Larry PortTrying to raise kids and live responsibly amid an onslaught of nonsense.

My wife, Dina Roth Port, penned her first book, Previvors, which will be published by Penguin in October. It’s a guidebook about women at high risk for breast cancer and profiles the stories of five women who took control over their fate.

Dina spent the past two-and-a-half years writing, researching, interviewing, and revising what’s turned out to be an engaging and important book, and I am so incredibly proud of her. And she’s going to be so embarrassed that I wrote this.

I’ve worked hard on major projects before, pulling 18-hour days for weeks at a time. But her writing effort is like nothing I’ve ever seen: the subject matter is intense, the work took years, she had to track down and interview more that seventy top experts, and extract the stories of the women she interviewed. All on top of shuttling kids back and forth to school, adopting a puppy, and keeping our household running.

So take a look at her newly launched website and blog at dinarothport.com. And you can even pre-order copies of Previvors!

Last year I wrote a series of articles on the absolutely riveting subject of cloud computing. I don’t know that it generated any sales of Rocket Matter (my company’s cloud based legal software product), but today I received a very nice note from a Computers 101 teacher. He’s going to be assigning my article to his students.

Anyhow, if you’re wondering what the cloud is that they keep talking about on those pretentious IBM commercials, here’s a brief idea:

“To understand how cloud computers are organized, imagine you’re a general trying to a direct an army. Instead of individually ordering each of the infantrymen to follow an order, you direct an officer. The officer disseminates the information to the troops and makes adjustments based on their performance and environment. If an individual infantryman falls, another one can compensate.

It’s the same with the new server architectures. Instead of communicating with individual machines, commands are issued to the intermediate layer.”

To read the full torturous article and feel the pain of the Computers 101 class, click here.