This year’s pumpkins

This year’s porch pumpkins were carved tonight. Sweet spouse Linda did the hard work and cleaned the pumpkins (thank you dear!). Given my current reduced motor skills, this may not be the best job we’ve ever done. But this has been an important family ritual for as long as I can remember. John and Julie […]

The day 1K bug

Apparently, the Mars Rover designers did not anticipate their craft would endure much beyond the 90 days of the original mission plan. As both Spirit and Opportunity came up to their 1000th sol (the Mars day, consisting of 24 hours, 39 minutes, 35 seconds), engineers realized an upgrade would be necessary: the machine’s day […]

A good time and place for a brain tumor

Judging from the number of friends, acquaintances and strangers who have relayed their experience with brain tumors, I’ve picked the right decade and place to have one. A woman in SF wrote that her oligagiloma was removed at Stanford more than a decade ago: a friend-of-a-friend documented 2 relatives’ return to health and active lives, […]

A World HQ upgrade

The really big news today is that yesterday, on our Fry’s trip, John and I picked up a sweet 20-inch Apple Cinema display. Linda has transitioned in the past few months from a mostly TV viewer to a mostly Net surfer, resulting in me being largely kicked off the dual G5 Mac with it’s 23-inch […]

The ‘world’s most secret blog’ revealed

It’s Sunday morning, and a pleasant day stretches ahead. I’ve got a bunch of projects planned: some writing, a much-needed cleanup of the ‘World HQ’ and moving my secret blog to a public URL. Michael Matze, our family counselor who has helped me through past difficulties, has encouraged me to work through current trials by […]

Thank you…

Please know that I am all but overwhelmed by the kindness that daily comes my way in the form of phone calls, email, blog comments, mail and postcards (not to mention the wonderful meals that have shown up on our doorstep a couple times now). From (literally) Berlin to Tokyo friends and colleagues from current […]

Thinking about current life and times while strolling on a beautiful day

Just back from a very pleasant walk around Stanford corral and golf course with faithful Australian Shepherd Cassie. It’s a beautiful, crisp autumn day, the sky is deep blue and cloudless, the oaks and eucalyptus sparkle in sunlight that is starting to take on its winter mantle as the sun gets lower in the sky, […]

Brain as walnut

Bruce Sterling’s brain/walnut analogy would seem quite apt, given the appearance of the MRI below. It really does look like a walnut in this particular image slice. Some of the other slices look very different…

My brain, and some news about same

So, as promised, here is a Magnetic Resonance Image of my brain taken last Friday, October 13. The view is from below as it were, and the perspective is such that the hemispheres are reversed - that’s the right hemisphere on the left, and you can probably see a bright oval something there, wherein lies […]

The Paperless Project produces some positive results

A while back we decided to do something about the drifts of paper that tend to collect, over and over again around gulker.com’s ‘World HQ.’ No sooner do we dispatch one batch of mailed and faxed documents, but another one seems to spontaneouly grow. Finding these documents, on those rare but vital instances when […]

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