Some Days in the Life - June 12, 1999
There legitimately wasn't an entry on Thursday, however. Hey, when you gut the network, you have a lot to do.
I was awakened this morning at eight. It's never a good thing to wake a Scotsman up early on a weekend. The phone, she was a-ringing, so I staggered over to it.
It was Kara, a truly excellent Director of Summer Programs over at the Academy. She was calling because try as they may, they couldn't access the World Wide Web from our Link (which is a lecture hall with a computer projector in it and the like). This would disrupt the United Church of Christ conference currently going on on campus.
Well, the prospect of several thousand Evangelical Christians losing their ability to access CNN.com frightened me as much as anyone else -- after all, without the Internet, they might start wandering the streets and knocking on doors with promotional literature. And I live on the street nearest to the Academy. So, I schlepped over to the Link.
It was dark -- I don't know when Kara had last tested it, but she wasn't there now. I pulled out my handy Powerbook, plugged in and started up. And I was nervous. We'd been doing network upgrades and we'd run into some trouble as a part of the process -- mostly because our old, relatively primitive network had no capacity to diagnose hubs that were failing and separate the hub from the network before it started spewing garbage packets out onto the network, causing potential trouble. Heck -- one of those had brought our old network down because it had gone undiagnosed.
Our new network core is the most sophisticated switching technology available, with Spectrum Element Manager watching it like a hawk. So, suddenly "perfectly good" aging hubs had been shut down pending a repair or a replacement. We'd dealt with a couple on Friday.
We had no capacity to deal with any on Saturday. If the Link were dead....
My powerbook finished powering up. I clicked on my Mail icon.
My mail slid down normally. I blinked. I opened Internet Explorer.
No problems to CNN.com. Nor to ABCNEWS.com. Nor to UCC.com.
Now I was confused. I called Kara and explained that it all worked normally for me. She said she'd be right over.
Kara and Chris, her assistant, brought their powerbooks with them. We booted them up. This is when I learned that these powerbooks hadn't been even turned on since the Summer before -- which is to say that they hadn't been adapted to the Firewall, nor to the complete change of ISP we'd had. Their DNS settings were looking for nonexistent DNS servers. Their default router addresses were for a machine that hadn't been in use for nine months.
I spent the nine minutes it took to switch both of them. They saw the Internet. I didn't make snide comments about how you don't wait until the day you need equipment before you tested it. They were thankful. I went home and back to sleep.
On reflection, now that I've had tea, it doesn't really bother me. The point of Summer Programs is they bring in massive amounts of cash into the Institution so that Evangelical Christians can come and have a nice place with network hookups for a weekend rally. Those massive amounts of cash help pay for... well, me. I rather like that. I'm happy to help.
But please, have me help late on Friday, not early on Saturday. Ugh.
DeForrest Kelly is dead. You fill in the joke. I don't want to.
The joke got brought up (but not said) last night online, and it was almost too much for one or two people. McCoy wasn't just a TV character to them. He was a role model. And it was just too painful for people. I can understand that, though McCoy wasn't a role model for me. My favorite character was Scotty. And it seemed unfair -- after all, McCoy was supposed to live to 137, according to the Season Premiere of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The only character from the original show in the premiere, no less.
But I don't claim it doesn't affect me at all. It does, more than most celebrity deaths I've heard about. DeForrest Kelly lived a very quiet post-Star Trek life. Unlike Shatner and Nimoy, he never tried to get people to forget the role he had created and the place it had in history. He was perfectly content to retire after Star Trek, reprising his role every now and again and going to conventions. I never saw him at a convention (I've only been to one Star Trek specific Con -- I like the Literary Cons better) but he was always described as amiable and a true gentleman. Unlike the two more popular, better paid parts of the central Star Trek trio, he hasn't written a book called I Am Not Spock or Get A Life about how much he resented his fans. Clearly, he didn't resent his fans, he appreciated them, and the notoriety that came with it.
In that trio, McCoy stood for humanity -- the voice of emotionalism. The voice of conscience. The often short shrifted symbol of the man who says that there are deeper, more emotional, more human considerations than logic -- considerations which make us better than Vulcans, not worse. In the best of the movies, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, McCoy was at once the man who was morally offended that humanity was trying to play God and take over Evolution with the Genesis device, and astounded and pleased with the Genesis Cave, where humanity's most wondrous achievement had been given its only successful fruition. The two were not incompatible for McCoy. Unlike the often overly cerebral and "preachy" monologues of McCoy's humanity-spokesman successor, Jean-Luc Picard, McCoy always seemed to have his beliefs come from his heart, inspired by the moment -- impressed with human ingenuity and concerned over humanity's quest to better itself at the cost of its basic morality. McCoy should be impressed with the fruits of Genesis and passionately against its creation and use. It was who the character was.
And clearly who DeForrest Kelly was as well. More than most, he seemed to be his most famous character in interviews. And it's known that in the travesty that was Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, McCoy was supposed to turn against Kirk in the name of a Vulcan who took his greatest pains and shared them. Kelly refused to play the scene -- the first time in history he ever caused trouble. McCoy wouldn't do that -- not to Kirk, and more importantly, not to himself. Humanity didn't turn away from itself.
After Kelly's revolt, Leonard Nimoy also refused, but it started with DeForrest Kelly, who believed so passionately in what his character represented he could buck the ego of William Shatner, who wanted his own character to be the only one who resisted. And yet, unlike Nichelle Nichols, Walter Koenig, George Takei and (most passionately) James Doohan, DeForrest Kelly never said a negative word about William Shatner in public that I have ever seen.
A true gentleman. A passionate believer in the mythology he helped create. A part of Americana.
I'll miss him. So will we all.
A friend is coming North to hang out today -- fellow by the name of Greg Fishbone, who's published some of my stories and is one of the folks who wrote How to Become A Superhero in Ten Easy Steps with Louise and I -- which is now at Simon and Schuster, being reviewed. We will see. So, I'm off.
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