January 2, 2005 Archives

A friend called me this morning. He's a very good friend, a close friend. We don't speak often enough.

The conversation hadn't gone very far when he told me about another mutual friend with an awful form of cancer. Then he told me about another friend of his, someone I've met, with another awful form of cancer¹. And, as the "coup de grace," he told me about a small, inconsequential operation he had had.

Billy Crystal says we call them procedures, but they're operations.

This evening another friend called. His son had suffered a seizure - not the first. Now he would be re-examined for the possibility of a rare disease from an overseas trip to a third world country.

Finally I spoke to my dad tonight. A close friend of his, someone I've known all my life... someone whose house I ran away to when I was 12 or 13... is in the hospital. He needs surgery but isn't medically ready at the moment (whatever that means)².

Where am I going with this?

As I faced into the new year, I realized I was approaching my 55th birthday. When I get there everyone will tell me it's not as old as it seems or as old as it once was. C'mon. This is like putting lipstick on a pig.

Fifty five is old and I am now out of warranty.

No, I don't feel like an old person and I try not to act like an old person. I have often said, "I'm 54, but I'm immature for my age." I'm only middle aged if I'm living to 108! Those things that affect old people become inevitable.

Helaine says this is why you should live for the day. In the abstract that's right. In reality it's much more difficult to do.

Growing up, getting older, looked so much more promising from my viewpoint as a kid. From here, the view is not quite as sweet (nor as sharp without my glasses).

There is no moral here. I have no uplifting message to tag on the end. Life is a journey - a finite journey. You never know when or how it will end. In fact, you're the one person who never finds out.

¹ - I'm not sure why I am using the word awful as all forms of cancer pretty much suck.

² - This guy, a lifelong smoker whose wife doesn't know, told the doctors he doesn't smoke. He might as well ask them to cure him by touching up the x-rays.

Tonight on Sixty Minutes I watched Leslie Stahl's two part piece on Google¹. I didn't learn anything new, and was pleased to see many of the good things I had heard being reinforced.

There is one part missing from that story... something I had never seen touched upon.

In order to do what it does, Google must cache the entire Internet. So, if Google says it can search 8,058,044,651 pages (as it does right now), those pages must be stored (possibly more than once) in Google's server farms.

I would hope they have a sophisticated way of compressing the data for fast indexing and easy storage - still that's more than a daunting task. And Microsoft, Yahoo and a few others do much the same.

Last year, when my webhost had a server crash and lost a few weeks of data, Google's cache allowed me to go back and reconstruct nearly everything I had lost. And if they do it with my site, they're doing it with every site, whether the info is good, bad, useful or useless.

¹ - The piece was produced by Rome Hartman, who probably doesn't remember me. Back in the early 70s I worked for his father, also Rome Hartman, at a radio station in West Palm Beach, Florida. On the weekends, we sometimes went out in the station's boat as he did fishing reports. He's done well for himself in spite of having known me.

Scientists at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, part of NOAA, have created an amazing animation which shows how the "Boxing Day Tsunami" transversed the Indian Ocean. Even if you have dial-up (and this will take a while) it's worth the wait.