't the same at all. The IBM PC was just announced, another personal computer for tech-heads like the Apple II or TRS-80. There was no Web, no cellphones, no spreadsheets that the home user could run "what-if" scenarios with. There was no Starbucks, no iPod, the walkman was to be invented in a year or so. There was still a cold war, still a Berlin wall, and people had pensions and read the newspaper in the evening. And I think they still watched Harry Reasoner then.

For me in 1981, writing something involved typing, hoping I hadn't produced invisiprint and that I didn't make too many typos because I had no way of fixing them. I was ignorant of the possibilities of word processing. Four years later, I'd write a screen access program, but in 1981, I didn't even know what programming a computer involved. I was bumming around Berkeley, going nowhere slowly at the start of that decade.

So basically, drifting through life ignorant and unconcerned, when I kept a diary I logged my emotions and the daily events that meant something to me.

Thinking back today, I realized how much history I lived through that I could have paid attention to and didn't. So the purpose of this is to capture what today is like, in ways that I will not remember later.

For example, in the 20th century history class we just finished, we discussed the Vietnam war. I lived through it as a child, but my memories of news reports, with clattering teletypes in the background only recall lists of figures, how many servicemen and how many Viet Kong killed that day. I never thought to pull out one of the cassette recorders I'd owned as a kid to capture one of those newscasts. I never thought to write down anything about the war that struck me as intriguing, because I had no interest.

I remember watching the Apollo Moon landing at Age eleven at the house of a family friend, and the wonderful descriptions provided by the friend's father, sitting on that hot stifling July in his garage. Even at eleven I knew it was significant, but I wished today I'd remember some of the less famous utterances from the astronauts and the newscasters.

The details I do remember are of no significance. The 11-year-old friend was named Lillian and we ran around the yard before that, pretending to be horses. Her last name was Black. Her teenaged brother was Rus, and her mom had been a P.E. teacher at some Saturday program I attended. I remember the father fighting with Rus about whether he could have a beer. I remember how all the other family members went inside, because only that man and I were interested in the moon landing. I can't even remember his name, and yet he spent the afternoon entertaining a visiting blind child with lively descriptions of the event. I remember only one thing from his descriptions; the dust rising as the astronauts jumped about on the moon.

Later, during high school and Watergate, I heard the shaming of Nixon as background noise; I paid so little attention.

As another example, thirty-five years ago, I lived in Germany as an exchange student. For the Germans it was thirty years after Hitler. But people were slippery about the subject, and didn't want to recall much about the second world war. I tried to politely ask but I got rebuffed. As a young person it was a bad idea to push for answers. But even then, I was dimly aware that people around me had lived through a landmark historical event, and weren't speaking of it, and each of them probably had a piece of that tapestry of history we wish to learn more about. What I failed to realize is that even then in 1975, I too was living through a history I had no interest in recording. I remember a few scattered details; how milk was sold in plastic bags; how the post office and most banks were run by the government, how trains were timely and efficient and how you needed your passport wherever you went. I was surprised at How most people had a national ID card in addition to passports and how different all the grocery stores were from each other. Also I strongly remember how the young people identified with the communist party, often singing Das International at parties, how a revolution in Chili was constantly discussed, and how it all contrasted with my sworn signature on my own passport saying I never had anything to do with the communist party. All I knew was that the communists had been in North Vietnam, that they ran Russia, that the school library had a book for kids called "What You Should Know About Communism." Not until I read more later did I learn about Joe McCarthy or the revolution my German friends were talking about. I dimly thought that if freedom of speech was such a great thing, that it shouldn't be denied to communists, but I had no real idea who they were, and where they conspired.

I remember my German schoolfriend Angela who once told me in a whisper that she was Jewish, that her family secretly celebrated the holidays. I thought Germany was open and welcoming to Jews in the 1970's; publicly people said they were, but Angela didn't believe it for a moment. "I only trust you because you are American," she told me once.

More memories of Germany are personal. There was a time when we went swimming on a lake with Holland on its far side, and I hid my passport under a rock, along with most of my clothes. When the border patrol requested our passports, I had to swim back across, frantically search for the correct rock, swim back one-handed, my passport held aloft. I think the border patrol felt a bit chagrined when he saw my disability. "American," he grunted "Not accustoming you this passport finding."

In my closet is a shoebox of letters I typed home, on the thinnest onion-skin, with most events sanitized for the consumption of parents. One day I must try to scan it all, and perhaps ferret out some gems of history long forgotten.

Thirty years ago, in 1981, Reagan was president, and in liberal Berkeley, where I lived at the time, everyone was horrified and stunned by his Star Wars initiatives. There was little knowledge of terrorists attacks, Iran was mentioned in the same breath as the hostage crisis, and people still sharply remembered Watergate from a few years before.

I had worked as a section 504 trainer for CIL, and I remember flying in a tiny prop plane to Montana to train some folks in their disability civil wrights. I remember a similar training in Michigan, where people called themselves "handicapped" and we Berkeley-bites introduced them to the idea that pushing for your rights was OK even if it did cost, because you couldn't put a price on leveling the playing field. I didn't think of those people as conservative, just backwards, because they still needed their consciousness raised; they were country-folk in the hinterlands who apologized for being handicapped and alive-- they didn't understand even the concept of equal access.

Enough rambling. Now to today. What can I say about 2011, that won't necessarily be remembered clearly three decades hence?

First, this idea of civil rights. Everyone excepts that Asian, black, Latino peoples are equal. Everyone excepts that women are equal. And people claim to accept that the disabled are equal, but a few ugly facts, like the price of equality do intrude. Today, we remember restrooms with five stalls and shorter lines, but they are a thing of the past because the handicapped stall has swallowed up three. Today massive cuts in education are making the schools scramble for funding, asking local taxpayers to foot the bill. But the elephant in the room is the expense of leveling the playing field for the disadvantaged and disabled. Nobody questions well-meaning regulations designed to keep schools and public buildings safe. Other public services are suffering massive budget cuts as well, with some cities going bankrupt and others merging their police and fire services with larger cities next door. Massive pension debt has scared cities, and even the right for public sector workers to engage in collective bargaining is threatened. I hear that only 7% of our private workers are unionized, 12% of public sector employees, yet conservative opinion unanimously seems to believe that unions have to go. And nobody is discussing how unfunded mandates, intended to better society are also causing their own kind of poison.

Thirty years ago, as a beneficiary of rehab funding, I could get pretty much any device or service I needed if I could prove it would expedite my education. That kind of freewheeling spending is certainly a thing of the past, but one wonders if thirty years from now unions will be flourishing or extinct. One wonders how ultimately we will emerge from the current financial crisis, or if it will still be dragging on. Will I still have health insurance or any savings? Will workers still use 401K or 403B to save for retirement. Will taxes still be higher than last year? And will NPR which now might be on the chopping block be around to report semi-objectively on the government?

Today, one thing that seems different than the world of thirty years ago, is the big public divide between the ultra-conservative right-wing movements, like the Tea party, and the extreme left that still breezes happily along in Bastions like San Francisco. The left don't want the cuts, the right demand cuts, and everyone else tries to decide which things to keep and how to avoid it costing too much. On the radio, you can hear Rush Limbaugh blaring out for three hours every morning, insulting put-downs drawing even more conservative listeners in. And those same conservatives to me seem very hypocritical since they are happy to take handouts that benefit their special interests. They dislike regulation and fashion themselves as rugged individualists who don't need social programs. However, they have no problems limiting free trade, or asking regulators to look the other way if it can increase their profits, even at other peoples' expense. They do not remember that their grandmothers might have barely escaped the triangle shirtwaist fire, or that their education even occurred during the generous sixties.

I feel more comfortable with the liberals, who misguided our nation in to deeper debt but at least seem to do it with concerns for the less fortunate. Will all those conservatives on the radio like Sean Hanity, Glen Beck and Michael Savage actually push the average John IQ. to implement changes that bring us closer to the constitution and farther away from being a socialist state? Supposedly we pay the highest corporate taxes of any nation now and everyone wants freedom, even if it means constricting the freedom of some other group. Even liberals with whom I naturally identify want freedom for the disadvantaged at the cost of freedom for the marketplace. Ayn Rand had some good points; do people even read her today?

Thinking about liberals, political correctness itself threatens freedom of expression. In our attempts to not offend anyone we squelch others. Today people do seem to be getting tired of affirmative action and politically correct language, but the backlash is often mean-spirited or at least rude and insulant.

Despite what I hear on the radio, the media seems to me to be uncritically liberal. the Today Show is certainly got a liberal bias, with its constant chasing after sensational news and its focus on Obama as the best thing since sliced bread. Its regular criticism of George W. Bush leads most Americans to believe that he was totally wrong-headed about weapons of mass destruction under Saddam Hussein' purview and so we mostly hate former president Bush. We like his father, because Bush senior got us in and out of the Kuwait war quick, but will history tell us later that both Bushes were terribly misguided or that they were powerful leaders who made the right decisions. How much of our hatred of Bush junior is fomented by the liberal media? As an open-minded person, I tried to read and listen to both the liberals and conservatives in a vain attempt to find some truth in between. But without media to inform us, we have no information, therefore our opinions are censored, even if advertising, rather than politics control the information.

And that is also a divide. Some believe that the Internet lets people access a wider variety of media outlets. Want world news? You can check out hundreds of sites? Want local information? That is here too. You can read bloggers, watch YouTube, click on anything and everything you want. This is supposed to keep us better informed.

But old-school journalism believes that people are dumber, clicking on sound bytes, flitting from one story to the next, and that basically we have a national attention deficit that prevents us from getting educated on our world. They believe that once, networks were seen as a public trust with obligations to inform us about current events, and that news was not entertainment. Now, it certainly is packaged as such. The media makes no attempt to educate us. And without education will we make wise decisions about our future?

I am concerned that media today is more interested in ratings than in keeping us informed, but is it the media's lack of information that killed the public's desire for it, or is it the public's appetite for scandal and sensation what killed the media's reputation?

I remember trying to read Scientific American many years ago, and the articles were too long and involved for me to follow. I remember Fortune had long articles as well, that really delved in to the practices and cultures of different businesses and their leaders. I think I could have been an investor then, but today, with only sound bites to guide me, I doubt it.

This week, the big news is that tonight, the federal government will need to shut down if the democrats and republicans can't agree on the budget. At our California state level, the same thing is happening; Jerry Brown tried to eliminate redevelopment agencies, and some entities want him cutting education more, while others want him to cut it less. Nobody seems to realize that the government is a mirror of our own conflicted beliefs, our yearning to continue the high quality and ubiquity of favorite social programs, vs. our desire to keep our own personal tax burdens down. Surprisingly nobody seems in favor of a flat tax, nobody wants to cut those unfunded mandates that regulate our health, safety and support for the less fortunate. Nobody wants their pet social programs cut, and nobody wants to trim the wings of suit-happy lawyers. These are my partial solutions to our current budget debacle, but my solutions aren't popular.

Several airlines are in the news as their fleet ages and problems, like a hold bursting in the fuselage midflight, causes public outrage and fear. The result: inspections increase and flights canceled en masse.

Right now our aging infrastructure isn't in the news because no bridges have collapsed recently. Just let a passenger train derail, or a state loose power for a week and suddenly infrastructure will be the big item again.

Everything from national parks to highway repairs is going to be downsized anyway; it isn't popular politically to spend on infrastructure. Recent investigative journalism has uncovered that California wasn't properly regulating the earthquake safety of schools in a report called "On Shaky Ground" but though agencies are being blamed, nobody is suggesting that extra be spent to give them more employees. And we have no idea if the agency that oversees this kind of thing is inefficient or underresourced.

Alternative energy is discussed a great deal, because we have to import oil from countries that are mostly hostile, and because we have no more domestic coal. For the average citizen, improvements in alternate energy seem to move glacially. A few companies will convert your home to solar, at an exorbitant price. We see a few more wind farms, and you read about biodiesel. And a few cars, like the Chevy Volt that run only on electricity are now available for consumers. But most of that electricity still comes from sources that are not renewable. There's a controversy about whether subsidizing corn grown only for fuel is wise. At Deanza college where I work, they installed three charging stations, adjacent to the almost always empty bike rack. These stations will charge electric cars for a price. Will these be universal in thirty years and will gasoline disappear?

James Kunselor, in "The Long Emergency" predicts that it will take a long time for us to ramp up to an infrastructure that depends only on renewable energy.

Last year, my neighbors and I fought city government with Nimby fervor to prevent developers from taking over every inch of ground with tightly packed condominiums. We heard endlessly about the city's future plans for walkable communities and local commerce. But they made no plans for public transit to improve, other than locating the condos near existing bus stops, where most of the transit that used to run was cut out of the previous year's budget anyway. They made no provision to reduce traffic, other than adding more signals. They had no plans for a grocery store or any kind of shopping center the condo residents could actually walk to. Basically they used the green bandwagon to promote more suburbs.

And even here there's no right answer. The $73 million developers offered the city to bribe them in to letting them develop would have gone a long way towards plugging holes in its deficit.

It's like the school junk food controversy. MacDonalds and Coke, to name just two, have funded some schools' extracurricular activities in exchange for promoting their wares to the kids. Schools need the money, and fast food needs the commerce. Kids need the extracurricular events. But obesity is a big public health concern as well.

When I was a kid, we didn't talk about walkable communities, because we walked to school and home. Families often had one car, Dad came home to dinner prepared by Mom and in my neighborhood at least, any neighbor who saw us doing something bad could punish us. A shopping center I could walk to was built near my home when I was around ten.

The grade school I live across the street from today, is invaded twice a day by hordes of parents dropping their kids off. My little nephews don't play outside much. The parents seem way too alarmed about child molesters, but I'm not a parent. But kids don't play outside on my block as much as we 1960s kids played. The media says it's TV, computer games, worried parents and too much junk food in school, or maybe just too many cars. The dream of a walkable community anywhere here in Silicon Valley is certainly far away.

CalTrain which says it's been serving the Peninsula for 150 years is drastically cutting back service. VTA, which built the lovely Baypoint transfer station for light-rail passengers has cut so much and accommodated routes to fit, that this station is barely used. I expect BART to be next. We're supposed to get out of our cars and ride the public transit that isn't. Why is there no push to force employers to consider having us work from home? Now that would be environmentally friendly.

Several model buildings around the community preport to use mostly solar energy. Our local humane society is green certified, and the Kirsch Environmental center at De Anza also has some prestigious seal showcasing its environmental consciousness. But as far as I can tell, average buildings still use as much power, more in fact, because we have more computers, we don't turn them off much and every device from a Fax machine to a dictation recorder needs a walwart which consumes power even if the gizmo isn't connected. We have lights that don't automatically shut off, and workers who receive no rewards for being power thrifty. Before climate control, you could control your climate in coastal California by simply opening windows most of the time, or by pulling down the shades in the cold winter and hot summer. We still are irresponsible enough to wax poetic about the environment while designing buildings with no windows that open.

Our college has a lot of stuff that keeps breaking, from door locks to toilet paper holders in the restrooms. I'm told it is because legally we have to accept the lowest bid from contractors. But this costs our funding sources more in the long run. Society is just filled with these contradictions.

Technology does seem to improve however on the consumer front. Though we use laptops and PCS for word processing and spreadsheets, more and more, the smartphone is the computer people carry everywhere. The iPhone has only been out three years, but its touchscreen interface truly is a paradigm shift. My mom saw an iPad II at Target of all things and now she has to have an iPAD. People don't care that it has to be activated by and later tethered to iTunes to be completely useful. Will that be its Achilles heel? Android tablets and phones are competing too, but their very openness makes them inconsistent, often poorly designed and mostly inferior to the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad. For example, manufacturers can implement any subset of Android they choose; lock out apps they dislike, and use hardware that isn't powerful to run some parts of the operating system. I'd like to see Android win in this battle for the best PDA/Phone, but I have my doubts. I saw a report about a Trojan that installs on Android phones and emails everyone in your address book telling them your phone is compromised. Similar reports caused Google to actually start remotely pulling apps off of consumers' phones. Will we have a future where you will come home to a fridge infected with an electronic virus and find its manufacturer has disconnected the power and your food is all rotting?

Ray Kurzweil predicted that in 2010, we'd all be connected to a censorium where the Internet would be just an eyeblink away. That's not happening exactly. There is 3G and 4G which is supposed to be faster, but at $30 a month you get only 2GB. Even home bandwidth will be capped, the rumors say, or at least there will be a limit on the number of bytes you can get per month. This will definitely put a dent in streaming services. You can now stream movies directly to your phone, and look up anything anywhere, provided there's a cell tower nearby and enough cash in your wallet. The poor need not apply.

And the poor are invisible. There is less welfare for them today, social security, Medicaid, medicare and aid to families with dependent children has been cut. They often work two jobs. I see the face of the poor more, because they are my paratransit drivers, working twelve -hour shifts, barely awake, and unskilled enough they have no other employment prospects. And right before 911, everyone in congress was debating about the bankrupcy of social security. There's supposed to be none left when my paratransit drivers retire, if they don't first loose their jobs when cars can eventually drive themselves.

And there is progress on that front. High-end cars can keep you in your lane. The NFB challenged companies to come up with a driverless car that a blind man could command, and someone won the prize last year. But it isn't ready yet for a real road.

Another paradigm shift that I haven't seen anyone writing about is the idea that you buy content that has no physical substance. I can log on to Itunes, or the Amazon store and with a single click purchase a song, video or ebook for downloading. It may or may not contain the hateful digital rights management that prevents us from copying it freely. But people accept this quietly, selling their records and CDS, filling their hard disks with "content" that a stray wrong bit can blow away.

Because my job involves producing digital content, I back it up to CD. I notice that CDS I made ten years ago aren't reliable. I know that consumer-grade CDS wear out faster than commercial ones, but that means all of the amateur content of today, the podcasts, blogs and videos will disappear in to ether. Even if some archaeologist uncovers a cache of old CDS will he be able to read any of them still?

The old computers that my husband restores often contain foam that has disintegrated in to sticky dust. I understand that this same thing has happened with the original astronauts' space suits.

Kurzweil also predicted the ubiquity of voice response systems, and that's partially implemented. More and more you call a service and must utter precise instructions like "Reservations" and "Credit Card Validation" instead of pressing numbers on your touchtone pad. But you can't have a conversation with the automated attendant. You can't say "I seem to be missing some income that should have been direct-deposited to my account" for example. However the mindless reps who man most customer-service lines today are even more annoying than computers. They seem to have been required to prove their IQ was limited before being handed the job!

One of my earliest memories, probably in the early sixties was making long-distance calls, how expensive it was, how you talked quick because you didn't want to spend more time than you could afford. How the phone lines hummed and chirped as you first dialed (no touch tones, a real dial) the operator, who contacted the long-distance operator, who actually made your connection. I remember my dad telling about the big underseas cables that connected us with Europe. Later I read about the many attempts made to lay those cables, and the political and commercial wrangling over rights and expenses to connect us overseas.

Today we use Skype, if we are computer savvy, and VOIP phones if we are not. Will thirty years from now this all become a seamless infrastructure? Will old-fashioned wired phones completely disappear, and will everyone only use cell connections? Now on a list of disappearing jobs on this morning's news, they said the job of telephone linemen is in danger.

I listened to one of the first Internet radio broadcastsof Science Friday, archived online. It was done in 1993 using RealMedia when the Internet was still for most consumers a new cool thing. People could only imagine the possibilities of the web. A futurologist said that one day you would be able to ask the Internet a question and it would answer.

Today, people see the Internet as a part of life; but a nerdy part never the less. Media creators make youtube videos, podcasts, wikis and blogs, and the rest of us geeks consume them. There is some Luddite talk about information overload and how everyone permanently glued to an iPOD is disconnecting from real relationships. Others argue that sites like Facebook and those apps which can tell you via GPS where your friends are all physically located actually enhance the quality of real relationships. I believe that people thought TV would ruin our brains too.

Newspapers are in flux, though their demise has been predicted also for a while. Most of them have ad-laden Internet sites, and young people say they get most of their news from the Internet, but whether it is the New York Times or the Chicago sun they are logging on to, it is hard to tell. My unscientific observations have me believing it is more like Facebook and Youtube! At any rate, circulation is dropping, and papers are facing bankrupcy. Old farts like me think literacy is in decline, and judging from the student papers I read from the flash drives they leave with me, I have plenty of evidence. But nobody asks the question of whether literacy matters; perhaps it will not.

Also thinking about the media, it's fascinating to see the changes television has gone through. Today for a price you can get TV on your phone, any time and anywhere. For free, you can get digital broadcasts, but analog broadcasting ceased in January of last year. I recorded the audio from those stations the last night they were on the air, because it seemed historical. Digital was promoted is way better, but no more could you easily get the signal in a fringe area, or with a battery TV that you moved from place to place. Digital signals need a better antenna that is in a fixed location. Digital signals let broadcasters add more channels to their streams, and send more content through the airwaves. They enabled the FCC to sell the wide spectrum previously gobbled up by analog signals. It was progress.

But Comcast cable, the monopoly that isn't, took advantage of this unrelated change in broadcasting to force its customers to go digital as well. They insisted we use cable boxes to suck up the signal, as they encrypt more and more of their channels. Eventually, I predict we'll have to rent those cable boxes, the way customers who chose digital, rather than having it forced on them do, but for now it's no additional cost.

Comcast's competitors are AT&T which now controls DirectTV, I believe, and Dish Networks, also satellite. The promotion campaign for AT&T now is called U-Verse, which gives you 500 some channels, and Comcast calls its ultimate channel line-up X-finity. They offer deceptive low prices $29.95 for the first six months, but you have to sign a contract. T-Mobile also offers $10 a month for broadband net access via cellphone, called 4G, but it's equally deceptive. It gives you a capped 200 MB, not enough to stream much of anything.

As a child, I remember all programming was generated by the three big networks, NBC, ABC and CBS. Today TV is fragmented among many networks, and a variety of fascinating books have documented this change.

It is disturbing how contradictory TV messages can be. Conservatives see modern comedies as rude and vulgar and lacking in family values, but at the same time, they keep ratings up which must make many investors and TV executives happy. And people clearly want to watch this stuff. Rap lyrics create this same kind of uncomfortable doublethink.

On TV the popular show American Pickers glorifies hoarding while several other shows exhibit the deplorable conditions that compulsive hoarders live under.

Today the craze is reality shows, everything from Survivor to American Idol. My husband and I loved Ice Road Truckers. Also popular are cooking shows, but people spend less and less time at home, so I think they fantasize more about whipping up gourmet meals than they actually do. Shows like Trading Spaces and Say Yes To The Dress show off our narcisistic streak. And people are intrigued with the paranormal and supernatural, UFOs, ghosts, vampires and zombies. Broadcasts abound.

Also worth mentioning is the attempts of both Comcast and AT&T to control your entire media experience with bundles that include Internet, TV and phone service; Comcast calls its service Triple Play. The phone service is also IP-based, and I wonder if any great catastrophe will cause a triple melt-down of all services, since they run through essentially the same fiber-optic wiring.

What is ubiquitous today that won't be in thirty years? Did we ever think LP records would be endangered? Did my parents listening to 1940s radio dramas realize how fleeting their reign would be? Did people think telegraphs and train travel, both hallmarks of 19th century life, would disappear as quickly as it did. So what is common today that is going away?Maybe it's the keyboard I'm typing on, with that grease stain near the spacebar. Maybe it's my snazzy new flat-screen LED TV. Maybe it's something like rubber bands, ziplock bags, Barbie dolls or sweatshirts. I'd write more about that one ordinary part of life now if I knew it would disappear!

And what craze will grab the future? Today we look back laughingly at cabbage patch dolls and pet rocks. Will people of the future collect original iPods the way we collect old radios today?

I also think about diaries. Reading real journal entries is one of my favorite parts of history. Did the journal writers worry that the paper would disintegrate? Will our blogs and emails get preserved?

I see I'm asking more questions, and my future self won't want that. She'll want to know what life was like today, really; for me to remind her about ordinary everyday things. I can remind her how leaf blowers are not quiet, and how primitive voice recognition was. I can remind her how bitter the battles over gay marriage were. I can remind her how hard my college tried to recruit more Latino students. I can remind her how we worried about our health and spent a lot of time working out at the gym and how there were so many TV commercials for pills to maintain your sexual prowess, banish insomnia and offer comfort for allergy sufferers. But maybe all of this stuff will continue to be future concerns as well.

Take Starbucks. It wasn't an institution thirty years ago, though I loved the little coffeehouses in Berkeley it tried to imitate. Back then, poets did really sit around composing doggerel, and students argued politics while consuming capuccino. "The Espresso Experience" on College and Bancroft was a favorite hangout with a sunladen patio and chairs made of wooden spools.

Today's starbucks seems to have fifty drinks with hundreds of variations. There is music playing that you can buy from the iTunes store with a single click. Being wired means having Internet access as well as being energetically full of caffeine. It is a place to go and meet friends, or to sip quietly while enjoying a good book. You can get a sandwich or pastry too, buy coffee beans or a travel mug, and there is one in every neighborhood.

That is one example of something ordinary today that could be gone thirty years from now. Maybe budget cuts will force all schools online, and my busy campus, with book-bearing students rushing to class, or chatting on the benches by the cafeteria will be a thing of the past. They'll just click their way to a degree.

Maybe instructors will no longer pontificate in front of whiteboards while half the class texts their friends and the other half frantically scribble notes or wave their hands in the air. Perhaps they won't go to the library to study, and schools won't have to worry if they have the funds to keep all their computers upgraded to the newest and latest thing.

Should I tell my future self about the Roomba, the first house robot, that scuttles around on its little wheels like a bug, vacuuming the room in a semi-random pattern that leaves dog hair behind. The new improved Roomba can return home to its charger and plug itself in.

On the science front we hear about virtual reality, genetic engineering, quantum mechanics, nanotechnology and endless medical breakthroughs, all which are supposed to improve our lives. I follow this stuff, but don't see it changing much currently. You read that scientists can now take pictures of rats dreaming; that is they have pictures of the rat's dreams. You read that quadreplegics and those poor people who are locked in can now control items onscreen with just brain waves. Scientists are growing brains in petri dishes which they plan to try to interface with robots. They are trying to interface our human brain to computers. They are growing skin on a substrate and playing with stem cells and cells that are similar hoping that generating organs will be easier in the future. You read that some of the pseudo-stem cells they've generated actually become diseased more quickly, creating organs that are weak and underperforming still. You read about flat plates which will use some form of capacitor to charge your electronic gizmo instantly, but they certainly have not appeared for you to acquire at Best Buy. You read about space elevators being constructed of carbon nanotubes, and quantum computers that instead of being binary will know about seven distinct states. But though fascinating it's not technology that seems to be making any impact, say the way the iPAD II is doing with its round-the-block lines in front of stores, and consumers eagerly snap up the few that are in inventory.

Our first probe has flown by Mercury and taken pictures. The little energizer bunny Opportunity is still trekking across mars, seven years after it landed, while Spirit is stranded out of sunlight with a stuck wheel. Will people land on Mars and eventually find the rovers and tell us how they are really doing? Or will we find that telemetry is good enough and we won't desire or need manned missions anywhere? The scifi writers sixty years ago thought we'd be colonizing planets by now. I remember a 1960s episode of The Outer Limits, where a head was kept alive by a tank to which it was permanently attached. Today we've decoded the human genome but we are a long way from defining consciousness or keeping a human head alive.

Last week the news was all about Libya, and the debates were all about how Obama should have been more or less aggressive when trying to contain our interference in this country. It seems like we are taking a larger and larger role interfering in foreign countries, ever since Teddy Roosevelt sent Taft on his secret mission in 1905 to Japan to hand them Korea. Yet as citizens, we are very divided about whether this involvement is or is not a good thing for us. Will our future see us scaling back, and will we have a better understanding of why radical Islam hates us so? Or will we be as far from political answers as we are from answers to the scientific riddles?

Predicting the future is still awful popular, and I should go through some books which will be out of print soon enough and highlight what they say. It fascinates me to find out which predictions actually come true.

I am intrigued by the public fascination with end times prophecy. There is Coast To Coast, the graveyard talk show originated by Art Bell that explores UFO sightings and other pseudoscience. Not a week passes that it doesn't cover something about 2012. On September 21st of that year, according to programs on the history channel that repeatedly air, a catastrophe will commence that was predicted by Nostradamos, Mother Shipton, the Mayas, the Hopis and the book of revelation -- How could all these esteemed sources be wrong? And we've had a lot of earthquakes, hurricanes and Tsunamis lately. And web bots have even "predicted" a 2012 catastrophe.

But though people cannot get enough of the world ending, it is still only crazy survivalists that actually prepare. Catastrophes in the future include electromagnetic pulses, earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, hurricanes, plagues, atomic attack, lack of water, limited energy, a big solar flare, financial melt-down, massive crop die-off from disease, terrorist bioweapons, and an asteroid hitting the earth. This stuff is really popular with all the media now, books, radio, TV, podcasts, blogs. But we just consume and are a bit overwhelmed with it. We aren't building shelters, stockpiling supplies, relearning old skills or growing victory gardens as a society. We are playing with our i-devices and running to Wallmart for the latest styles. Is this going to be our downfall, or is all this future pessimism totally unwarranted? After all, mammography has cut the deaths from breast cancer by a third since 1990!

This week's big techno-movie is "The Source Code" something about the man-machine interface and virtual reality. Haven't seen it yet, and I wonder if it's described. Will it become a classic or be considered something B grade 30 years from now?

In the movie, apparently someone transfers to a parallel universe, but he's not in the same time as he was in his current universe. Our culture shows a remarkable plasticity between science and faith though, when a recent host asked a scientist on his program if the scientist "believed" in parallel universes. I wonder if historians looking back at our time will say that the conflict between science and religion was a recurring theme.

Before Galileo we had no real conflict between these two studies. Today creation science and intelligent design tries to bridge the gap. People implicity choose whether to believe in science or God. Some see God or gods as merely ancient aliens who dropped in for an occasional visit and to meddle with the technology of early civilizations. But just as we used to see Veliskosvky's plate tectonics as crank science, perhaps some of these other theories will eventually become more or less respectable. It's kind of a free-for-all age, where you have the freedom more or less to believe in whatever you want, and even though gay marriage is being hotly disputed, most people are free to do most things they desire. I wonder if these freedoms will be preserved.

But religion might change too. The Vatican, backwards as it is about punishing its child-molesting priests seems very forward thinking when it decided that extraterestrials might exist and that they are part of God's plan. And just this week 67 metal books were found in some cave and according to the media have more explosive ramifications than the dead sea scrolls.

So it's hard, sifting through scientific, social and political trends, not to mention spirituality, technology and just plain pop culture to predict whether something that's so important now is going to be seen as landmark later on. Which of the many infomercial strategies promoted today will improve wealth? Which financial advisor's investment strategy will prevail, or in hindsight be seen as cruelly foolish? Which technology will grow and influence the next generation? Which of today's new jobs will excel in to the future? What should I focus on now telling early stories about?

Perhaps we will outlaw nuclear power before a big accident, and some serendipity will lead to a free energy source much safer and infinitely renewable. Maybe we will find a way to make nuclear power safe and dispose of the waste. Maybe we will discover a peaceful path to winning over warring nations. These are all the problems endlessly discussed but unresolved today.

Even though 911 almost ten years ago was shocking, to us on the West Coast it was more like the nuclear meltdown after the earthquake hitting Japan. It was very tragic; we tried to help, we watched CNN. For the people I know, it did not significantly change their lives.

We note that there was an earthquake in New Zealand, one in Turkey, one in Mexico, continuing after-shocks in Japan, so it makes me wonder, are earthquakes increasing in frequency today, or is the media just better at reporting them?

Today I watched the free video from Stansberry and Associates at www.endofamerica38.com. He claims our demise will come from the devaluation of the U.S. dollar, foundation of the world economy and that martial law will ensue as banks close, and our economy collapses. This is the catastrophe that he says will threaten in the near future our entire way of life. Should I intensively grow potatoes or stockpile real gold? Should I be sure the potatoes are different varieties and that the gold is not onsite?

Thirty-five years ago, Howard Ruff published "How to Prosper During The Coming Bad Years" a summary of the content of his newsletter The Ruff Times, which essentially said the same thing and it was my introduction to this doomsday preparedness stuff. But I'm not as convinced as these guys that the world is ending, and I'm not as convinced as the happy socialists that we need to create more laws, costly to society as a whole, to protect the downtrodden. Today, we have so many experts claiming that other experts are wrong I think our national paralysis reflects that nobody, especially the experts have no real idea what's in store and what to do about any of it.

The Stansberry and Associates free video mentioned above is an informercial masquerading as prophecy. He claims if you subscribe to his newsletter and invest in his five reports which detail the secrets of his recession proof strategies that you will be able to escape the collapse of the U.S. dollar. Which brings me to the point that even as he espouses investing, he's just like everyone else in America; driven to market something to us. Will this second decade of the 21st century be known as the age of marketing?

We are not dealing with our economic deficits or paying back our debts. Some claim the government is printing more money, and so deeply in debt it can never recover. Many claim that the government has repeatedly lied about the depth of the financial crisis. Just a few years ago, we were told to start spending more to jumpstart the economy, and I remember Bush signing in to law tax reductions and one-time cash incentives which enabled us to do just that. Yet, in the same breath we are told that saving and investing are crucial for our financial health. All around us, every imaginable good is market to us, but we're supposed to have enough self-control to ignore all this subliminal pushing from advertisers!

We aren't protecting our environment except for a few well-publicized stabs at the Herculean task. We are not protecting our planet's biodiversity. We are not colonizing space to protect our civilization. We are not inventing a new political system which will balance the forces of regulation, the free market and our endless appetite for social programs. We are failing to live within our means, spending more than we consume, and are not investing or saving enough. We are not fixing health insurance, our schools, rising obesity, crime, drug addiction or our aging infrastructure. At least this is what we repeatedly hear. Either naysayers are wrong, or magical thinking will prevail and we will fix at least enough of us to keep going, just like Spirit and Opportunity.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

My take on the Wisconsin Schools Budget Thing

There is one gripe missing from our public discourse about how the budget crisis is affecting education.

I am not sure the 10-second attention span of the public can grasp this subtle point, but this is my blog so I'm going to try.

The daily news is filled with stories about California schools laying off teachers, closing libraries, canceling music programs. And there is this national debate about whether public employees have the right to collective bargaining.

I've been a voter for around 35 years and for nearly every one of them, I've heard arguments for and against propositions to give more money to schools. Sometimes they want to raise our taxes, sometimes it's a bond measure. But we are always hearing about the need for more classrooms, more retrofitting, more infrastructure maintenance.

At some point the public got tired of the schools' insatiable demand for cash, and they said No.

Now that I am a public employee, I still have no idea where all the money really goes, and that's what worries me. We are blaming unions, and teachers, but ultimately these, along with students are going to suffer. In my opinion, we should be blaming the boards and administrators that make decisions about how the money was spent. Whether or not these decisions were sound, the problem is boards rarely work to sell the public on how much previous generosity benefited education. They just took the publics money and used it somehow, and then came back to the trough to beg for more.

Successful nonprofits keep the public apprised of how their donations are being spent. But schools don't do a good job of celebrating with their donors. They don't even see the public really as donors, and this is why there is so much whining and complaining if the public fails to cough up more cash year after year.

Schools of all education levels need to communicate to the public when things are going well how their donations are helping. They need to publicly show where all that money is and is not being spent. They can ask for more next year, if they prepared the public beforehand by showing what they were unable to afford.

But pride gets in the way. The school board doesn't say "Hey there John Q. Public. We are way out of compliance with this law because we felt unethical about not giving our hardworking teachers a raise. So we decided to invest in them this year even if we had to skimp a little on fire safety." If people were willing to loos a little face for the sake of full disclosure, I am sure the public would be understanding as everyone needs to make some tradeoffs in budgeting.

The result: one gets the feeling that schools are hiding something even when they aren't. Tenured professors, lavish new buildings, heavily hyped athletic programs, excessive vice-presidents, deans and other assorted administrators earning high salaries lead to the public's perception that money is being wasted.

The public doesn't realize all the regulations that school's labor under; all the unfunded mandates that supposedly level the playing field for the underprivileged or set exact standards and requirements for accreditation. If for example, a school is required to maintain an expensive program to feed children below the poverty line -- if it's required to undertake costly earthquake retrofitting to stay in compliance, if the impact of ongoing pension funds is high and reducing its impact on the environment is causing it to spend some of the public's funds, then the public must be aware of these burdens. Otherwise the public is going to mistakenly believe that the school is wasting their money.

The subtle part of this point is that I am not judging whether the existence of unfunded mandates is right or wrong. I'm also not saying that any particular school has too many chiefs or pays for too many Indians. I am not saying schools should or should not repeatedly ask the public for more support.

What I am saying is that school boards and administrators need to take responsibility for publicizing and openly demonstrating exactly where and how the public's money is spent. There will be great debate of course, but nobody will accuse the schools of hiding expenses and they will earn more respect and probably more funding as well!

Outlook and JAWS


There is an annoying problem for JAWS users who read email in Outlook. When trying to read a typical html-formatted newsletter, Jaws, and I assume other screen readers repeatedly read "Right-click to download pictures. Outlook prevented download of this picture from the internet." And most newsletters have tons of image links which JAWS faithfully insists on reading all this text for each.

Sighted people just don't see any pictures. They can right-click on any of them to get the image, but I who don't care about pictures, simply want the annoying message about how outlook is protecting me to go away.

I discovered how to fix it. The fix does download pictures, but I don't get newsletters from unknown companies so I figure I'm pretty safe. Simply right-click on the message in your inbox before opening it and from the context menu, select "Add sender to Safe Senders List." Typical Microsoft, now isn't that the most intuitive solution you've heard of lately?