Fast Track for the Elderly - Help or Hindrance?

I went to the Illinois Secretary of State office today to get new a license plate sticker. In and out in five minutes! The office has put in place a fast track for seniors (65 and older). Age has its benefits. However, this approach is a reflection of the general view that equates elderly with poor and infirm. Whereas I enjoy the benefits of the elderly I recognize the unfairness of institutionalized preferential treatment for people who have no real right to preference or deference. The negative side of the silly equation is workplace discrimination and chronic underemployment of the aging.

My generation had the good fortune of being born slightly ahead of the baby-boomer wave. The boom provided a steady supply of workers for the pre-boomers to manage who could fund retirement of the pre-boom generation. When the boomer wave breaks as the generation begins to turn 65 this year, the retirement system breaks with it - and the world economy is grappling with how to support the elderly with health and dignity. Preferential treatment in government offices is a symptom of government trying to address the problem with no observable impact on budgets. It lets the legislators and bureaucrats feel they are addressing the problem without really doing anything. I may as well enjoy it while it lasts.

For folk who do not live in the USA - Secretary of State sounds like an impressive title. It is not. It is the administration department of State Government.

Fall in the Botanic Gardens

Clickenzee on the image to see more from the Botanic Gardens

London Street

I was trying to do some real street photography in London, but all I came up with was boring pictures of people - so I changed my approach and took boring photographs of streets - but I think they are graphically more interesting.

Image Sensor Implant Restores Partial Sight

Just add a Compact Flash card and I will not need to carry a camera any more.

Image Sensor Implant Restores Partial Sight:

"Electronics Weekly, BBC News: German firm Retina Implant reported testing results of the chip that has restored limited sight for people blinded by retinitis pigmentosa and similar diseases, destroying only the eye's photoreceptors, and leave its layers of image processing neurons intact."

SOFA So Good

We arrived at SOFA, checked our coats, bought tickets, and had our tickets checked by the ticket checker at the door. I noticed that he scanned preprinted tickets, tore bought tickets in half, but just looked at my tickets taking no action.
When we left I pulled out the coat check tags and noticed that they looked remarkably like tickets to SOFA and not at all like coat check tags.
Turns out we had entered the show by displaying our coat check tag, and we now have two unused tickets for SOFA. They would be worth $24 - if the show did not end in 55 minutes.

Living real life in London

We have been in London for three weeks. We have been here long enough to feel that we do not have to run around and "tour" every moment. Instead, we can live almost normally, not  like locals, but almost like expats.

We are in Hampstead. This suburb has been an intellectual center of London for many years. All around us houses display the little blue plaques that mark the home of a prominent person or family. Gracie Fields home is a little way up the hill. The Huxleys lived around the corner. Sigmund Freud lived a few blocks away.


Shopping malls are few and far between. High Streets are lined with interesting little shops with much more diversity than can be found in malls. The restaurants are reasonably priced (generally) and serve fresher and tastier food than similarly priced US restaurants.

Last weekend we visited our family in The Netherlands, with a brief stopover in Brussels, courtesy of Eurostar, the train under the tunnel. We missed  a strike of Belgian rail workers by two hours. Yesterday we took a train to Oxford to spend the day with Hilda's cousin. Last night Julia and Abigail slept at our apartment. Tomorrow we are off to a coastal resort in Devon for the weekend. And so it goes.

Life is good.

Golders Green Shopping

See and download the full gallery on posterous

We went shopping for groceries in Golder's Green this morning.

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I don't often see miracles, but...

Hilda's old G5 iMac was misbehaving -- badly. It often died when sleeping. (We can only do it once, but computers can be re-booted after death.) It could not connect to the web over a wired Ethernet connection, but worked (sometimes) over WiFi.

So, I decided to start from scratch. Easy decision, given enough time.

I updated the SuperDuper back-up. All of our data files are also up on Dropbox (somewhere in the cloud) so we have at least three copies of everything. I ran an install from the DVD that was shipped with the system, which wiped the internal hard drive. No problem ... 

...until it tried to use the 2nd disk. It was unreadable. Install stopped after 30 minutes, with a high-falutin version of "OOPS" as its message. I tried some later  versions of OS X - no go - the machine is the last of the G5s - not an Intel processor. So, being of unsound mind, I decided that I could make a copy of Disk 2 on my other  iMac. I have an external DVD drive in addition to the one that is built in.

First try -- not enough space on target drive. OK -- what's on the source?  Almost nothing except OS 9, says Finder. Do this magic using Terminal :

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

killall Finder

Find all the stuff that is not OS 9 (9 is X-1) and copy it to a new DVD disc. Worked! Used the new DVD to complete the install on the iMac. Worked.

Tried to get on the 'Net. No go. Putzed around with the settings on the 2Wire modem supplied by my ISP - ATT U-verse. No way to get on the 'Net - neither Ethernet not WiFi.

Reset some stuff on the 2Wire modem that was designated as "Don't do this unless you are asked to by tech support."  I spoke to myself (what I tend to do at this stage) and asked myself to do it (I am my own tech support). Got online. Went through several update cycles to get current versions of everything. Installed the stuff we really need - Dropbox, Skype, NeoOffice. etc.

Fired up iTunes.

Here is the miracle:

Jacob (my grandchild)  is approaching his bar mitzvah.  iTunes had his barmitzvah portion and Rabbi Frankel's rendition of the related brachas already set up. Where the @##$$% did it find it? Easy answer - on Dropbox - but who told iTunes it was there? Not me!

More miracles may be reported here. 

Unemployment is contagious. Great graphic.

Someone found my iPhone and connected it to the Internet!

I received this e-mail:

"The remote wipe of Clive Moss’s iPhone requested at 11:19 PM on June 24, 2010 began at 11:46 AM on July 12, 2010.  All media, data, and settings are being permanently erased from Clive Moss’s iPhone. This process may take up to two hours, depending on your device. Please note this process cannot be cancelled." Let us hope that the wipe works!  RIP old iPhone buddy. My new one should arrive next week.

We are all in Jerusalem

Dinner @ tmol shilshom

Great food and wifi outdoors in Jerusalem.

Highly recommended.

Monday - In YYZ

Great Airport. Many power outlets. No free wifi.
An oddity. We had to complete a customs form and go through customs and immigration to connect from an international flight to an international flight without leaving the transit lounge.

Just boarded the Air Canada 767 to Tel Aviv. The seats have power outlets! In coach!

Waiting to leave for Israel

Will the weather hold or will we miss our connection?

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At A Streetcar Named Desire at Writer's Theater

Edited with Photogene

---

Clive

Pics: http://Clive.smugmug.com

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Good Morning Chicago

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Clive
Pics: http://Clive.smugmug.com

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From the City of Chicago

We are downtown for a while. Some iPhonetography.

Good times.

Just in case you are tired of watching re-runs...

Challah

Before







After




Spring Soup from Cook's Illustrated.

A walk with an iPhone

Today I went out in the glorious spring weather with nothing but an iPhone. Also, I am posting this entry from the phone - just because. Today's style is old time B&W.

Blogged from my iPhone.

Dog-food is to Dogs as Formula is to Babies

At about 4:45pm our two dog boarders began to harass me. I call them Mutt and Jeff. According to Wikipedia, Mutt is "a tall, dimwitted ... character." Jeff is "an inmate of an insane asylum." Works for me. Their rightful owners call them Sheba and Bernie. 
Anyway, they began to harass me. In total unison. Two months ago these two dogs never agreed on anything. I thought they wanted to go outside and poo or pee or whatever, so I harnessed them up and took them out. One peed, the other did not. Yes, these are details, but kingdoms are lost on details - as in "my kingdom for a horse"
Back inside, they were still restless. I gave them their rations of dog-food, which they downed in seconds. About 180 of them.
They were sated, and stopped harassing me, but were clearly not satisfied.
It occurred to me that dog-food is to dogs as formula is to babies. It will keep them alive, but not living.
I know nothing about this subject, so I took the course of the ignorant. Google.
The first article looked promising. It said:

The best food for your dog is . . .

Fresh food. Fresh chicken, turkey, beef, bison, venison, and fish. Fresh raw vegetables and occasional fruit. Fresh brown rice and oatmeal. Fresh yogurt, eggs, and cottage cheese.

This is not "people food." Calling real food "people food" makes it sound as though people are the only living creatures who are entitled to eat fresh foods, and that simply isn't true.

Virtually all living creatures thrive on real, fresh food.

Just sayin'

Walking with Camera, iPhone and Dogs

I usually walk alone, with a camera and iPhone (or iPod or other MP3 player). 

We are taking care of a small white Havanese and a large apricot Standard Poodle,

I almost always listen to a podcast and take pictures of whatever attracts my interest. I happily get exercise and learn something while observing the real world - or at least what passes for the real world in the suburbs. Body, mind and soul are all maintained.

Adding dogs to the group complicates the activity. Two dogs and a human result in three different opinions of which direction to go and where to stop and roll in the grass or do whatever else needs to be done. The dogs rarely want to stop to take a picture; I rarely want to stop and poop. The dogs move my hand whenever I want to take a picture; I stop them from rolling in whatever dogs want to roil in. Doggy-bag activity is not one of the higher callings of human endeavor.  (I think this could help.)

My blogs entries are mostly pictures with few words - to the point that I often omit captions. Todays podcast ( a discussion of "Creative Nonfiction"} made me re-think. More words may communicate better - and force me to develop a new skill. I have always been an awkward and slow writer. My thoughts rush in parallel - writing demand a linear sequence. It is hard to make parallel lines of thought flow in the logical line that writing demands. Thinking linearly is hard. 

Maybe a class in writing could help. Maybe parallel columns could help. 

Or not.

This Week's walk

Not much walking this week - Shavuot and Showers intruded. A few from the Botanic Garden:

A walk in the woods

This statue of Linnaeus always looks ugly to me


A beaver collecting nest material

Japanese Garden

Shavuot, Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and Wikis

Shavuot is the most unobserved of Jewish Holidays except by the fully observant Orthodox communities.

For an overview of the holiday, read this

Shavuot in its modern form commemorates the giving of the law to the Jewish people at Sinai. It occurs to me that the form of the "giving' fits very well with the social media of today.

The Ten Commandments (or really, utterances) were given out over Twitter. Concise, clear, no BS.

For forty days, Moses heard the law from G-d, and and put it on Facebook, hoping that the Jewish people would friend him.

Moses started a blog which was ultimately redacted as the Torah - the five books of Moses.

The Tannaim started their own blogs (bloggim?). They blogged a lot  but some smart guy decided that something like a Wiki was needed, so the Tannaim built their version of Wikipedia called the Mishnah.

Unfortunately, their discussion pages were lost, so we are stuck with the Mishnah.

But the bloggers of the day were not content. For several centuries they blogged about the Mishnah and people commented on the blogs until a huge body of unorganized halachah and  midrash floated around the blogosphere.

Around 500 CE the folk in Babylon and Jerusalem decided that yet another Wikipedia was needed and they each did their own - the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem Talmud.

So we now have two Wikipedias (Talmuds, Talmudim) - Babylonian and Jerusalem.

Since then we have had multiple cycles of blogging, commenting, and redaction. The process carries on.

We analyze, comment, complain, contradict. We try to make sense of life, but we give up and live anyway.

The social media of today are new in technology - not in fundamentals. We, the Jewish people, have always lived that way.

I am back from London

We had a great week in London. Lisa and the family have a wonderful temporary home in Hampstead -- we really enjoyed being with the family and living a London suburban life for a week. Very different from our past visits to London which were either frenetic touring to see all the "sights" or business trips of days and nights in offices and meetings.
The need to "see things" has passed - we can now simply be there and enjoy the life of a great city.
My favorite images of the week (non family snaps) are these:

Black Hat at Lunch in Golder's Green

Couple on Finchley Road

Shoes found on Sidewalk

Underground

Monday London Walk

After a stroll through Regent's Park we bussed and walked around London with Lisa as she shopped for food for the week.

We had lunch at a Kosher Indian Restaurant in Golders Green.

Friday Walk

Cloudy, overcast, distant thunder, lots of packing, etc, so it was a short walk around town to two banks and the library with my iPhone.

Thursday. No walk. Art.

I attended my water painting class, with the following result



No walk -- it was cold.

Wednesday Walk

We drove to the city for the afternoon. Even downtown looks Springy.
This is my favorite shot of the day:


 Others:

Tuesday Walk

Another warm day. I headed West to US-41, followed the bike path down to Deerfield Road, across the pedestrian bridge back to Central Ave, and then home. Odd mix of pretty spring views and ugly power lines.

An older house in our neighbourhood. Odd lack of windows - an added bathroom?


Sunset Woods


This door has not been opened in a while


Power, Telephone, Highway, and Cell Phone Tower - 100 years of progress


Over the Highway












The end!