I hadn’t really planned on posting something today for my birthday. I’ve got the weekly thing going nice and steadily, and I’m behind on my fiction, so I was just going to maybe jot a little bit here for the week’s post and go on.
A high school friend of mine died this morning. George and I weren’t best friends, but once I caught up with him a few years ago on FB, we stayed in touch there. He was one of the other Michigan fans from my hometown in SE Ohio, so together we weathered the jibes and jokes and grief from all of the aO$U fans back home.
I had a rough time in high school. Lots of teasing and some bullying too. But George was a safe person for me. He’d say hi and ask how I was.
He was diagnosed with liver cancer just a few weeks ago. Less than two months. H
Cancer sucks.
Folding
I’ve lost far too many friends and family members to that bastard of a disease.
Want to help fight cancer?
You can throw some money at research if you like. And I’m not discounting the work the various organizations do. But the reality is, most of us can only donate so much.
Absolutely, your $25 or $50 will help to an extent.
But what if you could do something more tangible?
That Wiki article mentions distributed computing.
I’ve talked about Folding@Home before. F@H is a distributed computing system that allows medical researchers to run powerful simulations across multiple computer systems. Your computer has unused power because even when you’re surfing the web or working on a spreadsheet, you’re probably only using 20-30% of your system’s power. Even if you’re streaming, you still have a lot of power in reserve. Distributed computing uses that power by running in the background, waiting to see when you’re not doing hardcore computing. You’ll never even know it’s there.
You can read more at the F@H website and download the client there. If you’d like to join a team (you don’t have to), my team, the Quiet Professionals, is 234447. I usually “crunch” or use my computer cycles for Alzheimer’s research, but this week, in honor of George’s memory, I’m working on cancer research.
Birthday Stuff

Yeah, today is my birthday. 59 celebrations of twelve periods between successive new moons since my parturition. Last night I celebrated with most of the family by extinguishing an inappropriate number of paraffin-coated pieces of oxidizing braided cotton inserted into a bakery product while they serenaded me with the species growth incantation. I did receive one sacrifice though it was not wrapped in a cellulose product.
I’m fond of quoting Jimmy Buffett, in part because he had so many good things to say. An appropriate birthday quote appears in “Changes In Latitudes, Changes In Attitudes:”
“Yesterday’s over my shoulder, so I can’t look back for too long. There’s just too much to see waiting in front of me.”
For all the complaints people have about Buffett’s lyrics, he really wrote a ton of touching and wonderfully philosophical words in his songs, and that line is one of them.
I have a habit of focusing on the past. I explain it away sometimes by saying it’s because I’m so interested in history and story and so forth. But I more than occasionally have the wrong focus, where I choose to concentrate on what’s happened to me rather than looking ahead. I’ve come to the realization—multiple times, sadly—that if I pay more attention to the things I’ve learned from Jimmy, my life might get better.
Of course, that thought sends me down the rabbit hole of wondering what my life might have looked like if I’d learned that lesson back in 1983 when I first heard that song.
I’ll leave you with another appropriate JB song that I often share with friends on their birthdays. Here’s the audio on the official JB channel, but I like the video better.
Image by Michael Bußmann from Pixabay
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