August 23, 2007
by infmom
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In Japan, a calico cat with its paw upraised is a symbol of good luck.
We were lucky to have had Calypso.
Calypso, May 1994 – August 2007.  Rest in peace, beloved kitty.
Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.August 17, 2007
by infmom
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I haven’t been writing much lately. One of our cats, Calypso, is very ill and my mind has been occupied with that. There isn’t much we can do for her other than make her comfortable and assure her that we love her, but that doesn’t keep me from fretting.
However, I think writing about miscellaneous “good stuff” is an appropriate way to take my mind off that, so herewith…
When I was a kid, the book A Hole Is To Dig was one of my all-time favorites. My grandmother gave it to me, and hearing her read it in her cultured British accent was a real treat. I can still hear the way she did it. One of my fondest memories.
That book came back to me today when I spotted a link to a really nifty web site (thank you, userfiriendly.com Link of the Day) that lets you plot on a map exactly where you’d come out if you dug straight down. We always assumed it would be China. It isn’t. Who knew?
I’ve been seeing more and more links to “How to keep your house cooler” tips these days, and quite rightly so. Unfortunately, one of the best tips is “Live in a dwelling that was built before people assumed everyone was going to have air conditioning.” This house was built in 1930 and does a reasonably good job of keeping us cool sans a/c on hot days if we just do a few simple things like pull in as much cool air as possible with fans at night, close up all the windows before the air starts heating up for the day, and go spray down the southwest-facing wall with the hose late in the afternoon to help cool the hot stucco wall. But I don’t suppose that kind of common sense advice will fly with just everyone. I wonder how people like me and my brothers survived all those years without air conditioning. Three out of four of us are children of the 50s when a/c was a luxury for the rich and nobody ever heard of air conditioning a public school. Not that I’d want to go back to those days and make all the kids swelter in class with only a fan or two and an anemic “blower” under the window to try to push away the sticky, sultry heat, but still…
There were several things that parents did, that I swore that I’d never do when I became a parent. I think I’ve done pretty well on “Don’t tell your kids they aren’t entitled to their own opinions” and “Don’t make arbitrary rules about curfews and bedtimes without considering the individual kid and his or her needs” and “Don’t view boys and girls as differently important,” but I’m still having problems with “When I was your age…” and I utterly failed in the matter of “Because I said so.”
Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.August 10, 2007
by infmom
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I read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood when it first came out. My mother had read the excerpts in the New Yorker and went out and bought the book practically the first day it was on sale, and when she was done with it, I read it.
I found some eerie parallels–Lowell Lee Andrews had been executed while I was celebrating my birthday, for example–and could get some feel for the midwestern landscape, since it hadn’t been all that long since we’d moved from central Virginia to Iowa. But it wasn’t till, as relative newlyweds, we moved to Wichita, Kansas in 1974, that I really began to appreciate the setting of the book.
Capote himself, I never had much appreciation for. All I saw was the clown act he so often performed on various TV shows, and his eventual meltdown while talking to Stanley Siegel. While it was easy to acknowledge his gifts as a writer, his public persona was so annoying that it was hard to find any reason to like him, himself.
That finally changed, yesterday, when I saw the film Infamous. While it was somewhat jarring to try to picture “James Bond” (Daniel Craig) as Perry Smith, it was finally clear why Capote melted down after In Cold Blood was published and never really accomplished anything much as a writer again.
The movie was based on George Plimpton’s Capote biography, which was not so much a biography as a collection of reminiscences by the people who’d known him. I read that book several years ago but it didn’t communicate as powerfully as this movie, at least not in my recollection. Clearly, I’m going to have to read that book again.
Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.August 4, 2007
by infmom
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The past few days I have been feeling really good. And feeling that more good things are right around the corner.
My health is improving, my outlook is brighter and the worries of the recent past seem to be fading.
In celebration of that, I’ve been trying to remove everything that might be contributing to negative energy around me. No, I’m not a wholehearted believer in feng shui, but I do think that there are things in one’s environment that can contribute to general improvement by their removal. If that makes sense.
So today I went through the file drawer in my desk. The original idea was to get out all the computer instructions and registrations and so forth and put them in the binders I bought weeks ago, but in the process of unearthing those I discovered a whole bunch of things from my last job that I absolutely, positively, did not need to keep.
I shredded the worst of them, put the rest in the recyle bin, and feel lighter already. I had disposed of the worst of the worst long ago, but had forgotten these last unpleasant remnants were still filed away.
I’m going to search through the rest of those files and see what else I can get rid of. It sure felt good to run that stuff through the shredder. Now I need to rustle up a brown paper bag so I can empty the shredder into that per city recycling instructions and give the seething remains the permanent heave-ho.
Onward and definitely upward!
Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.July 30, 2007
by infmom
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I am a late-comer to a lot of things my kids take for granted (or have used since practically Day One). I find this amusing, since I was the one who got them a computer when they were really young (a much loved Commodore 64) and encouraged them to explore anything that caught their fancy.
I also was “online” starting in 1983 with a CompuServe subscription. However, I was a latecomer to the internet/world wide web because my budget really didn’t stretch to cover a higher powered computer until I learned how to build my own, and the early browsers (Mosaic in particular) drove me nuts trying to get any kind of performance on a 386, which was all I had until well into the Pentium era.
I was a whiz at online chatting, though, sometimes using two computers and two phone lines to yack away on two different networks at once (and keep up with multiple public and private conversations the whole time span). I think the zenith of my chat experience was in the early days of cable network broadcasting when a group of us from across the USA all watched the same “Lost in Space” rerun on the Turner channel and discussed it in real time via chat room.
A lot of today’s computer/internet users were either not born or not “online” yet in the years when if you had a CompuServe account and your friends had The Source, there was no way you could send them an email directly. Strange but true.
My kids poke fun at me for my lack of in-depth internet experience and they’re light years ahead of me in discovering the wonders therein. They do try to help old Mom by sending all kinds of links via IM and email. And I’ve gotten addicted to sites like Gizmodo and Lifehacker that provide me with all kinds of other neat stuff to check out.
Not enough time in the day, really. Which is why I was so delighted to come across the “Habit List” in the Productivity 501 blog, which gives me a way to map out the things I intend to accomplish every day for a month, and mark them as done or not-done each day so I can see where I’m piddling away my time.
I have also (thanks to Lifehacker) finally gotten into the glory that is RSS feeds and have set up Google Reader on my Google home page so I can see all the various blogs, cartoons and so forth that I like to read every day and can pick and choose what I want to look at, all in one convenient place.
I don’t think I have gotten my time managed really efficiently yet, but these new (well, new to me at any rate) tools are a step in the right direction.
Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.July 23, 2007
by infmom
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My book arrived at 10:30 Saturday morning. Alas, I had already agreed to make the ultimate sacrifice and go to F’zer’s company picnic that day, so I didn’t actually get to start reading till about 4:30pm. (But hey, we won tickets to Disneyland and a Toys R Us gift card in the raffle, so it wasn’t entirely a vain sacrifice on my part.)
I finished it at about 12:30pm yesterday, having gotten to the “Battle of Hogwarts” chapter at about 2am and having thought that was probably the best place to break it off lest I do something stupid like stay up all night reading. (Not to say I didn’t consider it, mind you.)
Warning, spoilers ahead, as I revisit my predictions in the previous message and see how well I did.
My predictions and speculations on the final book:
I had also noticed the connection between Harry’s blood and Voldemort’s in Goblet of Fire because of Dumbledore’s reaction when he heard about it. And when I heard what Ravenclaw’s object was, I immediately said “I bet it’s that ratty old tiara Harry used to mark his Potions book in the Room of Requirement.” So I followed many of the clues pretty well. I thought the fact that Dumbledore offered to hide Draco and his mother by making them appear to be dead was a clue that Dumbledore himself only appeared to be dead. That was a bit of very clever misdirection.
I loved finding out more about Dumbledore’s past. He’s always been presented as such a perfect but mysterious character up till now and this book filled in the blanks.
Now I have to wait for F’zer to finish reading the book so we can discuss it. And of course so I can read it again and go over the good parts at my leisure.
Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.July 19, 2007
by infmom
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Seems odd to think that after Saturday there will no longer be a world in which people didn’t know how the Harry Potter story would end.
When I first started working at the library, the staff decorated their table at the yearly city-employee potluck with a Harry Potter theme. Being a bunch of librarians, they had already read the books. But nobody else (including me) had read them at that time, so the clever details of the table setup and staff costumes flew right by everyone else.
It did inspire me, however, to read the books for myself, and for that I’m very thankful, because I was able to snag the first two books without difficulty from the chidren’s room and then buy them without having to wait, and I’ve bought all the subsequent books promptly upon release.
The only other series I’ve been so caught up in has been Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander books, and the final installment of that series is due sometime in the next year or so and I’m champing at the bit to read that, too.
F’zer’s company picnic is on Saturday, and we’re going, and I hope he appreciates what a monster sacrifice I’m going to be making to do that when my Harry Potter book is due to arrive from Amazon that day!
My predictions and speculations on the final book:
Just a couple more days and I’ll be able to tell how much, if any, of this came close to the mark.
July 13, 2007
by infmom
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Like many people, my level of expertise varies widely, subject by subject. Get me going on ancient history and I’ll talk your ear off, with references. Ditto American history of the mid 20th century and later (heck, I lived through most of it, why wouldn’t I know about it).
Computer stuff is hit or miss. I’m a good diagnostician. I can usually figure out what’s wrong, even if I don’t know exactly how to fix it. I like fixing computers so learning how to do new things is easy and usually fun.
But when it comes to applications, it seems like either I know it or I don’t. I’m not well versed on things like IRC (my daughter had to help me get it going the few times I tried it) or a lot of the really cool internet sites that everyone seems to understand. (No, I’m not into digg & co and haven’t bothered to learn, yet.) I hate the Windows XP interface even when it’s modified to a pseudo-classic interface and have done my best to avoid learning it in the same kind of depth I have for previous iterations.
And I don’t, as yet, know much about sound, video et al. I have a video editing program that I can’t quite figure out (the manual that came with it sucks). I only recently got into iTunes and am still far from expert in its use. I’ve thought about doing my own podcasts but haven’t gotten going on that, either, although I did buy a copy of Podcasting for Dummies when I found it on a closeout table.  (Um, haven’t read it yet.)
However, yesterday when I found an old cassette tape with the voices of my children from their very, very early childhood, I realized it was as good a time as any to learn how to transfer audio tapes to CD.
So I downloaded Audacity. Looked for a manual of some sort. It doesn’t have one. I loathe trying to learn how to use software by poking through help files. Loathe. But as it happened, a Google search turned up good, clearly written instructions for exactly what I wanted to do.
So…Â today I did it.
I also tried modifying the recording by removing all the background noise, although I’m not so sure that really improved the recording because it seems to have taken out a bit more than just the noise. I’ll have to burn the two versions to CD, though, and listen to them carefully through headphones. My itty bitty speakers aren’t going to work for critical listening, not to mention that the only way my little corner of the office is habitable when it’s hot outside is for me to keep a fan blowing right at me, and you can’t hear clearly over fan noise, for sure.
Still, though, I consider myself now to be On My Way to learning about sound recording in the computer age. I did plenty of it back in the years when the only way you could edit stuff was to sit down with a tape block and a razor blade and cut and piece together chunks of audio tape. I was an expert at doing that. Now I have to learn the bladeless way.
I can do this!
Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.July 8, 2007
by infmom
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July 8, 2007
by infmom
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Not one single song-lyrics site has the words to Arlo Guthrie’s “Presidential Rag” correct. They must all be feeding off each other, because they all have the exact same mistakes. And the transcriptions have obviously been done by someone who wasn’t even born at the time. “You said you didn’t know that the cats with the birds were there,” indeed!
In the interest of clarity and a weary observation of history repeating itself:
Presidential Rag
You said you didn’t know
that the cats with the bugs were there,
and you’d never go along with that kind of stuff nowhere.
But that just isn’t the point, man,
that’s the wrong wrong way to go.
If you didn’t know about that one, well then what else don’t you know?
You said that you were lied to,
well, that ain’t hard to see,
but you must have been fooled again by your friends across the sea,
and maybe you were fooled again by your people here at home,
’cause nobody could talk like you,
and know what’s going on.
Nobody elected your family,
and we didn’t elect your friends,
no one voted for your advisors,
and nobody wants amends.
You’re the one we voted for, so you must take the blame,
For handing out authority to men who are insane.
You say it’s all fixed up now, you’ve got new guys on the line,
but you had better remember this while you still got the time:
Mothers still are weeping for their boys that went to war,
And fathers still are asking what the whole damn thing was for,
and people still are hungry, people still are poor,
An honest week of work these days don’t feed the kids no more.
And Schools are still like prisons,
’cause we don’t learn how to live,
and everybody wants to take, nobody wants to give.
Yes you’ll be remembered, be remembered very well,
and if I live a long life, oh the stories I could tell,
Of men, wars and poverty. of sickness and of grief,
Hell yes, you’ll be remembered,
be remembered very well.
You said you didn’t know,
that the cats with the bugs were there,
And you’d never go along with that kind of stuff nowhere.
But that just isn’t the point. man,
That’s the wrong ,wrong way to go,
If you didn’t know about that one,
well then what else don’t you know?
Copyright© 1974 Arlo Guthrie
The song was very popular on the braver radio stations in 1974. I doubt it’d get past the Chain Gang bean counters today. One unusually fearless radio station from Green Bay played that song and back-timed it perfectly… to end right before “Ladies and gentlement, the President of the United States…” as Nixon stepped up to resign. Can you picture any of the Chain Gang stations having the balls to do that today?
(If I were Arlo, I’d have written that fifth verse as “men, wars and poverty, of sickness and of greed/ Hell yes, you’ll be remembered, remembered well indeed.”)
Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.
