The Honor Roll (and Video Games)

Yesterday, I finished restoring my computer. When I designed and built it, I wasn't trying to save a nickle: I was trying to build the fastest air-cooled machine on the planet. I lost track of what it has cost me over the years, possibly because I don't want to remember. An upgrade in December set me back about $3000. I don't want to admit dumping something like $10,000 without having a very, very good reason, which, at the moment, I'm sorely lacking. There is Dolby Digital 5.1 audio certified as THX by George Lucas, and a monitor to die for.

The only use I have for it is playing video games; you are likely to run into my alter ego, Rufina, in any number of massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). At the moment, it's Lord of the Rings Online. All my serious work, though, is Mac based.

I also used to maintain a list of the names of those who died fighting multiple myeloma; I called it the Honor Roll. The data is simple: name, next of kin, relationship, date of birth, date of death, date of diagnosis. The process of maintaining it is not.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, Mr. Phelps, is to guess how the one topic relates to the other.

A hint: I haven't updated the Honor Roll in about two years. I feel guilty about my neglect, because so many of the survivors appreciate the Roll. Myeloma has its Little Arlington, although shabby, full of weeds, and not so grand at the moment.

Give up?

In my former life I was a Knowledge Engineer/System Designer/Programmer/Senior Scientist. I loved to program computers. There is no better exercise for the brain, nothing, that more wonderfully concentrates the mind (except maybe an outraged husband with a gun). In graduate school I learned to program in assembler for supercomputers, fell in love with an obscure programming language called SNOBOL4, and proceeded to make a specialty of programming in FORTRAN as if it were SNOBOL or LISP. Good code is so terse, so stripped of BS, it's like the essence of a poem. Getting it there is the best, most rigorous editing job in the world.

So when I set up the Honor Roll, naturally I figured out how to automate it. The information is in a relational data base, from which I extract a text file equivalent which is then fed into a — wait for it — SNOBOL4 program that regularizes and error checks all of the entries, then produces a finished web page which I then upload.

Eventually, I'll publish the statistics from the data base. I hope they will be useful.

Two or three years back, though, Mac stop being delivered with the old OS 9, and, instead launched a new, magnificent operating system, OS X, which had, for my purposes, only one small flaw: it couldn't run SNOBOL. The critical piece of my automation just died right there before my eyes. What was I to do?

Well, the obvious answer is just to edit the web page manually. But once I do that, I have to acknowledge the permanent loss of the last piece of my career, which was my first piece, computer programming. I hate giving it up. Which I expect is a major reason, besides relapse, etc., why I let the Honor Roll go.

There is also the undeniable truth that regularly updating the Roll is not easy on my psyche. I do consider it a kind of spiritual therapy to do so, to keep me grounded. But it is neither an exercise nor a duty that I relish.

In case you haven't noticed, all of my posts are about acceptance. I preach with fundamentalist zeal about the importance of accepting truth, regardless of how unwelcome, in order to fight cancer effectively. Well, in this case, I just wanted to pretend that I still had an important piece of me that I have in fact lost. I was being childish. I apologize.

Shortly, when the DVD-R decides to let me, I plan to resume maintaining the Honor Roll page. Eventually it will be up-to-date. I'll feel bad about the people that I could have had listed and didn't, but at least I'll be back doing a service that helps many of the survivors accept their loss.