David Alison's Blog

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Finding Davey: A Father's Search for His Son in the Afterlife

September 12, 2018

Note: On August 17, 2018 I released my book: Finding Davey: A Father's Search for His Son in the Afterlife . It is available on Amazon in both Paperback and Kindle formats . When I started writing Finding Davey it wasn't because I wanted to write a book. It was because I wanted to keep a journal of what was happening to me as I navigated my way out of the profound grief I found myself in. Initially it was a struggle just to get through each day; so much of my life had been turned upside down by the death of my son that I found myself in free-fall, grasping for anything stable. Most days I would write down how I felt and record my thoughts. This was not intended to be a cathartic exercise; the writing was often very difficult and required that I re-experience the emotions as I wrote down how I had been feeling. Many tears were shed on my keyboard in the early stages. I did it because I wanted to see if I was in fact getting better. When you've fallen down a hole so

Digital Landmines

August 21, 2018

When you lose a child the number of challenges you face is profound. One of the reasons many grief stricken people disconnect from their prior lives is that the reminders of their loss are everywhere. I experienced this first hand after I lost my son in a car accident in July of 2016. As a purveyor and advocate of technology for over 30 years, I had always been a fan of the sharing nature of the modern internet. Easy access to information opened completely new and innovative ways of solving problems for me, and I embraced it fully. Over the last few years social media has evolved, pushing more and more automated engagement on it's users. Social media is both a blessing and a curse to the newly bereaved; it can be a primary conduit for connecting with friends and family. In our case it allowed us to see all the wonderful acts of kindness people were doing in our son’s name , receive links for inspirational videos and articles, and do research on how consciousness could survive p

What to say to a parent that lost a child

August 14, 2018

Losing a child is arguably the most difficult challenge a person can face in life. When I lost my son Davey in July of 2016 I was plunged into the most profound grief and sadness I had ever experienced. In my 55 years on this planet I have been through a lot, however this made every other challenge I encountered seem trivial by comparison. It wasn't just my son that died in a car accident on that hot muggy day in July. I died too. I instantly became a completely different person, changed to my core by an event that brought up all of those deep existential questions that I had previously just brushed aside. In the initial days I was in free-fall and found myself surrounded by hundreds of people that wanted to express their sympathies, doing everything they could to support me and my family. The vast majority of my friends and family handled it with grace and compassion. A few were so overcome with emotion they blurted out things that only made my sadness more profound but as t

A Course Change

July 24, 2018

When I started this blog just over 10 years ago it was to document what I was experiencing while adopting a Mac . My primary computing platform at that time was Windows and I was both a long time user and developer. My goal with the blog was simple: I was learning a new platform and wanted to share with others what I had discovered. The internet has always been a tremendous resource for me and I felt that I should do my part and contribute to that knowledge base. That simple goal ended up serving hundreds of thousands of readers over the years. Though I haven't made a single post to this blog in over 4 years, hundreds of people still visit this blog daily based on search results for things like Time Machine errors , keyboard shortcuts , upgrading an old Mac hard drive to an SSD and setting up a MacBook for a college student . I received messages from readers of this blog fairly regularly asking when I would return to blogging, but I always replied with "soon... I h

The death of the internet as we know it is about to begin

April 26, 2014

When I talk to people in person about Net Neutrality I generally get blank stares from all but the highly technology oriented people. Most folks don't know or care how the internet works. Ask the average person if they understand the internet and most associate it with a web site or email. They still say things like "The internet is down!" when their local connection is having issues. There is nothing wrong with this blissful ignorance. Technology should fall into the background for most people. There are lots of things that work this way. Most people don't understand how water or electricity is produced and delivered to their homes. They turn on a switch and a light comes on. They turn a handle and water pours out of a faucet. The stuff just works (most of the time). If you fall into this category you need to learn more about the Net Neutrality issue and how the internet we use every single day is about to be hijacked by the cable and wireless industry. It will

Arq and Glacier - Affordable Mac Cloud Storage

May 23, 2013

After the near miss I had in losing a considerable portion of my personal digital library I decided to do something about it and look into a cloud based solution for keeping my files safe. I’m still using Time Machine locally to back up nearly everything, I just wanted a final line of storage just in case. I’ve been using DropBox for years for my documents and miscellaneous files. I have several Google Apps for Business accounts that store my emails and shared docs and spreadsheets. The code I write is versioned and stored in GitHub . For the most part I live off the cloud already, the only thing missing was my large collection of family photos and videos, which totaled nearly 140GB. iCloud is cool and all, and I love the way it keeps my little iPhone photos synced, but at $100 / year for only 55GB, this is a pretty expensive solution. I looked at a variety of different cloud backup solutions and found them to be ill-fitted to my needs. While many of them have plenty of capaci

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