No, Dave, it’s just you

This is my recipe for the refried beans in my bean and cheese burrito every day. It started out as a way to reduce my salt intake, but now Jordan relies on it for a midnight snack. I make as much as will fit in my pressure cooker, which is enough for about 8 lunches and a week of midnight snacks. It is inspired by recipes in Pressure Perfect by Lorna Sass. (An excellent cookbook, several of the recipes are regular dinners in our home.)

Makes 9 cups, about 10 generous servings.

Add to pressure cooker:

• 4 cups dried black or pinto beans
• 2 T vegetable oil very important
• 1 T garlic powder or granulated garlic
• 1 t salt

Fill the cooker to the half-way mark with water, seal the cooker, and bring it to pressure. Once the pressure regulator is rocking gently, cook for 30 minutes for black beans, or 40 minutes for pinto. To cook, place the cooker in the sink and run cold water over it until the pressure valve releases.

WARNING: if you forget the oil, the beans will foam and clog the pressure cooker. The cooker will explode, causing burns and severe injury to anyone in the vicinity. Don’t forget the oil! (This hasn’t happened to me.)

While the beans are cooking, fry until the oil is fragrant and colorful:

• 12 dried arbol chile peppers (available in the Hispanic section of the grocery store.)
• 3T or a vast, unmeasured quantity of vegetable oil

Set aside the chiles. If you like your beans mild, discard them and keep the flavored oil. I use a huge amount of oil, mainly Smart Balance and/or olive oil. It makes the beans smoother and more filling, so I don’t crave more cheese or other less healthy sources of calories.

In a large sauce pan, fry in the oil until onion is limp:

• 1 large (2-3 C) onion
• 1 T whole cumin, or ¹/₂ T ground

Add, and fry until onion is lightly browned:

• ¹/₂ T dried oregano

In a food processor, mix the onions, beans, and some or all of the arbol peppers. This will take several batches. Mix the batches under medium heat in the saucepan, adding water and/or liquid from the cooker. Keep in mind that the beans will get thicker as they cool. If desired, add more salt to taste.

Recently a worm has been spreading that infects DSL modems. It is a harbinger of things to come. There are all sorts of other internet-enabled devices which are configured through a nearby computer. At our office, we’ve got new telephones that operate on the same principle.

This worm lets itself be known by blocking the most common ports on the modem– essentially blocking network access. That’s exactly what happened sometime between Friday night and Saturday afternoon. And yet, on further inspection, it looks like it wasn’t this worm. For one thing, someone claiming to be the worm’s author claims to have shut it down a week ago. For another, I was ultimately able to determine that both the hardware and software were wrong (but the manufacturer didn’t help.) And finally, the worm apparently attacks only from outside your home network.

This has reminded me of how insecure these network-attached devices are. I assumed I wasn’t vulnerable, now I’m not so sure. In the old days network attached modems, printers, and other such devices were built using custom chips that were difficult to break into either because they couldn’t be updated remotely, or because few possessed the specialized knowledge to program a particular device. These days, these devices are built on top of a standard set of software and hardware which isn’t much different from a PC. Someone who knows how to program Linux has a head start in figuring out how to modify a network-attached device.

Manufacturers assume that as long as administrative access is limited to the local network, the device is safe. My DSL modem even has the administrative password printed on its bottom, along with other information they expect you’ll never change. But there’s no guarantee that a laptop inside the network hasn’t already been infected, and from there it could guess the password and infect the modem.

I’ve been fighting Carpal Tunnel for about two years now, and I still haven’t gotten over it. (That’s one reason I haven’t been blogging much.) Here are a few things I’ve learned:

• Carpal tunnel is a misnomer for what I (and many people) have. It describes a nerve being compressed in the wrist. The problem is, the symptoms are identical to the nerve being compressed anywhere between the brain and the hand.
• That being the case, surgery would do nothing for me. Anti-inflammatory medicine (such as aspirin) can help with the symptoms, and for some that’s good enough.
• You can have CT and also have lots of other problems simultaneously that have the same symptoms. In my case, I have real CT, but the main problems seem to be due to muscle tension compressing all three nerves (median, radial, and ulnar). And it’s tension near the elbows, arm pits, shoulders, and neck.

The symptoms I have aren’t bad, but they are persistent. I’m not worried about the numbness and tingling; I just want to be able to continue to use computers for the next 50 years without too much nerve damage. But for now I’ve given up laptops (or at least I’m trying to) and I’m trying all sorts of things. This week I’ve got one hour of physical therapy (which is really helpful, although I’ve been at it for six months), a massage (which is similar to PT, but less painful), and two visits to a Chiropractor. (Just had my first ever visit on Monday. It seemed to improve my posture, which is important since bad posture is one of my biggest problems.) I also spend a significant portion of the evenings trying to replicate what the PT does. (She gives me homework.)

It’s likely that this will be a persistent battle. Rather than going back to normal, I’ll be doing some amount of self-care for the rest of my life. If I’m lucky, that will mainly involve a few simple exercises, a hot bath every once in a while, and the occasional massage. That wouldn’t be so bad.

Here is the Gettysburg address, illustrated using the first Google Image search result for each word. I considered doing it as a puzzle, but some of those images are pretty cryptic.

Last night I went to www.AnnualCreditReport.com, the site set up by the FTC for checking your credit report once a year for free. That site then sends you to the three credit rating companies, each of which buries links to credit report under a mound of offers for their credit monitoring services.

The worst of these agencies, from a security standpoint, is TransUnion. They require you to create a username and password, plus a password recovery question.

A password recovery question is essentially a secondary password that’s a whole lot easier to guess than the primary password. Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account got hacked into by someone who could guess a few personal details that anyone in her home town would know.

Last year, TransUnion let me create my own password recovery question. This year, they’ve disabled that, so I had to choose from one of their questions. Every single question is something that a high school acquaintance might know about me and could be guessed from public records. Mother’s maiden name. Father’s middle name. High school mascot. The street I grew up on. If you’re from a small town, everyone in the town would know these things about you.

Now consider that you use your TransUnion password exactly once a year. If you don’t choose a good password, for example if you reuse the same password for every website you visit, it’s easy for someone to get a list of all your credit cards, bank accounts, loans, and mortgages. If you do choose a good password, you’re almost certain to not remember it. So the password recovery question is your password. (What’s the right thing to do? Choose a really cryptic password like A2LCA6BVW3 and keep it in your wallet. And don’t mix up your O’s and zeroes or ones and ells!)

So what should Sarah Palin and all the other small-town folks in America do? Go to AnnualCreditReport.com and use the mail-in form.

I have an appointment at a sleep clinic in a few months. I strongly suspect I have sleep apnea, although I also strongly suspect that I can eliminate it by sleeping on my side. The problem is that side sleeping seems to be bad for my carpal tunnel syndrome. (Long story short: I’ve been in treatment for nearly a year and a half, physical therapy for four months, and I just had an MRI scan of my neck which ruled out a herniated disk as part of the problem. I’ve got muscle tension all up and down the areas where those nerves run from the brain to the hands, all of which contributes in some way.)

One reason I haven’t done anything about my sleep apnea suspicions is that there are so many things that affect a good night’s sleep. In particular, it was just this spring that the kids have stopped treating our bedroom as a late-night Grand Central Station. And there’s been some backtracking there.

Most nights Sylvia will come into our room, having just had a nightmare, and ask me to help her think of good dreams. I don’t like being roused from my bed, but in moderation this is one of the joys of parenthood.

We tend to get happier as we get older, and I believe that the main reason is that over time we learn to live with our bodies and our brains. We learn tricks to get around our nagging limitations and develop habits which suit our idiosyncrasies. I am particularly enjoying opportunities to teach these tricks to Sylvia. It’s not something I remember anyone ever doing for me (although I’m sure I just wasn’t aware of it) and it’s something that only I can offer her— and which only someone of my temperament will value. There is nothing more personal than dreams, and perhaps she will inherit my lucid, self-referential dreams in which I know I am dreaming but can only affect the dream within the bounds of dreamland rules. When I give her dream ideas, I am passing a bit of my imagination to her, and helping her to form habits that will let her use her imagination to improve her life.

I’m one of the teachers for the senior high class at church. This year, the whole curriculum is one long service project. They could have chosen to count whales in the Pacific. Or they could have spent spring break in Louisiana. Instead, they realized that what was needed most–and where they had the most to offer– is comprehensive sex education right here in Minnesota. That’s one of the things our denomination does best, and they’re organizing a day-long event on May 17th. They won’t be instructing it– but it wasn’t hard to find highly qualified instructors.

Recently I joined Facebook in order to coordinate a project with the high school kids at church. Facebook really isn’t designed for this sort of thing; Yahoo Groups might be more appropriate, except that communicating with teenagers is hard. They all have email, but most of them never check it. Some of them check Facebook several times a day. (Others refuse to sign up.)

Ever since then, I’ve been getting “friend” requests. For the most part, I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how many of these are people I know quite well. But I occasionally get one from someone I barely remember– but who might have good cause to remember me.

I went through the same thing with Friendster when it was popular. I’m a minor celebrity at Opus (and only at Opus), so after I got home from Opus one year, I got 50 friend requests. Mind you, I’m sure I had meaningful conversations with most of those people, but my brain is terrible with names and faces.

In everyday life, we assume that friendship is commutative. That is, if I am your friend then you must be mine. That’s absolutely not the case with social networks, where friendship is linked to one’s access another person’s information. A celebrity who wants people to know what he or she is doing needs to approve everyone as a friend.

Twitter has a more natural model. Signing up to follow one person’s tweets doesn’t imply that that person needs to follow yours. As does Slashdot, which lets you declare “fans” and “foes.”

Social networking sites need to forget friends and just have fans. The interface on Facebook wouldn’t need to change much. (Although the underlying data model would need to be significantly revamped.) When you sign up as someone’s fan, that person could be given the chance to deny you access. (In practice, that probably wouldn’t stop a committed stalker.) You’d also be given a chance to be that person’s fan.

In real life, friendship isn’t as commutative as people pretend it is. How close one really feels to another is often a guarded secret or an unspoken assumption. Doctors regularly feign familiarity with their regular patients, whom they see far too infrequently to remember. As do ministers and a host of other people in a variety of professions.

Sylvia got class photos at school a while ago. The photo company, rather than asking up front which pictures people wanted, printed a kitchen sink portfolio and sent it home with the kids. The parents were instructed to return any unwanted photos along with payment for the rest.

Jordan dutifully took a few photos out and returned the rest with her credit card information. In theory, that should have been the end of it. (Her credit card was just fine.)

The other night, a debt collector called. They claimed to own the debt. They didn’t know much about it, not even Jordan’s address. So they said they could not send her a bill.

And they wanted her to pay not only the amount owed (which seemed excessive) plus an $8 handling fee for paying over the phone. Jordan asked for an address. The caller provided one with an incomplete zip code, then hunted around for a different address.

Neither Jordan nor I knew how to handle a call from a debt collector. For the record, the law you need to know about is the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. In short, if you get a call from someone claiming to be a debt collector, you should:

1. Not reveal too much information about yourself or any potential debt. In particular, don’t say anything that would confirm or deny any debts. Keep in mind, the caller could be anyone. Plus, they will use any information against you. If it’s a scammer or identity thief, any random information makes it easier to impersonate you.
2. Request that all communications be in writing. Don’t tell them your address (see above). If you really owe them money, they should have or be willing to find your address.
3. Tell them to send you a description of the debt in writing.
4. If they balk, you may politely remind them that failure to comply results in a $1000 fine.
5. And, of course, do not accept any “convenience charge.”
6. When you get the statement, which they are required to send within five days no matter what, it shoud say that you have 30 days to pay or contest it. If you don’t respond in time, that is not evidence of debt, but it will complicate matters if you really do owe them.

The relevant section here is on page 5 of the FDCPA.

Sometimes I use Google to see if other people have the same voices in their heads that I do.

It turns out that nobody else has a little voice that sings along with Elton John saying Plaid thongs say so much.

On the other hand, someone else did think of Yahweh or the Highway.