Kelly Joyner’s Final Days

From my facebook status update:

Doing all your communication through Facebook forces you to admit to yourself that in the future, no one will give a shit what you had to say now.

Wait, let me go put that on my blog. There, I can still pretend.

Information security is most reliably done in a layered model, a consideration of which fact leads to a couple of interesting economic points.

The basic idea behind the layered model is that several successive security measures must be bypassed before data can be accessed. The outer layers protect large sets of data, like firewalls at the boundary of a corporate network, while middle layers protect sets of machines, like the traffic isolation provided by switched wired networking and VLANs. Inner layers protect smaller amounts of data, like that accessible from a single server, protected by the authentication and authorization infrastructure of the operating system. The innermost layers protect only part of this data, such as GPG encryption on a single data file.

The amount of data protected by a security measure is significant because of a simple fact: it is bad business to spend more money to secure a thing than the thing is worth. There’s no point in building a $500 safe box to protect a $10 bill.

Consequently, the outer layers of a security model, which protect the most data, can and generally do cost the most, since their cost can be amortized across all the data in the company. Corporate firewalls and VPNs and AAA infrastructure have a very significant per-seat licensing, hardware, and administration costs, but since they protect all corporate data, the total cost to protect a petabyte of data for a year is relatively low.

Move toward the inner layers of the onion, however, and because less data value is being protected, both the expected and actual costs drop spectacularly. At the single-server level and below, standard layered security measures are generally available for “free”. They ship with the operating system or are freely available, and the sole cost associated with them is administration, updating the installed base to fix any vulnerabilities found, education of the work force in the proper use of the security tools, and auditing and compliance remediation costs.

Those costs are not free, nor are they particularly low, but, again, they can be amortized over more than one set of data. This leads to the second point:

Because marginal “per-seat” costs at the inner layer of the model drop to near zero, but the administrative and educational overhead stays the same, it is much more economical to use the same security technology for a given layer across the enterprise than to support multiple competing technologies. It also follows that this is more true at the inner layers of the model than the outer.

I just watched Avatar in 3D for the second time, and I’ll say it: I love this movie. I will own it on blu-ray, I will get it in 3D as soon as I can get it in 3D, and I will watch it over and over again until something more beautiful comes out, which I doubt will be very long.

The story is simple, and on second viewing the thick melodrama of the dialogue melts into pure hokum. An evil corporation flies across the galaxy to an alien paradise called Pandora to strip-mine it for unobtanium, a highly-concentrated energy source needed to preserve a dying Earth. The native Na’vi are ten foot tall slender blue humanoids with carbon fiber skeletons, small breasts and serendipitously heart-shaped asses. They live, of course, right on top of the mother lode. The head of military operations wants to take them out.

A paraplegic ex-marine, Jake Sully, remote pilots a human-Na’vi hybrid body like a VR puppet; hence the name of the movie. He’s supposed to infiltrate the Na’vi and come back with valuable data for the military, but instead falls in love with the chief’s daughter and discovers that every living thing on the planet is interconnected together in a huge Gaia network.

If you can’t guess what happens next, I won’t spoil it for you, but if you think you know, you’re probably right. Hint: there will be a spectacular explodiriffic inter-civilization donnybrook. Heroes will do heroic things, and die doing them. There will be a heart-pounding showdown between the hero and the villain. True love will triumph.

Subtlety is not the script’s strong suit, and there’s no nuance in its unabashedly political message. For that some people will love it, and others will hate it. I just think that in fifty years it will make interesting commentary on our times and the less subtle ideologies they gave rise to.

Look, this story has been told a hundred times before, titled Dances with Wolves, or The Last Samurai, or A Man Called Horse, you name it. It’s been told better, but it’s told well here, and the reason it keeps getting told is that it works.

Here’s the thing, though: you don’t care about the story. The story is beside the point. The point is that this movie looks like Cameron hopped in a space ship and flew to Pandora to shoot all of this in camera. Have you ever seen the BBC series Planet Earth? The first half of this film is Planet Pandora, a stunning National Geographic travelogue of this strange world, its flora and fauna and strange native customs.

If there’s one thing I cannot be counted on to attempt objectivity about, it’s exploring lush alien landscapes. I grew up a geeky, galky teenager reading Anne McAffrey and Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle and there is nothing I like more than seeing fantastic alien landscapes and peoples made real, and that’s what Cameron does here. He creates an entire world, an acid drenched world of neon jellyfish  by night that turns technicolor Amazon in the day. He never throws a three-dimensional spear into the audience, or makes things leap out of the screen in disruptive ways, but instead uses 3D to add depth to the scene, as if we are watching a 3D videogram from the future.

The real scene stealers in the movie are the Na’vi, virtual creatures that look so real you want to cry when you see anguish on their faces, as you frequently do. The performance capture technology seen in this movie is like literally nothing I have ever seen before. The subtlety of expression on the face of Neytiri, the Na’vi princess played by Zoe Saldana, is so convincing that you believe it. It looks real. It’s frankly amazing. Saldana’s performance here is her own, refracted through a blue giantess with yellow cat eyes and pale tiger stripes.

That is what is special about this movie. That, and inevitable huge land and air battle between the humans and Pandora. No red-blooded American boy who grew up on a steady diet of sci-fi and comic books can look you straight in the eye and say he doesn’t want to see a giant interplanetary battle full of wrath and pathos. I couldn’t, at any rate.

The story, if resigned to melodrama and derivation, at least animates the retelling with genuine enthusiasm and gusto, trading suspension of disbelief for fantastic visuals and soaring journeys through flying mountains.

The characters could have been cardboard stereotypes (some of which Cameron himself created), but for a host of strong performances by the well-chosen leads. Although, perhaps ironically, Jake Worthington’s performance in a dual role as Jake Sully and his blue alter ego never quite stands up to miss Saldana’s, he creates a cocky, good-natured grunt who is floored first by the jaw-dropping beauty of the world he’s been shipped to, and then by Saldana’s typically spunky, adventurous, passionate chieftan’s daughter.

Stephen Lang has one of the best turns of the film as the head of the military forces on Pandora, and manages somehow to give a cigar-chomping performance without ever actually chomping a Cigar. He really chews the scenery up as the guy you love to hate, and he milks it for every last drop of awesome. Sigourney Weaver’s gruff, cigarette-chomping scientist with a heart of gold is pure vintage Cameron, and Michelle Rodriguez is a similarly strong Cameron heroine who flies choppers and shoots things. Cameron has a good eye for tough chicks, and Rodriguez, like Lang, plays her small but meaty role with all the gung ho gusto she can muster, which is a lot.

If you’re one of those indie drama queens who constantly sniffs about how nobody makes movies at a human scale any more and wonders aloud about whether technology is killing the soul of the medium, you won’t like this movie. This movie is pure Hollywood, a ridiculously expensive mass entertainment whose impact depends on spectacle–but what spectacle! This kind of movie is what Hollywood is about. It brings magic to the movies in a way not seen in years, or, I dare say, since May of ‘77. Kurosawa proved with The Hidden Fortress that a movie doesn’t have to be deep to be great. Go see this one.

My brother and I were driving down the mountain for nearly the last time this morning. We were talking about how I needed to wash my car and replace the small reflector knocked from the front light assembly when he’d hit a deer on a foggy morning. It wasn’t major damage, but it needed fixin’. As we were having this conversation we passed very nearly the point on the road where the accident had happened. We were travelling about 40 miles an hour.

A big buck, maybe a six-pointer, came bounding down the cliff on the right side of the road and froze right in front of my car. I slammed on the brakes and dodged to the left.* The deer hit the car midway down the right fender, and his hindquarters swung around and slammed my passenger mirror into the window, breaking the glass. I got a good look at his face when it slammed antler-first into the windshield as he rolled up over the roof and was gone.

I stopped the car and glared at my poor passenger-side mirror, then looked into the driver side rearview in time to see the buck look around uncertainly and bound off down the hill. It didn’t seem fair, the son of a bitch taking a big chunk out of my car and then getting to bound, too.

Travis rolled down the window and reported a dent in the fender. At the bottom of the mountain I pulled off to the side of the road to check it out. A big dent, maybe a foot wide and eight inches high, but at least a smooth one. The elastic paint on the car had split into a series of parallel ribbons on one side but had not cracked otherwise. Maybe one of those glue-and-suction fix-a-dent kits and a little clear-coat might make it look decent until I can afford a real paint job. Don’t laugh. It could happen.

Irony: it sucks.

*–Thank you, anti-lock brakes and Porsche stability management!

You know what creeps me out about American cheese? It’s individually-packaged slices, how the creases on the slice are always the inverse of those on the wrapper and how it’s obviously cast into it, liquid. This cheese came into being in that wrapper, like some kind of pod creature or Frankenfood.

Or was the cheese melted first, and then poured in? Am I getting pre-melted cheese? Wikipedia will answer this for me. The truth is not pretty.

Things I have learned:

In rich people neighborhoods, it is a bad idea to drive a busted-up car.

In rich people neighborhoods, the mail comes early.

As the Iraq war sort of winds down, I thought I’d point this out, since most people don’t seem to remember it: the Bush administration lied. They said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, that they were working with Al Qaeda, that they were behind 9/11, that we were going there to give Iraqis the gift of freedom, that we’d be welcomed as liberators, that Iraqi petrodollars would pay for reconstruction, and that we could fight the war with very few soldiers (but a lot of expensive equipment). These are, inarguably, lies. The people saying them at the time knew they were lies. Many people pointed out at the time that they were lies, and anybody who did a little investigation beyond watching Fox News or CNN or whatthefuckever could and did find out that they were lies.

As a result of these lies, thousands of Americans are dead. Thousands. DEAD. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead. Halliburton, KBR, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics, among thousand of other members of the military-industrial complex general Eisenhower worried so rightly about are fat on more than seven hundred billion U.S. taxpayer dollars.

If you were one of the sheep I fucking told you about back then, I just want to remind you that I fucking told you so. I want to remind you that you’re a chump who paid good money to kill your friends and innocent people you never even met. I want to remind you that that blood is on your fucking dirty, dumb hands, and that any number of people you called traitors tried to tell you the truth.

Also, fuck you, asshole, you sorry piece of shit.

Try to do better next time.

I know you won’t.

Fucking sheep.

You think I’m kidding, but I’m really not.

Kevin Jordan and his girl Stephanie came out on July 4th, and we barbecued up some buffalo hot dogs and what everyone present claimed without exception were the best burgers they ever had.* The sun set blood red over a very hazy day, and as the valley lit up orange and purple in the twilight, it started to explode. Rockets shot into the air and exploded in star burst, leaving umbrellas of smoke hanging in the darkening sky. All night long, until I went to sleep at two, the valley looked like LA in the opening shot of Blade Runner. We were so far away from the fireworks that at times we would watch the whole show go off in Sunnyvale or Cupertino before the first sound of explosions reached us. I watched transfixed all night. I was reminded somehow of the news coverage from Baghdad at the beginning of Desert Storm.

Garnish with Mexican green onions, tomatoes, and butter-leaf lettuce. I used chopped Mexican onion greens instead of lettuce, and it was full of win. Dress with garlic aoili and serve on a corn-dusted Kaiser roll pan-toasted with margarine. For maximum win, serve with wedge-cut garlic fries, optionally dusted with whole ground chipotle pepper as well.

I remember when I first moved here out to Mt. Hamilton road and saw the weekend and daily bicyclists heading up the hill, most on their way to Lick Observatory. They ranged from the relatively young to the very old, and I thought to myself: those are people in superhuman shape, to ride 40 miles round trip from an elevation of perhaps 300 feet up to 1600, back down to 600, then up to 4300 and repeating the whole thing in reverse. Superhuman shape.

I was right. Dear god, I was right.

Last Monday I bought a 21-speed Specialized Hard Rock mountain bike, about 14 years old and not the prettiest thing in the world but in pretty good mechanical condition. I’d ridden a bike about once in the last decade, but I’ve spent an hour most days on a stationary bike in an air-conditioned gym for the last few months, so it’s practically the same thing, right? Right?

Maybe not quite.

First I went up Mount Hamilton, which is a ludicrously scenic twisty two-lane highway with an average eight-degree grade, and this is, indeed, a pretty good way to get some exercise: go uphill until you’ve reached your goal, then turn around and cool off and air dry on the thrillingly effortless coast back down.

Today, my goal turned out to be about ten minutes uphill, because my seat is, in technical terms, maladjusted and what us bicyclists like to call “a pain in the ass”. In non-technical terms, it felt like somebody was trying to rape my butt with a bicycle seat.

I was having such a good time on the way back down, however, that when I got back to Rose View drive, I foolishly said to myself that I should just ride all the way to the bottom of the hill (1.8 miles and about 630 vertical feet) and see how long it would take me to get back up. I think, basically, I was just really enjoying the terrifying slalom and didn’t want to stop.

I did enjoy it, too, tremendously, watching the valley lit golden in the evening sun, even though in the back of my mind I knew I was going to pay for it.

Here’s the thing: I can’t make it back up the mountain. Well, I can, but not in one go. I had to get off and walk my bike an embarrassing number of times. Partly this is because I haven’t ridden a bike in so long, and never one with so many gears; I learned several things about gear selection on the way back up that would have made things a bit easier. That damned seat didn’t do me any favors either, but in the end saliva was dripping from my lips and my mouth was full of sand and I felt just a little light-headed, so I’m not kidding myself: riding up a mountain on a bike is hard work and it’s going to take me a week or two to even do the little stretch I have to do in order to commute with any kind of panache.

It’s not all bad, though: that walk takes me 45 minutes, and on my bike I made it in 25, although a good bit worse for wear than I’d have been on foot.

I have not written in some while. It is not that I have had nothing to write, but that I have been preoccupied with the doing of things rather than the chronicling of them. I have also decided that I should not rush what I write, but finish and edit them so that they shall be a proper record of my thoughts and experiences rather than a rush that gets only the guts of my experience rather than the flavor of it.

I have decided, however, that I must before long begin to write of this place where I live, a place not an estate but closer to one than any a dirt poor kid from the woods has lived before. If I do not describe these things then when my lease is done and I move somewhere cheaper to save the paltry sum I can save by doing so, my experiences will be lost. I will have only my fading memory to look back on in my old age, and it fails me so often now that I fear it will be worse than useless when the rest of my hair has gone gray.

This place is to me aspirational; the life I live here is the one I will strive to live from now on. It’s a vision not of richness but of aging quality, of sturdiness, simplicity and beauty.

It has a hot tub. A hot tub is a thoroughly middle class luxury, but it’s one I’ve never had before, and mine is built on a platform above my house so that it looks westerly down on the north end of the valley. It is often my pleasure early on a weekend afternoon to turn on the jets so that the water warms, and late on a weekend afternoon to dress in swimming shorts and a t-shirt and Birkenstock sandals, to gather a towel and a beer or a cuba libré and a volume of short stories by Ernest Hemingway or Ian Fleming and walk up the steps to the hot tub.

I can then spend the rest of the daylight warm under the shade of the canopy, reading the adventures of James Bond or Nick Adams while I drink my drink and watch the sun slowly fall down through the sky past the hill to my north, painting in rainbow the waters of the San Francisco bay and burning the clouds off the Santa Cruz mountains. I watch the city and the cities come alive with light, the crickets begin their nightly song.

When I am done I stand in the tub and pull up and over the heavy cover and when it finally thumps into place I feel a satisfaction of a job properly done. I gather my things and step soaking into my sandals, sloshing comfortably in the leather back down the steps, the wind chilling my body as I walk to the kitchen door.

Inside I squish across the tile floor of my kitchen (clean! or an approximation) and turn off the jets in the pantry, then squish some more dripping up the carpeted spiral to my loft, where I shower briefly in my spacious echo tile shower echo room under the hot water, then walk naked around the top floor that is mine and dry myself and look out the windows at the expanse of the valley below, a million twinkling lights with lives behind them and the still glowing pastel stained glass sky above the mountains, and I am content.

The next few years I will not live here, I will venture down into that valley for the small sum I can save by doing so and when I wake up in the morning and look out my window I will see only the house next door. When I watch the sunset from my home I will see if I am lucky some small slice of mountain below the sky. I will remember this place, though, and in time I will live in a place like it again.