Today

Prologue: I don't know if I'm just extra-emotional these days, or if I'm embarking on a new stage of being more personal in this blog, but here's another visceral post about what's on my mind and heart right now.

It's Lauren's birthday today. She would've been 30 if CF hadn't taken her nearly six months ago.

I'm listening to that Savage Garden album (Affirmation) she always used to play while she was getting ready in the morning. When she was still working, I heard this music nearly every day coming out of the the CD player she kept in the bathroom. My favorite from it, "I Knew I Loved You Before I Met You," is currently playing.

Brad sits and listens for a bit...

Ooh. "Crash and Burn" really hits me differently now. I'm realizing that I haven't listened to these tunes in a long time.

Anyway, I've taken the day off of work. I'm planning to go up and spend some time with my in-laws today, and we're going to see an Angels game. Then, since I realized I'd be home this morning, I've arranged to have a plumber come fix a faucet and I'll run a couple errands before I head to Ontario. (Finally I'll get the Prius back after a month-long repair job!)

More listening...

"You Can Still Be Free" is a great song, and appropriate for today. As I've mentioned before, the peace and strength I've had in this whole process of dealing with Lauren's death has been amazing. I've never quite understood it, but it's getting easier to accept the gift of joy God has presented.

As I recently told a friend, I'm doing really well in general, but I'm a little afraid of embracing that "doing well" too tightly for fear of losing my grip on the memory of Lauren. She assured me that I'll never forget; of course that's obvious, but I can't claim that everything running through my mind has been completely rational these days. It's nice to be nudged toward reality from time to time, though... I do have a tendency to get lost in thoughts and theories and "what if"s.

Well, the album is over, and the beginning of the plumber's arrival window is approaching, so I should get dressed. As I've told people over and over, the thing I need most right now is prayer, so if you happen to run across this please keep me in yours.

UPDATE: I feel compelled to add this quote from Lauren:
"You never know how much you can face until you turn around and see that it's now behind you."
Very well said.

640 ought to be enough for anybody

And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming: today's Wondermark is fabulous.

And in regard to that title... this is post 640 to this blog, in nearly 6 years. Check here for the "source" of my (mis-)quotation.

Remembering Lauren

I don't often get very intimate on my blog. I usually just talk academically about silly things like technology or grammar. Or link to my favorite webcomics and authors. But please indulge me as I share some personal stuff.

First, as most of my real-life friends know, my wife Lauren passed away last November (that's her own personal blog in that link there). I haven't spoken of her death much online, deciding to keep things private for a while. Aside from Facebook, that is, but my FB friends are generally people I know from outside the Internet anyway.

She had cystic fibrosis, a genetic condition that caused her in her final years to have increasingly frequent and debilitating cases of pneumonia and other lung infections. Despite her disease, she was an amazingly positive woman; for nearly her entire life, she was able to make CF be merely "something about her" and not allow the disability to define her. In fact, the link at the beginning of this paragraph goes to one of her three (3!) blogs: she was trained as a scientist and also freelanced as a writer. She spent a lot of time distilling medical research about CF into information that average sufferers and caregivers could use to understand the illness and its treatment.

In addition, she was a strong Christian (this link goes to her blog where she wrote devotionals reflecting on passages from the Bible). In our nearly-decade-long relationship she was a great encouragement to me, and I to her, as we pressed onward with faith in God and toward the hope of our future dwelling in Heaven. I'm so glad now that she's being given a perfect body, unmarred by the strife of this present age, in which to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

But providing this brief description of an amazing woman, my wife of more than 6 years, is not what prompted me to write about her. You see, in her "side career" as a writer, she attended the Mount Hermon Christian Writers Conference on three separate occasions. While there, she made many friends and touched many lives. She was working on a book called "Dear Future Husband" in which she intended to publish selections from a large group of letters she wrote (beginning at age 14) addressed to the man she would one day marry. The last one begins "Dear Brad," and she gave me the whole set as a wedding gift.

Even that awesome writing project (which never got published) isn't quite why I'm remembering her in this post. One of the friends she made at the Writers Conference is Austin Boyd, another talented multi-career individual who for a time worked at the same scientific consulting firm for which Lauren compiled environmental emissions inventories at government installations across the state and the country. Just three days after she died, Austin proposed a scholarship/award to be given at the 2010 conference in her memory, to honor someone else who has withstood many challenges while shining the light of Christ through the written word.

Along with Lauren's parents, I went on Monday night, March 29, to this year's conference to see the presentation of the inaugural Lauren Beyenhof True Grit Award. Between Austin and his agent, Les Stobbe, they were able to present $1000 in her memory. In the course of his presentation, Austin showed a video interview with Lauren and me which had been recorded in 2007. The award went to Rachel Marks, a woman who's fought with cancer but seems as plucky and determined as Lauren ever was to keep hardship from getting in her way.

The whole experience of attending the conference for this presentation was humbling and awe-inspiring (and, as you'd expect, quite emotional). I was able to connect with a part of Lauren's life I hadn't really experienced before, and I heard from many people whose lives she had touched with her ebullience and love. It lifted my own spirits to be in a mountain retreat, communing with the Lord and with other people who knew my wife. I'm glad that Austin paid her this very special tribute, and that I was invited to share in an event to honor her life. I know Lauren would've been confused and taken aback by all the attention, but she and her memory deserve it all.

Thanks, Austin, for creating the award; and Les, for helping to present it. Thanks, Mom & Dad K., for raising a fantastic woman who captivated me and is an integral part of who I've become. And thanks most of all to God, who orchestrated our lives that we might find and fulfill each other in such a wonderful way.

---

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.

~ Jeremiah 29:11

Hey, lookit that!

My blog address is now officially on my own domain (augmentedfourth.com)! Blogger is still hosting & publishing everything, but I finally got around to making my server's DNS point to them instead of using the amateurish blogspot.com URL.

Also, in playing with blog stuff I was poking around some old posts of mine. Apparently, in October 2005, I saw into the mind of Steve Jobs. Everything I predicted/desired in that post has come true in the years since.

How Star Trek *should* have ended...

I really like last year's new Star Trek film, and this cartoon parody is hilarious. The best part is at the very end.

Geek code - why do I do this, again?

So, it was pointed out to me today that my current Geek Code, shown at the bottom of every page of this blog, is significantly out of date. As I always mention when publishing these updates, version 3.12 of the Code was formulated in 1996, so my available options for the various categories aren't particularly reflective of how things really work in the world these days.

In any case, here's my new Code:

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GIT/MU d+@ s:+>: a->+++ C++> ULXB++++$ L+++ M++ w--() !O !V P++ E--- W+++
N o++ K? PS PE+ Y+ PGP++ t !5 X- R- tv+@ b++ DI++++ D--- G++ e*++ h r? y?
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

If you really care about knowing what that all means, you either know the code already, or you can get it decoded for you here.

Here I am...

Oh hi, blog. Sorry to be neglecting you. But ultra-short-form posts on Twitter and Facebook are so much easier. I hope you're doing OK. If I think about anything I want to share that organizes itself into paragraphs in my mind, I'll come back and post again. But I haven't forgotten you. I promise.

More amazingness from Andy Ihnatko

From a recent interview Andy gave to the Tactical Pants Blog:

If you could rename the iPad, what would you call it? Why?

I have no problems with the name. But if I were to rename it, I’d probably go with “Severe Eye Injury” or maybe “Adorable Baby Ducks In Horrible Imminent Danger.” It would be Apple’s ultimate statement of confidence: “Our new tablet computer is so handy and useful that you won’t give a damn _what_ it’s called.”

As usual, he lives up to his signature wit throughout, but this answer exemplifies precisely why I read everything that ever comes out of this man's head and onto a computer screen.

Andy Ihnatko on His Tactical Internet Pants and Apple's iPad | Tactical Pants Blog

On Predictability

I've been thinking a bit lately, and I've come up with this maxim:

Anything predictable is exploitable.

I'm going to confine this to network traffic at this point, since it's the only application for which I've given this much thought, but I'm willing to bet that it holds true in other areas as well.

Keep in mind that exploitability is not, in itself, a bad thing. A Web browser predicts that an http:// server is running on port 80 and exploits that. With that assumption, most people won't have to know what the previous sentence even means. Sometimes you run across sites where you have to enter "dummydomain.net:8080" in your address bar for servers that aren't using port 80 for Web traffic, but the ability to assume and predict a standard port is good.

On the other hand, exploitation can be bad. In old TCP stacks, the sequence numbers always started with 1 and incremented from there. This ability to predict traffic and forge legitimate responses can allow malicious machines to hijack sessions through what's called a "man-in-the-middle attack." More modern implementations of TCP/IP start the sequence number randomly; this prevents prediction and exploitation.

There are many steps in a chain at which predictability can lead to exploitability when it comes to network security, and not all of them are even technological. Take, for instance, the predictability that some percentage of users will click the link in a spam email message. Given that mass amounts of email can be sent at virtually no charge, and there is always some small percentage that will respond positively, there is still a return on investment that makes spam campaigns profitable. [0]

The same thing applies to cryptography. The only way to have a message encrypted well enough in transit to prevent decryption is to create ciphertext that is as close to pattern-free true randomness as possible. If there's any way to detect patterns, and therefore create predictability, exploitation will soon follow.

I can go on, but I think I'll stop here for now. I think, however, that the ability for prediction to beget exploitation is the driving force behind security these days (not limited to computer security). For instance, it's the regulated unpredictability of financial systems like the stock market that keeps people from reliably exploiting them for their own gain!

I might have more thoughts later, but I just wanted to put this out there while it was on my mind.

[0] "Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion." Chris Kanich, Christian Kreibich, Kirill Levchenko, Brandon Enright, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Vern Paxson, and Stefan Savage. Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 52(9):99-107, September 2009.

Genius!

This is an awesome quote from one of my favorite tech columnists. It's the final line in the linked article.

Remember that to Google, the millions of people who use the Internet are like one big immense sofa with thousands of cushions. It’s always rummaging through our user experiences and finding loose change that we never knew we lost and never miss once it’s been taken.

- Andy Ihnatko, Chicago Sun-Times