Category: family fun

I just finished reading Summerland again, this time aloud. A simply amazing book, even if a lot of it was over the heads of my audience.

Baseball, American folklore, good vs evil, love — between fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, friends and even the grudging admiration and affection of friends who can’t admit it — and life, it’s all in there. I fall in love with Jennifer T. Rideout each time, and hope for the redemption of the worst ballplayer in the history of Clam Island, Washington, even as I know he will come through.

At this point in the life of my iBook G4, I am rebooting every couple of days. It seems that as I open more and more applications or do more stuff, the kernel requires more RAM than I have, swap files are created, stuff is paged out and paged in on a s-l-o-w disk, and things get really tedious.

In 7 hours, we have already needed 1/2 a Gb of swap.

0:05 up 7:05, 2 users, load averages: 0.28 0.78 0.78

-rw——T 1 root wheel 67108864 Aug 8 17:00 swapfile0
-rw——T 1 root wheel 67108864 Aug 8 22:18 swapfile1
-rw——T 1 root wheel 134217728 Aug 8 22:21 swapfile2
-rw——T 1 root wheel 268435456 Aug 8 22:56 swapfile3

So it looks like some people have managed to squeeze a 1 Gb DIMM where Apple only offered a 512. Meaning this little beast could accommodate 1152 Mb of RAM.

iBook G4 800 MHz [12.1 LCD] October-2003:

Apple’s ibook G4 800 GHz comes with 128 MB soldered on the logic board. The system has one memory expansion slot. The main memory of the system can be upgraded to 1152 MB [maximum].

Not all vendors claim to be able to do this in an 800 MHz, ca. 2003 iBook G4.

Bears investigating.

The Seattle Times: Pacific NW 08/06/2006: Out Of The Attic And Into The Light:

IT WAS A STROKE of great fortune for the late photographer Imogen Cunningham and her son, photographer Rondal Partridge, that his daughter inherited their keen sense of observation and talent for visual storytelling.

While Cunningham, who died 30 years ago in San Francisco, and Rondal, who’s 88 and still shooting photos at his home in Berkeley, slummed in artsy coexistence with mid-century contemporaries such as Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams, little “Muggins” was hovering in the background, drinking in her kid’s-eye view of the Bay Area’s high-caliber arts scene.

Those “rather rowdy and entertaining evenings around the dining-room table” also included appearances by San Francisco sculptor Ruth Asawa and her architect husband, Al Lanier, the writer Felix Green, Lange’s husband, Paul Taylor, and the influential architecture critic Allan Temko, who was immortalized in Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” as the character Roland Major. The elderly Cunningham would catch a ride across the bay to Berkeley with whomever she could find to drive her.

“It was a wild, pretty wonderful time,” filmmaker Meg Partridge says of her childhood. “You always thought as a kid, ‘This is reality; this is normal.’ ”

Partridge had some clue as a child, but certainly recognized at the start of her film career in the 1980s how extraordinary it was to grow up in the orbit of some of the 20th century’s most celebrated photographers, from her acid-tongued grandma “Imo” to her famously eccentric dad, Rondal, to her fiercely matriarchal godmother, Lange, “the grand dame.”

These were the people who fed Partridge’s mind — strong-willed women and charmingly off-center men, wandering souls with uncannily focused lenses.

Worth reading for insights into the personalities and temperaments of artists, as well as some history.

Independent Online Edition > Environment:

Sun-darkened skin was still considered most undesirable, the give-away sign of an outside labourer, and special creams to counteract accidental tanning were advertised in the women’s magazines.

My recent family research has turned up a lot of agricultural laborers, so my current tan is just another part of my heritage.

“Asymmetric warfare” and ethics:

Steven Poole, our guest-blogger from last week, has this to say about “asymmetric warfare”:

Asymmetric warfare’ is the term employed by the US military for fighting people who don’t line up properly to be shot at: on the one side you have battalions of American infantry, marines, tanks and aircraft; and on the other you have terrorists, or guerrillas, or militants, or insurgents. [Read the whole thing, as they say. cb]
Of course the reason people don’t line up to be shot at, wearing proper uniforms, distinguishing themselves from the civilian population, and so on, is that it would be suicidal so to do. And here lies a real difficulty for conventional just war theory. If recourse to war is sometimes just—and just war theory says it is—but it may only be justly fought within the jus in bello restrictions, then it looks as if an important means to pursue justice is open to the strong alone and not to the weak. Faced with a professional army equipped with powerful weaponry, people who want to fight back have no chance unless they melt into the civilian population and adopt unconventional tactics.

I suppose it bears mentioning that, in my American history classes, the use of unconventional tactics and non-existent uniforms were cited as examples of defensible tactics by the colonists against the occupiers. Now when these same tactics are used by natives to resist an occupation by US troops, it’s a violation of the Rules of War.

Tanker Inquiry Finds Rumsfeld’s Attention Was Elsewhere:

The topic was the largest defense procurement scandal in recent decades, and the two investigators for the Pentagon’s inspector general in Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s office on April 1, 2005, asked the secretary to raise his hand and swear to tell the truth.

Rumsfeld agreed but complained. “I find it strange,” he said to the investigators, on the grounds that as a government official “the laws apply to me” anyway.

So much for government of, for, and by the people. The rest of the article is interesting for its portrayal of how little value the civilian leadership places on accountability and measurable execution of goals. And yet we constantly hear the refrain, if we had business people in government, things would be run more effectively. As if business doesn’t have it’s share of incompetent blockheads.

Hmm, more here — with pictures. Great minds, if I may flatter myself.