On February 15, 2017, my father passed away after a lengthy battle with dementia. Following is the eulogy I delivered at his memorial service. [Read more…]
Coming full circle
First, let me post the TL;DR version right up top: Shirly and I have suspended all efforts to adopt. We have closed our old site, mormonsadopting.com, and have deactivated our account on adoption.com. I’m sure this is disappointing and even heartbreaking to our friends and family, who have held out hope and prayed for us and with us as we have sought the blessing of posterity. We’re simply at a point of spiritual exhaustion with respect to this matter, for reasons that should be abundantly clear in the course of this post. [Read more…]
Belkin B2B128 and macOS Sierra: how to get them working again
I’m fairly militant on keeping my electronics running the latest updates – security, stability and all that. Which made it frustrating that, after I installed macOS Sierra on my MacBook Air, my Belkin B2B128 Ethernet adapter stopped functioning. The USB outlets seemed to work fine, but the Ethernet functionality – which is of course the main reason I bought the thing – was AWOL.
I put up with it for a while and got by with WiFi – grudgingly, I might add, since our router is right next to my home office desk – but now that I’m on a consulting assignment with a different client whose WiFi is less than reliable, matters came to a head. I need Ethernet on my notebook, ASAP. So I jumped on a chat with somebody from Belkin. His response: sorry, it’s broken, we no longer support it, you’ll have to get a replacement.
Seriously? This thing cost me around $50 last year. It worked fine until the latest macOS update. This is a software issue, not a hardware issue, meaning it’s easily remedied. I griped on Twitter, which yielded this response:
@rpboots Hi Ryan. Thanks for reaching out to us. Our Engineering team is working on it. Stay tuned on our website for more updates.
— BelkinCares (@BelkinCares) December 8, 2016
Thankfully, Tom’s Hardware came to the rescue. Seems that, in cases like these when a software update breaks something (which seems to happen with USB 3.0 hardware), you’re better off checking with the chipset manufacturer, which in this instance is an outfit called Asix. I went here, downloaded and installed their latest driver (compatible with macOS 10.12, AKA Sierra), and I’m back in business.
Hey, Belkin? Get with the program.
The undelivered eulogy
On June 18, after many years of struggle with drug addiction, my youngest brother Chris was found dead of an overdose. At the funeral service, a close friend to Chris and one of our brothers spoke. For my own healing process, I elected to write a eulogy of my own.
Let me repeat here what I have personally told my brother and Chris’s friend: nothing about this blog post should be considered an attempt to “set the record straight,” or to somehow clarify or articulate more effectively anything either of them said at the funeral service. One or both of them covered what follows here; they truly did an exceptional job honoring his memory. I wrote this to help my own mourning process, simple as that.
I should also say that they have earned my respect. It’s taken me literally months to write what they turned around in just a few days.
MBA: check.
A long, complicated story preceded this picture. I hope to start telling it soon. For now, it’s enough to say that a goal more than three years in the making has been accomplished. (In the meantime, read this.)