I have been using 32-bit Karmic Koala KUbuntu for a while now. Given that it is supposed to go to actual release some time in October, I thought I should share some impressions.

It’s not just the color schema which has changed. KUbuntu actually looks and feels like Canonical might have put more than their customary $20 into the development effort. From what I’ve read with the bug reports though, the 64-bit edition got the same $1.98 in development funds it always gets. You still cannot install the 32-bit Lotus Symphony Debian package on the 64-bit edition of Ubuntu. (OpenSuSE 11.x fixed this problem with the RPM, but the Symphony developers chose a rendering engine which had a lot of bugs on the SuSE platform.)

There’s a lot of really neat stuff which has been added. The move to 00 3.1 was very welcome. The talk of dropping sun-java-6 is not. Many things actually work better. The newer version of SciTE was quite welcome as was the current versions of Tea and Leafpad.

Some things are just as busted as they have always been. Both Konsole and eTerm are still claiming to be VT terminals when neither really are. Until you can map the NumLock key as the Gold Key when in application mode and not have the emulator continue using it as a toggle between application and keypad mode, you are NOT a VT emulator. I do not care how many documented escape sequences you handle or how many *nix applications you work with, until you can telnet into the Deathrow cluster, log in as Demo User, type EDIT A.TXT at the command prompt, hit the </> key on the keypad to bring up keypad help, exit from keypad help then hit <NumLock>-<7> on the keypad to get the editor command prompt, you aren’t even remotely VT compatible. I won’t even go into using <NumLock><*> to bring up the find prompt or the “-” key to delete a line followed by <NumLock><-> to bring it back.

LS-120 drive support comes and goes. I think this has a lot to do with some underlying changes to the kernel and boot loader in general. They are completely re-vamping how they do devices in this release. I do think they will launch this release as is come the October release date, but I also think few will consider this brave new device methodology successful. Nobody seems to be working on the LS-120 issue directly. It appears that the issue is directly related to some other problems though. A good many of us author types continue to use LS-120 and LS-240 drives along with a rotating stack of disks for work-in-process snapshots. It allows us to do off-site storage at friends and family with media that is continually re-usable (i.e. GREEN) rather than one time only CDR or the more expensive few-times-only CDRW. While we have thumb drives, most of us have processes in place, along with storage cases, for the LS-120, so we continue to use it.

The shortage of development funds is really apparent with OO 3.1. The file save dialog has blank check boxes and doesn’t actually add default file extensions, even if you have that option selected. It also cannot import any of the normal supported image file formats, most likely a result of the file dialogs being so broken. Both JPEG and PNG give the error “unknown graphic format”. Another killer for me is the breaking of the Weblog plug-in. One of the few reasons I wills start OO instead of Symphony these days is to write a blog entry. I think I know what the developers broke, I just don’t know if they can fix it. OO only works with Mozilla. This version of KUbuntu had a new default browser named Arora introduced. Let’s just say that Arora was a nice idea that didn’t come close to working out. Konqueror was magically set as the default browser after one round of patches during this alpha/beta process. A lot of sites don’t work correctly with Konqueror so I changed my default browser to Opera as will most people who do any significant amount of surfing. The choice didn’t really matter for this particular problem. OO 3.x only works with Mozilla. This release attempts to use the system default browser. While the upload will eventually get to your blog, the process will die on your computer with various errors relating to the browser. Prior versions of OO forced the user of FireFox with this plug-in, and perhaps OO in general, not so in this release.

I’m sure a large team is working on these bugs. Indeed, there is yet another OO release waiting for me in my updates list. Updates are occuring at a furious pace now that the freeze is on. It is nothing to run an update in the evening and find over 100Meg of updates waiting for you at some point the next day.

DO NOT INSTALL THIS RELEASE IF YOU HAVE MORE THAN ONE SATA DRIVE AND MORE THAN ONE OPERATING SYSTEM.

I cannot make that warning any clearer. Prior to joining this beta, I wiped my entire machine. I trimmed the RAM back to 4GB and used some bootable CD-ROM based utility I had to blast the drive contents and install fresh MBRs on each drive. My machine has 250GB, 1TB, and 1TB drives installed. They are viewed in the BIOS that same way with no remapping. All drives are SATA. I almost wish I had a 500GB SATA to use for an experiment, but I don’t at this time.

There were a few DOS things I was going to need to do, so before installing the alpha/beta, I installed FreeDOS. The 250 is seen as the first disk drive and the primary boot device by the BIOS. Sadly, both 1TB drives are not only the same size, but the same brand and model, so other than by partition table, one cannot tell them apart. I know, I know, but I was going to play with some RAID settings at one time to reduce the number of backups I need to make…before I found out the nVidia RAID was “soft” RAID, not actual RAID, and many Linux distros had trouble with it.

FreeDOS installed, I even broke out my old DOS editor VEDIT to do some editing. Just for grins, I installed a DOS based version of WarCraft to see how things worked. All was well, and I was happy.

Then I installed Karmic Koala. I was somewhat befuddled when I went into the custom partitioning and the 250 was listed as /sdc not /sdb, still, I put my boot and swap partitions on the 250, used one of the 1TB drives for /home, and another to store my /db_data and /books trees. The boot and swap were placed at the end of a FAT32 extended partition which I use for transfering data around. I rebooted as was rather pleasantly surprised to see my FreeDOS partition in the Grub menu…at least until I tried booting it. No amount of tweaking can fix this. Grub-pc is mapping the drives in the wrong order. Every DOS and most flavors of Windows respect the BIOS drive mapping order. That is why you can have a BIOS option which allows you to change drive ordering and things work. Grub-pc and the boot loader are not respecting this ordering. You will be okay if you only have one disk drive. Those of us who do a lot tend to have multiples, and that is where the problem lies.

Without swapping out one of my drives, or adding another, I cannot tell if Grub-pc/boot loader is taking the second drive, the last drive, or sorting for the biggest. From a DOS and Windows perspective, it doesn’t matter, you cannot boot from the provided boot manager. You would be better off if they left all other entries off the menu since that would alert you to the problem early on.

Remember that boot loader which came with OS/2 Warp? People bitched that it had to have its own 1.2Meg primary partition, but it was genius. It was optically isolated from everything but physical drive failure. No matter how corrupted one of your bootable partitions became, you could always boot another entry, hopefully one with fix-it tools to fix the corrupted partition. We haven’t had that in a while. PowerQuest had something they sold which was Windows based, as did many others. Problem was, when your Windows boot partition was corrupted, you couldn’t boot anything else. They seemed to lose sight of the fact that most of us had other bootable partitions not just because we hated Microsoft trash, but because we had utility partitions off on other drives which let us do full backups, virus scans, surface scans, drive partitioning and partition repair. No, sticking a bootable System-Rescue CD in and booting that isn’t quite the same thing. (Though I have had to use my System-Rescue CD more now that the freeze went in than I did when the project was in wild west mode.)

This move to be free of the BIOS was a bad idea. I believe part of the reason the developers are trying to move away is the fact that no Unix or Linux distro runs worth a damn on midrange and mainframe computers. Yes, there are a lot of different flavors for those computers, some are even put out by the hardware vendors themselves, but they all outright (&_&*ing suck when compared to the non-Unix/Linux operating systems on those same platforms. The Linux crowd is learning the same thing the PowerBuilder crowd learned. It is the same lesson every PC product foolish enough to pay the Gartner Group to market it learns. PC stuff does not scale up. There’s a reason OS/Z, MVS, and OpenVMS don’t run on x86 CPUs and it has nothing to do with greed. The simple fact is that the x86 was never designed for business use, it just got used by business.

Eliminating support/reliance on the BIOS is one of the many thousands of things which has to be done to get a version of Unix/Linux to come even remotely close to competing with OS/Z, MVS, or OpenVMS. Of course, to achieve the goal of being able to replace those operating systems, you have to abandoned support for the x86. There is no operating system method of bridging that hardware gap.

Intel has tried valiantly to bridge that gap. They got caught red handed thieving Alpha CPU technology from DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation). Rather than do the right thing and put all of the Intel board in prison, GQ Bob cut a deal letting Intel continue to thieve technology from the greatest CPU in production at the time. Intel worked tirelessly, along with HP and millions (if not billions) of R&D dollars to try and get into the 64-bit chip market. Then, it happened…roughly 10 years late to the party, HP and Intel proudly strode into the media spotlight with the first (and possibly only) Itanium CPU which didn’t melt, smoke, or burst into flame when operated at its rated speed. Once they completed development of the fire retardent system, known as the clock speed limiter, they quickly ceased manufacture and sale of the Alpha which easily had more than 5 years left of engineering improvement without requiring any significant breakthroughs. Of course, the chip was quickly nicknamed the Titanic by the industry, but the industry had to concede they had definitely located a middle ground. You could load Unix, Linux, and OpenVMS on the same CPU and none of them would run worth a damn. Ah….the Holy Grail….

At my age, I should really know better. It was late when I got home, but I wanted an update on that poor Asian Yale student, so when I got home I turned on The Jerry Springer Network which pretty much goes under the call letters CNN these days. There, on the AC*360 segment “Keeping Them Honest”, I got to witness the left hand of al-Qaeda in all its glory.

Two people with absolutely no idea what security costs or what national security really is yacking on about a pair of border crossings in Montana which were lightly used, but both getting $33 million in upgrades as part of the stimulus. Not only did they name the towns and show the sites, they even publicly stated that the crossings were closed in the evening. The camera shots showed there was obviously no eye-in-the-sky camera on a pole providing 360 degree surveillance and no significant barricades stopping someone from driving around the location at night.

Thanks guys. You really know how to do Bin Laden’s job for him. Should we name the next terrorist attack to occur on U.S. soil after you? It seems only fitting.

Apparently these two guys don’t watch news reports from any other network either. If they had, they would have known that it took Canada a while to start tightening its entry requirements and most intelligence communities suspect a large pool of sleeper cells is sitting in Canada where border crossing into the U.S. is much easier. God knows it would be tough for them to get across the Mexican border now. The odds of them getting mowed down by the drug dealers thinking their human trafficing business was being infringed upon are quite high. For several months I’ve actually been wondering how the various government agencies were going to spin it in the press when a terrorist cell stupid enough to try crossing that border did get mowed down my people not in uniform. In truth, I’ve been pondering how come someone hasn’t manufactured evidence for drug lord consumption showing that the white supremacists/vigilantes/Minute Men/whatever-they-are-called-in-the-press-this-week slipping across the border offing their troops. If even half of the news reports are correct about those boys spoiling for a shooting war, all it is going to take is for the first drug dealer to open fire on them and the world ammo supply will drop considerably. I’m actually finding it hard to believe it hasn’t happened already. As Adolf Hitler showed the world, no matter how big, advanced, and battle hardened your army is, a war on two fronts with natural barriers will grind it down.

I was too stunned for words when I watched this segment. I didn’t know if I was more stunned that a full tactical unit from Homeland Security wasn’t coming in and confiscating the video, or that the Jerry Springer Network had been this desperate for ratings. Maybe the two guys doing the report thought that if Robert D. Novak and the Washington Post could blatantly breach national security without receiving death sentences that they had no fear of prosecution either.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/20/AR2005102000874.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair

Since neither of these guys understand anything about the cost of security upgrades, let me ’splain a few things to them.

1. National Security is only as strong as its weakest point. This is especially true when we are talking about border crossings.

2. Getting reliable high speed Internet to a remote location isn’t cheap.

While there may very well be only 5 vehicles per day crossing at one of those points, it only takes one van full of fertilizer getting through and meeting another van with barrels of diesel fuel in the back to create something like Oklahoma City (Yes, that particular bombing had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, but you can all remember seeing the pictures of the damage from about that much homemade explosive.)

To the guys who have apparently always lived in huge cities and complained about having to drive over 5 hours to get to the border crossing, let me throw some realities out for you. Trenching nothing more than regular phone cable costs about $8K per mile. Dial up isn’t good enough when you want a 360 degree camera system feeding live high-res photos back to some central Homeland Security location where a massive computer system with complex facial recognition software can scan and identify detainees in a matter of seconds, at most 1 minute. That is the required response time. Your agents can bobble around for at best 3 minutes over at a terminal or walking around with a camera, but you have to try hitting a 1 minute window for transmit+process+response.

Don’t even think you can do this with the lower cost satellite Internet service providers. I had a Satellite provider for years. I finally got rid of them and went with Verizon Wireless. Regular retail satellite service fizzes out when it gets cloudy. It doesn’t have to be raining or storming, just heavy clouds. Anyone who has ever had a satellite ISP knows this. You don’t really want to have security on all but cloudy days, do you? There is a bandwidth problem with retail satellite ISP service. While they could probably tweak a few things for government accounts, they can’t get around current physical limitations without new equipment in orbit.

Maybe they could get a wireless company to build cell towers out there, but I’m guessing they would want the feds to pick up the tab on that. We all saw the video, there’s nothing around. Wireless service is also susceptible to jambing. It is, after all, a very low powered radio. All you need is a transmitter with more power.

That leaves us with trenching a cable. In this day and age, I would hope that they bust for a fiber optic cable big enough to provide phone and TV service to all of the communities along the route. It’s not that I want someone free loading on my tax dollars, just that copper eventually rots and glass doesn’t. You should od things right the first time. 5*70*8000 = 2,800,000 just for the trenching costs. That doesn’t include the equipment needed at multiple points for tapping stations/hubs, or the price of the cable. That is also assuming you could trench straight through without having to route around an oil or other pipe line. Now we need the hi-res high speed all weather camera equipment, secure routers, etc. Let us not forget also that one of the buildings shown had a roof which obviously wasn’t holding back water anymore and the fact there were no visible concrete barricades or other breaching defenses to stop people from driving around the crossing.

Do I believe the political banter about all of the jobs the projects will create? Nope. Not one of those jobs is permanent. In less than a year each of the projects should be completed and all of those people will be looking for work again.

I do believe, however, that if every border crossing is upgraded, we can then turn our attention to other methods of entry.

At my age, I should really know better. It was late when I got home, but I wanted an update on that poor Asian Yale student, so when I got home I turned on The Jerry Springer Network which pretty much goes under the call letters CNN these days. There, on the AC*360 segment “Keeping Them Honest”, I got to witness the left hand of al-Qaeda in all its glory.

Two people with absolutely no idea what security costs or what national security really is yacking on about a pair of border crossings in Montana which were lightly used, but both getting $33 million in upgrades as part of the stimulus. Not only did they name the towns and show the sites, they even publicly stated that the crossings were closed in the evening. The camera shots showed there was obviously no eye-in-the-sky camera on a pole providing 360 degree surveillance and no significant barricades stopping someone from driving around the location at night.

Thanks guys. You really know how to do Bin Laden’s job for him. Should we name the next terrorist attack to occur on U.S. soil after you? It seems only fitting.

Apparently these two guys don’t watch news reports from any other network either. If they had, they would have known that it took Canada a while to start tightening its entry requirements and most intelligence communities suspect a large pool of sleeper cells is sitting in Canada where border crossing into the U.S. is much easier. God knows it would be tough for them to get across the Mexican border now. The odds of them getting mowed down by the drug dealers thinking their human trafficing business was being infringed upon are quite high. For several months I’ve actually been wondering how the various government agencies were going to spin it in the press when a terrorist cell stupid enough to try crossing that border did get mowed down my people not in uniform. In truth, I’ve been pondering how come someone hasn’t manufactured evidence for drug lord consumption showing that the white supremacists/vigilantes/Minute Men/whatever-they-are-called-in-the-press-this-week slipping across the border offing their troops. If even half of the news reports are correct about those boys spoiling for a shooting war, all it is going to take is for the first drug dealer to open fire on them and the world ammo supply will drop considerably. I’m actually finding it hard to believe it hasn’t happened already. As Adolf Hitler showed the world, no matter how big, advanced, and battle hardened your army is, a war on two fronts with natural barriers will grind it down.

I was too stunned for words when I watched this segment. I didn’t know if I was more stunned that a full tactical unit from Homeland Security wasn’t coming in and confiscating the video, or that the Jerry Springer Network had been this desperate for ratings. Maybe the two guys doing the report thought that if Robert D. Novak and the Washington Post could blatantly breach national security without receiving death sentences that they had no fear of prosecution either.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/20/AR2005102000874.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair

Since neither of these guys understand anything about the cost of security upgrades, let me ’splain a few things to them.

1. National Security is only as strong as its weakest point. This is especially true when we are talking about border crossings.

2. Getting reliable high speed Internet to a remote location isn’t cheap.

While there may very well be only 5 vehicles per day crossing at one of those points, it only takes one van full of fertilizer getting through and meeting another van with barrels of diesel fuel in the back to create something like Oklahoma City (Yes, that particular bombing had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, but you can all remember seeing the pictures of the damage from about that much homemade explosive.)

To the guys who have apparently always lived in huge cities and complained about having to drive over 5 hours to get to the border crossing, let me throw some realities out for you. Trenching nothing more than regular phone cable costs about $8K per mile. Dial up isn’t good enough when you want a 360 degree camera system feeding live high-res photos back to some central Homeland Security location where a massive computer system with complex facial recognition software can scan and identify detainees in a matter of seconds, at most 1 minute. That is the required response time. Your agents can bobble around for at best 3 minutes over at a terminal or walking around with a camera, but you have to try hitting a 1 minute window for transmit+process+response.

Don’t even think you can do this with the lower cost satellite Internet service providers. I had a Satellite provider for years. I finally got rid of them and went with Verizon Wireless. Regular retail satellite service fizzes out when it gets cloudy. It doesn’t have to be raining or storming, just heavy clouds. Anyone who has ever had a satellite ISP knows this. You don’t really want to have security on all but cloudy days, do you? There is a bandwidth problem with retail satellite ISP service. While they could probably tweak a few things for government accounts, they can’t get around current physical limitations without new equipment in orbit.

Maybe they could get a wireless company to build cell towers out there, but I’m guessing they would want the feds to pick up the tab on that. We all saw the video, there’s nothing around. Wireless service is also susceptible to jambing. It is, after all, a very low powered radio. All you need is a transmitter with more power.

That leaves us with trenching a cable. In this day and age, I would hope that they bust for a fiber optic cable big enough to provide phone and TV service to all of the communities along the route. It’s not that I want someone free loading on my tax dollars, just that copper eventually rots and glass doesn’t. You should od things right the first time. 5*70*8000 = 2,800,000 just for the trenching costs. That doesn’t include the equipment needed at multiple points for tapping stations/hubs, or the price of the cable. That is also assuming you could trench straight through without having to route around an oil or other pipe line. Now we need the hi-res high speed all weather camera equipment, secure routers, etc. Let us not forget also that one of the buildings shown had a roof which obviously wasn’t holding back water anymore and the fact there were no visible concrete barricades or other breaching defenses to stop people from driving around the crossing.

Do I believe the political banter about all of the jobs the projects will create? Nope. Not one of those jobs is permanent. In less than a year each of the projects should be completed and all of those people will be looking for work again.

I do believe, however, that if every border crossing is upgraded, we can then turn our attention to other methods of entry.

Criminal fraud in the technical recruiting industry is nothing new. It starts off with wire and mail fraud and migrates forward through a list of crimes which would make even John Gotti blush. We’ve always had to put up with the FBI and Postmaster General not enforcing the truth in advertising laws. We have always had to put up with bottom feeder companies running advertisements on-line and in the newspaper help wanted section stating “competitive salary” when they knew damned good and well they were offering a salary which was 30% below the bottom end of the legal range published by the Department of Labor. No matter how many of us complained or filed charges, they never bothered to go after them. Of course, that has been changing lately now that every government in the country is skint broke and the fines for wire and labor fraud are quite high. Now that vendor management systems have been put in place that allow a company to block submission of any resume with a bill rate or salary requirement above the posted rate prosecutors can also nail them with Racketeering and Price Fixing.

Lately, I’ve been noticing a new trend. Having done some work as a Business Analyst (BA) and migrating my career more towards writing with a focus on technical writing, I’ve been paying more attention to the BA and technical writing contracts. The fraud is really running rampant now. I’m pretty jaded. I thought I had seen it all. I’d lived long enough to have seen Union Carbide slaughter roughly 25,000 civilians in Bhopal ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster), a President blatantly commit perjury for reasons other than national security without getting thrown out of office ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Bill_Clinton), and another president order a friend to out a deep cover CIA operative in the press without the reporter, editor, or person who did the outing suddenly having fatal heart attacks or an even more sudden case of lead poisoning in the brain ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair). I didn’t think there was any crime one could commit which would phase me. I mean we’ve watched every large consulting company with an offshore division fly workers over here by the tens of thousands on tourist visas to do billable work for clients without paying one red cent of taxes on them and without any concern over the fact they were committing multiple federal crimes while doing it.

I must say, I’ve been floored lately. It appears that some of the companies who were the worst offenders of the published salary/rate ranges of the Department of Labor have been getting some official contacts over the matter. They are now committing an even bigger violation by down classing all postings. Here are the traditional roles:

• Business Analyst - $90-$250/hr – attends all meetings and gathers all data for project. Assembles all information and some of the resources needed by technical writers and technical analysts. Responsible for drawing out the high level system flow diagram and creation of the Work Initiation doucment. BA will also assemble critical test cases for the Project Manager and QA group to use. Note that critical test cases aren’t all test cases, just the business critical few which define success and/or failure in the eyes of the business. (i.e. stopping a customer with an account 180 days past due from placing a new order, not how the application/system handles alpha characters in a numeric field.

• Technical Writer Category 2 - $65-$180/hr depending on cost of living for area. This group is sometimes called Junior Business Analyst, but that is a misnomer. These are people who were programmers, not necessarily good programmers, but programmers long enough to understand how specifications should be written. They are the ones receiving the information from the BA and writing the technical specification documents which the TAs and programmers will use to actually develop the system. In some situations they will write test cases the BA will use in testing the system. This technical writer is aware of internal library routines and best coding practices which have already been put in place at the shop. They will participate in code walk throughs and ensure library routine X was used to prompt for all numeric fields since QA has already certified library routine X handles all invalid entries correctly.

• Technical Analyst – (formerly Programmer Analyst) - $55-$185/hr depending upon location and skill set. $55/hr is for the most widely available skill set where the cost of living index is at most zero. No location along any coast qualifies for that rate no matter how widely available the skills are. The rarer the skill, the higher the rate. Yes Verizon, New Jersey is “along a coast”, not that you would ever consider even paying as much as $55/hr to anyone. Does most of the programming an initial system testing. Also guides the programmers doing the grunt coding.

• Programmer - $25-65/hr depending upon location and skill set. DOES NO ANALYSIS OR SUPPORT WHAT-SO-EVER. This title has almost disappeared because it was so widely abused in the past. A programmer is not on call for production or system support. They translate the specification they are assigned by the TA and run through the limited number of test cases documented in that specification. When QA finds bugs they are required to fix them. These guys leave at the end of the day and don’t think about computers again until the next time they show up for work.

• Technical Writer basic - $7-30/hr depending upon location and if there is a specific documentation tool involved like Adobe or RoboHelp. This person does absolutely no research. The don’t conduct meetings or interviews. They simply get familiar with the document template and plug things the BA provides them into it. On later phases of the project, they will use the help creation tool to plug in grammatically correct help text for each field and/or screen, but the actual content will come from all of the previously created project documentation, not through any research effort on their part.

These job titles and rate ranges haven’t changed much over the past decade. Yes, there is the occasional scam artist which manages to obtain a $250-400/hr billing rate, but those are isolated cases. These job definitions are universal and undeniable. So, imagine my shock when I found the following:

http://seeker.dice.com/jobsearch/servlet/JobSearch?op=101&dockey=xml/9/5/95cbbb4f7c54654cddbe5a4278cac1e5@endecaindex&c=1&source=20

I actually used the phone number to call Sudin since they were looking for a C/C++ programmer with skills on OpenVMS able to do requirements definition and Java programming and somehow also do customer support even though that role does not fall into any definition of technical writer. Keep in mind the billing rate was set as negotiable. I would like to say that it was quite a shock when Sudin told me in broken English that they were looking to pay $35-40/hr and wanted 5-10 years of experience on OpenVMS, but it wasn’t. I informed him of the fact he was willingly participating in a crime and he made numerous promises to go fix his posting and list the shitty billing rate. You’re reading a blog about it because he hasn’t done it and Dice hasn’t taken the posting down yet.

There are those among us who live to travel. They get a gleam in their eye packing and thinking of some place new. Sometimes they travel for weeks or months on end, but, for the most part, they always come home.

For most of us, there is something incredibly special about home. Even when we move away and create lives in another location, it is a very long time before that “home” replaces home. In large part, I think several of the annual holidays, while formed around some religious themes, were actually created more due to our need to come home and for those there to have us come home. When we are in our youth and away it is more because those there need us to return, some time after we cross 40 it is more because we need to go home and remember.

Even when you don’t have kids of your own, you can become so caught up in the what and the where that you lose track of the most important “w” of them all, who. When you start to realize you don’t know who you are anymore, it is a comfort to go home and find yourself again. At times I wonder just how bad off our country is going to be given so many families have lost their homes. Their kids won’t have a place to come home to later in life. Oh, I’m sure their parents will find a dwelling of some kind, but it might not have that feeling of home.

Oddly enough, this essay isn’t about the economy or politics or even IT. This little soul bearing has to do with my grandmother. She’s about to turn 95 and has the advanced dementia which sets in when Alzheimers has taken root along with the body starting to shut down. For her it has been a slow and horrible exit. Some times she remembers me, but I don’t expect it anymore. When she does come around into quasi-lucid conversation she cries about wanting nothing other than to go home. She doesn’t have a home anymore. Even if she did, she has to have the full-time medical care that could only be provided by a facility much like the one she is in. She is in the best to be found around here. We know this because she has been in other places before.

Still, there is a twisting of the knife when you hear that. It is conditioned into use from childhood from those first times we were separated from home and no matter how great the place was we were at, we only wanted to be home. With Grandparent’s Day around the corner it’s an extra turn of the rusty blade.

There has been a lot of chatter from politicians about “ euthanasia panels” for a government run health plan. They use it as a scare tactic to try and defeat any kind of change in the medical industry. I can tell you right now that I would be the first to sign my name up and say, before I get like this, let me sleep the coming sleep.