OCTOBER 3, SUNDAY

NHT

So what do I write about when nothing happened yesterday? My little brother Ted who died eight years ago kept a journal at the age of 8 which he kept in his fantasy fort between the roots of a huge oak tree. I managed to read it at some point. Almost every daily entry was NHT, nothing happened today. So that could be the entry for today, NHT. This was the also the time when he used to fill his pockets with rocks so that at bedtime he could loosen his belt and his pants would drop effortlessly, with a thud, to the floor.

But NHT wasn’t quite true of Ted’s early years. I can remember standing with him when he was about six in town at the edge of a vacant lot covered with thick brown dried weeds which was ablaze. There was a fire engine there and a number of fireman spraying it with long hoses. I remember looking over at Ted who had a beatific smile on his face. I didn’t say anything. But I knew his preoccupation with matches and lighting fires was the cause. Later in high school he picked the lock of the upper floor of the high school building as a prank and blew up a firecracker which was a little more powerful than he expected so that all the windows blew out at the end of the hallway. No one suspected him then, either. One time in the Himalayas we were walking home to my mother along a mountain road with our arms full of a gift of rhododendron flowers when walking beside me he suddenly disappeared, slipping beneath the wires of a fence and dropping fifty feet with a couple of bounces to the Tehri road below. We had been in India for two weeks. Coolies picked him up and took him unconscious to the school dispensary while I ran crying home to my mother. He barely survived a puncture in his head and broke his arm in a number of places so that he spent weeks in the hospital with a cast that held his arme out straight, bent at the elbow, and encased his chest down to his waist. A second fall when he was daydreaming on a 12 foot high scaffold looking up at the sky and it tipped over, he thought the world was tipping, was almost as bad. Later his penchant for secret activities led him into the CIA and we didn’t know for years what he had been doing and only found out near his death that he had discovered an ingeneous way to locate Russian secret installations from planes and then satellites that made finding a needle in a haystack much simpler.

So NHT didn’t fit his life and it turns out doesn’t fit my day yesterday.

After my near panic on Friday over welcoming hackers into my computer I calmed down yesterday. Not a penny has disappeared, yet, and I’m guessing it won’t. I’m betting that the purpose of the scheme was to accompany me by keeping me on the phone to Best Buy and to get me to do something to fill someone’s pockets and that everything done before that was to set me up. I’m betting that there was a fishing expedition and that I was the big flopping fish who was almost drawn in and then at the last minute broke away. Of course, I may be wrong. There was too much chatter in the background as he guided me so earnestly where a room full of fishermen were reeling in fish after fish. I don’t think it was a sophisticated operation and that immediately after I removed the program I had allowed to be installed on my computer they realized I was gone and went on to other fish.

But in the meantime I decided to quiet down and prepare my computer to be wiped clean if necessary by removing from it everything that I wanted to save, particularly 100 or so desktop file folders holding 50 to 100 photographs apiece which stubbornly wouldn’t let me slide them off the desktop and onto a portable drive. The second thing was to decide to change all the passwords that a new feature on IOS 15 told me were on lists of compromised passwords. Both of these were things that I had put off for months. I took my obvious hacking as an opportunity to learn what the process of being hacked was about and how to protect myself. So I had a very dull and routine day.

But I did learn what my computer problem was and a little about the Apple iCloud into which I deposit all my photographs and everything else on my computer. I had never trusted it. I knew my full resolution photographs were stored on the cloud and that the photographs that I saw in my Photos file were low resolution, apparently the same, replicas. And it was this that was causing my problem. In order to shift a folder of photographs onto a hard drive and to be saving the originals, stored in the cloud, the computer had to download the originals from the cloud to my computer. And this took so long that I had become impatient and quit when I couldn’t shift the files before the download took place. Yesterday I was patient and waited and waited until the photos in a folder were downloaded, after which I could slide them across. But it took all day.

And now that I understand this process it seems amazing. How, invisibly, can this process be taking place in the other direction every time I take a photograph with my iPhone. Each photo within moments is stored in high resolution form in the iCloud and stored on my phone as a low resolution replica that I can look at immediately. And this does connect with my trip and help prepare me. Now I know that every photograph I put into my photos folder is backed up and safe even if my iPhone drops into the Aegean.

I also found out how to back up the backed up copies in the cloud onto a hard drive where I am now storing the high resolution copies. So I’ve finally learned a little about the miracle of the cloud. And all of this is thanks to being hacked and being forced to protect myself from the next hack. So it was a good day. Something happened yesterday.