Dogs, family and websites

I haven’t been here to post for a while. It seems that the dogs and my family genealogy website have been taking all of my time. My son and DIL went on vacation in early June which left me with 9 dogs (yeah that is 9) and the rest. By Wednesday of that week, I was ready to release my finches into the wild, turn the cats free in the front yard and start adopting out the dogs. Luckily one of my son’s friends was able to come over to stay with me. He took over the difficult dog duties and it was such a relief.

My Yorkie is pregnant. That’s why we had 9 dogs instead of 8. When breeding time came, the stud I had arranged was unavailable. His owner was due to deliver a baby herself any day. In desperation my DIL and I searched for an alternate stud. The only thing we could find was a male Yorkie for sale. He turned out to be a proven stud and a very sweet dog. So dog #9 came home. He was very enthusiastic about his duties as a stud. As a result, I have a female who looks like a hairy football. Her first due date is July 21. The male was starved for affection and needed more attention than we could give him. So we put him on Craig’s List and the calls started within 15 minutes. He has gone to a wonderful home where a very lovely teenage girl will give him the love he needs and 2 Pugs to play with.

Hopefully the Boston Terrier and the Cocker Spaniel are pregnant. We had to pay a stud fee for the Boston, but the owner of the Cocker stud wants first pick of the litter. I need to measure their bellies again today to see if there is any change. The Boston has gotten heavier, so she must be pregnant. I hope the Cocker is pregnant. Her stud was very beautiful. He is black and white with a shock of white hair in the middle of his black-colored head. Her litter should have buff and white and black and white puppies.

Through all of this my pain continues. I am having trouble picking the Boston up because of my back. I have finally been to the rheumatologist and fortunately I do not have rheumatoid or psoriatic arthritis. I have good old osteoarthritis, but it is particularly bad in my knees and hands. The doctor recommends injections of an artificial lubricant into my knees. I am all for it, but must pay $160 out of my pocket per visit for 5 visits. I just don’t have it now. When I sell the first of the Yorkie puppies, I will be able to afford the injections. The second puppy is going to purchase a 1988 pickup truck so that I will have a vehicle again.

I have been mentally and emotionally stressed out too. I have finally admitted that my finances are out of control. I sought help with a consumer counseling service only to have them recommend that I file bankruptcy. At this point I have to just try to dodge creditor calls. I can’t even contact an attorney until I have a certificate from the consumer counseling service. It’s part of the new bankruptcy rules. I hate it, but it may be my best opportunity to get things under control. I should not have credit cards; I just treat them like a license to spend.

There have been pleasant things happening too. I found my Dad’s favorite song and made him a CD for Father’s Day. For his birthday I made him a slide show of his early life, my mother’s early life, their wedding and an assortment of family photographs. Choosing the background music was challenging, I didn’t want to make people cry and also didn’t want to be flippant. For my mother’s segment, I used Steely Dan’s “Peg”. It’s one of my favorite songs and of course it was her name. Dad was in Texas with my sister’s family over his birthday. They had a party for him and waited until everyone left to present him with my gift. He loved it. I guess the rest of the family loved it too. My sister had previewed it and decided then that it needed to wait until only the family was there to watch it. I sent extra copies for my sister’s family. I also sent copies to mom’s brother and sister. I had fun putting it together, but had to leave out many pictures to keep the running time down to 15 minutes. I think I am going to make some more slide shows. I have loads of pictures in albums, but never really look at them. If they are put together on a DVD, I may look at them more often. I also have the ability to transfer video tape to my computer. I have super 8mm movies from the 1970’s I want to share. I also have my son’s first year. Some of that is dark and I hope I have software I can use to play around with it and lighten it up.

My genealogy website was hacked and used to send out millions of phony bank emails. As a result, I am moving it to a new hosting company. I have everything back up except the database. That was the point of weakness that allowed the hacker in. I had not been keeping up with the updates, so it is partly my fault. I have been able to get it back up with the version I was using when it was hacked, but I am having trouble updating to the latest version which is more secure. I just keep plugging away until I get it right.

Me and the technology revolution

I was awakened yesterday morning by my cell phone crying out for recharging. I just took it off the charger the day before. I couldn’t get enough signal to call home and tell someone to remove my dog’s coat, so the phone wasn’t really used. I think I need a new battery. Since I was already awake, I got up to watch my favorite morning show Good Morning America. They had a segment on viral videos that got me thinking about technology.

I sort of fell into the technology arena as a career; it was actually a desire to avoid PE class that got me into what was call Data Processing in 1970. I had moved to a new town and they had vocational training available in high school. I had observed some of my brother’s experiments into weird science, so I thought maybe the Electricity/Electronics class would be for me. The Vo-Ed guidance counselor convinced me to go into Data Processing instead.

I didn’t realize that the school’s technology was just behind the times. It was all donated equipment, so they didn’t have a computer. I did at least learn to operate a keypunch (does anyone remember cards?), sorters, interpreters, collators, calculating punch machines, reproducers and tabulating machines. They were all geared to manipulating punched cards and hopefully create meaningful reports from them. It was sort of fun playing with all of those wires we had to plug into thick plastic boards. We were also given classes in accounting and I learned I had a knack for putting numbers in little boxes.

Still not really having a goal in mind, I applied to college with Data Processing as my major. It wasn’t until I started my classes that I discovered that it was computer programming. Luckily it fell in line with putting numbers in little boxes, so I did well. I was fortunate to get a programming job shortly after graduation and so began my career. I never thought that my high school training would be of any use, but I was the only person who even recognized the dusty old machines in the storage room and so became the on-site expert for punched card applications.

I think a lot of my success was due to the fact that I was always like a kid on Christmas when presented with new technology. I still marvel at the fact that the laptop I am using right now has more memory and computing power than some of the mainframe computers I worked on in the 70’s. I do confess that I was very skeptical about personal computers when they first appeared. I thought of them as glorified video games. My brother-in-law had introduced my then husband to Super Pong and my hubby had to have one right away. Of course I was the only opponent available to him, so I got hooked into playing almost every day. He seemed to enjoy trouncing me just a little too much, so I developed a real dislike of video games that required aiming and shooting. When Atari introduced its first home computer, my ex wanted one. I did not want a computer in my home because it was too much like bringing work home. I also figured it was just to give my husband a newer, bigger video game console. The day I found a personal accounting program for the Atari, I started to see the home computer in a new light. Unfortunately my husband got the Atari in the divorce, so it was a little while before I had a computer at home again.

I didn’t really expect the microprocessors to stick around. At one job we had created an Accounts Receivable system on a mini-computer to replace one that ran on a mainframe. We converted one branch to the new system and noticed some performance problems. It was taking almost as long to process one branch on the mini as it did to process the entire company on the mainframe. We still had 37 branches to convert to the new system. So we set up a test using 10 branches. The results were laughable. My project leader was really into statistical analysis and had a ball working up the projections. At 75% conversion, it would take 24 hours to process the accounts. At 100% the projected processing time was 48 hours. I had done some research into the operating system of the mini and found that our time problem was related to the alternate inquiry paths that the analyst who designed the new systems had used liberally. Every time one account was updated, all of the account records had to be updated to preserve the alternate paths. Surprisingly the answer was to create a separate file for each branch.

The IBM personal computers started appearing in my office in 1985, but they were used only by management. They seemed limited to word processing and spreadsheets. Having worked with batch processing applications for years, I still didn’t see why people were so thrilled with Lotus 1-2-3. I figured the admin folks were just glad to see the old Wang word processors go away and force all of us technical types to do our own documentation. I did like the flowcharting program. It was much more fun to use than a pencil and a plastic template.

The business analysts kept throwing around the term “automated platform”. I was working for a bank and it turned out that ‘platform’ referred to any function performed a branch by anyone but a teller. This was where they were going to first utilize the PC’s. I had been working on loan applications and the first to use the PC’s would be Customer Information. CIS had just been an application we fed with loan information. I didn’t realize how important it was in the bank’s relationship with the customer until the big re-vamp of CIS started. The automated platform was going to be a byproduct of the CIS project. It just seemed to take forever to get off the ground.

The first real value I saw of the PC’s use in business applications was when my team started reworking of our loan calculator. We were fortunate to have a business analyst who was a math whiz. He had also learned Lotus, so he had set up Lotus applications that the programmers could use to test the new mainframe version of the loan calculator. By the time I retired from the bank the automated platform was a reality. We had tied networks of PC’s in the branches to the mainframe. Account setup was performed in the branch by the personal bankers. The customer’s existing relationship to the bank was available to the network from the CIS system on the mainframe. Personal and address information was retrieved and could be updated while the customer was present. The PC specialists had worked out a method to distribute software updates to the networks over the T1 lines rather than having someone go out to each branch. We were creating loan documents on blank paper at the PC using stored boilerplates and data retrieved from the mainframes.

In 1988 my sister’s husband got an Apple II GS as part of a bonus from his employer. I ended up buying one for myself because my sister kept calling me with questions that I had no way to answer. I had never touched an Apple computer. I still didn’t want the computer to become a way to work at home so I was glad it was an Apple. I didn’t think it could communicate with an IBM operating system. I bought a 300 baud modem (wow!). Soon I was connected to GEnie (America Online didn't support Apple then) and discovered a bunch of games and applications for the Apple. There were bulletin boards where other Apple users that knew more than me were available to help me out. In fact that was where I learned I was wrong about being able to communicate with an IBM mainframe. Soon I had the appropriate software, was set up on the bank’s security system and now I could manage most of my middle of the night trouble calls from home. The only problem with it was having to logoff the computer to call the mainframe operators at the office. I do not miss dial-up. When several of us had computers at home and were handling trouble calls with them, I convinced my manager to get us a cell phone. It weighed about 5 pounds and had to be carried with a shoulder strap. I also had purchased a PC clone personal computer. It had a 100 MHz processor and 100 mg hard drive. Now I was in the fast lane! That was about 1990.

The personal technology boom started just about then. Cell phones got smaller, personal computers got faster and larger memory, and hard drives got larger capacities. I have upgraded or replaced my computer about 6 times. Megabytes gave way to gigabytes, which will give way to terabytes soon. Communications speeds took off like a rocket. I was a member of a very small group when I bought that 300 baud modem. Now I find it difficult to get through a day without using the Internet and on a cable modem of course. I have become one of Time Magazine’s Persons of the Year! I use VoIP telephone, so no more long distance charges. Cell phones not only allow us to speak to each other, now we text message; take pictures and video then send them to our friends; listen to music downloaded from the Internet and can check our email. Soldiers in Iraq are able to record events and post them on the Internet. We are truly able to communicate around the globe and it is all due to personal computers, cell phones and the Internet.

My grandmother lived through the advent of airplanes all the way up to the space shuttle. My mother never learned to use an ATM. She felt the people of a certain age just could not learn to live with all of this new technology. I vigorously disagree. I feel like I have experienced 200 times the technological advances she was exposed to. I still have a time to experience more. Where will tomorrow take us?