Geometry As An Interactive Design Space

I've been somewhat coy about the software project I'm working on; that was exacerbated by my having to take a break from working on it for some months to deal with other aspects of Real Life ; now I want to talk about it in some detail, and show you why I'm interested in it, and what I hope will come out of it. If you haven't yet read my previous post on "The Geometry of the Many-Angled Ones", please follow that link and read it; there's a very basic description of Geometric Algebra there, and that's the basis of the software I'm designing. When you come back, jump past the cut for the rest if this post.

Travels and Home Maintenance

Just so you know why my posts and comments are going to be coming in sporadic bunches: we're simultaneously getting ready to go to Louisiana for a week to meet our brand-new grandchild and boxing up everything in the bottom floor of the house so we can move it all out and have the floors redone. What we have right now is really crappy grey carpet, which picks up dog smells like you wouldn't believe, and is currently several shades darker than it was when we first moved in (and cleaning it helps only temporarily). And since kids and grandchild are coming to visit us here in a month or so, we need to toss the carpet. Also, because our TV set is an old CRT model that weighs more than 150 pounds, and even together the two of us can't move it, let alone carry it upstairs, we're going to replace it with a flatpanel and let the recyclers haul it off. So there'll be lots to do in RL here for the next couple of weeks, and not much time to push electrons around. But if nothing else I'll post some pictures from Louisiana by the time I get back.

Seniority

So last week I officially became a senior citizen: I turned 65, and am now on Medicare (thank Ghu: it's hundreds of dollars a month cheaper than the previous health insurance¹ I had, with pretty much comparable coverage).  Of course this happened in front of the backdrop of OHNO DEBT DISASTER THROW MEDICARE AND SOCIAL SECURITY RECIPIENTS TO THE WOLVES!!!!  I was beginning to wonder if there would be any Medicare by the time my eligibility kicked in, but luckily my coverage started Aug. 1, before Standard & Poors could downgrade US Government credit and turn us into a Third World nation.</sarcasm>

Oh, and another landmark: I am now a grandfather.  My older son Alex and his wife Melissa now have a bouncing baby girl, Ellanor, born about a month ago.  Because they're in Louisiana, we haven't seen her in person yet, but we've seen lots of pictures, and she is, of course, the cutest grandchild ever.

^1. And why, he asks rhetorically, do we need health insurance?  Just give me health care, and we can eliminate the 15 or 20% of the health care expenses in the US the insurance companies eat without providing any useful good or service.

... and One More Thing ...

Eek, yet another thing to take away time and energy.  A couple of weeks ago I noticed a bump on my back that was rather tender.  Went to the doctor and she diagnosed an infected cyst, so I went to a surgeon (who just happened to be the surgeon who performed Eva's lumpectomy last year, someone we both really liked and respected after that) who set up an outpatient procedure a week later, and pumped me full of antibiotics.

Still Here After All This Time

It's been a really long time since my last post on this blog.  That was caused by a number of things: recovery from surgery was slower than I expected, at least in terms of getting back the energy to do things during the day.  For awhile there it was all I could do to go to the park and sit for an hour while the dogs walked around.  It took almost six months to get up the energy to walk any distance myself, but once I started doing that, my energy started coming back at a faster pace.  Now I can do 3 or 4 hours of (mostly non-physical) work a day after walking the dogs.

But once I had the energy, more things intervened.  Our Lhasa Apso, Jemma,  suddenly (over the course of 2 or 3 weeks) went blind.  We spent some time going to vets and not getting a definitive diagnosis until we saw a veterinary opthalmologist.  He diagnosed SORD (Sudden Onset Retinal Disorder), a disorder whose etiology and mechanism are pretty much unknown, but whose prognosis is 100% blindness in almost all cases, and which has no treatment.  Jemma has been blind now for several months, and has mostly acclimated herself to it.  Dogs aren't as strongly affected by blindness as humans, because smell and hearing are so much more acute for them.  Jemma's only serious problem (aside from a non-related eye infection that lasted several weeks) is that when she gets excited or upset she gets disoriented and gets stuck in loops between obstacles, going back and forth until she accidentally goes off at an angle and misses one of them.  We''re working with her on that, but she is a very stubborn dog (a breed quality) and is having trouble taking direction when she gets that way.  Spencer, our Rat Terrier, has been very solicitous of her, following her and trying to help her (though not very consistently). He has come to get us a couple of times when she got into trouble in the back yard.

The other thing that's been keeping me from the blog is a project I've started.  Now that I'm able to do useful work at least part of the day, I've decided to come partially out of retirement and create software that, with a little luck, I can sell to bring in a little extra money; at least enough, I hope, to pay for the additional hardware and software I've had to buy for the development work (that's not really a lot, but retirement hasn't been quite what it was supposed to be, thanks to the Current Financial Unpleasantness).  I've got a project that I think I can do myself, one that I've been thinking about off and on for a year or so.  It will start out as a Macintosh application, sold through Apple's Mac App Store, and if that's successful, I plan to port it to the iPad. Details in a near future blog post.

I'll continue to post here, but probably not as often as I was doing last fall.  I'll be spending about 20 hours a week on the software project, and that will include some postings on a new blog I'm setting up now along with a website for the company that will sell the software.  I'll post the details for the new site and blog here soon.

Whose Case Is It Anyway?

Well, now I know why the doctors I've been seeing about my spine haven't been giving me advice on how to manage my problems.  Seems that the neurologist now considers herself to be operating solely in an advisory capacity to the neurosurgeon, but she didn't mention that to me.  Also the surgeon moved his practice from Providence St. Vincent Hospital to Legacy Meridian Hospital (different health systems and provider networks, of course), and that's the first I've heard of that, also.  So it looks like I've fallen through the cracks.  Time will tell, we've got messages in to the surgeon's new office asking what my status really is.

Oh, and quite by accident, this won't affect my health insurance situation.  If I were staying on COBRA it would, since that coverage makes Providence a preferred provider network; anything done at Legacy costs me an extra 20% of the invoiced amount (which has been a problem because the neurologist is at Legacy Meridian).  But as of the beginning of this month my COBRA coverage has expired (thanks, Congress), and I'm going on the Oregon Medical Insurance Pool.  Coverage won't lapse, but I have to wait for the paperwork to be done and my coverage info sent to me before I can get it to the providers.  I believe the OMIP coverage will be the same for both providers (at least I hope it will; Providence is more convenient for a lot of things, and I like the hospital itself better).

It's interesting to compare this situation with the therapy Eva is getting for breast cancer prophylaxis.  There is a single person who is her case worker whose job it is to coordinate therapies and doctors, and to make sure that she knows what's going on, and that everyone is singing from the same page of the score.  And all the health professionals go to great lengths to keep it that way.  I think everybody should have a case worker, for all health concerns.  I did a rough back of the envelope calculation: Eva's caseworker says she's carrying 300 active cases; for everybody to get one (and assuming an entire family gets the same caseworker, which makes sense to me) means we'd need considerably fewer than a million caseworkers nationwide.  I bet we could train that many of the currently-unemployed to do the job in less than a year.

Hot Today

It's hot today (94 ℉ at 5PM) and the upstairs floor of our house, not being air-conditioned, is uninhabitable.  The downstairs floor is set into a hillside, so conduction into the dirt and rock keeps us reasonably cool unless we have a heat wave where it never gets cold enough at night for the air to cool down again.  So right now my office, which is downstairs, is in the mid-70s.  There's a portable airconditioner in the TV room, where we eat dinner most nights, that's holding that room at about 72 ℉.  So the only uncomfortable part of the day (aside from having to go out, of course), is making dinner.  I tend to keep that simple and fast.

The one thing I can't figure out is why the dogs like to lie around in the heat upstairs so much.

Exciting animal story for today

(at least the animal found it exciting)

I was sitting here at the computer when Eva yelled down the stairs from the living room, "There's a bird trapped in here." Eva ran down as I ran up, because as a little girl she once got a bat trapped in her hair for a minute or two, and is very averse to that ever happening again.

The bird had come in the sliding door from the deck, which is at the end of the north wall of the living room. The rest of that wall is picture windows (this is an Atomic Age split-level ranch, and the amount of light coming into the living room was one of the reasons we bought the house), and the bird tried to get out again through a window. It was trapped in the window by Spencer, our rat terrier, who wanted to either play with the bird or eat it, either of which would have been seriously bad for the bird. Either way, Spencer was trying hard to get to the bird, and the bird was frantically flying around in the window, but afraid to move away from it, so it was trapped in the casement. The bird was further confused by the fact that another bird (perhaps its mate) was flying around just outside the same window, and the trapped bird clearly wanted to join it.

There's a baker's rack with plants and some display vases next to that window, and now there was also an excited terrier trying to get to the window, so I had to spend several minutes moving things out of the way while holding the dog off. Luckily, Jemma, the Lhasa Apso wasn't quite so excited about the bird, though she did circle around that part of the room, a few feet back from the window. Eventually the combination of my persuasion and Eva's calling the dogs from downstairs got them both to leave the living room. The bird by this point was too scared even to be fluttering around in the window; it had landed in the corner of the window and stayed there.

The bird didn't seem to be going anywhere, so I looked around the room for something to catch the bird in that wouldn't hurt it or let it hurt me. I grabbed a blue felt blanket off the couch, the security blanket that we put on Spencer at night (he likes to sleep curled up in the fetal position on the couch completely covered by the blanket). I carefully surrounded the bird with the blanket and very softly closed it up so that I had my hands around the bird's body and wings. The bird didn't move; I guess it was still pretty scared. Then I carried the blanket out on the deck, held it over the railing above the back yard, and shook the blanket gently so the bird could get out. It flew straight away from me as fast as it could, apparently undamaged.

Spencer doesn't seem to have noticed any new smells on his blanket, which I'm happy about. He can wind himself up quite enough even without the smell of prey to excite him.

Hurry Up and Wait

A couple of weeks of medical drama for Eva, then a week or so of medical drama for me, neatly wrapped up with a minor medical procedure (installation of some electrodes under my skin for pain relief similar to the TENS unit I'm currently using) that was supposed to happen yesterday (Friday), but didn't because the doctor's office forgot to let me know I needed to get a blood test and an EKG beforehand. I'll blog about all this in a little more detail later on, but it explains why I haven't had time to post anything here in a couple of weeks.

Also, it's been a bad week for the good guys. Requiescat in Pace:

Mez (Merril Pye) died Jan. 1, 2010 after fighting cancer for several years, but I (and the rest of the Making Light community where she posted for the last few years) only just found out today.

Jeanne Robinson, wife of Spider, died last week of cancer, surrounded by her family and friends.

Update:

George Scithers' ashes were interred at Arlington Cemetery last week. George was for decades a giant in science fiction fandom and in publishing. He was a major force in creating and maintaining the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society.

Medical Status

The kids have gone home, the dogs have settled down, and I've gotten a few of the medical tests and consultations out of the way, so things have slowed down a bit. The consensus of my doctors at this point is that surgery is probably not indicated now; instead we're going to investigate having a neural stimulator implanted in my spine. This works very much like the TENS unit I'm currently using, except that instead of electrodes pasted to the skin, it uses wires and a small control unit implanted next to the spine. The first step is a temporary implant, to test whether the stimulation will actually help; before committing to that I have to get a psychological exam to make sure I'm not a fruitcake who won't react properly to the current. That's scheduled for 2 weeks from now.

Now if Congress would just get off its collective thumb and pass the COBRA subsidy extension, I may get back $5 or $6000 that I've already overpaid for health insurance before I have to change my coverage from COBRA to the Oregon Health Plan, and then to whatever they're going to call the Health Reform Act post-COBRA coverage (can't tell the insurers without a score card). Then we can figure out who's going to cover the implant procedure.

More Sporadicness in the Near Future

I went in for a cortisone shot in my spine yesterday and got some bad news: more problems with disks up the stack from the last problems. Recovery from the shot blew yesterday, and there'll be more medical appointments in the next couple of weeks. On top of that, my older son has finalized the dates for his visit back to Oregon, and it's the week starting this Friday. We'll be putting him and his wife up in the spare bedroom, and acting as reunion central for the rest of the local family and friends, so I don't expect to have much time for the internet. I'll sneak in posts as I can.

More on Eve Arnold

Via Luminous-Lint:

My aunt Eve is going to be awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at this year’s Sony World Photography Awards in Cannes this April.  Even neater, the award will be given on April 22, the day after her 98th birthday. Go, Eve!

ETA: see my previous posts on Eve, here and here for more information about her.

Ping! I'm still here

The silence on this blog in the last few days is not an ominous indication of any bad things happening.  I've just been swamped with a lot of unexpected chores, my car was in the shop for several days, and I've been relearning the techniques of video feedback in preparation for making a video track for a piece of music that Tim Walters composed using audio feedback.  I'll post about the video feedback sometime next week when I've tried out some more ideas.

Posting is going to be sporadic for the next week or so; to keep you off the streets and out of trouble I'm going to leave you with a puzzle Robert Anton Wilson put into his Schrödinger's Cat trilogy.

Sometime in the middle 15th Century, two monks traveling through Romania stopped in the capital of Wallachia for the night.  They were invited to stay in the castle of the Voivode Vlad III, called Dracula (son of the Dragon), and later called Vlad Ţepeş (Vlad the Impaler) for the manner in which he executed thousands of his enemies.  Vlad sat them at his table at dinner and engaged them in conversation about their travels.  Then he asked both of them what they thought of his reign in Wallachia.  The first monk, fearing that telling the truth would anger Vlad into having the monk impaled, told the Voivode that his reign was just and benevolent, and that he was respected and loved far and wide as a great ruler.  The second monk, sure that he would be impaled if he lied, spoke of the injustices and atrocities of Vlad's reign. Which one of the monks was impaled for his answer?

Pictures taken by an amazing lady

My aunt, Eve Arnold, will be 98 years old in April.  For more than 50 years she was a photojournalist and professional portrait photographer, the first woman to become a partner in Magnum, the photographers' cooperative, and a life-long friend of Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom I hold to be one of the three or four best photographers of the 20th Century.  I mention all this because there are several retrospective shows of Eve's work at the moment, and some of her books are being reprinted; I'd like more people to see how good a photographer she was, and how amazing a person.  The title link of this post will take you to gallery of her photos at Magnum.  This link will take you to a portrait of her taken by Cartier-Bresson a little over 10 years ago.  Eve has a Wikipedia page, if you're interested in more about her life and works.

Eve was  hired in the 1950's to take publicity photos of Marilyn Monroe and they became friends.  Eve published a book of photographs of Monroe, and became Monroe's preferred photographer as well.  She's published a number of other books of her photographs; I highly recommend in particular "The Unretouched Woman" (unfortunately out of print, but the paperback can be found in used bookstores), whose photographs illustrate the lives and surroundings of women all over the world, and which has an introduction in which Eve talks about how she became a photographer and what her work means to her.

I haven't seen Eve in many years (she moved to England in the 1960's and has resided there since), but she has been a role model of mine since I was a teenager, not least because she encouraged me to try photography, which has remained a source of joy to me to this day.  I have been very lucky in knowing many women, some of them my relatives, who have chosen their paths to suit their own abilities and desires.  Eve is high on that list.

And the Season Ends in a Blaze of Glory!

Executive version: Feeling great, on with my life!

I just got home from my first post-op exam by the PA of the surgeon who did the back surgery on me 3 weeks ago. I've been feeling really good about things since I came out of the anesthesia after the surgery, despite being told then, "Oh, yes, we worked for 6 1/2 hours, why did you think we expected 3?" Turns out they really expected a fair amount of work, but a good outcome, and I was away for those hours and didn't notice, so we'll let that one pass.

Post-op support was terrific; the nursing staff was professional and friendly (and very careful about the tordol injections they used for pain relief; if you don't push those with extreme care they burn like a mo-fo, and I barely felt even the ones given by the student nurse). Both rehab therapy and occupational therapy were immensely helpful in showing me how to use the brace and the walker, and going through the way our house is set up (I brought photos) to talk about how to deal with obstructions and such.

Progress has been ahead of schedule since then; I only spent 3 days post-op in the hospital instead of the expected 4, and I've been getting around with a walker and a back brace since then. The walker is getting less necessary, though I'll need the back brace for the next six months or so as the spine fuses into its final shape. Comparison x-rays show the spine is properly aligned; the incision wound is healed (and the rash that I had on it was a fairly common side-effect of the surgical adhesive they used to close the wound; the rash is gone now).

So I'm declaring victory and holding a parade. I can drive as long as I don't need to use the pain pills (and I haven't for almost a week), I can make a cup of tea and carry it into the living room or out on the deck to sit and read or watch the trees and the birds, and my mobility is improving on a daily basis.

Almost the End of Surgery Season

After two highly successful surgeries, one a gum transplant and the other bilateral carpal tunnel release, I've got one more to go. On Monday I go in for a lumbar decompression and fusion. This is the big one, because it's not day surgery; I'll be in the hospital for 3 to 4 days, and the recovery time is weeks. In the past, I've usually posted to the web communities I'm active in before the surgery to let them know I'll be offline for awhile. This time I'm simply going to go in, and then start posting again when I can, probably after a week or so. I'm posting to this blog so someone who's really wondering where I've gotten to can find out.

In case anyone does come by to find out where I am, I want you to know that this is not risky or exotic surgery, and the actual techniques are a lot better (read: less invasive) than they used to be. And unlike the last time I had back surgery, in 2001, I've been really pleased with the pre-op support of the doctor and the hospital, and the really good planning for the hospital stay and subsequent therapy. So I have a lot of reason to expect a good outcome.

Se you in a week or so.

More Dog Pictures

Here is a slideshow of some more recent, and better, too, pictures of Jemma and Spencer (click on a photo to see it full size). We've had them six months now, and they're working out very nicely. Not to say they don't have problems, but we expected more than we've had. And they are really cute ...

Back to Life in the New Year

OK, it has been awhile. The last few months have been full of twists and turns, and a lot of stuff to deal with, but we seem to be slowing down a little now, so I'm taking some time to bring this blog up to date. A quick list of some of the things we've been dealing with, and in the next (real soon now) post I'll put up some more pictures of the dogs.

• On the dog front: Jemma had to have surgery for her ear infection; it was very successful, but in the process we discovered that she has (or at least temporarily had) some sort of auto-immune clotting problem; we've been treating that successfully, but part of the treatment is Prednisone, which makes her ravenous; we've had to be satisfied with holding her weight steady; getting her to lose some weight will have to wait.
• I don't really need a new car now — oops, guess I do after all: I had been thinking about buying a new car; with the economy the way it is, I decided to put it off for at least 6 months. Then someone ran into the back of my car and totalled it. So now I have a "new" 2004 Volvo wagon, the first car I've bought in 12 years, and the first I've owned with all wheel drive. I got it just in time for the really nasty string of storms we have from just before Christmas to just after New Year's Day. Which would have been really terrific, I could have cruised the icy streets in safety (that car handles really well on ice and snow; I'm impressed) except ...
• Cue the storm: the first Sunday morning of the storm, about 8, we were awakened by a loud noise from the other side of the house. A large tree in our side yard had come down and was resting on the driveway and the deck, and had just missed the back of the car. It turned out there was no damage to the house, but it took us 4 days and a lot of money to get the tree cut up and hauled off without it taking out the deck. The tree blocked the driveway for that time, so I couldn't get the car out.
• Smooth operations: A couple of months ago I started planning to have surgery at the end of December; it was a relatively new operation that relieves chronic back pain resulting from compressed nerve roots, which I've had for the last 8 years or so. All was going well until my medical insurance refused to cover the operation. A lawyer and two appeals later, they're still not going to cover it. One possibility is for me to pay for it myself, since I can probably get it done for about one third of what the hospital will charge, but ...
• I'm a statistic: in the beginning of November I was informed that my job was going to be eliminated as of the end of the year. The job market being what it is, I haven't found another job yet. The good news is that I have medical insurance through COBRA (paperwork still going through), the bad news is costs (almost literally) an arm and a leg.

So what does this all mean? I've decided to treat being laid off the way Travis McGee treated the time between cases: I'm taking my retirement in pieces. So we'll use unemployment to pay for medical insurance, and pay living expenses out of retirement savings (which weren't as badly hit by the stock market tanking as a lot of people; I was getting ready to retire soon anyway, and was in the process of moving out of the stock market and into bonds and other income assets). When I find a job, I'll unretire for awhile, until the economy improves enough to make retirement practical. In the meantime I have a lot of books I've been planning to read, a novel I've decided to write, and if I get bored I can always download courses from MIT and learn economics or astrophysics. So I'll have fun.

New Additions to the Family

We've been threatening to get a dog again, and now we've adopted not one, but two dogs. We'd originally planned to get them last Monday, but couldn't get everything ready in time, and then we realized that on Tuesday, the roofers would show up and decided to wait. Good decision.

Tuesday reminded me of that scene in The 5,000 Fingers of Doctor T where they're touring the dungeons, and Terwilliger shows them the poor wretch who's been imprisoned in a giant bass drum while someone beats on it. The roofers wanted to get the entire job done in one day, so they threw a crew of 6 or 8 at it, and went at it like gangbusters (or maybe eardrum busters). The dogs would have gone nuts; we almost did even though we went out for a couple of hours.

So Wednesday we went to the shelter, and after wanting to take home just about every dog we saw (there were a lot of Border Collie and Australian Shepherd mixes; our last dog was a Border and we fell in love with the breed), we found a pair of older dogs who'd been kenneled together. When we took them out for a meet and greet, they were friendly with us, and got along well with each other, so we adopted them.

There was a strategy in this. We've always had large working breed dogs; the Border, at 45 pounds, was the smallest dog we'd ever had. But now we're neither of us up to giving a dog like that the exercise it needs, and there's nothing worse you can do for the physical and mental health of a dog than not get it enough exercise. This is also true of children; in fact, there are so many similarities that we got a lot of our child-rearing techniques from a book on dog-training written by a Hollywood dog wrangler. So we were looking for small dogs; these guys are both small and past the young adult stage, so their need for exercise is (at least theoretically, see below) lower now.

One of the dogs is a Lhasa Apso female named Jompa, about 9 yo, and the other's a Rat Terrier male, Spencer, who's 6 yo. They're settling in fairly well, though the terrier turns out to be a bolter who can get through our chain link fence in seconds. The good news is that it's not running away, just the urge to explore, because he will come back. The bad news is we live on a busy street, and he doesn't have good car sense, so he's now on a leash whenever we go out, and will be until he's obedience trained.

ETA: our bolter is starting to learn to come back when called. I lost him at the Arboretum that we've been taking our dogs to since we moved to Portland 30 years ago, while trying to hang onto both leashes and get a stool sample for the vet (I need to get a couple of extra arms). But I yelled for him, and he came back and let me grab his leash again.

Neither of these dogs was ever trained in any way as far as we can tell, though they're housebroken and they recognize their names. Worse, the terrier has scars where a harness was put on too tight and left on him all the time, and he flinches from loud voices and criticism. So we have some work to do to win the dogs over (though after only twofour days they're both willing to cuddle and be petted by us, which is a very good sign).

We've taken them to the vet, and had some good news and some bad news. Jompa has an ear infection, a sore mouth where 2 teeth were extracted, and is a little overweight. On the other hand, she's healthy in other respects. Spencer has developed kennel cough since we brought him home from the shelter, and seems to have an allergy to grass. But we've got medicines to deal with most of this, and they are fairly good about taking them (Jompa doesn't like getting stuff squirted in her ear, but she doesn't get angry and snappish, and she doesn't hold a grudge afterward. All in all we're really pleased with the dogs, and we think they'll fit in very nicely.

Birthday Season!

It's the peak of the season now; Eva's birthday (7/29) has come and, until my birthday (7/31) we'll be the same age, then I pull ahead again. Jeremy's birthday (6/1), Eva's brother Steve's birthday (6/27), and his daughter Rachel's birthday (6/17)are all in June, Alex's birthday was a few days ago (7/19), and his wife Melissa bats cleanup on 8/4. Party ON, dudes!