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Our Civic Duty Is to Plant Trees

Fall on the farm is a reckoning and an endpoint, a closing of the books like the end of the corporate fiscal year. When fall arrives, you measure up the year’s crops and projects, report to the stock analysts gathered around the kitchen table, and look at what you have to work with for the year to come.

This fall, the analysts, Rebecca and I, recommended planting a few trees.

There are two fall seasons. One is astronomical. It arrived on Tuesday, the 22nd when, for the second time in 2020, night and day were equal. The other fall season is meteorological, usually starting weeks after the arrival of astronomical fall. This year, it arrived only a day later, or at least it felt that way to me. My grandparents used to say that when the weather changed, their rheumatism warned them. My joints ached when I got up on Wednesday morning and they reminded me of my age all day. I got a flu vaccination on Tuesday, so the aches could have come from the shot. I’ve had a day of aches after a flu shot before. Maybe it was the shot, maybe it was the weather, and maybe it was 2020 taking another swipe at all of us.

Whatcom County summer wasn’t bad. Our rain gauge has been off-line since we moved back to Waschke Road, but our neighbor near Deer Creek hauled in bale after bale of second crop hay this month. A good second crop always signaled a good year on the farm. Several deer have been stealing our son’s apples this summer and Albert the border collie has had more than enough squirrels to keep in line. Life thrives. After a peak following the 4th of July, the covid-19 infection rate has stayed relatively low in Whatcom, although we have had a late summer flurry of infections this month.

The wildfire smoke last week kept me indoors, but the gloom blew away over the weekend and we had blue skies and sunshine until the rain arrived. Still, fall and winter 2020 don’t look to me as if they will be much better than the spring and summer. The covid-19 pandemic has been brutal, possibly the worst year for death in this country since World War II. As I am writing this, we have close to 202,000 dead. The death rate in Whatcom County is not as high as it was in April and May, but it has held fairly steady through August after it plummeted in June and then rose in July. Many scientists predict covid-19 will flourish again in the fall like the flu does when we are driven inside by cooler weather.

There is talk of a vaccine soon, which I balance against equally credible talk that a vaccine won’t arrive until the grass greens up again in spring. A vaccine, or a dozen, will no doubt eventually arrive, maybe even in the next month or two. I’ll jump in line to be jabbed when a vaccine comes, but I liken it to the flu shot I got day before yesterday.

I am not optimistic.

I’ve been getting flu shots every year for fifty years. During that half century, every three or four years I’ve experienced head and chest congestion, body aches, and fever. Flu-like illness, if not genuine influenza. The vaccine doesn’t always work. I read the scientific literature on vaccination now as diligently as anyone. I don’t have a degree in epidemiology or virology, but I used the same types of statistical analysis on digital equipment performance that the medical people use on vaccines, so I have a passing understanding of what I read.

The experts talk about efficacy versus effectiveness. Efficacy measures the theoretical success of a vaccine in preventing disease. An efficacy of 60% means that under carefully controlled conditions and testing, 40% more unvaccinated people will get the flu than an equal number who are vaccinated. Put more practically, you roughly double your chances of avoiding the flu by getting vaccinated against it. Flu vaccine efficacy varies each year, but it bounces around 60%, which is a good enough number for me.

Vaccine effectiveness is a slightly different. It’s more realistic, but less precisely measured. Effectiveness gauges how the vaccine works in a real population where people have underlying conditions, vaccines are not always stored or injected properly, and not everyone gets vaccinated. These conditions are hard to control and compare, making the measurement less precise.

You can’t hold it against the vaccine that medical personnel sometimes make mistakes and people are sometimes sick and don’t always follow advice. Those circumstances increase the probability that you will be exposed to the virus and become infected. Therefore, effectiveness is generally lower than efficacy, but the data shows your odds of staying healthy are still far higher if you get the shot. That doesn’t mean you won’t get the flu, but instead of a yearly ordeal, the flu becomes about as intermittent for you as the Olympics.

Therefore, each year, I roll up my sleeve, look away, and am pleasantly surprised at how little the needle poke hurts.

But I still get the flu sometimes. Some years the vaccine works for me, some years I’m dealt the losing hand.

We know by now that covid-19 has sharper claws, bigger teeth, and jumps from person to person more easily than the flu. Influenza virus, when it kills, almost always asphyxiates its victim. Lungs cease to supply adequate oxygen and death follows. Covid-19 hits the lungs, but it also attacks the heart, veins, and arteries, the liver, and the brain. Autopsies of covid-19 victims show that they can die from harm to any of these organs.

Death tolls are not the only hurt. Covid-19’s damage can linger after recovery. Some victims who cleared the virus months ago still have heart or brain dysfunctions. Young athletes seem especially vulnerable to lingering heart problems. No one knows when or if they will recover or if they will die suddenly on the playing field in years to come.

If I were to get covid-19, my chances of survival are relatively low. I’m obese, I have type-2 diabetes, a heart condition, and I’m old. I expect to see spring 2021, but, realistically, I have to consider death by covid as a possibility.

Of course, I will get a vaccination as soon as one is available to me, but I still remember the many times that I ached with chills and fever from the flu I was vaccinated against.

Even with a vaccine, I plan to wear a mask, avoid indoor gatherings, keep socially distant, and amp up the air purification system in our house.

We’re planting a few trees in the yard this fall. I want to be around to prune them when they need it.

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Cissy Chandler Worked Naked From Home

Folks wonder about dressing for remote work. Cissy Chandler was the wife of Raymond Chandler, the classic hard-boiled detective story writer. She preferred to do housework in the nude. In a letter, Chandler said she felt more comfortable doing it that way.

You don’t have to dress for work at all when you work at home. There is nothing to stop you from following Cissy’s example. Throw on a suitable top for video meetings, or turn the video off, and there you are. Try it. You might like it.

I know myself well enough never to have tried working naked. I’m decidedly not Mrs. Chandler. I wouldn’t feel comfortable at all. If I had my preference, I’d put on clothes to take a shower. But I’ve attended formal meetings minutes after jumping off a farm tractor, sweaty and dirty from hurried work that took longer than I expected. I don’t recommend that either, but I know it can be done successfully and, on occasion, I was glad that I could do it.

Dress in the way that makes you most productive. I tend to dress like a Pacific Northwest junior programmer most of the time: tee-shirt and jeans; perhaps because I hit my productivity stride when coding most of my workday. My east coast colleagues tend to be more formal: collared golf shirt and khakis. In the day, you could spot IBM techs by their white shirt, black suit, and inch-and-a-quarter black tie. I’m not sure how or when Cissy Chandler hit her stride, but she was an artist’s model in New York City before she met Chandler in Los Angeles.

If you have customers, managers, or colleagues that demand a certain style of appearance, by all means, take steps to keep them comfortable. I used to keep a pressed dress shirt, tie, and jacket handy if I needed to make a formal impression in a meeting, putting them on and removing them as needed through the day.

Distractions are the scourge of the class working from home. Offices and other formal workplaces insulate workers from some distractions and promote others. For example, when working in an office, I can’t recall ever being distracted by a passing thought that I forgot to turn on the dishwasher, but I have been frustrated for hours listening to a talkative guy from sales recount his weekend fishing for salmon off Westport while I had reports to write.

Working at home, Westport fishermen never show up at my door to chew off my ear, and Cissy Chandler died before I enter elementary school, but the dishwasher does cross my mind occasionally.

A productive response to the thought of an unrun dishwasher is to continue working to a good stopping place, dash to the kitchen, punch the button, and return to work.

An unproductive response is to call a halt to whatever you are doing, grab this morning’s office coffee mug, do a quick scan of the kitchen for other dirty dishes, put them all into the washer, brew another cup of coffee while filling the dog’s water dish, give the kitchen floor a quick sweep waiting for the coffee to get done, and, a half an hour later, fill a fresh mug, return to the office and try to figure out what you were doing when you thought of the dishwasher.

How to avoid the second response?

Some, including me, use their attire to trigger an attitude that shields them from distractions. I can assume my work attitude any time, but when I have dressed in a certain way (I must have a left-hand breast pocket for my phone and fountain pen), and I have trimmed my beard and put on computing glasses, the work attitude snaps into place almost automatically. I still might think of the unstarted dishwasher, but I won’t allow the thought to take over.

Don’t go out and buy a collection of pocket tees, grow a beard to trim, and get computing glasses to emulate me; you may be able to focus better dressed like Mrs. Chandler. Study yourself as I’m sure she studied herself. Humans love rituals. Make them work for you.

Discover what puts you into a relaxed and productive frame of mind, then do it. Turn the video off if necessary.

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Network Performance

I realize this post assumes more technical knowledge than many of my readers possess. In the pre-COVID-19 era, my grandson Chris and I held free consultation sessions at the Ferndale Public Library to help folks over technical hurdles. We’re working with the Whatcom County Library System to resume these sessions online. I’m in several COVID-19 hyper-vulnerable categories and do not plan to resume in-person sessions until the viral landscape changes significantly, but Chris and I miss our library sessions and hope to get something going online soon.

An image in a Zoom meeting pixilates into a messy checkerboard of colored squares. Or the screen freezes. Or a voice sounds like a chef is chopping it up and throwing it on a sizzling griddle.

These, and a hundred variations, are network performance issues, which, from an engineering standpoint, can be reduced, but never eliminated.

You may find it hard to believe, but these visual and audio burps demonstrate the computer network’s reliability. The web we experience today is an engineering miracle that has transformed a ramshackle collection of unreliable and inconsistently implemented subnetworks into a reliable global service. Unlike a traditional phone connection, which is essentially an unbroken wire from one user to another that either succeeds or breaks, computer network connections steer their own path like a car on a cross-country drive taking detours and switching highways, slowing down and speeding up as conditions change, but never stopping. Instead of failing, the network recovers and corrects itself with these gyrations.

Great. Wonderful. But we all want the broken images and garbled sound to go away.

Here are some fixes. Most are not expensive. 

Network speed check

Start with a speed check. There are many free speed checkers available. Google “free network speed check” and take your pick. Follow the simple instructions (press GO.) In half a minute or so, you’ll get a download and upload rate in MBPS (MegaBytes Per Second). You may also get a Ping time in milliseconds, (ms), but it’s the upload and download rates you want. Most aggravating problems are with downloads. An upload of a large file like a video that takes five minutes is not nearly as painful as a garbled movie image or a messed-up Zoom meeting, which are almost always due to slow downloads.

Note, however, a full-on home office may need fast uploads. Businesses pay extra for fast uploads. If you find yourself losing valuable time waiting for files to upload, a business network connection will cost, but it should solve the problem. Premium residential service probably won’t help.

We have comparatively good network service from Comcast here in Ferndale. That’s because the Comcast infrastructure here is fairly new and reliable. Other areas may differ. At the moment at our house, downloads are about 400 MBPS, upload 20 MBPS. This is good for residential service. Disregard theoretical 1000 MBPS promises. Theory is wonderful, but practice is what you get for your money.

Your internet service provider

If you have speeds substantially below ours, call your internet service provider. (Comcast, Frontier, etc.) Something may be wrong that they can easily fix with a reset or reconfiguration. At worst, they will try to sell you premium service. Ask for a free upgrade. You might get one. For internet service providers, losing a customer is often a greater loss than a free upgrade. Internet service providers often comp and discount freely to avoid completely losing your monthly payment. When 5G cellular comes online your negotiating position is likely to get even stronger.

Secrets

Now, I’ll let you in on a few secrets. Your real performance may depend more on your home network than your internet service provider. If you have a typical broadband connection, you have a modem and router attached to a television or telephone cable coming into your house. The modem separates the computer network signal from the incoming signals and converts it to the Ethernet signal used by your computing devices. The router distributes Ethernet signals to your devices. Almost all residential routers emit radio waves (Wi-Fi) that link the router to your computers, but they also have sockets (typically four) that you can use for cabled connections. These days, modems and routers are usually combined into a single device.

Modem-routers

If your modem-router is old, you might need a new one. In the computer world, newer means faster. If your modem- router is more than five years old, a replacement will almost certainly improve your performance. I use 18 months as a rule of thumb for replacement. If you got your modem-router from your internet service provider, ask for a free upgrade. They want you as a customer.

Wisdom is that you can get a better deal by purchasing your own modem-router, but the internet service providers prefer to support their own equipment and they will fight you on it. You have a legal right to use your own equipment, but, in my experience, the providers are more likely to offer a free modem-router than cease trying to charge you for using your own.

Upgrading the software on your modem-router may help performance and some serious security issues with home modem-routers have been corrected recently with software upgrades. If you can, it’s safer to opt-in on automatic upgrades.

Ethernet cables vs. Wi-Fi

When it’s possible, I use an Ethernet cable rather than a wireless connection to devices. On our home network, a cabled Ethernet connection is ten times faster than a Wi-Fi connection. Cables are their own form of torture, but they perform better.

Our house, which is only two years old, was wired with CAT6 ethernet cables but not set up to use them. When we moved in, my grandson Christopher and I worked on our inhouse cabling. Now, we can plug into wired Ethernet anywhere in the house we want. There are lots of YouTube tutorials on Ethernet home wiring if you have the DIY bent. A few special tools are almost a necessity for DIY, but you can also have the wiring done for you. If the wires are already in the walls, a pro can finish the job in a few hours. Typically, you can add an Ethernet socket to all your television cable outlets.

If you want more connections than the usual four on the router, get an unmanaged Ethernet switch, which will branch a single socket to multiple sockets. Avoid “hubs.” They also multiplex Ethernet connections and are sometimes cheap, but they are old and slow technology. Managed switches are for network engineers, not residences.

In my office I have an unmanaged five-port switch I bought from Amazon for a little over ten dollars. Connected to a single Ethernet wall socket, the switch yields four fast network connections.

If your house is not wired for Ethernet and you don’t want to spend much, you can buy premade Ethernet cables to run on the floor like extension cords from your modem-router. Shop around for cables. Prices vary. Avoid trip hazards, be neat, and don’t use cables that are longer than needed. If you coil the excess, strange interference patterns can cause erratic performance. Use switches to provide more fast remote connections than the four on the router.

Wi-Fi

Typically, you still need Wi-Fi for tablets and phones, although I sometimes use a USB-Ethernet cable adapter with my Surface tablets.

There are some tricks you can try with wireless when you have performance issues. The cheapest and easiest is to move around. Wi-Fi signals pass through most walls, but metal objects, like a water heater or other appliances can slow a signal down. High current appliances like starting air conditioners or furnaces also affect radio signals, which can explain fluctuating performance. Try to locate your modem-router centrally and close to the areas where network performance matters most.

If a Wi-Fi signal is unreliable in the perfect spot for your home office, don’t despair. Current standard Wi-Fi uses two channels: 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. The 5 GHz channel is faster, but it does not penetrate walls well and it has a shorter range than the older 2.4 GHz channel. Routers today default to 5 GHz and reserve 2.4 GHz channel for old devices that can’t access the 5 GHz channel. If your perfect spot is in a remote corner, you may get better performance if you configure your router to use the 2.4 GHz channel for the device you use in your perfect spot even if it will work on 5 GHz.

If your home network covers a large area, you may want to look into a “mesh” system that emits Wi-Fi signals from more than one source. These are a more effective version of the Wi-Fi repeaters that were touted as range extenders a few years ago.

Tri-band routers have two 5 GHz channels and one 2.4 GHz channel. The router distributes 5 GHz devices over the two fast channels. Decreased congestion on the fast channels improves performance. If your biggest problem is distance, go with a mesh. If you have a ton of contending devices, get a tri-band.

Don’t just shrug your shoulders when you have network performance issues. You have a good chance of improving your experience.