Who Knew There was an Opposite Counterpoint to the Bucket List?

My next birthday will be my 70th. That is a surreal realization for a former Young Turk, now, apparently, an Old Fart. The grim circumstance of my age group over the past nearly two years is only sadly underlined by the fact that nearly half of my high school buddies are no longer with us. Covid is not the primary cause for these sad facts, but its constant presence is a reminder of our ultimate mortality.

However, for some, me included, getting to this age also means reduced income pressures, with some wealth and the ending of child rearing duties. Those fortunes mean having the freedom and time to pursue lifelong interests or new experiences. When combined with an awareness of pending mortality, these realizations led to the innovation of The Bucket List, made famous in the 2007 movie with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, playing two terminal patients pursuing their last desires. The Bucket List is for those things you want to do or accomplish before you kick the bucket.

I have to admit I have been thinking of the Bucket List of late. I got fascinated with the idea as I assembled up desired travel destinations or new activities like sailplaning or writing a novel. I was surprised that the Bucket List phrase itself, while mentioned a couple of places, really was not popularized until the movie. When talking about it with my family and how surprising the recent vintage of the phrase was, we decided to watch the movie again. We had not remembered well our first viewing. We enjoyed it tremendously with new insights and feeling the second time.  Jack and Morgan have immense chemistry and humor.

It was about this time that I replaced our wooden deck at home with one using the new plastic-wood composites. We have had our current house for 23 years, and every three or four years I had re-stained the deck, which is south-facing and much exposed to the sun. Emerging cracks and incipient decay had been pointing to the need for a full replacement for a few years now. I dreaded the prospect of the replacement — since I had a glimmer of how difficult it might be — but could put it off no longer as this summer approached.

The replacement was way more of a horror than I had expected. In order to retain the deck joists, which were still in good shape with no rot, I decided to remove the old decking and replace it with the newer composite. The old decking had been screwed into the joists with star (T20) screws. However, to remove the many hundreds of screws involved, each screw head needed to be re-exposed after decades of weathering and painting. Bent over on knee pads, each screw took minutes to be chiseled at and picked at in order to expose the star-shaped screw hole sufficient to hold a star bit to get purchase and back it out of the hole. Up-down, up-down, up-down hundreds of times with cracking knees and aching back! My gloved hands ached from the incessant picking and flecking of stuff in the clearing hole. I soon learned the need to use fresh picks and bits in order to hasten the slow process along. The installation of the hidden-connector system for the new composite decking was a chore in itself, but was an absolute breeze in comparison to picking out the holes on the screws. The hours I spent on this job exceeded by many times what I had dreaded from my initial estimates.

The hours I spent over those damn screws kept me muttering to myself, “Never again, never again.” With hours at hand and a mindless activity, I had little to think about except bucket lists and hateful screw holes. It was in one of these mindless states that it struck me that if one could assemble up a list of desired activities before one croaks, why can’t one also assemble a list of activities they will never do again? Replacing decking easily took the first position on my ‘never-do-that-again’ list.

I now had two different lists to think about and assemble while doing my screw-picking. I also kept ruminating on what is the right name for an opposite listing to the Bucket List. When enlisting my family to share in this rumination, it was my son-in-law, Adam, who came up with the label ‘f*ck-it list’. Not only did it rhyme with Bucket List, but it perfectly captured the spirit behind this negative list. Damn straight; f*ck it! Thanks, Adam!

I don’t think it is necessary (or even wise) for me to share all of the actual items on my Bucket List or F*ck-it List. As for the latter, I will say that some additional items on the list include not working for stupid clients again (smart clients are OK) and not moving my own furniture to a different residence. The decking prohibition has the honor of being the inaugural item. Never eating tofu again is also on the list. At 6’3″ with creaky knees, I also am contemplating adding to the list no longer flying internationally in regular economy seats.

Even at my ‘advanced’ age, I am fortunate to still have the cognitive wherewithal to handle two important lists. One good fortune of pending mortality is the freedom to pursue a relatively few things of great personal meaning and importance; that is, the Bucket List. Another good fortune is to avoid doing things that you have hated in the past; that is, the F*ck-it List. So, I say, it is OK to say f*ck-it as you continue to kick the bucket. For every Bucket List yin there is a yang deserving never to be done again.

Oh, and the deck? Well, I think it turned out rather nicely, don’t you? Which is a good way to either add or cross an item off a list, depending on your mode.

Coming Out of an Extended Outage

In the more than 15 years of the existence of this AI3 blog, I never have had an outage of more than an hour or so. Today we come back online after an unprecedented 11 day outage. Woohoo! It has been a frustrating period.

The problem first arose after standard maintenance. We use Amazon Web Services‘ EC2 instances running Linux Ubuntu in the cloud. We had backed up our sites, taken them offline, and were doing what we thought was a routine upgrade from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) to 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa). We had some hiccups in getting the system functioning and re-started, but finally did so successfully. After upgrading the server we waited 24 hours during which all Web sites ran fine. We then proceeded to do local upgrades to WordPress and some of its plugins. That is when all hell broke loose.

Upon restarting the server, we lost all SSH communications to the backend. The AWS status check messages indicated the AWS system was fine, but that the instance was not passing checks. When something like this happens, one really begins to scramble.

We did all of the necessary steps of what we thought was required to get the instance back up and running. We restored AMIs, snapshots and volumes and created new instances with combinations of those thereof. Nothing seemed to work.

After days of fighting the fight on our own, we bought support service from AWS and began working with their support staff. Though there were some time delays (overseas support, I assume), we got clear and detailed suggestions for what to try and do. Naturally, due to customer protections, AWS support is not able to manipulate instances directly, but we got the instructions to do so on our own.

It appears that we may have had a kernel or virtualization mismatch that crept in somewhere. However, after a couple of tries, we did get concise instructions about creating and attaching new volumes (drives) to our instance that resolved the problem. After years of managing the instance on our own, I was pleased to get the degree of response we did from AWS support staff. We can also buy support for a single month and then turn it off again. That is our current plan.

Knowing what we know now, or perhaps being a larger organization with more experience in remote server management, could have caused this outage to be solved in a much shorter time. (We also were not devoting full time to it.) The solution of how to properly move backups to restored volumes attached to new instances is a pretty set recipe, but one we had not baked before.

So, now we are back running. Our snapshot restored us to prior to all of the upgrades, so that task is again in front of us. This time, however, we will take greater care and backup each baby step as we move forward.

This glitch will cause us to go through our existing infrastructure with a fine-tooth comb. That effort, plus the holidays, means I will be suspending the completion of my Cooking with Python and KBpedia series until after the beginning of the new year.

Sorry for the snafu, and thanks to all of you who contacted us letting us know our sites were offline. My apologies for the extended outage. And Happy Holidays! to all.

Enjoying Our First Sabbatical

I have spoken of my wife, Dr. Wendy Maury, a couple of times on this blog. She is a professor of virology in the Department of Microbiology at the Medical School of the University of Iowa, at which she has steadily climbed the rungs over her twenty-year tenure. She has had a successful career, attaining full professorship about a decade ago, while enjoying much publication and research funding success. One of the highlights of her stay was being able to teach our son, Zak, while he was a med student at the medical school. Both of our kids and their spouses are now nearly through their medical residencies. Both kids were greatly influenced by their mother’s passion for science and learning about human diseases.

Watching Wendy over the years I observe it is hard to find time away when one runs a wet-bench laboratory with many students and technicians. There are also grants to write and papers to write and all that comes with teaching and mentoring and peer review and service activities in a university. So, it was something of a surprise when Wendy posed the idea of taking a sabbatical in Norway. We had talked of the possibility many times, but both of our demanding jobs seemed to keep the prospect on the unreachable horizon. And, of the places we had discussed, Norway had not been on the list.

But a colleague of Wendy’s, Dr. James Lorens, had some unique instrumentation and techniques of direct relevance to her interests and a nice set of labs at the University of Bergen. Jim had actually grown up for a time in Iowa City so knew the U of Iowa well. Before we knew it, we had committed to a nearly half-year stay in Norway, where Wendy would accept a temporary position in Jim’s labs at UiB (Universitetet i Bergen).

From that decision in the Fall of 2018 we had about six months to wrap up our stateside activities and get ready to live in a foreign country. That is not an unusual activity for thousands of research and work vagabonds, but it was new for us. We had to shut down two residences, get visas, and make all of the sundry arrangements required for such lengthy stays.

We arrived in Bergen in mid-May, just in time to experience Constitution Day, the most venerated holiday in Norway. Everyone in Bergen — as throughout Norway — dresses in their best finery, including dark suits for the men and traditional dress (bunad) for the women. Parades, marching and drumming, singing, and carousing signal this proud country’s joy and pride of independence. Locals told us they had not seen such glorious sunshine and weather on this day for decades prior. The celebrations were indeed a unique introduction to this proud culture. Fireworks at 11 pm while it was still light caused a phalanx of startled seagulls to stream out from the city center over our house. Drummers and singers passed by our house for some hours after. (I find this drumming business kind of cool, with seemingly at unpredictable times organized groups to single drummers banging martial beats across our nearby park or through town.)

We’ve been here now a month, and I totally love Bergen and its people. Norway is perhaps the wealthiest country in the world, and the people are well educated, sophisticated, and nearly all speak English. The people are happy, ready to break into song at any excuse, and friendly, though not gregarious to strangers. It is an expensive country on all fronts, from eating out to transportation and housing. There is a wealthy class, but class differences seem small. Service staff appear to be well compensated, one of the reasons, I’m sure, for why general costs for everything are high. The Norwegian sovereign fund from the country’s North Sea oil revenues have been wisely invested. The infrastructure in this country is the best I have seen anywhere, is modern, and very tastefully designed.

Bergen is the second largest city in Norway, with about 420,000 people in its greater metropolitan area. It is a maritime city with a climate moderated by the adjacent Norwegian current. Bergen is the gateway to Norway’s fjords, so is also a destination for day cruises, mountain hut hikes, and cruise ships (though those stay down in the harbor area, and are not generally obvious in town). The University of Bergen is a major resource, and students and cultural activities abound. There has been a constant stream of music festivals from classical to rock since we have been here. Last weekend, for example, we saw Mark Knopfler at the 13^th century Bergenhus Fortress, which was a spectacular concert at a most unique outdoor venue.

Bergen is nestled in an interlocking series of inlets and fjords with water and islands dotting the meandering paths to the North Sea. The city is surrounded by seven mountains — sites for a famous local daylong hike crossing all peaks by the intrepid, which took place a couple of weeks back — with the two highest easily accessed via the steep Fløyen funicular (inclined tramway) or a gondola ride up to Mt Ulriken. Local transporation is excellent and clean and efficient, including bus and light rail. The city wisely taxes cars heavily with throughways well segregated from living spaces. Traffic and parking congestion is non-existent. It is the most walkable and liveable city I have experienced.

Bergen’s combination of water and mountains and green vegetation and summer light leads to a gorgeous environment. Combined with the historic buildings, including the picturesque Bryggen heritage site from the period of the Hanseatic League down at the harbor, there is a beauty to the place that is world class.

With the maritime climate comes rain, which we have seen about half of our days here. For only a couple of hours in early morning could one say it is dark outside, but even on rainy or cloudy days there is generally some break in the clouds with blue sky. About half of the days have been warm and sunny and totally stunning.

The university here has graciously provided a garret apartment in a wonderful house for us to live, right in the center of town next to beautiful Nygårdsparken. To avoid the high cost of restaurants, I experience the high cost of groceries as I shop the local marts daily for our dinner. It has been fun to learn about local foods and differences from the standbys from home. Since I do all of our family cooking, and have for decades, I get to experience all of the shopping variety that our new home provides. It is enjoyable and a hoot, though sometimes the localvore experience can be a challenge to create the meals I contemplate.

Wendy’s work is proceeding well, and my own plans for the stay here were to study and research for a new book I am starting. However, it turns out that there is cutting-edge semantic technology and AI work taking place at the university, and I have already given a seminar and begun some collaborations. I have been pleased to meet and have great discussion with Andreas Opdahl, Csaba Veres, and Enrico Motta (temporary appointment from The Open University). There is also a vibrant startup community here doing AI and semantic technologies, including Wolftech and Mjoll. Media is a particular emphasis for these startups.

Bergen also provides a nice jumping off point for travel, especially to Northern Europe. Wendy and I have many trips planned (and some already taken) both to other countries and throughout Norway, We visited Oslo last weekend, and we somewhat duplicated the famous ‘Norway in a Nutshell’ trip on our own. We will continue this cycle of work in Bergen and adjacent travel until our return to the United States in October.

I think I may have had a glimmer of awareness that there was a place called Bergen in Norway a year ago. I generally consider myself to know a bit of the world and have kept many places on a desire-to-visit list. Yet Bergen was not one of them. Our experience so far just goes to show how little we know of the world and its wonders and glorious places. It also shows how being open to new experiences and challenges can bring surprising and unanticipated rewards.

I may post other updates about our experiences as the summer goes on.