Category Archives: Commentary

Merry Christmas – whoever/wherever you all are

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It’s Christmas Day 2021. Traditionally a day when the family gets together and … does whatever families that get together do when they get together.

Present score is

  • Connected by phone to my elder sister.
  • Connected by phone to my younger sister’s telephone which has no ‘your call is important blah blah’. Pro Tip Sheila – turn it on.
  • Imagined connecting with my younger brother who apparently is still conducting a no internet, no email campaign. No old school spirit there 🙁
  • Kids have organized two separate web events – one Zoom today, one Webex tomorrow. Hoping to see/hear all of them allowing for grandchild-centered emergencies
  • Could this be the year my sister-in-law calls?

Looking forward to Christmas 2022 by which time everybody will be octuple vaccinated* and face-to-face becomes the ‘word of the year’. In the meantime, here are some previous WOTY winners

*  not counting seasonal flu shot

Harbingers of Doom

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The ‘Internet of Things  – a network of ‘smart’ digital devices – represents the future. In the context of the IoT, a thing can be a person with a heart monitor implant, a farm animal with a biochip transponder, an automobile that has built-in sensors to alert the driver when tire pressure is low – or any other natural or man-made object that can be assigned an IP address and provided with the ability to transfer data over a network.

If you feel the need for more detail on the IoT, then Dr. John Barrett’s presentation at TEDxCIT on YouTube is a great place to start.

Experts estimate that by 2020, the IOT will consist of almost 50,000,000,000 smart things.

So, the future is bright. Right? Not so fast …

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Hello world. Again.

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If only my database had been more secure and/or I had been more diligent, there would have been just a single instance of my ‘blog’.  Even then there would have been serious discontinuities in my blogging for many reasons – mostly categorized as ‘reality’ intruding into life.

My earliest attempts at a blog used a very home-brewed piece of software running on an HTML personal web site which has disappeared. Fortunately or unfortunately – depending on your point of view – not all was lost. I had a series of what I called rainy day stories – a collection of short, this-is-what-real-life-is-like, accounts of what was happening at the time. So, old news is it. And Now & Then is where to find it.

Welcome to ‘Hello world version 3 or 4 or whatever’. I’ll try harder this time.