Last Thursday, Sylvia started school at Park Spanish Immersion, the local public school for English speakers whose parents want them to learn Spanish. This morning at the school bus stop she taught the whole family a convoluted counting song she’s learned. It’s the kind where you add a motion with each verse, until it’s impossible to keep up without just convulsing randomly. (Not long after cinco, in this case.)

Most districts in the Twin Cities seem to have a Spanish immersion schools, and there are plenty of other languages available in the public schools. You can thank open enrollment, whereby Minnesota students can apply to any school, regardless of where they live. (Busing is only available within one’s home district, though.)

I’ve created a Twitter account, but not just for any old random drivel. Only the random drivel that the kids force me (or Jordan) to say. twitter.com/KidsMadeMeSayIt.

With apologies to Frank Herbert, as well as all of you who actually drink beer.

I’ll have a beer
Beer is the brain-killer
Beer is the little drink that brings total obliteration
I will drink my beer.
I will permit it to pass into me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will drain the inner keg and see its path
Where the beer has gone there will be nothing.
Only I remain.

Recently a worm has been spreading that infects DSL modems. It is a harbinger of things to come. There are all sorts of other internet-enabled devices which are configured through a nearby computer. At our office, we’ve got new telephones that operate on the same principle.

This worm lets itself be known by blocking the most common ports on the modem– essentially blocking network access. That’s exactly what happened sometime between Friday night and Saturday afternoon. And yet, on further inspection, it looks like it wasn’t this worm. For one thing, someone claiming to be the worm’s author claims to have shut it down a week ago. For another, I was ultimately able to determine that both the hardware and software were wrong (but the manufacturer didn’t help.) And finally, the worm apparently attacks only from outside your home network.

This has reminded me of how insecure these network-attached devices are. I assumed I wasn’t vulnerable, now I’m not so sure. In the old days network attached modems, printers, and other such devices were built using custom chips that were difficult to break into either because they couldn’t be updated remotely, or because few possessed the specialized knowledge to program a particular device. These days, these devices are built on top of a standard set of software and hardware which isn’t much different from a PC. Someone who knows how to program Linux has a head start in figuring out how to modify a network-attached device.

Manufacturers assume that as long as administrative access is limited to the local network, the device is safe. My DSL modem even has the administrative password printed on its bottom, along with other information they expect you’ll never change. But there’s no guarantee that a laptop inside the network hasn’t already been infected, and from there it could guess the password and infect the modem.

I’ve been fighting Carpal Tunnel for about two years now, and I still haven’t gotten over it. (That’s one reason I haven’t been blogging much.) Here are a few things I’ve learned:

• Carpal tunnel is a misnomer for what I (and many people) have. It describes a nerve being compressed in the wrist. The problem is, the symptoms are identical to the nerve being compressed anywhere between the brain and the hand.
• That being the case, surgery would do nothing for me. Anti-inflammatory medicine (such as aspirin) can help with the symptoms, and for some that’s good enough.
• You can have CT and also have lots of other problems simultaneously that have the same symptoms. In my case, I have real CT, but the main problems seem to be due to muscle tension compressing all three nerves (median, radial, and ulnar). And it’s tension near the elbows, arm pits, shoulders, and neck.

The symptoms I have aren’t bad, but they are persistent. I’m not worried about the numbness and tingling; I just want to be able to continue to use computers for the next 50 years without too much nerve damage. But for now I’ve given up laptops (or at least I’m trying to) and I’m trying all sorts of things. This week I’ve got one hour of physical therapy (which is really helpful, although I’ve been at it for six months), a massage (which is similar to PT, but less painful), and two visits to a Chiropractor. (Just had my first ever visit on Monday. It seemed to improve my posture, which is important since bad posture is one of my biggest problems.) I also spend a significant portion of the evenings trying to replicate what the PT does. (She gives me homework.)

It’s likely that this will be a persistent battle. Rather than going back to normal, I’ll be doing some amount of self-care for the rest of my life. If I’m lucky, that will mainly involve a few simple exercises, a hot bath every once in a while, and the occasional massage. That wouldn’t be so bad.

Here is the Gettysburg address, illustrated using the first Google Image search result for each word. I considered doing it as a puzzle, but some of those images are pretty cryptic.

Last night I went to www.AnnualCreditReport.com, the site set up by the FTC for checking your credit report once a year for free. That site then sends you to the three credit rating companies, each of which buries links to credit report under a mound of offers for their credit monitoring services.

The worst of these agencies, from a security standpoint, is TransUnion. They require you to create a username and password, plus a password recovery question.

A password recovery question is essentially a secondary password that’s a whole lot easier to guess than the primary password. Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account got hacked into by someone who could guess a few personal details that anyone in her home town would know.

Last year, TransUnion let me create my own password recovery question. This year, they’ve disabled that, so I had to choose from one of their questions. Every single question is something that a high school acquaintance might know about me and could be guessed from public records. Mother’s maiden name. Father’s middle name. High school mascot. The street I grew up on. If you’re from a small town, everyone in the town would know these things about you.

Now consider that you use your TransUnion password exactly once a year. If you don’t choose a good password, for example if you reuse the same password for every website you visit, it’s easy for someone to get a list of all your credit cards, bank accounts, loans, and mortgages. If you do choose a good password, you’re almost certain to not remember it. So the password recovery question is your password. (What’s the right thing to do? Choose a really cryptic password like A2LCA6BVW3 and keep it in your wallet. And don’t mix up your O’s and zeroes or ones and ells!)

So what should Sarah Palin and all the other small-town folks in America do? Go to AnnualCreditReport.com and use the mail-in form.