Monthly archive: November, 2008

Foxes in the Henhouse

28/11/2008, by 4 comments

Last month when I tried to transfer money from our bank account to our hired man’s by Internet I was met with a message: You do not have a Clave Dinámica, a Dynamic Key, and this transaction cannot be processed. It was the middle of the month and I needed to pay José’s salary. Obtaining this Dynamic Key required going to town and applying for one in person. So what is this thing, I wondered, and why, oh, why are they making me jump through yet another hoop in the endless Dilbert maze of bureaucracy?

It sounds impressive: Dynamic Key. Like something Superman might use to lock away Kryponite. Or, something you might get inside a cereal box when you were a kid. Or, maybe something that might prevent fraud.That remains to be seen.

Eight days ago the sub-director of the Dirección Inteligencia y Seguridad Nacional (DIS) was arrested. Roberto Guillen Solano along with eight others are accused of syphoning off over two hundred million colones ($500,000.00) from various bank accounts here in Costa Rica.

Now let me begin by saying that the DIS is the Costa Rican equivalent of the United State’s National Security Agency (NSA) and are in charge of… well, the nation’s security. According the one national newspaper, La Nacion, “The DIS is an agency under the Ministry of the Presidency, whose main function is to carry out intelligence work for the government on security matters.” They have full access to a whole spectrum of data on the country’s residents and foreigners who live here. Me, among others. The database (Datum.net) was apparently used to pilfer those who had so much money in their accounts they wouldn’t notice if $2,500.00 or so went missing. That would not be me. I never keep that much money here. I don’t even have that kind of money. So I don’t think they targeted me, but who knows?

Here’s how it worked. Last year Mr. Guillen apparently used his access code to gather information from Datum.net not only from his office but also from his house, according to La Nacion. Through the portal the group obtained peoples names, cedulas (Costa Rican Social Security Numbers), bank accounts, properties owned, vehicles, and other helpful information. They then simply forged checks off those people’s accounts. Pretty brazen. And why they thought they’d not get caught, I have no idea.

Apparently, from what I can glean from news reports, again from La Nacion, Datum.net was a subscriber database and members were issued monthly statements showing who had accessed their accounts in the past month. Mr. Guillen’s name, or code, reappeared over and over. Duh! And this was the sub-director of the agency entrusted with Costa Rica’s national security. It doesn’t bode well for the country, I’d say. The director of the agency was apparently away–– on vacation–– in the USA at the time of the arrests.

But the most appalling thing about this whole mess is, all but two suspects have been released from jail pending trial. They have been told to check in with the attorney general’s office once a month and not contact the other suspects. Two of the suspects have been detained, because they “have a history.” The sub-director of DIS, an official from the phone company, who supplied cell phones for the group, and a lawyer, whose office was used for meetings, are all walking around scot-free.

I now have a Clave Dinámica and I can use it to transfer money from one account to another. It is a plastic card about the size of a business card that has a grid of numbers on it. When completing a transfer I am asked to enter the number corresponding the the intersection of A-1, for instance. There are three sequences of these and then the transaction can be completed. It’s not fool proof. Who knows when another ring of these types will show up and one of them happens to work at the bank and has access to my Dynamic Key and its numbers.

Blog contents copyright © 2005-Present SC Morgan. All rights reserved..

Let it Rain!

26/11/2008, by 7 comments

All went well on my return flight from Oz… until I arrived in L.A.

In Sydney, I waited endlessly at check-in but wasn’t concerned. Traveling is all about Being In Transit so it really didn’t matter to me if I sat on the plane, sat on a bench, or stood in line. At least in line I gave my derrière a rest. The check-in clerk was polite and asked how things were going. We had a brief chat about Obama and how the election created a sense of hope around the globe.

When we wrapped up he said, “Let’s check your ticket, shall we?” I agreed that that was what I was there for.

“Well,” he said, “it looks as though someone has upgraded your seat assignment. Let’s not look too hard into how that happened, shall we? I’ll just go ahead and check you in.”

My mysterious upgrade landed me in something Qantas calls Premium Economy, which turns out to be the equivalent of USA air carrier’s First Class. It was the luxe treatment: extra room to recline further, a foot rest, WIDE seats, a fluffy pillow, a blanket with a sheet stitched to the backside, decent food served with cutlery and linen napkins. The luxe! I arrived in L.A. 16 hours later, rested and ready for the second half of my journey.
 
The L.A. airport is a bit like the city itself; on first glance it appears glamorous but the further into the depths one descends the more tawdry it becomes. The bathrooms were–how can I say this?–grungy in a third world kind of way. They did have toilet paper on the rolls, but the whole place appeared to have been trodden down by thousands of human souls doing their business. And even though I washed my hands, I left feeling only slightly dirtier than when I entered. The kind of place where you check your shoes when you leave to make sure you are not trailing a piece of toilet paper behind you down the concourse. L.A.

At my gate (62) I discovered, along with my fellow travelers, that our plane was still in the hanger, having “repairs.” There would be an update in one hour. They would be happy to help with connecting flights but their computers were down so would we please form one line and wait. And, thank you for your patience. The woman in front of me had none, thank you, and badgered and bitched about the delays, went to other gates to demanded seats on flights, returning to bitch more to her husband, who seemed fairly unconcerned. She let all within earshot know that he *had* to be at a board meeting in Little Rock, Arkansas, at eight o’clock the next morning. No one seemed impressed.

The agents eventually called those of us with connecting flights to Costa Rica to come to the head of the line. YO! That’s me! Two of us sprinted to the desk and received tickets on the next flight out, allowing us about 40 minutes in Houston to dash to our connecting flight. And, so I made it. Home.

 And now I am stuck here.

Alan met me at the plane and that was grand. Never has a hug felt quite so complete. I always feel connected to Alan whether we are together or apart but I much prefer to be “next.” Next is where I belong. We stayed in San José for a day and met with our lawyer to catch up on the details of our legal situation here. Don’t ask.

We arrived home to discover it had been raining. I don’t mean a shower or a thunderstorm. I mean Rain, with a capital R. All the rivers coming down off the Braulio were swollen and had torn bushes and banks with them as they rushed toward the sea. They ran brown with mud. We bypassed Limón but heard that the storm surge had breached the sea wall, flooding the lower part of the town. Down along the Caribbean there were places where the sea had thrown trash up onto the beach, and in some sections, where the road is close to the sea, it had thrown debris across the road.

 Puerto Viejo looked like a mongrel dog. Wet and bedraggled, the muddy streets bore few signs of tourism. I imagine most of them fled at the first signs of bad weather. There were a few stragglers sitting in the bars, but not many.

It rained all night Friday night. The kind of deafening rain that makes conversation almost impossible. Our porches were soaked and we wrapped up the furniture and pulled in the cushions. Nothing to do but wait it out. The power went out about 7 PM and then was on and off all night. I have to hand it to the guys from the electric company, I.C.E.. They worked their asses off keeping us connected.

The next morning we had the electricity back. That was the good news, the phone was gone. Our potrero was full of water and it was still raining. The water was 50 meters from our house. Our house is raised on meter high posts so we weren’t overly concerned. One of the good things about listening to your neighbors before building in an area you are not native to. We heard it endlessly when we were thinking of building:

Never build your house under a tree. Never build your house next to a river. Never build your house at the bottom of a hill. Always build your house on post, and make it high.

Saturday we heard the bridge at the entrance to Puerto Viejo was washed out and one of the two back roads to Bribri was gone as well. The one left is only suitable for 4-wheel drive vehicles. The news today is of extensive flooding across the Caribbean slope. The footage showed people huddled on roofs of houses while they waited to be rescued by boat and taken to shelters. All vehicular traffic has been halted except for emergency use. We are at a stand still.

I am grateful for a solidly built house and a good roof. It is still raining as I write this, but it has subsided to a respectable drizzle. My dear father-in-law––rest his soul––would have called this rain, but he came from North Dakota and didn’t know rain from Rain.

Alan and I are cuddled up in our house, warm and so-far safe. Our phone lines are still out and there is no traffic on the road. We will know when they get the bridge repaired when we start seeing cars pass by. For now, it’s a bit like the “old days” when we went for days and sometimes weeks without light. It’s quiet and peaceful with only the sounds of the jungle and the rain. Like white noise it calms the soul and eases the mind, especially if you are dry.

I will give thanks on Thursday, and give food and clothing when I hear of an effort to do that for the homeless.

(my connection is too slow to post photos right now. Maybe later I’ll post a picture of the Puerto Viejo bridge that went out during the storm.)

Blog contents copyright © 2005-Present SC Morgan. All rights reserved..

Seven Wheelchairs: A Life Beyond Polio

13/11/2008, by 4 comments

Gary Presley took his last physical steps in 1959 when he was only seventeen. He contracted Polio from the Salk vaccine. It’s ironic that he got it from the last in the series of immunizations meant to protect him from the very disease he contracted and it happened the very year that the Sabin vaccine, much safer than the Salk, was trial tested. Since then Presley has used a wheelchair to get around. In fact, he’s gone through seven of them. Today he is a writer and mentor, an editor of the Internet Review of Books, and an activist in the disability community.

It’s been a long journey.

His memoir Seven Wheelchairs: A Life Beyond Polio, published this year by University of Iowa Press, tells the story of his pilgrimage from innocent victim to angry and defiant adult, and ultimately to an accepting, if somewhat battered, philosopher. In his own words:

“...cynical and unfeeling, a burnt-out case, which I attemptedattemptto explain away by saying I survived then and I survive now by mating an ignorant combination off existentialism and stoicism, by becoming a peculiar bastardized oddity rolling about the world, forever dependent.”

I found this book fascinating on many levels. I am Critical Care nurse by training and the book is an in depth look backward at the treatment of Polio. I am old enough to remember Stryker frames, used to rotate paralysis patients in the ICU, but the Iron Lung was obsolete long before my nursing career began. Presley’s descriptions of “the can” and the treatment he received in hospital are riveting.

I know from personal experience that many events that happened in his hospital stay would not be tolerated today. Nursing has come a long way since the 1960s. Simple acts such as turning a patient on a regular schedule would be done regardless of how reluctant or combative the patient might be, and Presley, by his own admission, was no easy patient. Anger and helplessness make for combative and frustrated patient. Sudden and irrevocable paralysis, a sentence.

In the years I took care of new paraplegics and quads I always tried to engage them to talk about their frustrations. Perhaps it takes as long as it has taken Presley to get to the root of the issues, to open up and speak the truth about himself as well as the world of “Crips.”

Not only does he give us a look at treatments that now seem antiquated, but he uses his memoir to underscore the importance of the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. How it changed, not only his world, but the world of thousands upon thousands of disabled people in the United States. Presley uses the words Gimp and Crip to describe himself and his fellow travelers, but don’t ever let him hear you use the expression “wheelchair bound.” For him and others in the disability world wheelchairs liberate rather than imprison.

But fundamentally this memoir is a universal look into what disables us and what empowers us, regardless of whether we ride a wheelchair or not. As we travel the road with Presley we begin to see ourselves in his agony and frustration. We are all crippled to a degree by whatever limits our lives. What we do with that is how we ultimately live. Simply put, in Presley’s words: “Of course, it is madness to regret what cannot be changed, and I now have learned to keep the madman locked away where he cannot hurt anyone.”

This is the trap door where we store our anger and blame once we have the maturity to understand that we are responsible for how we choose to live our lives. By the end of the memoir we watch Gary Presley find work, love, parenthood, and a life without rancor. “The paralyzed man miraculously found the ability to turn the other cheek, “‘to live each day fully and gracefully.’”

Some people might be afraid to pick this book up. Those same people might also be afraid to look hard into their own lives. Seven Wheelchairs: A Life Beyond Polio is a book that is educational on a political and social level as well as a personal one.

It is well worth a read.

Blog contents copyright © 2005-Present SC Morgan. All rights reserved..

A Quasi-technotard in Oz

09/11/2008, by 2 comments

My trip to Oz––Australia for the uninitiated––included 20 hours travel time in one fell swoop. Wednesday, October 22, I stumbled to the airport at 5 AM, Costa Rica time. The flight left at 7 AM and got into LAX about 5 PM that night, with a brief four-hour layover in Houston, Texas. Might as well see as many airports as possible in one day.

The Qantas flight left LA about 11 PM. I Arrived Friday morning, October 24, in Sydney. I have no idea where Thursday went. I gather I get it back on my return trip, arriving in LA two hours before I left Sydney. If your head is spinning, imagine mine.

This loss and gain of an entire day belongs in the same folder where I store my understanding of how the Internet works and where emails go when they are sent. I am better than Ted Stevens, though. I don’t think the Internet “is a series of tubes.” I know it works, or most of the time it works.

But what about the screw up at Heathrow airport a couple of months ago where 80,000 bags were “misplaced” in a 48-hour period? Let us hope I am not shunted off into the the Misplaced Passenger Warehouse in Milan to be sorted out and returned. Although, a side trip to Italy might be nice.

In any event, after 17 hours in a plane, packed like small fish in a tin, I was glad to get out and greet spring Down Under. The jacaranda is in bloom here so brick houses in sandstone colors of the Outback and red tile roofs poke through the greens of eucalyptus, palms, and billowy clouds of pale lavender.

I was met by my son-in-law, Tim, in his hybrid Toyota Pyrius. The combination of the silent “motor” (battery, actually) and driving on the left was a bit disconcerting so early in the morning, but I have been on the “wrong side” of the street most of my life so driving on the left seemed fitting somehow.

The next few days were spent getting my legs under me and tending to my son, who arrived a few days before from Japan for medical follow up, and to my daughter, who was freaking out because of many things. Read her blog for further details.

Soon we all settled into a routine of sorts. Sam and I would head off to the pubs to watch the World Series between his doctor visits and physio rehab for his botched ACL repair- long story, that. In the evening I cooked dinner and helped maintain calm. We are all staying in a rather small flat sharing space, stories, and modern technical knowhow.

I always enjoy hanging around my kids who are of that computerized generation. What are they called? GenX? Makes a person wonder what they will do after GenZ. Gen(2)A?

I am not a complete technotard when it comes to computers, though. I act as my own “techie” in the jungles of Costa Rica. I once had to troubleshoot my router/ wireless system and was able to fully confirm that it was, in fact, dead without sending it into Apple for a confirmation. It took a lot of Internet searching, forum entries, and downloading of analyzing software, but I did it. I have installed and de-installed software, repaired fractaled screens (after that I learned to turn it off during thunder and lightening storms)and several other techie items.

The last few weeks have been fun, learning about all the things available out there in this ever-more-connected Techie World.

Sam was traveling light when he left Japan and did not bring a computer with him. Instead, he was using his sister’s. This created a bit of tension in the apartment as she uses hers for work. Meraiah has just quit her job at AP to become a freelance writer for NYT/IHT (one of the many things on her plate she was freaking out over). Programs he installed on her laptop were slowing down the processing speed, but tended to accelerate her temper, so I moved him to my Mac laptop. This is how I learned about Slingbox.

Sam is an avid sports fan and has figured out a way to watch U.S. sports while living in Japan. He first used a cable package but discovered all the programs were in Japanese. Plus, they would simply cut off the play if the game ran over the allotted time. (Bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, one out… click… gone. Very frustrating.)

Slingbox is an amazing device. Created by a couple of nerdy guys from the Bay Area (now worth millions), who wanted to watch their favorite team when on the road, the device is hooked up to your TV set (or someone’s TV set) and then broadcasts all of the content over the Internet. Sam is now able to watch stateside TV on his computer from Japan. I suppose he could do it from an iPod as well. He also has a router that transfers files from his computer to his TV. Amazing, to say the least. I have no idea how all this is accomplished, but I now have Sling Player on my computer.

I also had installed, courtesy of Sam, a program that allows him to access his computer’s desktop remotely from anywhere in the world. Once installed on my Mac, Remote Desktop Access allowed him to view his own PC desktop, open and close files, look up items in his address book, and numerous other activities (even search for those missing bags from Heathrow?). Makes me think I’d better beef up my security and firewall.

Ever read Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon? It’ll make the hair on the nape of your neck stand straight.

Blog contents copyright © 2005-Present SC Morgan. All rights reserved..

YES WE CAN!

05/11/2008, by 3 comments

Welcome to your place in history, Barack. You earned every vote. Congratulations to you and to David Plouffe, who I believe ran the most impressive political campaign in my memory and perhaps in the history of American politics.

Blog contents copyright © 2005-Present SC Morgan. All rights reserved..