Void Where Prohibited

Being married normally means someone is wondering where you are at all times. This is not the same as being single and having living parents. Singleness means answering the question of what to do today while marriage significantly reduces one’s freedom and generally requires less planning. Either way, maintaining a healthy body is work - as we age, nothing gets easier. Dating and romance become a distant memory. My mom started a second life at fifty. She was free but unable to pay her bills - exciting for her and terrifying for her family. How she lived through odd jobs and boyfriends is anyone’s guess but that was Mom being her authentic self - scrappy and elusive. She was happiest when making her own decisions and answering to no one. Remarriage meant stability at the cost of being left at home alone like furniture until her fifth husband died. Shortly thereafter, she succumbed to mental and physical decline and her children had to make decisions for her. Which path would you choos

Why trouble oneself with independent thought when God will sort out the winners and losers? Study and experimentation - science, in other words - require gobs of money. Despite their vanity charities, the rich and powerful would rather not smarten up the chumps. It's working for them. "Live and let live" presumes one's opponents uphold the same credo. The devout instead demand "convert or die" and see life as a game of maximizing the number of lives "saved." A bearded white Peeping Tom grandpa in the sky keeps score. When belief is the teensiest bit challenged, the Golden Rule is reflexively discarded for "if you're not for us, you're against us." No, Satan can't fool the heaven-bound! The end justifies the means. Belief covers everything, like flowers upon a mass grave . Centuries after Gallileo risked his life with a telescope to refute the Catholic Church's willful blindless, we stare agape at a United States of

I spent a beautiful sunny day in San Jose with four 90 year old men yesterday: three siblings (including my father in law) and their cousin, all Chinese Americans born to immigrants. Some served in WWII and some in Korea. The closest we got to talking about the military was their visits to the VA. I missed another opportunity to ask about their experience, to apologize, or to thank them for fighting for the future of an empire that withheld rights from Asian Americans and immigrants for centuries. My father was drafted to serve in Vietnam and enrolled in officer’s school. He had the good fortune of being stationed in Georgia in a unit that must have been set aside for kids with connections. They spent their days marching in the woods and destroying tanks. Therefore, I exist. A few years ago, my daughter's choir group sang at a Memorial Day ceremony at the military cemetery in Colma where it is foggy every morning between May and September. Vets in the audience were asked to stan

As this diagram shows, a password consisting of three four-letter words smashed together with camelCase is more secure than 8-character passwords that are impossible to remember. Length is what matters.

How to change the extension of multiple files at once on Linuxish systems: find . -type f -iname "auditTrail.csv" -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do mv -- "$file" "${file%csv}zip" done

I miss Grandma’s smile and her trademark greeting: “You look so good!” You might not have looked your best, but she meant it. Grandma was happy to see you because she genuinely enjoyed the company. Grandma was always up for adventure. She looked forward to her great grand daughter Kate’s birthday parties, musicals, and school promotions. Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to make it to Kate’s high school graduation but she attended a musical during Kate’s senior year. From my childhood birthday dinners to Pam’s bridal shower to Kate’s first birthday to Kate’s last year of high school, Grandma was always there. She made every event better with her enthusiasm and cheerful, engaging conversation.  When served food or a glass of wine , she would always declare: “This is so good!” Thank you Carole, Dad, and Caryl Anne for making sure GG was part of Kate’s life. In keeping with Grandma’s generation, she was also a tireless worker. She did everything she could to help win the Second World War. Sh