Exploring the Complex Reasons Behind Madge Networks' Downfall

There I was shooting the breeze with an old mate. The conversation turned to why Madge Networks went titsup. My analysis is that Madge Networks had a solution and decided to go out and find a problem. They deferred to more incorrect strategic technology choices. The truth of the matter is that when something goes titsup, its not because of one reason only, but a myriad of them all contributing to the negative consequence. There are the immediate or visual ones, which are underpinned by intermediate ones and finally after digging right down, there are the root causes. There is never a singular root cause for anything but I'll present my opinion and encourage everyone else to chip in. All of them together are more likely the reason the company went titsup.

As far as technology brainfarts go there is no better example than Kodak. They invented the digital camera that killed them. However, they were so focused on milking people in their legacy film market that they never saw the tsunami. That tsunami also dealt a killer blow to another innovative company named Polaroid. Madge was a pre-cursor to Kodak and Polaroid. They perfected Token-ring and should have moved to developing silicon for future Ethernet and WiFi networking kit. Instead they went to merger and acquisitions but lacked the savvy skill in the disciple that Cisco mastered. Ironically, Cisco did make an offer to Madge Networks which wasn't accepted. As they say in this part of the savannah, “Eish!”

My first encounter with Madge Networks was in 93/94 installing the FDDI adapters into Netware SFT III servers. Only adapters that worked without crashing the system. From that day I was a Madge fan.

Any conversation about this topic requires discussing the “Switching to ATM” strategy. The reasoning was clumsy, but sounded sophisticated at the time. In essence it was backing the wrong horse. It was complicated and did not address the market for the desktop. The silicon for desktop connectivity was never going to be ATM. At that time there was also the Token-ring versus Ethernet debate. The conclusion was that Ethernet won but in actual fact users actually opted for wireless radios for their desktop networking instead of a clumsy wired connection. WiFi beat both Token-ring and Ethernet and most computing devices don't have Ethernet. Think smartphones and laptops. Ironically, the Ethernet technologies today have more attributes of Token-ring than Ethernet as on the fibre side the standards all have their origin in FDDI. (Remember FDDI???) As an aside, one of the most stupid legacy defaults from Ethernet is it's pathetically small frame size. Token-ring was designed far better on so many fronts and this was one of them! BTW: Nowadays you get Ethernet rings as specified by G8032. Taking about rings, another great attribute of Token-ring was source route bridging. It was miles better than Ethernet which only had pathetic transparent bridge. Token-ring allowed the creation of a far larger layer 2 domain without melting down due to broadcasts. Ethernet was forced to layer 3 to achieve equivalence.

All that effort in making a Token-ring MAC in hindsight could have best been used by Madge in leveraging the acquired silicon developing expertise to climb on board the storage networking bandwagon that was about to hit. The underlying requirement was for high speed storage (never video or the other Jet Jetson technologies that was going to drive ATM). One of the driving attributes of ATM was that it had QoS. However, it wasn't the only way to solve it. Using higher level protocols it was possible with Ethernet to have RSVP that did the same thing. And the silicon was way cheaper, as the cost reduction of Ethernet had already been progressing for a number of years. Nowadays, most multimedia traffic that requires prioritization uses Diffserv. Not really a sophisticated QoS as defined by the ATM standards but it does the job.

Somewhere in the late nineties some pony tail decided to change the Madge corporate identity. A change in corporate identity never works and never increases sales. No company has succeeded, but yet companies all try it. The only people who make money are the marketing agencies hired to do the job and the company that self inflicts itself with this dumbass decision goes backwards. The classic case is Coke with its new Coke strategy. Luckily they had enough bulk to reverse the mindless exercise. Whoever, at Madge decided that it was a good idea to go from lightning bolts to brown cardboard boxes, take note, it sucked. Never mind that the logo went from unique to bland.

And then that LANNET acquisition. Strangely, enough when I spoke to them later they always said they were an Ethernet company. I think Madge Networks heard what they wanted to hear and put a square peg in a round hole. They wanted them to contribute an Ethernet component to their ATM ride.

Now before I went to work at Madge Networks I worked at Network Interface Consultants (NIC), a Novell Netware reseller. Netware also went titsup. Novell, was also known as the Big Red. In the early nineties my first LAN installation were done using IBM PS/2 servers running LAN Manager from IBM on token-ring. I then started work at NIC doing Netware installations. I started on Netware 3.11 but often had to support Netware 2 installation. This was the days of DOS and OS/2. It was the days before the Internet where drivers updates and bugfixes were downloaded from a BBS using 9.6k baud modems. It had to be a US Robotics and I can safely say I spend more time with that modem than anything else. All software came shrink wrapped. The Novell Software came in a Big Red box, shipped freshly shrink wrapped from the Mormons.

In primary school my parents gave me a Kodak Instamatic camera. It was a very popular camera and I took a number of pictures along the way. I was never an expert photographer and to this day take grainy out of focus pictures. But along the way I captured memories. It was a neat little gadget. The manufacturer Kodak created the digital camera, but instead of trying to convert their film business, they milked it. When the conversion came the company went titsup. Ironically, that Novell with Netware have a similar reason as to why they went titsup. Also the same as Madge Networks!

But back to the early nineties where I was working for the the previously mentioned Big Red box reseller in the leafy burrows of the man-made forest of Jozi. Big Red was the Ferrari of networking in those days! The reseller received special status and more discount based on the training and certification of the people employed by them. I thus undertook self-study for CNE and ECNE certification. My boss was real shirty, never paying for in-person training. Here is my certificate. I had to do a conversion to MCNE but that piece of paper has gone missing.

We were driven by sales and more customers started asking for Microsoft Windows file and network servers. I became a part time trainer to pay for the costs of the certification from Microsoft. I also made a bit on the side.

Soon the Microsoft business increased and the Novell business decreased. But that doesn't explain why Novell went titsup. Novell had two great assets: they owned UNIX and understood the pre-cursors to hypervisors. Instead the went into a battle with Microsoft on the desktop, It did not end well. Their file system was totally reusable in a virtualised world. It never happened.

But the biggest reason I think Novell went titsup is that they did not get the Internet. They went down into the desktop gutter (they acquired Wordperfect) instead of heading for the clouds. See what I did there?

Netware 3.12, indeed a Ferrari in its heyday! As before direct any flaming Lamborghini's to the comments below.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

Go & have a look

Often, I see technicians dealing with issues and problems while sitting firmly on the seat of their pants at their desks. Call me old school, but I do not think this works! There is no substitute for the eyeball.

When I was a technical account manager at Madge Networks, I received a call about a problematic branch of Standard Bank. It was their flagship branch in Sandton. No expense had been spared and it was clad top to toe in marble. However, the staff at branch regularly reported that the network became toast. As is token-ring's self-healing nature it would correct itself automatically. The temporary outages were causing a great deal of frustration and technicians at the bank had been unable to diagnose the fault. I decided to investigate. On the first visit that I was at the branch I plugged in my notebook and did a health check of the network. It was running as smooth as a Husqvarna sewing machine. My mom owned one of those from the late sixties. I left and resolved to come back later.

On my second visit, I was sitting at my notebook in the room where the MAUs (token-ring hubs) were racked sifting through network traces looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack. The room where the network equipment was racked also served as the stationary store and had some mainframe printers. My thoughts were disturbed by one of the mainframe printers kicking into life. The print job completed and a few minutes later a staff member arrived to retrieve the print job. She walked over to the printer and the next moment the hubs started “shotgunning”. “Shotgunning” is the distinctive sound a token-ring network makes as the relays open and close when a fault occurs. The self-healing nature of the network kicks in as it starts attempting to isolate the fault. The manager of the branch ran into the room and excitedly asked if I had seen and diagnosed the fault. I assured him that I had captured the fault on my equipment and if he could give me a moment to analyse it, I would provide some feedback. But first, I walked over to the printer. It was located at the end of the room and a passage was left to reach it between piles of stationary boxes. Halfway down this passage was a piece of carpet covering a token-ring fly lead. Suspiciously I lifted the carpet, and immediately eyeballed the problem.

The human traffic over the carpet to the printer had badly frayed the fly lead and each time someone went to fetch a print job the frayed fly lead would short and cause a fault. We replaced the fly lead and moved the printer to a more suitable location and the problem was solved. Without being present and doing visual inspection many problems will remain unsolved. Thus, the most important aspect of solving problems is to go and have a look.

The Japanese are extremely familiar with the concept of go and have a look and to them it is known as genchi genbutsu. At its essence in means you need to develop, and design products based on being at the coalface and seeing the problems, not hearing about them second-hand. You need your own eyeballs and not a report given to you by an intermediary. Only then do you provide added value and solve problems. Even though this Japanese concept has been with me throughout my working life, I am not Japanese.

One morning before I arrived at Investec I had a phone call on my mobile that the dealing room wasn't able to operate. Connectivity was lost to the main server and the network was being blamed. I arrived at the dealing room and was accused of network changes the night before. Highly unlikely, I quipped, I was at a company event were buckets of beer were on offer and I was not capable of changing anything. So, I asked them to show me the problem. The application wasn't able to connect to the server but from a command line we could ping the server. The server IP address was 10.0.32.99

After a few minutes of head scratching I loaded Ethereal, now known as Wireshark, a packet capturing tool. One packet capture later I worked out that:

• the app did a DNS lookup first before using the server name field as an IP lookup
• the app was configured with 10.0.32.99 The IP was not assigned an A record in DNS against a DNS name.
• the app did a DNS lookup on 10.0.32.99.investec.co.za (this failed), then it tried 10.0.32.99.co.za, and a result was returned for an A record from on the Internet,

It seems that overnight someone in South Africa registered the domain 99.co.za and as soon as that happened things went pear shaped. I resolved the problem by creating a DNS entry in the local investec.co.za zone with a server name for 10.0.32.99 and configured the app to use that server name.

After all this I expected the IT manager of the dealing room to appreciate the effort like the dealing room manager in London as written about in the Herd of Zebra article. How wrong could I have been! She said how dare someone register 99.co.za without asking her permission and why did I allow it. I was gob smacked for a while and then I let rip. It boggles the mind that people are appointed to manage Information Technology but do not understand the basics about DNS! My manager at the time called me in and said she did not like the way I talked to people. I was young and naive. In the world more and more people operate outside the sphere of their abilities. Even a real estate developer can become leader of the free world. In South Africa it is common for cadres of the ruling party to be deployed as Ministers in fields to which they have no clue about the fundamentals in the area in which they are the leaders. This has been the case in telecommunications which is to put it mildly, a rotting roadkill golden wildebeest carcass.

I was working at an ISP where the neighbours were building a multi-story building next door. One morning driving in a saw a car in the visitor's parking lot covered in cement. I was initially flabbergasted that such an incident could happen but when looking up from that parking lot, it was obvious that it was a matter of time before something like that happened. The path of the crane arm was directly overhead. Often when you have a look, the potential for an incident is there. If you don't look closely or you in a hurry you end up with your car covered in cement.

A bolt fell from the roof of a vendor neutral data centre. It smashed the windscreen of a car. A few minutes before that a number of people including myself had walked past that point which was a few metres from the entrance. Having car parks in areas that are dangerous seems to be common.

One of the companies I worked at has a set of values: distinctive performance, dedicated partnership, client focus and cast-iron integrity. These are laudable values, but you do not need to work at a specific company to live these values or any other values. In many cases people within the company do not even live the stated values.

Sir Richard Branson summarized all business values in a single sentence which is that it is all about doing the right thing. Most companies do not realize that the priority in life for individuals lies elsewhere. A company can easily replace an individual, but that same individual cannot with the same ease replace his family.

The difference between a good company and a great company is that a great company will always give more than what it takes. To this end the priorities of the individuals need to have the same level of focus as that of the company’s customers. The reason is simple in that without a happy employee, the company has a diddly squat chance of having a happy customer.

I worked at an ISP where the boss would regularly force his staff to compete against each other and in meetings he would kick the walls. It wasn't an environment where you excelled, you just existed.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

My journey into IT

My first job was for the Railways. It was fun working there until I was told that I could not be a member of their pension fund because I was disabled. I did not stay around to argue the point and moved on to work for a little networking company known as Network Interface Consultants.

There was a two-year probation before an employee could join the railway pension fund and I slaved away in blissful ignorance in what was to come. I wrote programs in Cobol with embedded SQL. The database was DB2 which was hosted on IBM and Amdahl mainframes. I was assigned to the Information Centre and my boss delegated me to program some management information systems. The railway wanted some simple reports which they had not been able to obtain from the Information Centre for years. The report requests were simple. They wanted:

• Top 20 senders of goods per station
• Top 20 receivers of goods per station
• Consolidated Top 20 senders and receivers of goods per station
• Top 20 types of goods send per station
• Top 20 types of goods received per station
• Consolidated Top 20 types of goods per station

Everything that was not in the Top 20 was aggregated into a 21st item named other.

I slaved away at my desk to write these reports with a few hiccups along the way. One memorable run had a logical flaw that resulted in a run lasting a full day and a bill of a quarter of a million Rands after which I finally delivered the program.

The next day they phoned me and said great, but they wanted additional reports. They wanted the report not by count but by financial value. Within an hour that was done and dusted.

The next request was to group all the stations into branches, i.e. stations were assigned a branch line number and the reporting was done per branch. The program took longer than what I envisaged as I had made a programming fault and could not spot it. It was a whole month before I had it working!

After I had delivered this version, I never heard from these guys again. A good many years later I was in a remote railway office and immediately recognized my reports laying on a table. I was impressed that my program was still being used!

My first digital experience was using my dad's calculator, a Texas Instruments model, to help him pay and calculate the weekly wages on his farm, Oakvilla. This was an upgrade from a hand cranked adding machine that was used previously.

My first computer was bought by my dad while I was at Grey College. It was a ZX81 and would be the genesis for my career. It was a cheap system and I connected it to a television inherited from my grandmother Joey. I would sit on the end of my bed and input programs from British computer magazines. My mom has won a tape recorder as a prize at the local Spar and I used that to buy cassettes tapes that had programs stored on them that I could download to the ZX81. The programs would take ages to load and sometimes required multiple attempts. My favourites were the Flight Simulator and Chess programs.

The ZX81 only had 1K of RAM and required a clumsy addon to push it up to 16K. This addon was one which you could not bump while you were typing on a primitive plastics membrane keyboard. I was one of a million other similarly minded kids around the world learning about computers. I persuaded my dad to buy one from a computer store in Pietermaritzburg that was nestled in the lane behind Shuter & Shooter bookstore. Next to the computer shop was the Juicy Lucy where my dad treated me to a Cheeza after the purchase.

I scored a holiday job selling books at Shuter & Shooter. During the holidays they would hire a hall at the Royal Agricultural Showgrounds in Pietermaritzburg and basically move their warehouse there for the duration. I would have parents come in with book lists and the move around the warehouse picking out the books from the stacks and placing them in a cardboard box.

Once a year the showgrounds would host the Royal Show. I would look at all the new tractors and dream of owning one. I never did. But by far the best part of the show was carts selling homemade sweets from the Fudge Lady. Sweets have never tasted any better since those days as in my mind no-one has duplicated the smell and experiments of those carts.

We always had members tickets at the Royal Show. We would drink tea and have sarmies sitting in an enclosure service by waiters dressed up as Jeeves. Ouma Joey would join us and we would pretend to be posh watching the show jumping. I actually preferred the dogs being showed with the most boring being the cattle paraded around the ring.

When people refer to greater leaders of World War II, they refer to Churchill or Patton. When people refer to greater leaders in technology it is Jobs, or Gates. But there are greater leaders of World War II and technology than Churchill, Patton, Jobs, or Gates. They are Turing and Flowers, but history would not acknowledge them as such. Their work was the foundation of the allied victory in World War II and forms the basis of computer technology which underlies our modern society.

Make no mistake, Churchill and Patton were the public face of the victory in World War II with their combative actions and stirring speeches. Their leadership value was to inspire, but beyond that they lacked real substance. They would not change the world. That would be Turing and Flowers. They both worked at a secret facility in the UK, Bletchley Park, and it is here that computer technology was born. Turing would prevent U-boats from destroying shipping convoys and Flowers would help eavesdrop on the German command structure, decoding messages faster than what they could read it themselves.

Turing was the great theorist who formulated the basic algorithms of technology which we use to this day. He was also able to solve problems in intuitive ways, utilizing reasoning skills that leveraged more than just theoretical knowledge. In this way he was able to break the German Enigma codes, not once, but multiple times. The Enigma codes were what the Germans used to communicate with the U-boats in the Atlantic. Turing would seek patterns from known events then reverse engineer the coded messages. He built special purpose machines that solved the codes faster than some present-day general-purpose processors. A machine to solve a specific task is always faster than a general purpose one, even if it is more than 70 years old.

Flowers was a great practical man who was able to build complex technology with just the resources available in the 1940's. He broke the Lorenz code with that first computer. The Lorenz code was user by the German war command structure.

Turing would be ostracized and would take his own life when society tried to change his feelings of sexuality. The computer that Flowers built would be destroyed and due to the perceived impact of the cold war, never acknowledged.

It is a fallacy to believe that the great leaders are those that are well liked and for whom the most votes are cast. They are usually the most corrupt. The true leader succeeds without fanfare or reward, except his own belief and desire to solve a problem. That was Turing and Flowers!

In South Africa we have Highveld storms that are awe inspiring but snow and cold is not a regular experience. It has only been my travels beyond the shores of South Africa, that I have encountered snow. In those parts of the world it is a common and often unnoticeable experience. However, for me, it is always new and exciting. In the late nineties I travelled to New Hampshire in the United States with Peter Turvey. We were working for Madge Networks and trying to score an OEM deal for Token-ring switching with Cabletron. I clearly remember from my visit to Cabletron the experience of walking past the meeting rooms with no chairs. The CEO believed it would help to be more productive if meeting rooms had no chairs!

The state of New Hampshire was covered in snow and we drove to the Cabletron buildings. It was a large glass building and like most of these, the glass was polarized to only look out but not in. We arrived a few minutes early and parked in front of the building. Outside the building was a large pond that was completely frozen over. I looked in amazement at my first site of frozen water, never having seen so much of it frozen. I walked out into the middle and jumped up and down. Next, I picked up a rock from the edge and tried to crack it. I then tried to run and skate on it with nothing more than my shoes and ended up on my ass. We then walked into the building, where many people had gathered looking out the windows at the madman who was out on the frozen pond. The deal never happened, but I do not think we can blame that! By that stage, the perception was that Token-ring was dead.

I have since moved on from programming into networking and more generic IT functions. Also specializing in the odd technology themed joke, here and there. I have one April's Fool's day decided to change Google Maps' location of the South African Presidency to 1 Saxonwold Drive. When I did it initially, nothing happened. Two weeks later I saw it as the headline article on News24.

Around the same time my review of the Saxonwold Shebeen had a shout out on the radio.

The best April's Fool joke was when I went to De Beers to help with a Netware issue. Outside the door was a group of angry people asking the network manager why he had to clean the network on that day and he should rather do in at night or on a weekend. He had emailed the company on April Fool's day informing them that he was going to clean the network. They were going to use compressed air and blow the dust out of all the cables. He asked people to step away from their computers as the dust was going to come out of the fan ventilation holes on their desktops. It was legendary.

I also hang out on the MyBroadband forums. If I don't find something to laugh about there, then its a really slow day.

Aquaduct | A Roman-Inspired Masterpiece for South African Railways

In my time at Datavia, I crafted a program named Aquaduct, a nod to the grandeur of Roman engineering and my belief that I am the reincarnation of Julius Caesar. Aquaduct was a sophisticated system designed for the Chemical Laboratory of the South African Railways, tasked with storing and analyzing water samples collected at fixed intervals along the nation’s extensive railway network. These samples were critical for ensuring the quality and safety of water used in railway operations, a vital but often overlooked aspect of maintaining the infrastructure. Sadly, given the crumbling state of South Africa’s rail system under the current regime, I suspect this meticulous process has fallen by the wayside.

Aquaduct was built to run on DOS, leveraging the power and flexibility of Clarion, a robust development environment for the time. The program operated as a multi-user system, hosted on a Netware server, allowing seamless access and collaboration across the laboratory’s operations. It was designed in close collaboration with a dedicated team of scientists who provided detailed specifications, ensuring the system met their exacting standards. The result was a thing of beauty—functional, efficient, and reliable—a true testament to the Roman ideals of precision and durability.

The program’s core functionality revolved around storing and analyzing water sample data, enabling scientists to track quality metrics, identify trends, and ensure compliance with safety standards. Its intuitive design and robust architecture made it one of the finest programs I’ve ever written, a digital aqueduct channeling critical data with the same elegance and purpose as its ancient Roman namesake.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

Great trips to the Costa del Sol

One of the great trips I had, was to the Costa del Sol, or is that the Costa del Golf. It was a Madge Networks Sales Conference. We stayed in Marbella and flew into Spain landing at Malaga. We flew from South Africa via London and on the plane were a whole load of Germans. The Germans could not speak a word of English and I was trying to make conversation with the dude next to me in my best primary school German. It was hilarious.

When we landed, we collected our baggage and, on the way, out I saw the same German dude and his friend were talking to a Spanish baggage agent about his luggage. The conversation was going nowhere. A Spaniard and German trying to speak English which neither of them able to. I thought I would help and worked out he had to go to the baggage counter. Our transport had not arrived yet, so I thought I'd help him. We went to the counter where I eventually was able to determine the airline had his luggage and would fetch it for him. They arrived with a huge black dustbin bag. The German looked inside and all we could see was a mess. All the German could say was, “Was ist hier los?” and all the Spanish agent was doing was shrugging his shoulders. My transport arrived and I beat a hasty retreat, even though I had huge sympathy for my unlucky travel companion.

On a previous trip to Europe, I had landed in Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands. At the carousel, the passengers laughed as a pair of underpants came past. I laughed as well although the underpants look extremely familiar. Next came some socks, and other pieces of clothing which also looked like mine. Finally, out popped my suitcase that was ruptured and well and truly flattened. I collected the bits and went to the airline’s handling agent. It seems my suitcase had fallen off the trolley on the apron and had been run over by a 747. The airline provided me vouchers to replace my clothes and suitcase. The only hardened suitcase available was a green and pink one which I would continue to use for years afterwards. It stood out like a sore thumb.

The first activity on the agenda for that trip to Spain was parasailing. Before that I learnt the only words of Spanish that I know, “Uno cerveza por favor.” The boat that towed us for parasailing had a huge deck from which we launched. I was first up, and the operator asked me how high I wanted to go. Of course, I said, all the way. I was released and after a few minutes the boat became a speck in the ocean below me. I could see Africa and then noticed the clouds drifting past me. At that moment I also noticed that the harness was rusted. Damn! My poephol tried to exit my body out of my throat. I had a long journey down, trying not to imagine the harness detaching.

Next we went go karting. The track was amazing and a proper racing circuit. Some of the karts were also high powered with paddle gears. We tore around the track at high speed and there was a female driver who humiliated us by lapping us. I was leading Peter, a work colleague, around the track, and entered the chicane. I hit my brakes, he did not. He pushed me into the hay bales and my kart ended up on top of me. I cracked my ribs. The next few days were spent around the pool with pain killers and alcohol.

The day before we left Spain, we decided to go for a cycle. My ribs were not that sore anymore. The hotel had some MTBs and after obtaining directions we disappeared down the road and onto a dirt road. A few kilometres down the dirt road we came to a river crossing. I was in front and after crossing stopped to make certain everyone else was also able to safely cross. A couple of metres downstream from where we were crossing was a gypsy. She was doing her washing and started cursing profusely about the dirt we had disturbed in the river with our bikes. My riding companions has disappeared on down the road and I was trying to say sorry, but her mouth made even the sailor in me blush. I then heard another sound. It was the unmistakable sound of a large truck's air brakes. Around the corner came a huge dump truck. It crossed the river and create a mini tsunami. It took the gypsy's washing and dumped it a few feet up the riverbank. The gypsy was silenced and dumbstruck! I did not wait around for here to find her senses again. On the way back to the hotel we stopped at a little inn to have a beer. We discovered that for the price of a bottle of water in the hotel, we could have six beers. We spend the rest of the day there.

Although Spain was a great destination, one of the best party places in the world is Elephant Hills at Vic Falls. Been there twice. First in a DC3 and then in an Air Zimbabwe 707. The 707 must be the noisiest aircraft ever. You really knew you were in a jet as it shook your bones! Those were legendary parties, but I was young and too embarrassed to jump kaalgat into the swimming pool like the rest. Regardless, first time I had beers before breakfast.

One of the attractions at Vic Falls is white water rafting on the Zambezi. The first time was exciting; however, our raft never came unstuck. That was probably not a good thing as on the second trip I was a bit more blasé.

One of the rapids is a grade five rapid. This rapid is too dangerous to go over, so we are meant to walk around it. As we were approaching it and heading for the side to disembark, I was sitting nonchalantly on the side of the raft. The raft stopped suddenly as it hit a submerged rock and I went overboard. I was in the water and everyone, including myself pissed ourselves laughing. I then started to swim back to the raft but noticed I was not moving. The current was tugging at me. I put my head down and churned the water. All to no avail as I was pulled into the rapid. A rapid is an explosion of bubbles and you cannot float. I suspect I was dragged through the rapid scrapping the bottom. I tried to breath but instead swallowed water. I closed my eyes and made a promise to God.

I washed out into the pool at the bottom of the rapid. If I did not have a life jacket I would have sunk as I was too weak to move. And if I were not wearing a helmet, I most probably would have smacked my head against a rock without any protection. Someone threw a rope, but they had to do it again as the first time I could not move my arms.

Once on the side I hurled water, breakfast and I suspect beer. The rest of the trip on the raft, I held onto the safety rope even in the calmest of the waters.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

A common engineering joke is that if its loose then duct tape it and if its not loose then put WD-40 on it. That solves all problems. However, its not always that easy.

I worked at Madge Networks for over half a decade during the time where South Africa transitioned to a democracy. Madge Networks had a simple philosophy of “support without limits.” It meant that if you bought a Madge product you could be guaranteed that the company would assist you unconditionally in the use of that product and not charge you extra.

Madge went titsup. My analysis is that Madge Networks had a solution and decided to go out and find a problem. Robert Madge, the owner of Madge Networks, deferred to more incorrect strategic technology choices. The truth of the matter is that when something goes titsup, it’s not because of one reason only, but a myriad of them all contributing to the negative consequence. There are the immediate or visual ones, which are underpinned by intermediate ones and finally after digging right down, there are the root causes. There is never a singular root cause for anything.

As far as technology brainfarts go there is no better example than Kodak. They invented the digital camera that would eventually kill them off. However, they were so focused on milking people in their legacy film market that they never saw the tsunami. That tsunami also dealt a killer blow to another innovative company named Polaroid. Madge was a pre-cursor to Kodak and Polaroid. They perfected Token-ring and should have moved to developing silicon for future Ethernet and WiFi networking kit. Instead they went to merger and acquisitions but lacked the savvy skill in the disciple that Cisco mastered. Ironically, Cisco did make an offer to Madge Networks which was not accepted. As they say in this part of the savannah, “Eish!”

My first encounter with Madge Networks was in the heyday of Novell installing the FDDI adapters into Netware SFT III servers. Only adapters that worked without crashing the system. From that day I was a Madge fan.

Madge had a “Switching to ATM” strategy. The reasoning was clumsy but sounded sophisticated at the time. It was complicated and did not address the market for the desktop. The silicon for desktop connectivity was never going to be ATM. At that time there was also the Token-ring versus Ethernet debate. The conclusion was that Ethernet won but in fact users opted for wireless radios for their desktop networking instead of a clumsy wired connection. WiFi beat both Token-ring and Ethernet. Ironically, the Ethernet technologies today have more attributes of Token-ring than Ethernet as on the fibre side the standards all have their origin in FDDI. As an aside, one of the most stupid legacy defaults from Ethernet is its pathetically small frame size. Token-ring was designed far better on so many fronts and this was one of them! Nowadays you get Ethernet rings as specified by G8032. Taking about rings, another great attribute of Token-ring was source route bridging. It was miles better than Ethernet which only had pathetic transparent bridge. Token-ring allowed the creation of a far larger layer 2 domain without melting down due to broadcasts. Ethernet was forced to layer 3 to achieve equivalence.

All that effort in making a Token-ring MAC in hindsight could have best been leveraged by Madge in leveraging the acquired silicon developing expertise to climb on board the storage networking bandwagon that was about to hit. The underlying requirement was for high speed storage (never video or the other Jet Jetson technologies that was going to drive ATM). One of the driving attributes of ATM was that it had QoS. However, it was not the only way to solve it. Using higher level protocols, it was possible with Ethernet to achieve the same thing. And the silicon was way cheaper, as the cost reduction of Ethernet had already been progressing for several years. Nowadays, most multimedia traffic that requires prioritization uses less sophisticated QoS as defined by the ATM standards, but it does the job.

Somewhere in the late nineties some ponytail decided to change the Madge corporate identity. A change in corporate identity never works and never increases sales. No company has succeeded, but companies all try it. The only people who make money are the marketing agencies hired to do the job and the company that self-inflicts itself with this dumbass decision goes backwards. The classic case is Coke with its new Coke strategy. Luckily, they had enough bulk to reverse the mindless exercise. Whoever, at Madge decided that it was a good idea to go from lightning bolts to brown cardboard boxes, take note, it sucked. Never mind that the logo went from unique to bland.

And then that LANNET acquisition. Strangely, enough when I spoke to them later, they always said they were an Ethernet company. I think Madge Networks heard what they wanted to hear and put a square peg in a round hole. They tried to shove LANNET into ATM.

American Chopper on Discovery is one of the TV shows I watched. I often have sat on the couch and wondered why I was so fascinated by the Teutuls. I left it at, enjoyment. I also suspected that the pressures of working against deadlines and the bombastic and aggressive behaviour hit an accord with my work in Information technology (IT). However, I revisited the theme after attending a presentation by Peter Armstrong, where he asked the question of what the purpose of a rev counter in a car was. He assets it serves no purpose to the underlying functionality and purpose of a vehicle or is of any use to the driver. Now I would not buy a car without a rev counter, so if Peter's statements are correct, what is the underlying reason for that damn rev counter. There is no enjoyment for me in a car without a rev counter. I once drove an old sports car without one, but the loud sound of the engine in that case was a more than suitable substitute. I eventually found the answer in American Chopper.

American Chopper is about making motorcycles that are sick according to the older Teutul. Sick means cool, good looking and aesthetically pleasing. The bottom line is that the Teutils will not make a chopper unless it looks good. Yes, it must be functional and have a purpose, but it must be sick!

The aspect of quality is overlooked. A company that has been detailed enough to spend time on designs that make it look good, would have spent greater due diligence on the functionality. A better-looking product will be technologically better.

Secondly, there is the comfort. Product sets with rev counters, although delivering no functionality benefit, serves the purpose of harmonizing and making the purchaser of the product comfortable. This results in a satisfied customer, and a satisfied customer is the best advert for your business. As an example, I have missed the LCD panel with the paddle switches on Madge token-ring CAUs and switches. That was sick. The current generation of Ethernet switches with dull colours, bad designs and stupid flashing Christmas lights do not move me to confidence. It comes down to that fundamental genetic instinct to kick the tyres of a car. Admit it, you do it although there is no functional purpose to do it.

Before, I am cast out as a heretic into the wilderness, let me offer an example in Apple. Apple customers are the most vehement supporters of their products and I believe that the design of the products is core to this characteristic.

The hidden message to technologists is that do not stop when you have a functional product that satisfies a business requirement. Go the extra mile, to make it sick, like the Madge Networks kit.

One of Madge’s good customers was the Toyota factory in Prospecton just south of Durban. The IT manager Steve Kandasamy called to say the paint shop was reported intermittent network problems. He explained that the token-ring hub at the paint shop, a Madge Networks SmartCAU Plus was toggling between red and green on the network management station. Red meant a loss of connectivity.

Finally, I decided that I would fly down from Johannesburg to Durban to have a look as I was not able to remotely troubleshoot the problem. I arrived at the factory where the IT office always has a pot of Durban curry cooking on a primus stove in the corner. Best curry I ever tasted and never equaled.

We took the car to the paint shop and went via a circular route to the paint shop via the perimeter fence. When we hopped out at the paint shop, I noticed a clearly visible short cut road going directly from the paint shop to the IT office. When I queried this with Steve, he said I must never take the short cut. I did not question him on that any further.

We went into the paint shop and climbed a staircase to the top near the roof where the network cabinet was located with the failing hub. As I climbed the stairs, I noticed thousands of pigeons, inside and on the roof of the pains shop. When arriving at the network cabinet we noticed it was covered in pigeon sh*t. The sh*t was corroding the network chassis of the hub. We were literally in the sh*t.

I volunteered to drive back to the IT office to pick up the replacement hub while Steve removed the existing one. Outside I decided, to take the short cut. Fifty metres down the short cut I realized why it was not a good idea to use the road. All four tires popped. It turns out that that road was where the break down kits from Japan arrived and were unboxed. The containers where held together with large nails in the form of elongated and triangular spikes.

I went back to the paint shop and explained to an amused Steve what had transpired. He arranged a forklift with solid tires to pull out the car and a colleague arrived via a replacement car with a replacement hub. We replaced the hub in the cabinet while pain shop artisans installed a replacement roof on the cabinet of solid steel. The roof of the paint shop had those rotating mirror devices which the pigeons seem to ignore. I have no idea whether the Toyota factory still has a pigeon problem. It was a moment, but it was not like the sh*t hit the fan.

That happened at the turn of the millennium when a colleague who worked with me at Investec decided it was a good idea to cool the telecommunications equipment using a desktop fan. The networking room was not at an optimal temperature and in those days, cabinets had glass door which was useless at cooling the rack mounted equipment inside. The bearings in the desktop fan failed and the resultant smoke caused the gas suppressant to be dumped in the data centre. All this on the day before the millennium broke. Half the company thought the bug had hit.

So, in life I have known about being in the sh*t and the sh*t hitting the fan. The Presidency of Zuma was a moment where the shit the fan for the whole country. During those years the news was so debilitatingly depressive that I would often not listen to the radio or open up News24. I would rather listen to eighties music such as the band Queen or instead watch BBC documentaries. There is nothing calmer than David Attenborough and his nature programs. And there is also youtube videos of people repairing tractors. Far better karma than what is happening in the rest of the world.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

Today was a day I have been waiting a long time for.

I came to the realization that my life does have a stark contrast from my peers. I was carefully and delicately reminded that I carry quite a bit more baggage than the average person. For many reasons, many that are inadequate to bring up here, I represent both a large and small percentage of “real” people. I bring a much different background and diversity to my community. Every day, I have to be ready to go out there and defend, educate, and represent people like me. It is exhausting. Absolutely, horrifyingly exhausting.

While today represents many things, I am reminded of what hope, optimism, and empathy can bring to the table. It is hard to be in such a vulnerable position, but I will never back away from the challenges and benefits that I represent. Nothing is ever black and white, I don’t know when people will come to this realization. How could it be so difficult to understand that you can have limitations while protecting human rights? You can have protections while limiting public benefits. There are lots of things that can have equal and fair balances, why does everything have to be an extreme?

Today, I am refilled with a deep layer of hope and optimism that I fear I had lost. I am grateful for all the people who constantly defend democracy. I recognize that it was not my situation alone that resulted in this deep movement, but all the issues that humans care about – democracy, equal rights, environmental protections, healthy economy, and much more – that have resulted in this phenomenon.

I remember reading history books in high school and constantly wondering why I would ever care about any of it, or how it affected me. Now, more than ever, I understand the impact of policy, the magnitude of historic events, civil rights movements, and political balances.

The right words are out of reach as I truly process what is happening around me. It is one of those days that you know 5, 10, maybe 20 years from now will be written and played out into history books. I wish I had a more insightful reflection of this moment, however it is late… and I have to be up early tomorrow. At least, it is a new tomorrow, a more hopeful tomorrow, a tomorrow that promises new opportunities and a more equitable future.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office — but will return at the end of the month.

En anglais « writer’s block ».

J’ai entendu une remarque intéressante que je partage ici et maintenant pour ne plus l’oublier.

Cette difficulté d’écrire provient de la difficulté à accorder deux choses : ce que l’on veut réellement écrire et ce que l’on imagine que le lecteur veut lire.

En clair, ce « blocage » vient d’un manque d’honnêteté.

Rester à fidèle à soi-même. Peu importe le regard que les autres porteront sur ce que l’on a écrit.

Facile à dire. Pas facile à mettre en pratique.

J’arrive à écrire ici tous les jours en partie parce que je sais que personne ne me lit.

Le jours où ce sera le cas, les choses changeront probablement : quelle valeur j’apporte ? Quelle image je projette ?

Ce carnet n’a que pour seul intérêt le partage de l’expérience empirique que je fais de la vie. Mes sensations, mes émotions, ma manière de percevoir le monde.

Et peut-être qu’un jour cette expérience personnelle raisonnera chez quelqu’un.

Ce n’est pas un souhait aujourd’hui. La seule chose qui compte pour le moment, c’est mon envie égoïste d’écrire. Pour moi et moi seul. Et si un jour ces écrits sont lus.

Tant mieux... ou tant pis.

Democrats are taking the House and the Senate!!! Texas has flipped blue, and Abbott was told to get his hateful ass out! It's about damn time!

I am so happy I could cry. It doesn't mean things are going to be easy. It's still a hell of a fight, but it's a start. It's a start.

The horrific ads that have slammed into my phones and mail for so many weeks now are disgusting. The money poured in to create all of that ugly could have been used to actually help people.

It wasn't a tight win here. I am so, so very happy right now. Abbott and Paxton are bye, bye, bye! I could squeak!

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

A courier working a suburban delivery round does something that no law, contract or app has ever asked her to think about. She walks up to a front door, puts a parcel down, takes a photograph for proof of delivery, and walks away. Then she does it again. Amazon, describing the job in its own words, says its drivers “typically have at least 150 stops and deliver 200 to 300 packages a day.” Each stop is a doorstep, and more and more doorsteps have a lens beside them. Until recently, that lens recorded her. Now, on some doors, it can learn her. It can measure her face, keep the measurement, recognise her the next time she comes, and offer the householder a box in which to type a name.

On 14 October 2026, CNET reported on three proposed class actions that put that change before the American courts: Sigwalt against Amazon, and Fennessy and Trevino against Google. All three allege that the familiar-face features in Ring and Nest video doorbells and cameras create biometric faceprints of people who never agreed to anything. The people they name are delivery workers, neighbours, visitors and passers-by. Their faces, the suits say, are captured, analysed and kept as profiles that the device's owner can label. The companies have already switched the features off in Illinois, where biometric consent law is strictest, and they say the data is protected and, in the framing CNET reported, stays on the device. The day before CNET's report, Apple had announced a range of cameras and a video doorbell for its own Home platform that can recognise familiar faces.

Three lawsuits against two companies, and a third company entering the market, mean the pattern is now set across the industry. That makes it possible to ask the larger questions directly. What happens to the old assumption that you can move along a street without being recorded under your name? Who should have to agree to being recognised at a front door: the person who bought the camera, or the person the camera learns? And what does a neighbourhood become when every entrance can put a name to everyone who comes up the path?

Three Lawsuits Built on One Absence

The three cases share one central fact, and it is an absence. None of the people suing ever bought the product.

Charles Sigwalt, a Virginia resident, filed the first complaint in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington on 1 June 2026. The case is Sigwalt v. Amazon.com, Inc., number 2:26-cv-01887, and it names Amazon and Ring LLC as defendants. It is assigned to Judge Kymberly K. Evanson. The complaint alleges that Ring's Familiar Faces feature scans the faces of guests and passers-by and that the resulting facial recognition data is “not stored locally” but held in Amazon's cloud.

Four weeks later, on 29 June, eight Virginia residents filed Fennessy v. Google LLC in the Northern District of California, case number 5:26-cv-06534. Their complaint says Nest's Familiar Face Detection scans “the face of every person who appears in the camera's field of view” and compares the result against a library of stored profiles. “The feature is activated by the camera's owner,” the complaint continues. “It is not activated by, and cannot be consented to by, the bystander whose face is being scanned.” The plaintiffs say they have never bought a Nest product, never opened a Google Home account and never agreed to any terms of service. They simply walk through neighbourhoods, visit friends and run errands past houses where Nest cameras are visibly installed.

Two days later, Barbara Trevino, a resident of Glendale, California, filed Trevino v. Google LLC, number 5:26-cv-06694. Her claims rest on California law, including intrusion upon seclusion and the state constitution's right to privacy, and court summaries describe her as someone who walks past homes with Nest cameras in her own neighbourhood. A third Google case, Miller v. Google, followed on 17 July. On 4 September 2026, Judge Edward J. Davila consolidated the three Google cases in San Jose as In re Nest Privacy Litigation, under the lead number 5:26-cv-06534. A consolidated amended complaint was due on 19 October, and Google's response is scheduled for 1 December 2026. Google is represented by Cooley LLP.

None of these allegations has been tested, no class has been certified and no court has found either company liable. Even so, the complaints do something useful before any ruling. They describe, in sworn pleadings, how a person experiences these systems from the wrong side of the lens. The Fennessy complaint is frank about the gap. “Plaintiffs cannot identify which devices scanned them or on which occasions with certainty,” it says, “because Google built the system to make that information virtually impossible for Plaintiffs to obtain.” The person being recognised cannot know where they were recognised. The only parties that can find out are the company and, in part, the household that owns the camera.

The Consent Instruction Addressed to the Wrong Person

The companies have not ignored consent. They have addressed it to the wrong person.

Google's own support page for Nest's familiar face detection tells camera owners: “Use familiar face detection in compliance with the law.” It goes on: “Depending on where you live, you might need to get consent to have your camera help identify people visiting your home.” The same page says the feature “is not available on Nest cameras used in Illinois,” describing the restriction as a precaution in response to state legislation. Ring's help page for Familiar Faces makes a similar move. It recommends that owners tell the people they save as Familiar Faces, notes that some laws require explicit consent from visitors before the feature is switched on, and lists the places where the feature is not offered: Illinois, Texas and Portland, Oregon in the United States, and the province of Quebec in Canada.

Read as a set of instructions, these pages ask a householder to do something that cannot be done. A homeowner can ask a sister or a regular babysitter to agree to being recognised. A homeowner cannot ask the courier who will arrive next Tuesday, who may never come again, who is on a timed route and who has no idea the camera is doing more than recording. The homeowner certainly cannot ask the stranger on the pavement who happens to cut across the drive. The duty to obtain consent has been handed to the one party in the arrangement with no way of carrying it out.

That mismatch was noticed before the lawsuits. In December 2025, Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts released Amazon's response to his questions about Ring's face recognition. His office said the answers showed that people wanting their face data removed must approach each device owner individually, “forcing delivery drivers to potentially make separate deletion requests at hundreds or thousands of homes.” Markey's office described delivery drivers, including Amazon's own, as the group facing the greatest threat. The point is about structure as well as privacy. When consent and deletion are left to individual households, the person with the most exposure has the least ability to use either.

What 'On the Device' Does and Does Not Mean

The companies' main reassurance, as CNET summarised it, is that the facial data stays on the device. The companies' own documentation is less uniform than that slogan, and even where it holds, it answers a different question from the one the lawsuits ask.

Start with Ring. Its Familiar Faces help page says that profiles and facial recognition information are encrypted and “stored in the cloud, not on your Ring devices.” The page also says Familiar Faces is not compatible with Ring's end-to-end encryption option. Ring offers a library of up to 50 named profiles and removes unnamed profiles after 30 days without a recognition. The Sigwalt complaint relies on this architecture when it alleges that the data is held on Amazon's cloud rather than locally.

Google's position is more mixed. According to the Fennessy complaint, which quotes Google's documentation, earlier Nest models set up in the Nest app store familiar face data in Google's cloud. Newer models set up in the Google Home app store it in the device's internal memory, but “the cloud is used for clean-up.” The complaint also alleges that Google's documentation does not specify an automatic deletion period for unfamiliar faces. Google has not yet answered these specific allegations in court.

Apple's statement is the most carefully worded. Its 13 October announcement says that “Camera footage is securely processed locally on the customer's own Apple Home hub or in Private Cloud Compute,” and that “No one, not even Apple, can access the data.” Private Cloud Compute is Apple's server system for heavier tasks; introducing it in June 2024, Apple said that “no user data is retained in any form after the response is returned.” Apple's long-standing HomeKit face recognition is described in the same way. A February 2025 explainer from How-To Geek, consistent with Apple's own documentation, says the analysis takes place on the home hub rather than on Apple's servers.

These differences matter, and Apple's design is a real improvement on the question of what the company can see. A face template that never leaves a hub in someone's living room cannot be turned over in bulk from a central server. But keeping the data local answers only one question: who apart from the owner can reach it. It does not change the fact that the stranger's face was measured. It does not change the fact that a household now holds a record of when that stranger came and went. And it does not change the most important feature of all, which is that the owner can attach a name to that record. A named record kept in a neighbour's hallway is still a named record. “On device” describes where the data sits, not whether anyone agreed to its creation.

Apple Walks Into the Same Doorway

Apple's entry changes the debate because Apple sells privacy as part of the product. On 13 October 2026, the company introduced the Apple Home Collection, a set of accessories built with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric and managed through the Apple Home app. Apple said the range includes an LG Video Doorbell Wired starting at $249.95 in the United States, plus LG indoor and outdoor cameras and a floodlight camera. Apple's announcement says the cameras recognise “people, familiar faces, pets, vehicles, and packages.” The doorbell and cameras will be sold in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, with availability beginning in December.

The face recognition behind these products is not new. Apple's Home app has offered it for compatible HomeKit cameras and doorbells for years. Apple's iPhone user guide explains that the feature identifies people from faces in the owner's photo library or from recent visitors captured by the camera. Owners can tap an unidentified person listed under Recent, choose Add Name, and enter the person's name or their relationship to the household. The How-To Geek explainer gives a revealing example of a label an owner might use for a visitor the camera keeps seeing: “The Postman.”

That example captures the issue better than any legal brief. Apple's system is built to stop Apple, LG and Schneider from seeing what the camera sees, and it may well achieve that. But it is also built, quite deliberately, to let a household turn a recurring unknown face into a known one, even if the name is only “The Postman.” The person who delivers the post was never asked. The careful privacy engineering protects the owner's data from the company. It does nothing to protect the courier's face from the owner.

There is also a twist for British readers. Ring's Familiar Faces is offered only in the United States and Canada. Apple's doorbell will go on sale in the UK, where the law treats a camera that looks beyond its owner's boundary very differently.

A Round of 150 Doors

Go back to the courier. The doorbell debate is usually framed around a single visitor at a single door. Her working day is not a single visit. It is a sequence of 150 or more.

Each familiar-face library belongs to a single household. Ring's holds up to 50 named profiles, and Google's is shared across the cameras linked to a single home account. Nothing in the companies' public documentation says that these libraries are pooled into a national index of faces, and the lawsuits do not prove that they are. What the architecture does allow is this. A courier on a fixed round, passing many doors that have face recognition switched on, can end up recorded in many separate household libraries. In each one she may be named, labelled or simply stored as a repeat unknown face, under whatever description that household chose. The Fennessy complaint makes the repetition point about its own plaintiffs. Because they “repeatedly traverse the same routes,” it says, “the same devices would have captured and processed their faces on multiple occasions.” For a courier, repetition is not occasional. It is the job.

The research on delivery work explains why this matters. In October 2022, Data & Society published “At the Digital Doorstep,” a report by Aiha Nguyen and Eve Zelickson based on interviews with 20 delivery drivers and 20 doorbell camera owners across the United States. Most of the drivers worked for Amazon Flex, and most of the owners had Ring cameras. The authors concluded that doorbell cameras, though marketed as tools for home security, “are also near-constant tools of workplace surveillance for delivery workers.” They described householders taking on the role of a manager: using their cameras to monitor, instruct and sometimes discipline the people bringing their parcels. The report also found that drivers of colour spoke more reflectively and at greater length than white drivers about being watched during shifts, and about feeling conspicuous in predominantly white neighbourhoods. One line in the report sums up the courier's position: “The doorstep is both a workplace and a stranger's private property.”

Those findings came from the era of the recording camera. Recognition adds two things recording lacks: memory and a name. A clip of an unknown courier is a moment. A named profile that fires an alert each time she comes back is a running record of her working pattern, kept by a customer she has never met. She cannot see it, correct it or delete it, except by finding the house and asking. As Markey's office pointed out, a deletion right that must be exercised household by household is, for a delivery worker, a right that exists mostly on paper.

Even the law that does exist handles repetition oddly. Illinois's Biometric Information Privacy Act, the statute both companies avoided by withdrawing, requires written consent before a private entity collects a biometric identifier. In February 2023, in Cothron v. White Castle, the Illinois Supreme Court held that a separate violation accrues with each unconsented scan. On 2 August 2024, Governor J.B. Pritzker signed Senate Bill 2979, which provides that collecting “the same biometric identifier or biometric information from the same person using the same method of collection” is a single violation. The change targeted runaway damages in workplace fingerprint cases, but its arithmetic speaks to the courier too. Under the strongest biometric law in the United States, being scanned at the same door a hundred times is now treated as one wrong. Yet each separate household that recognises her is a separate act of recognition, and no statute yet speaks to what it means to be recognised at a hundred different doors on a single round.

The Presumption of Passing Unremarked

The central question in this story concerns something the law has rarely needed to name: the presumption that ordinary movement goes unremarked.

People are seen in public all the time. What they have historically not been is identified, recorded and remembered by the buildings they pass. The legal scholars Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Selinger gave this condition a name in their 2015 article “Surveillance as Loss of Obscurity,” published in the Washington and Lee Law Review. Obscurity, they argued, is not secrecy. It is the practical difficulty, the transaction cost, of finding or understanding information about someone. A face in a crowd is visible but obscure, because joining it to a name takes effort that almost nobody bothers to make. Hartzog and Selinger proposed that the answer to surveillance often lies in deliberately putting friction back into the process. Familiar-face doorbells do the reverse. They reduce the cost of identification to the tap of a button labelled Add Name.

The urban writer Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, argued that a safe street needs “eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street.” It is tempting to treat doorbell cameras as the digital version of those eyes. They are not. Jacobs's shopkeepers and residents watched and intervened, but they also forgot. A strange face was tolerated precisely because nobody filed it. A face-recognising doorbell is an eye that does not forget and will, if asked, write a name beside what it saw.

American constitutional law has begun to grapple with this idea, though in cases about government rather than neighbours. In Carpenter v. United States in 2018, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the Supreme Court that “A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere.” Six years earlier, in United States v. Jones, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in a concurring opinion that “GPS monitoring generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person's public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.” These rulings do not apply to private doorbells. The Fourth Amendment restrains the state, not the household next door. But they set out a principle that ordinary people grasp without reading any case law. Being visible at a moment is different from being compiled over time, and being compiled is what changes the relationship between a person and the places they pass through.

The Fennessy complaint tries to turn this intuition into a private-law claim. In its intrusion upon seclusion count, it argues that the plaintiffs' expectation of not being scanned is objectively reasonable because Google gives no notice and because “no social norm puts a passerby on notice that a doorbell is generating a mathematical map of his or her face.” That is the presumption of anonymity in movement, set out as a legal argument. Whether a court accepts it remains an open question.

Who Has to Say Yes

So whose consent should count? There are two candidates, and the products are designed around only one of them.

The owner's consent is real but limited. A household that switches on face recognition has agreed to the company's terms, and that agreement can cover the faces of its own members and of anyone who has actually agreed to be enrolled. It cannot cover the faces of strangers, because a person cannot consent on someone else's behalf to the measurement of that other person's body. The companies' support pages accept this logic when they tell owners that consent may be legally required. Their designs then leave the owner with no means of getting it.

European law answered the question some years ago, in a case involving an ordinary household camera. In December 2014, in Ryneš (Case C-212/13), the Court of Justice of the European Union considered a Czech homeowner whose camera also covered part of the public footpath. The court held that, to the extent such surveillance covers a public space, even partially, it is “directed outwards from the private setting of the person processing the data in that manner.” It therefore falls outside the exemption for purely personal or household activity. The court did not ban such cameras. It accepted that protecting one's property and family can be a legitimate interest. But it made the homeowner a data controller, with obligations to the people the camera captured.

British law has kept that principle. The Information Commissioner's Office tells householders that “If CCTV records beyond your property boundary, data protection law applies and there are rules you must follow.” The guidance expressly covers smart doorbells. It says owners must let people know they are recording, in most cases provide recordings to people who ask, delete footage regularly, and “stop recording a person if they object to being recorded and there's no legitimate reason to continue recording them.” Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation, biometric data processed “for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person” is special category data. Special category data can be processed only under narrow conditions, of which explicit consent is the obvious one for a householder. Apple's doorbell will go on sale in a country where the stranger's consent is not a courtesy but, in many circumstances, a legal requirement that the householder must meet. Apple's announcement does not explain how a UK owner is expected to meet it for a passing courier.

The English courts have already shown where the line falls. In Fairhurst v Woodard, decided in Oxford County Court in October 2021, Her Honour Judge Melissa Clarke found that a homeowner's use of his cameras, including a Ring doorbell, breached data protection law, and upheld his neighbour's harassment claim. The detail of the ruling is instructive. The judge accepted that the doorbell's video, which captured the neighbour only incidentally as she walked past, struck an acceptable balance. She found its audio capture, which reached much of the neighbour's property, disproportionate. The principle is proportionality. Incidental capture of a passer-by as part of protecting a home can be justified. A capability that reaches well beyond what that protection requires cannot.

Recognition of strangers falls on the wrong side of that line. Seeing who is at the door protects a home. A named, persistent record of the people who walk past protects nothing further, and costs people who have no say. A design that respected the consent of the person being recognised is easy to describe. Recognition would apply only to faces enrolled with the knowledge and agreement of the person enrolled. Faces that do not match would be discarded immediately rather than kept as unnamed profiles for a month. And owners would not be able to turn an unknown visitor's clip into a named profile without that visitor's agreement. That is no technical moonshot. In Illinois, the companies have simply withheld the feature instead.

The Street as a Directory

The deepest question in the CNET report concerns the future of the neighbourhood itself. What could a street become when every entrance can name everyone who approaches it?

The answer depends on whether the separate household libraries stay separate. Today they mostly do. But the industry has already shown it can link neighbourhood cameras when it wants to. Ring's Search Party feature, launched in 2025, connects outdoor Ring cameras in an area and uses AI to look for a specific lost dog. Reporting by 404 Media and others says it is switched on by default, so owners must opt out if they do not want their cameras to take part. Camera owners are alerted to possible matches and decide whether to share a clip. Ring's founder Jamie Siminoff has insisted, in comments reported by Newsweek, that the feature “is not designed to process human biometrics.” Yet in an internal email to staff in October 2025, obtained by 404 Media, Siminoff wrote: “You can now see a future where we are able to zero out crime in neighborhoods.” Asked by TechCrunch in March 2026 about features Ring was not currently building, he said: “It's very hard to say we're never going to do something in the future.”

No one has announced a feature that lets a neighbourhood search its doorbells for a named human face. It would be wrong to say one exists. But the parts are now sitting side by side. There are cameras at a great many entrances. Many households have face libraries in which strangers can be named. And there is a proven, opt-out mechanism for coordinating neighbourhood cameras in a search. Whether those parts are ever joined up will be decided by companies, by courts and by legislatures, not by the technology, which already makes it possible.

Even without a network, the social effects are visible. The Data & Society research shows that doorbell cameras already change how outsiders are treated in a neighbourhood, and that the burden falls unevenly. Add the ability to name, and the street starts to behave like a directory. Regulars are known, strangers are flagged, and the difference is recorded at every door. Such a street is not obviously safer, but it does tell people who belongs. The courier, the carer, the canvasser and the new neighbour are all unfamiliar faces until somebody decides to name them. Jacobs's street worked because it could absorb strangers without cataloguing them. A street of naming doorbells keeps a catalogue.

What the Courts Will Not Settle

The lawsuits will take years. The Nest cases are still at the pleadings stage, with Google's response not due until December. Sigwalt has barely begun, and both companies have real arguments to make. Arguments open to them include that the plaintiffs cannot show their faces were ever scanned, and that owners, not manufacturers, decide what the cameras do. Some may succeed. Class actions are a slow way to settle the basic conditions of public life.

But the questions the cases raise will not go away whatever the verdicts. A household device now creates a named record of the people who pass it. The companies have shown, by switching the feature off in Illinois, that they know how to withhold it. They have shown, by telling owners to seek consent, that they know whose consent is missing. And with Apple's launch this week, the industry has shown that the feature is becoming standard, sold as the privacy-respecting version of the same thing. On-device processing, end-to-end encryption and Private Cloud Compute all answer the question of who else can see the data. None of them answers the question the courier is in a position to ask, if anyone ever asked her: why is my face on file at a door I visited for 30 seconds?

The presumption of anonymity in ordinary movement was never written into law because it never needed to be. It was guaranteed by the effort it took to identify a stranger. That effort is disappearing, door by door, through settings that a homeowner can switch on in a minute. The decision about who has to consent to being recognised at a front door is being made right now, in product design and support pages, mostly by default. It should be made deliberately, by people who will one day be the stranger on someone else's path. That includes everyone.

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References

1. CNET. Report on proposed class actions against Amazon and Google over familiar-face recognition in Ring and Nest video doorbells and Apple's entry into the market. 14 October 2026.
2. Sigwalt v. Amazon.com, Inc. and Ring LLC. Class Action Complaint, Case No. 2:26-cv-01887, United States District Court for the Western District of Washington, filed 1 June 2026. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.363574/gov.uscourts.wawd.363574.1.0.pdf
3. CourtListener. Docket, “In re: Nest Privacy Litigation,” No. 5:26-cv-06534 (N.D. Cal.), including the Fennessy et al. v. Google LLC Class Action Complaint filed 29 June 2026 (ECF No. 1) and the order consolidating cases signed 4 September 2026; and docket, “Trevino v. Google LLC,” No. 5:26-cv-06694 (N.D. Cal.), including the complaint filed 1 July 2026. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/73548337/in-re-nest-privacy-litigation/ Fennessy complaint also available at https://www.classaction.org/media/fennessy-et-al-v-google-llc-complaint.pdf
4. Google Nest Help. “Troubleshoot familiar face detection.” https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9281945?hl=en
5. Ring Help Center. “Familiar Faces.” https://ring.com/support/articles/z3yhg/familiar-faces
6. Office of Senator Edward J. Markey. Press release on Amazon's response regarding Ring facial recognition and delivery drivers. 10 December 2025. https://www.markey.senate.gov/news/press-releases/just-in-time-for-holiday-deliveries-sen-markeys-probe-exposes-amazons-alarming-privacy-violations-with-facial-recognition-technology-in-ring-doorbell
7. Apple Newsroom. “Introducing Apple Home Collection, a new lineup of smart home accessories.” 13 October 2026. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/10/introducing-apple-home-collection-a-new-lineup-of-smart-home-accessories/
8. Apple Security Research. “Private Cloud Compute: A new frontier for AI privacy in the cloud.” 10 June 2024. https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
9. Apple Support. “Use Face Recognition in Home on iPhone.” iPhone User Guide. https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-face-recognition-iph04af43727/ios
10. Davidson, Adam. “How to Use HomeKit Secure Video Face Recognition to Know Who's at Your Door.” How-To Geek, 16 February 2025. https://www.howtogeek.com/how-to-use-homekit-secure-video-face-recognition-to-know-whos-at-your-door/
11. Amazon. Delivery Service Partner driver diary, About Amazon. https://aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/amazon-delivery-service-partner-diary-photos
12. Nguyen, Aiha, and Eve Zelickson. “At the Digital Doorstep.” Data & Society, October 2022. https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/AttheDigitalDoorstepFINAL.pdf
13. Illinois General Assembly. Public Act 103-0769 (Senate Bill 2979), amending the Biometric Information Privacy Act, 740 ILCS 14, signed 2 August 2024. https://ilga.gov/legislation/publicacts/103/103-0769.htm
14. Davis Wright Tremaine. “Illinois Revises Biometrics Law To Reduce the Prospect of 'Ruinous' Damage Awards.” August 2024, updated April 2026. https://dwt.com/blogs/privacy--security-law-blog/2024/08/illinois-bipa-biometrics-law-amended-for-damages
15. Hartzog, Woodrow, and Evan Selinger. “Surveillance as Loss of Obscurity.” Washington and Lee Law Review 72, no. 3 (2015): 1343. https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/wlulr/vol72/iss3/10
16. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961.
17. Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018), decided 22 June 2018. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/16-402
18. United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012), Sotomayor, J., concurring. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/10-1259
19. Court of Justice of the European Union. František Ryneš v Úřad pro ochranu osobních údajů, Case C-212/13, ECLI:EU:C:2014:2428, judgment of 11 December 2014. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62013CJ0212
20. Information Commissioner's Office. “Domestic CCTV systems.” https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/domestic-cctv-systems/
21. UK General Data Protection Regulation, Article 9, “Processing of special categories of personal data.” legislation.gov.uk. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2016/679/article/9
22. Fairhurst v Woodard, Case No. G00MK161, Oxford County Court, judgment of HHJ Melissa Clarke, 12 October 2021. https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Fairhurst-v-Woodard-Judgment-1.pdf
23. Koebler, Jason. “Leaked Email Suggests Ring Plans to Expand 'Search Party' Surveillance Beyond Dogs.” 404 Media, 18 February 2026. https://www.404media.co/leaked-email-suggests-ring-plans-to-expand-search-party-surveillance-beyond-dogs/
24. O'Connell, Liz. “Ring responds to concerns ICE could access new tracking feature.” Newsweek, 11 February 2026. https://www.newsweek.com/ring-responds-concerns-ice-could-access-new-tracking-feature-11496717
25. Loizos, Connie. Interview report on Ring founder Jamie Siminoff and privacy concerns. TechCrunch, 8 March 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/08/rings-jamie-siminoff-has-been-trying-to-calm-privacy-fears-since-the-super-bowl-but-his-answers-may-not-help/

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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Chapter 1: The Sentence You Type Before You Pray

The dishes are still in the sink when your phone lights up with a message that makes your face go hot. Someone has taken a small misunderstanding and turned it into an accusation. You can explain what happened. You have the dates, the messages, and every reason to be upset. Your first reply is sharp enough to make the other person feel what you are feeling. You read it once, satisfied that it is accurate, and then sit there with your thumb over Send. The kitchen is quiet, but something inside you is not.

I think this is one of the least discussed costs of kindness: sometimes it asks us to give up the immediate pleasure of making someone else uncomfortable. In my companion video about the emotional price of kindness in an unkind world, I consider why generosity feels so demanding when we are already stretched. Money is only part of the picture. There are evenings when the thing we are asked to give is our restraint, and that can feel much more expensive than reaching into a wallet.

This is closely connected to choosing compassion without pretending you were not hurt, because the choice in front of you is not between being kind and having self-respect. It is between responding from your deepest convictions and letting a painful moment choose your words for you. I know how appealing a perfectly cutting sentence can seem in the imagination. It promises relief. It offers the feeling of having defended yourself. But I wonder how many of those sentences would leave us staring at the ceiling later, wishing we had waited.

Proverbs 15:1 tells us that a gentle answer can turn away wrath. That does not mean a gentle answer will always be welcomed, or that silence is required when someone treats us unfairly. It means the temperature of our reply matters. We can state what is true, correct a false claim, and protect a boundary without making humiliation our goal. That is not weakness. It is choosing not to borrow somebody else's cruelty to make our own point.

Maybe you delete the draft and put your phone facedown. You wash a plate, breathe, and ask God to help you speak plainly rather than punish. Tomorrow you may send a message that says what needs saying, with no apology for facts you did not distort and no insult you will have to carry afterward. The other person might still disagree. You cannot purchase a peaceful outcome by being thoughtful. But you can refuse to spend your integrity on a reply that would have felt good for five minutes. The message can wait. The kind of person you are becoming cannot always be repaired with a second text.

Chapter 2: The Kindness Nobody Sees You Struggling to Give

The coffee had gone cold beside the newspaper when a knock came at the door. It was Saturday morning, and you had been looking forward to having a few hours without anyone needing anything. Your neighbor stood outside holding a letter from the hospital. She wanted to know whether you could help her understand it. You had barely slept the night before, and the thought of another problem made your shoulders tighten. You invited her inside anyway, but part of you wished she had chosen another morning.

I think we need to be able to admit feelings like that without immediately condemning ourselves. There are times when kindness comes naturally, when our hearts are light and we have plenty of patience to spare. Then there are days when we are carrying private worries, and even a reasonable request feels heavier than it should. The difference does not necessarily reveal how much we love people. Sometimes it reveals how tired we have become.

What troubles me is how easily we can begin treating our own exhaustion as a moral failure. We believe that if our faith were stronger, generosity would always feel effortless. We imagine that a truly compassionate person would never hesitate before opening the door. Yet loving someone and feeling tired are not opposites. We can experience both at the same time.

In Mark 10:46–52, Jesus encounters Bartimaeus, a blind man calling out for mercy. When Bartimaeus comes to him, Jesus asks what he wants him to do. I have always appreciated that question. Jesus does not turn the man's need into an opportunity for a speech. He allows him to speak for himself.

There is something we can learn from that simple exchange. Sometimes we assume that helping requires us to take responsibility for an entire situation. Someone mentions a problem, and we immediately begin searching for a complete solution. Before long, we feel overwhelmed by obligations nobody actually asked us to accept.

Your neighbor may only need help understanding a letter. She may need someone to sit beside her while she calls the hospital. Perhaps twenty minutes of your attention would make a frightening morning easier. You do not have to become responsible for every appointment, every decision, or every uncertainty that follows.

That is where I believe generosity becomes healthier. We can ask people what would actually help rather than assuming we must rescue them from everything. We can offer what we genuinely have available and be honest about what we cannot provide.

And afterward, when the door closes and the house becomes quiet again, we can allow ourselves to rest without examining every tired thought as evidence of a deficient heart.

God knows what it costs us to remain gentle when our strength is running low. He also knows that we are human beings who need care, not endless supplies of patience for everyone else.

Chapter 3: Making Room for Someone Else's Good News

The email arrives five minutes before you shut down your computer. The position you interviewed for has gone to someone else. You read the polite words twice, trying to make them mean something less final. Then a coworker appears beside your desk, smiling so widely that you know she has news before she speaks. She has been promoted. She asks if you have a minute because she wants to tell you how it happened. You do, technically. But your own disappointment is so fresh that her happiness feels like one more thing you cannot afford to give.

This is the kind of generosity that never gets called generosity. Nobody is asking for money or a ride. Another person is asking you to share a moment that matters to them, and you're trying to do it while holding something painful of your own. It would be easy to offer a thin congratulations and turn back to the screen. It would also be understandable to need a little time alone. The hard part is being honest about the difference between protecting a tender place in yourself and wanting someone else's joy to become smaller.

Romans 12:15 invites us to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn. I love that both belong in the same sentence. God does not ask us to choose a world where only happy people deserve company, or where those who are hurting must stop noticing other people's good news. Life puts these experiences beside each other constantly. A celebration may happen on the very day we receive bad news. It takes a generous heart to make room for another person's moment without pretending ours has suddenly become easy.

Maybe you turn toward your coworker and ask what the new role will involve. You listen for a few minutes. When she leaves, you take your disappointment to the car and let yourself feel it. One honest conversation does not erase the rejection. You can be genuinely pleased for someone and still wish things had gone differently for you.

I don't think kindness should mean disappearing from your own life. God knows the news you received, too. He is not disappointed that you need to sit quietly before going home. The generosity worth keeping is not a polished performance of endless patience or happiness. It is a willingness to remember that other people have hearts as real as yours, even when you are struggling.

And when tomorrow comes, you are allowed to ask for the same tenderness you tried to offer today. There is no price of admission for being loved. We are all learning to give and receive grace while carrying things nobody else can fully see.

Your friend,

Douglas Vandergraph

Explore the complete Douglas Vandergraph Master Index:

https://douglasvandergraph.com/douglas-vandergraph-master-index/

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October 2026 Update

Haste now the running life leaves all behind, Like washed up husks of dead crabs on the beach Picked clean by the fear of falling behind The pace which never leaves time to be sure Who lost the keys to the back of your mind: “I have forgotten what my mind was for Because I spent too much of it online, And now my attention span is too poor To buy back those important thoughts of mine. Wait, what was the point of this metaphor? Was it just to think of a witty line? My life is too rich to care for the poor.” Such is the state of a mind short on time, Constantly bubbling with slanted rhymes.

— Sonnet 10

We say that time is relative, but time is the real constant. We call it relative because we experience it as relative from our perspective. Sometimes it seems to go fast and sometimes slow. It is really our language for and perception of time that is relative. I can’t really tell you where October went. It is a truism that time passes faster and faster as we get older, and yet the days feel long. I wonder why that is? What natural process in our minds makes the time seem to go faster the older we get? Our childhood exists as a monument which we do not perfectly remember and yet which no one else can define for us.

Writing

I have now crossed 10,000 words (around 40 pages) on The Abolition of Man vs. AI project and there is more that I could add. It is not really a full length book but it is not really an essay anymore. I guess it is a good thing since I have always struggled with output in my creative process. I always found myself having to add words rather than take them away, but I think using Koala Quill has gotten me into the habit more. I’m not sure how I feel about it. I think I had a secret pride in this shortcoming of mine. I wasn’t like those other writers who word vomit onto the page — But then it’s all word vomit in one form or another isn’t it?

Don’t worry, I’m fine. I’m still working, and I’m almost ready to start querying my new novel. Fingers crossed!

Music

I did a little recording work on Bezukova, which is turning out alright. The pace was really glacial because even though the song is written, it was hard for me to really nail the sound I wanted with the guitar recordings. I have something I am mostly happy with, though that might change once I go back to listen and add vocals. I also got side tracked working on delay pedal that I finally finished. It’s a productive hobby but definitely a distraction.

I’ve also been falling back into “ricing,” which is a linux term for customizing your desktop and the tools you use everyday. I never thought it would happen again but here we are. To be fair, the tools I found make it a lot easier than it used to be, but it has still been a time waster. But then again, sometimes it is good to have something to waste time on that we only do for ourselves. But then again, again, I would get a lot more out of playing my guitar or reading a book — And it is far too easy to waste too much time. For anyone curious I am trying out the scrolling wm, Niri, along with Dux Material Shell. If we are judging by the time it took to get me up and running it’s the easiest rice I ever did.

Speaking of time, I wrote that sonnet about hurry I mentioned in the last update, which you may have noticed at the top of this post.

Reading

This month I picked up Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut (no relation to the Disney movie) and enjoyed it. It is perhaps not his best work, but I don’t think that’s the point. It was really good reading on my sporadic breaks at work because the structure of the novel itself is sporadic. He really messes with the form, and there are a lot of good quotes. Vonnegut is not for everyone but I really enjoy his zany pessimism which manages to snatch catharsis from the jaws of despair:

“What could be a more negative word than ‘futility’?” he said.

“‘Ignorance’” I said.

I also finished Death’s End by Cixin Liu, both in Chinese and English. This has been a multiyear journey for me, and while I don’t consider myself near native fluency yet, I was able to get about 80% of the reading/context by the end. Some passages I could just read, others were very hard to figure out, but I enjoyed it and it helped my reading level a lot. I plan to keep going, and should work on getting hold of a book soon.

I found the Chinese version of Death’s End randomly from a small online used bookstore. I think I started to read it and then got exhausted by how many words I had to look up, so gave up for a while. Eventually I tried again, and instead of trying to understand 100%, I decided to just write down a few words (roughly 5 new words per day) in my notebook, and then look them up in Pleco the next day. Pleco also has a flashcards feature, so I added them to flashcards and tried to review them every day. It was slow going. I set a tiny goal of one page a day (it’s a 500 page book), but I finished it, and I learned a lot more words. 5 × 300 = 1500, so even if you miss 65 days you are learning roughly 1500 words a year. I would also listen to/read the English afterwords to see how much of it I understood. I found that reading ahead in English killed my motivation to read in Chinese.

Source: https://wordsonrepeat.com/vocabulary-statistics

I think this approach, while “less efficient” than reading on an app where you can look up words instantly, actually led to a greater improvement in my reading level, since I had to think about the characters and try to remember them while reading instead of relying on the technology to do it for me. For my next one I think I want to try Red Sorghum by Mo Yan, which is a classic of Chinese literature. It will probably be hard, but at least there won’t be a bunch of hard scifi words. In the meantime I have a collection of intermediate Spanish episodes from Don Quixote that I want to try. I will try to keep up my flashcards, as well as listen to my favorite Chinese podcast, while I wait to start Red Sorghum. Studying languages is humbling. I think everyone should do it.

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#update #October

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Thank you for reading! I greatly regret that I will most likely never be able to meet you in person and shake your hand, but perhaps we can virtually shake hands via my newsletter, social media, or a cup of coffee sent over the wire. They are poor substitutes, but they can be a real grace in this intractable world.

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Send me a kind word or a cup of coffee:

Buy Me a Coffee | Listen to My Music | Listen to My Podcast | Follow Me on Mastodon | Read With Me on Bookwyrm | Connect With Me on Substack

Haste Now the Slanted Rhymes

Haste now the running life leaves all behind, like washed up husks of dead crabs on the beach picked clean by the fear of falling behind the pace which never leaves time to be sure who lost the keys to the back of your mind: “I have forgotten what my mind was for because I spent too much of it online, and now my attention span is too poor to buy back those important thoughts of mine. Wait, what was the point of this metaphor? Was it just to think of a witty line? My life is too rich to care for the poor.” Such is the state of a mind short on time, constantly bubbling with slanted rhymes.

#poetry #sonnet

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Thank you for reading! I greatly regret that I will most likely never be able to meet you in person and shake your hand, but perhaps we can virtually shake hands via my newsletter, social media, or a cup of coffee sent over the wire. They are poor substitutes, but they can be a real grace in this intractable world.

---

Send me a kind word or a cup of coffee:

Buy Me a Coffee | Listen to My Music | Listen to My Podcast | Follow Me on Mastodon | Read With Me on Bookwyrm | Connect With Me on Substack

In Summary: * My Tuesday has been dominated by the afternoon appointment with my Retina Doc and the injections he gave me in my eyeballs. As I sit here now, it's taken about 4 hours from those shots for my vision to return to close to normal.

Have been enjoying listening to college basketball this evening: Wofford Terriers vs Tennessee Volunteers. Shall finish the night prayers after the game, finish taking my night meds, and retire early. Tomorrow should be an easier day.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 217.38 lbs. * bp= no readings taken today

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, toe raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 05:50 – Ube Halaya * 10:30 – egg rolls, cooked filipino vegetables, noodles & chicken * 18:00 – finished the Ube Halaya

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:05 – bank accounts activity monitored * 04:00 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, take daily meds, unpack, organize, and nap * 12:30 – listening to KONO 101.1 * 13:20 – leave home, going to see the Retina Doc * 16:20 – returned home, waiting for my vision to return from the injections so I can sort of do normal things normally

Chess: * 12:50 – moved in all pending CC games, winning 1 game, and losing 1.

Our Father Who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

Kim (part 9)

Affairs to unfold across this May portend The fair enough to vote away and new By sweetly by Days to night of cue All verse to allow the Son of Man And in this day to many The frightful and renew Of olive bet Officially denote The days to cross the chore Victory Afghan and light to weary And surely new The trials of vlad and who you are For loss and gain unflighted power The sympathy oppose at sighted free For Capulets and know A cricket to remain, implored remember But as a man unfree And History rewrite The stake and sorry Nights abliss and new And worry glad Across this awful horror of the news Making plain receipt The right of many jumped Deceased and crossed of gold- to amend Insuppose of that name and making wane Night supports amend And due for care Unbosses to relay- That May beneath the Earth in flight of home Apostles wear And shining in esteem- the frame of Summer Crossing there- Sights to meanly be what cross by there And husband to rewrite Kim is on recede by merchant pet For praying fast Dutchmen by the force and China’s call Why the toads unfold the crossing point Devilish and hell Escaping prime Forces by the fender- Earthly stall Why summon seconds to be near Worthing fold and by Lear Emanescent laughs While dusted men remain The time is new And what across but shoes opposed to season be Nightly new- Whispers to the void and as we go Praying West This affordant shore and afternoon Kim is gone Waking Peter by the store- and ready ground Weddings and all night The Angels’ day alone Silver dollar to his might Esteem to China sudden care And Earthly know Seven to the mire- Gladded hand and all anew We the poor of broken point Astray to early go un us to grave What option there annoy Notes to Beograd and nights to there Fortuned rain- and wearied star Distance to unvoy in trading by All of us did suffer just to be The mercy guiding flame as older then Why to such we be Innerving man and day Crosses of inflection and to recuse Mystery afloat in one of hour Heroes those Aping at our wheelhouse in as far In quantum gold at relay field Curtis for the night as we to go The rays of bin History rewrites to cure the new The new of peace and at this man relay A hundred beds to gnaw Our guiding bet Castles ever be by this our voice And common death We will remember- and as we were Trilliums of gold across accounts Victory supposing to this height Welcome by the nights and early back Off to fortunes by our light Focal to our know with this we write Finding new our name History atold and taking gear Fogs and fists proclaim By knighting her Kingdom lungs upon our sail Time as bet beside this know Airstrip to the right and waking then What launches to our tap Within our own destruct- Raking to our day and visit come Nights be with us and early back To upon us code The fated roar Substance of our year in tested rain Our gold as near Onus by relay and Camden right Early ply to view This our fortress as we know The horror surely was and cast a screw The missions ended here Phases to remain and as our star Witness to our view Capital and code in us decide The waking four Seoul was timely then Friends to write the distance of our worth And as we less Pockets to align as to our breath What we had here- was surely to oppose forever then No game to know All to second be our chance History waved at us Pain but to untold that we were sparse Made anew Our History land to fight our hand- Prophecy unknows but why and then- Our surest bet as rods asleep Making death our problem And mystery by wear God within us hail and nine of year Simplex to rewrite Wrath was Kim to this afford And History to age Trappings to be there as decent men Uncursed our lot and taking own- Appeases new But on to this new fortune as we Seoul As we speak and should Mercy seeking Rome and to our set In making time and giving way The early joy- of setting Earth across to see No making known- but of our love, Korea As time is might Joy is further running Distance what was here and never again Never shall we leap upon our age But as we prosper gain As inklings to our joy and Summer hold Our frost December Math at this duress Making time affords This forever good and riding new Seoul and new afford The timely new Timely year And for delivery- in History bet upon this road- This ninth at core- and made Korea new.