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I have learned to live with loss; I suppose we all do at some point in our lives. Today marks six years since my brother Chris passed away.

Loss defines.

I remarked to friends and family in the days after he was gone that everything mattered more. Each choice, each action, each in-action: each would be measured against a more perfect ideal and each would require meaning. After six years I have realized this pursuit is fruitless — I cannot find meaning and purpose where there is not any. I cannot make reason from unreasonable circumstances. I can not make possible the impossible. What his loss has taught me, though, is that I can learn to love and accept and prioritize.

I have made my peace, imperfect as it is, with his loss. I have found meaning in those empty and vagabond days after he left. I learned that I can love for an eternity without condition or possession: that I can love an idea, a memory.

I vowed to teach my children about their Uncle — their Uncle Chris. I talk to my daughter Grace about him each night and she now says his name: Unka Kiss. For now, this is enough.

I miss our shared history. I miss my sounding board. I miss my brother.

With all that I miss, I still have love.

As parents we fill many roles: jester, counselor, disciplinarian, teacher, student. I know children mirror what they see and hear, however, this one has me boggled. I have decided that I am boring. My daughter finds me utterly useless at times and resorts to slapping, biting, and walking away as her attention atrophies. I sing and dance and make a fuss — She could care less. In an effort to keep her entertained we resolved to purchase discrete pieces of high cinema: Shrek was our selection this month. In desperate moments we have purchased Barney, Sesame Street, and Disney — we thought that our friends at Pixar would serve us well. Grace talks. She speaks in short burts, hiccups of speech and single syllable words punctuated by ooohhhs and aaahhhs that make sense to her mother and I. She puts together primitive sentences. We fancy her as bright, gifted. We are proud parents. She is capable of making the “Sh” sound but lacks the “r”. One could imagine her uttering “Shek” or “Shk” or something benign. It would seem that the Grace of God has smiled fondly upon me and laughed: my daughter pronounces “Shreck” as “Cock”. Yep . . . cock. She is proud; she is proud of her new word and the confidence that it brings. She finds it necessary to exclaim it to everyone we see. She says it at terribly inconvenient times: church, family gatherings, stores, walking in public. She will look at you sweetly and say, “I want cock!”. It is precise, clear, and unmistakable. We are mortified. So which am I: jester, counselor, disciplinarian, teacher, or student? I am blessed.

We accumulate things — it seems to be a secondary vocation for Americans. I am guilty of retaining things with little purpose, small sentimental items that I promise to someday give appropriate deference. My wife lost her uncle Mike shortly after her grandmother passed. These consecutive losses weigh on the family, each impressing their own terrible weight upon each who loved them. Mike lived in a cold-water, single room flat in Saint Paul and it was the responsibility of my wife’s siblings and their spouses to help empty his apartment. Clearing the detritus accumulated in a lifetime is a formidable task. In surveying his space I found myself asking why far too often: why would one retain an object like this? What meaning could it have had? I searched for answers as we packed his belongings away. I found scraps of paper squirreled away with wisdom and insight scrawled upon them. Mike suffered schizophrenia — his prose was spare, precise, and biting. His choice of language was curious and engaging. I was distracted from the business at hand — searching for details of a hidden man. I connected with his writing, read it closely and deeply. I searched for meaning, purpose to his endeavors. As the time passed that day I began to understand that I would never really know this man, this enigma. He eluded me. Mike is a wonder. He earned accolades and merits and favor, yet what was most important to him was the love and approval of his family. In considering the dense body of work he left behind it is clear that this was his priority — it defined him. In the end this was his lesson to me.

Christians believe death is a celebration. As a catholic I know it as a sacrament, and having lost my brother five years ago, a reality. My wife lost her grandmother yesterday — ninety-three full years ended on a cold sunny day.

She died on the morning of Saint Patrick’s Day. Her offspring mused that their father could not bear to spend another feast day alone and had called her home — I knew in my heart she would go on this day. The incredulous component: I knew. We all did.

Many came to pay their respects during the wake on Monday. I felt oddly out of place. I had not been in this kind of situation since my brother’s death — my actions during that time were automatic, almost natural and now I felt discomfort and a compulsion to hide myself. I thought it odd that my experience could differ in such vast and disturbing ways. I should know what to say, how to comfort, how to empathise; I feel I came up empty and cool far too often. I have no explanation for my reaction and am unwilling to speculate. I miss Grandma Sully. I miss my brother. This is enough for me.

I will spare you the details of the burial mass as it is an experience which I selfishly protect. It belongs to each who mourn — find your own sorrows if you must.

Grandma Sully is a gift.

I refuse to use the past tense.

While waiting at the gate for my flight to Chicago, I happened to witness the most egregious display of hillbilly social ineptitude imaginable. The gate next to ours was outbound to Houston, and it showed. The usual throngs of neat and durable business people were mixed with toothless, mullet bedecked passengers doing what passengers do best: waiting. Most passed the time in ordinary ways: listening to music, reading, eating, sharing a spot of light conversation. As we surveyed the gate my wife and I were both transfixed by the same victorian sensibility shocking behavior: a man leafing through a copy of Playboy. I admit that I was impressed; it takes enormous brass balls to plop down at your gate, snap into a Slim Jim, and unfurl the Playboy centerfold. As we stared in disbelief, a pair of young women in close proximity to our antagonist expressed their displeasure in an audible and obvious way. In his defense, the man simply stated that the news stand had run out of Sports Illustrated. What else was he to do?

Moshe Bar wrote in BYTE January 2001:

We penguinistas sometimes believe we are having more fun than anybody. But then I lean over the fence and discover the FreeBSD folks are having a hell of a party, too. And their OS is as fast as I have seen. I have to ask myself why I don’t just switch my server to FreeBSD.

After five years I decided it was time to see if he was right. Let me be clear: I am a Linux evangelist and have been for years. I have preached to the uninitiated and shepherded them to the promised land. I have preached to the blunt minded masses, dispelling doubt and sewing hope. I have designed, implemented, and supported solutions built upon Linux and open source. I have converted enterprises from Windows to Linux. Through all of this, FreeBSD remained distant and unapproachable until a few months ago. My co-worker Dave, an avid supporter of FreeBSD, invited me to sit through a FreeBSD server build recently. Dave exhibits an energy when working with Unix that is only rivaled by his passion for Texas Hold `Em, Louis XIII, and date night with his wife. His skill at the console was impressive and his knowledge deep. In a few short hours he had sufficiently demonstrated software installation, configuration, and maintenance. I felt I was ready to try it for myself. Installation was straightforward: carve up your disk how you like, label partitions, format, install, and boot into a working system. Installing packages after the intial OS installation is a breeze. FreeBSD maintains a system of ports, over 14000 open source applications ready for you to utilize. Installation is simple, change into /usr/ports, locate the package you desire to install, and issue a make install clean. After a few downloads, configuration, and compilation your software is ready to use. System updates are cake: because the entire system is source based, a simple cvsup -g -L 2 supfile connects you to a FreeBSD cvsup mirror server to pull down the most up-to-date bits. I am so thoroughly impressed with FreeBSD that it has become my server OS of choice. We recently migrated our core business systems from Fedora Core to FreeBSD — the performance increase was notable and the ease of maintenance and patching with a well designed source based system saves me time. If you have the itch give FreeBSD a whirl you will not be disappointed. Moshe Bar is a regular contributor to BYTE maintaining the Serving Linux section and is also Project Manager of the openMosix Project.

While reading a review during a lull in my TechServices shift, I came across one of the many adverts for VoIP service. This one, however, was special.

VoIP experst???? What the hell? I have tried for some time to not notice errors like this, but my world is rife with them. Technical documentation, once known for its high standards, is no longer. Product collateral and reviews — the same persistent issues: lack of quality and oversight. Perhaps we need to get back to basics. Perhaps we need more copy editors.

We all have lists. Grocery lists, book lists, todos. Some items are for the near term, others for the long. The items on these lists often give our lives dimension, colour. Sometimes they only lend clutter and angst. After the birth of our first child, my fun lists went away and my todo list blossomed into an intimidating hairy green monster.

I resolved to change all of that this evening. I made myself a few small promises: start writing again; be it blogging, short stories, poetry, no more excuses; clean my inbox of the five thousand items that have clogged it; organize my bookmarks into a resource I can leverage. I am pleased to report that I have completed all of these items, which frees me to begin work on my domestic responsibilities. I have atrophied in suburbia: my muscles and mind. I will get back to zero and rebuild. It only takes crossing a few items of a list to get the momentum going.