Author: Laura Conrad

Where I was in 1969

Everybody else who has a blog and is over 40 is reminiscing
about where they were when Apollo 11 landed 2 men on the moon, so
I guess I will too. (See all the science fiction writers at tor.com.)

It was between my Freshman and Sophomore years in college. I
was a physics major at Brown University in Providence, RI, but I
was at home with my mother and sister in Fall River, MA.

My summer job that year was in a tutoring program at Bristol
Community College for students who were judged to need some
remedial work to handle college level courses. I was teaching
three classes a day in remedial math, and getting home utterly
exhausted. So I usually took a nap after supper while my mother
was watching the news, so staying up late didn’t bother me as much
as it did some people.

I had vivid memories of hearing about Sputnik over the radio
at breakfast in 1957, and I knew that was directly tied to my
parents having better and more stable jobs teaching science in
college. So I probably thought the moon landing would lead to
there being good jobs for physics majors in a few years.

I was also a pretty avid science fiction reader, so I probably
thought it was a first step towards having humans living elsewhere
than on one planet. I remember having nightmares in 1962 or so
after seeing a film of George Gamow explaining about the life
cycle of the sun. He said it would become a red giant in
only a couple of billion years. I think the pictures in the
nightmare were actually from the chapter in a Bible stories book about the flight
of the Israelites from Egypt.

I was probably as wrong as lots of other people about the
directness and speed with which we were going to accomplish any of
those things, but if we ever do have extraterrestrial colonization
and reliable jobs for physics majors, it will be partly
because of NASA and Apollo 11.

Isabelle the iguana

Unfortunately I didn’t get a picture of her, but she looks a
bit like this one from google images:

[iguana in Cincinnatti zoo width=450]

Sunny and I were hanging out on a beautiful evening in the
park when a neighbor walked up with her on top of his head and
introduced her as Isabelle. We’d
met the human before because he likes talking to Sunny. She’s apparently really
glad the warm weather has come at last and she can go for walks.
Her tail hangs down his back, to past his waist.

Dog Parks again

A few years ago, I made a post about the dog park that
Sunny and I
were going to. It was a big part of my life for several years,
but last year, they closed it for refurbishing at about the time
I was spending a lot of time on Bonnie’s
estate. So I stopped being in the habit of stopping what
I was doing at 6 PM and going there and hanging out with Sunny’s
and my human and canine friends.

[Sunny at dog park in 2000]

There is actually an enclosed dog run not too far from there.
It’s nothing like as good a space but does seem to fill a
similar function for a smaller number of people.

I went to check it out last night, because starting next
Thursday, Sunny and I are going to be having his cousin Monte
stay with us while my mother and sister go to Poland for two
weeks. Now that Sunny isn’t moving so fast, there are a number
of places I can let him off the leash that aren’t official dog
parks, but I wouldn’t want to do that with a young, active dog like Monte
who doesn’t know the area.

[Monte]

As a place to take Sunny, it’s no better than a lot of more
convenient places we go, but assuming Monte turns out to be a good
dog park dog, I’ll probably be bundling both dogs into the car and
taking them there while I have the two of them to deal with.

One thing I noticed was that the owner who spent the whole time
she was there on her cell phone had to leave sooner than she had
planned on because her dog (a 2-year old Newfoundland) had some
undesirable interaction with another dog (I didn’t see what it
was; I doubt that it was anything serious). People really
shouldn’t assume a dog park is a substitute for interacting with
their dogs — you should be using the time to socialize with both
the dogs and the humans so that your dogs get used to how it’s
done right.

Digitizing Vinyl

I had some vacation ideas, none of which seems to be happening,
so I’m feeling like I deserve to spend some money on something.
I’ve looked at some knitting books, and surround sound systems,
and ordering gourmet spices and chocolates.
This morning what seems to be itching is the idea of digitizing
my collection of LP’s.

I was buying LP’s from 1968 when I went to college until about
1988 when I bought a CD player. For some of that time I was
making reasonable amounts of money, and when I wasn’t I was
living near record stores with $.99 sale bins, and that was the
period when my musical tastes were forming. So having my CD’s
digitized and easily accessible on the computer is good, but it
would be a bigger contribution to being in touch with my
personal history if I had the LP’s.

I was convinced enough that I wanted to do this to dig up the
right set of cables to put the output of my stereo system into a
computer sound card, when it turned out that my turntable from
1973 was pretty sick. I kicked it a while, and when it didn’t
get better I put it out for the trash on a Wednesday afternoon.
(Trash collection is on Thursday in this part of the world, but
electronic devices don’t usually last that long on this busy
street near MIT and Kendall Square.)

At the BLU
meeting Wednesday night, someone said that they had
digitized their videotapes by buying a gadget that copied them
to cd’s and then ripping the CD’s to their computer. It really
seems like that’s the way to go for LP’s, too.

So I currently have this in my Amazon
shopping cart. I may convince myself that this isn’t what to
spend money on, or that I won’t want to spend the time putting
the LP’s on the turntable and labeling the CD’s. But for now,
that’s what’s next on the toy-buying list.

I have a further fantasy that I can rent it for small amounts
of money, or gift bottles of wine, and that when I’ve digitized
the records some of them can be sold. But I certainly wouldn’t
spend the money if I couldn’t afford it without monetizing it.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001MZTZCG&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

MythTV discussion

I went to a Boston Linux and Unix
Users Group (BLU) meeting last night to hear a talk on MythTV by one of its developers
(Jarod Wilson who works for Redhat).

Some points of interest about real world MythTV use:

  • Recording from a cable box is more haphazard than you would
    wish — the most reliable way to record anything you’ve paid to
    be able to watch is to get the Hauppage HD-PVR which lets you
    plug in the composite video cables from the cable box and use an
    IR blaster to change the channels. Modern cable boxes have a
    firewire output, which should let you both record digitally and
    change the channels, but it’s fairly haphazard what channels
    your cable company will let you see unencrypted on the firewire
    output. Also, the HD-PVR will allegedly record in either 720p
    or 1080i, but there are some issues with the linux drivers for
    interlaced video, so you’re currently safer sticking to
    720p.
  • Most of the USB remote control boxes on the market,
    including the HP branded one that I inherited from Bonnie, are
    essentially the same as the Windows Media Center one.
  • If you’re setting up a filesystem partition for mythtv, XFS
    is currently stable and designed for large files. ext3 is
    usable; ext4 is a bit bleeding edge and people have lost data
    using it.
  • If you can’t handle the volume on the mythtv users mailing
    list, there’s an indexed
    archive     that you can search.
  • The speaker repeated the common wisdom that an NVidia
    graphics card with the NVidia binary-only driver “just works”.
    This has been very much not my experience, but it must be true
    for lots of people.
  • He admitted that his first install of MythTV took a week of
    hard work before it “mostly worked”. He says that once you have
    the setup working, using it (even for the non-technical) is no harder than a commercial
    system (such as Tivo), and administering it is a couple of
    minutes a week for an experienced Linux user, but setting up is
    definitely harder than it should be.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B0018LX0DY&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Backing Up

I just upgraded my computer hardware, so I’m typing this on a
shiny new
computer with 4 cpu’s, a terrabyte of hard drive, and 8 Gigs
of memory.

Getting all the stuff from the old computer to this one is
still harder than it should be, but is easier when you upgrade
while the old system is still working.

What ought to be true is that if you move the /home directory,
install the same set of packages, and import the data from the
database, you should have a working system.

Some people claim that you can just copy /etc and /var to the
new computer and then the new system will work the same way the
old one did. I didn’t find this to be true, and I’ve been hand
moving the things from /var and /etc that I turn out to need, or
reconfiguring the new system. Part of why this is less true for
me is that the new system is a 64 bid install, and the old one
was still 32 bits.

In any case, when you have the luxury of the old system still
working is a good time to check that your backup procedure is
working, and to add things to it as you find yourself manually
moving something from the old system to the new one.

The most embarrassing hole in my procedure was that I found my
system for entering lilypond into emacs via USB keyboard didn’t
work because I’d installed a little program it needed in
/usr/bin (which should be only executables from the package
management system, and doesn’t get backed up) instead of
/usr/local/bin.

I don’t yet have either gallery2 or wordpress working right on
the new system, but the old system seems to have the same
problems, so it probably isn’t the backup procedure.

My own backup procedure is largely rsnapshot, along with some
scripts that back up databases and the websites that are hosted
elsewhere. This gets everything you need (as long as you tell
it the right files to back up), but is fairly large and
cumbersome, so one of the things I’m missing is recent off-site
backups. It backs up to a 1
terrabyte firewire drive. Each backup takes up about 160
Gigabytes, but the files that are the same are hard linked, so
10 backups are only about 200 Gigabytes.

Anyway, I’m very happy with the new system, because now when
the backup procedure starts I just barely notice, instead of
having to stop what I was doing on the computer and go get a cup
of coffee.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001NXDBFY&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B00169AQQ2&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Report on the July 14 meeting

We played:

Schedule

We will be having our usual dropin meetings on Tuesdays at
7:45 PM at my
place.

We’ll probably skip August 11, so that people can go to the
special West Gallery
Quire workshop with Francis Rhodes.

La Marseillaise, and other unpalatable words

If you want to think more about the words than you could last
night while
trying to fit them to the music at speed, my research for my blog entry
yesterday turned up a page with several translations, as well
as a Bible site with all the well known translations of Psalm 137.

La Marseillaise

Since I recommended reading the Declaration of Independance on
July 4, I decided to recommend reading (or, better, singing) La Marseillaise on July 14, Bastille Day.

It isn’t as strong of a recommendation; the writing really
isn’t as good, nor are the sentiments as elevating.

But you really have to understand 19th century European
nationalism to have any shot at understanding the way the world
is still organized in the 21st century. So you should read this
as well as the patriotic songs of other countries. And for
understanding why you should oppose war on almost all occasions,
there still isn’t any text better than Psalm
137.

This
site has several versions of translations into English. The
one done by a French committee is interesting — I’d love to see a
summary of the discussion that led to “patrie” being translated “Motherland”.

If you’re in this area, we’ll sing all or most of the verses
tonight at the Cantabile Band
rehearsal tonight.

The Amazing Mrs. Palin

I didn’t think until this morning to connect Sarah Palin to the
tv show The
Amazing Mrs. Pritchard, which describes a supermarket manager
who becomes Prime Minister of Great Britain.

The New York Times has an article
this morning
about the ways the Republican establishment attempted to advise
her on how to become one of them. The quote that struck me was:

Mr. Malek [described earlier in the article as “a longtime Republican
kingmaker”] said he told Ms. Palin that “You have got to set up a mechanism so you can return calls.”

“You are getting a bad rap,” he recalled saying. “Important people are
trying to talk to you. And she said, ‘What number are they
calling?’ She did not know what had been happening.”

I am someone who frequently tries to organize people whose desire
to be in touch with the world isn’t ardent enough to have forced
them to organize the possible ways of getting in touch with them
so that there’s a reliable way to make contact. That “What number
are they calling?” sounds really familiar. You have work phones
and home phones and cell phones and email addresses and fax
numbers, and nobody could possibly check all of those all the
time, so if you hear that someone has tried the wrong one, you
tell your informant what the right one this week is. And I can
see where kingmakers aren’t used to dealing with
people like this. In my part of the world, even successful
organizers on a much lower level than the ones who run campaigns
for Governor are better organized about how to tell people how to
get in touch with them than this.

As I remember the TV show, Mrs. Pritchard does have some
trouble adjusting to living in the middle of the mechanisms set
up so that a Prime Minister’s phone calls get returned and
commitments get recorded. It’s part of the unreality of the
format that it’s a temporary adjustment difficulty that gets
wrapped up in a 50-minute show. But it’s also part of the
portrayal of Mrs. Pritchard as an unusually intelligent woman that
she does realize the necessity of the mechanisms.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000MV8Z9K&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

This is England

This
movie is about a 12 year old boy who is temporarily
recruited into a skinhead group in northern England.

It’s very well-done. I could have sworn I smelled the pot
during the scene where they all get high and sit around
giggling.

It’s also fairly unpleasant to watch a fair amount of the
time. So watch it when you’re in the mood for that. I realized
I was when I was browsing through the channel guide and it was
on one of the stations I don’t get, so I logged on to Netflix
Watch Now.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000UNYJV8&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr