Ah, families

Sandra has been collecting genealogical information for her family for quite a while. She and her cousin, Jeanette, share information from a variety of sources. Sandra organizes the information using Family Tree Maker software. It's work that requires close attention because names are often reused and, well, as she observed, "It gets confusing when cousins marry." By one account, she's her own third or fourth cousin.

Sawzall and the sounds of spring

This is a noisy time of year. We're still a month and a half before the leaves have returned. The snow is mostly gone; what's left is hard-frozen or just plain ice. So, when the birds fill a tree or when Sandra gets out her Sawzall to cut up some scrap wood, the sound carries full volume a long way. The strong northwest winds that we've had for the past couple of days do shape the direction of the sounds, so we're hearing more from Main Street. When the winds let up, we can hear more from the stream behind the houses across the street.

We went for a walk through the woods that surround Alden Labs. Tree cutters have been busy, thinning the woods. Most of the big logs are gone so the fire road is littered with oak, pine, birch, and maple branches. The sawdust helps with traction over the ice, but it's work to keep your balance when climbing through the brush. We're expecting that the wood crews will return with chippers to take away the brush.

On the walk, we get to see neighbors whom we've not seen in a while. One neighbor proudly showed off the crocus buds that are just peeking above the ground. We shared news about this neighbor and that and heard the news of others.

We have a small front yard and so can use the excuse that, when we're outside, we're usually out back. That's true, but it's also true that we're shy. (Well, that I am.) Shyness begets shyness, even when we get a sunny day on this first weekend of spring.

Travels with Mr. Sniffy

One of our regular walks takes us to the Worcester line and back, about three miles round-trip. The intersection of Chapel, Shrewsbury, and Holden streets can be tricky, but we're not in a hurry.

I let Marley walk on the lawn side of the sidewalk. It makes for a slower walk, but, again, we're not in a hurry. The lawns, particularly this time of year, are giving up interesting smells. Marley will plant his nose in the ground like a hook anchor and sniff out all of the goodness that the dirt has to offer.

Several households leave their dogs outside, either in a pen or on a run. All of the dogs have something to say about Marley's proximity to their homesteads. Marley, knowing that he's the visitor, is quiet and generally looks straight ahead. If the roles are reversed and a dog passes in front of our house, he'd have much to say. Some dogs, such as the St. Bernard at the corner of our street, seem more playful than protective. In any case, we keep walking.

Mike and Lynn's cat, Smokey, is staying with us for a bit. The Smokester is staying in the apartment. There are two doors between him and Marley, enough thickness to keep Marley from being interested. At some time, no doubt, each will become aware of the other. We'll deal with that then. For now, Marley is much more interested in what I'm having for lunch and will I please share a bit of it with him.

Holy Week and A Prayer for an End to the Iraq War

RB Note: No one will confuse me with a Catholic, lapsed or otherwise. Nevertheless, in serious times, we draw from serious wells.
3/20/08 Update: Five protesters were arrested for praying this rosary outside the federal courthouse in Worcester. See Pie and Coffee » 5 arrested for praying the rosary in Worcester

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posted by Mike on March 18th, 2008

Editor’s note: This will be part of a Holy Week prayer service at the Federal Building in Worcester.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, under the inspiratrion of Blessed Franz Jagerstatter, who gave his life to denounce an unjust war, on the fifth anniversary of the latest US escalation of its 17-year-long war on Iraq, we gather to beg Your forgiveness for the sin of this war and to ask for Your grace to end it now. We make these prayers in the name of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace. Amen.

For the over 88,000 Iraqi citizens killed since 2003, we pray:
Lord, have mercy.

For the 4,100 US soldiers killed in Iraq since 1991, we pray:
Christ, have mercy.

For the 200,000 Iraqis killed in the first Gulf War, we pray:
Lord, have mercy.

For the 1.5 million Iraqis, including 800,000 children, killed by US-sponsored sanctions between 1991 and 2002, we pray:
Kyrie, eleison.

For the thousands of Iraqis killed by “no-fly zone” bombings between 1991 and 2002, we pray:
Christe, eleison.

For our failure to speak out more forcefully against the sin of this long war on Iraq, we pray:
Kyrie, eleison.

Recalling that Pope John Paul II called war on Iraq “useless slaughter” and “unjust, immoral, and illegal,” we pray the rosary to Mary, Queen of Peace, that the ears of all those in the federal government might finally be opened to attend to the plea of millions of Americans who want the war to end now.

Pray a rosary:

The First Sorrowful Mystery: Christ’s agony in the garden.
Help us to end the agony of the Iraqi people and to return all American soldiers safely home.

The Second Sorrowful Mystery: Jesus is scourged.
Help us to end the torture our nation continues to inflict on prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere.

The Third Sorrowful Mystery: Jesus is crowned with thorns.
Help us to never again drop cluster bombs, depleted uranium, and other weapons onto the heads of the Iraqi people.

The Fourth Sorrowful Mystery: Jesus carries the Cross.
Help us to take up Christ’s cross of nonviolent love (even at the risk of criticism and jail) to end the Iraq War.

The Fifth Sorrowful Mystery: Jesus dies on the Cross.
Help us to love our enemies as profoundly as Christ did from his Cross and to reject this and all wars.

Close with the Salve Regina.

Doing business with a startup

A dozen years ago, I worked for a startup storage company for a couple of years. My primary job was documentation manager, but I also handled a number of tasks related to the web site and to customer service. One day, I received this message, sent to the company's general information account:















The product that the customer was waiting for was a 100GB file server. It was one of the fastest things on the market at the time and went for about $100K. Today, you'd have to work a bit to find a 100GB storage device; most are much larger. You can find a 1TB disk for $250-300. (A terabyte (TB) is 1000 GB.) The old system was a RAID-5 configuration, which provided redundancy in the case of disk errors. It was also limited to 10,000 files because of the limited memory for names. My desktop system now has more than 700,000 files and it's not even breathing hard.

Among smart and good people

One of the things that I liked about work was the chance to hang around with smart and really smart people. This ranged from people at IBM and Rational who get mentioned in articles such as Software that makes software better in The Economist to the somewhat lowly hardware engineer who did hexadecimal math in his head. I have several actual for-sale books in my bookcase written by friends and former co-workers.



Some don't write books, but contribute to the firehose that is Internet journalism.

So, even though I don't get to work with these folks, the 'net provides all sorts of ways of staying in touch.

Arlo, on being a security threat

I'm nowhere the threat I'd hoped to become.

Artists at work

Sandra and friend, Alicia, with Sandra's latest quilt creation:

Beware of success, eh?

Ken Olsen, then-CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation, in January of 1992:

"I tell people don't pray for good times. Just pray that the good times won't last so long so that when bad times come, it won't hurt you so terribly bad."

The bad times came. By June of 1992, Ken Olsen was out and Bob Palmer was in. By 1998, DEC was gone, sold to Compaq.

RIP, Arthur C. Clarke

From Indexed:















"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Putting winter to rest

The small pond at the end of our street has a fresh skim of ice on what had been open water for a few days. The ducks are taking it in stride (to the extent that ducks have a stride), walking on the ice when they need to, swimming in the cold water at other times. By tomorrow, I expect that the pond will be covered over in slush.

This hasn't been a hard winter. The temperature was rarely below zero. (We were below normal in the number of heating degree days.) We had more snow than in years past, but there were no big storms. The sheltered parts of the woods still have plenty of snow and the ice is nearly a couple of feet thick on some of larger lakes and ponds. No, the winter wasn't severe, just persistent. March is a hard month because we're ready for spring and, most years, spring doesn't come. We're still a month and a half to two months away from nights without freezing temperatures.

The sun is high and bright, but the wind is cold. Marley and I discovered this as we walked to the library in the center of town (a bit more than two miles each way). The snowbanks are gone and the dirt along the sidewalks have a lot of interesting smells (so Marley tells me). We enjoyed the feeling of almost being in spring as we looked at our town. We enjoyed the feeling because, tomorrow, the last day of winter, we'll take a step backward:

This week's RoasterBoy Playlist

• Buena Vista Social Club - Chan Chan (Tuesday, Mar 18 at 01:38 PM GMT)

  Back in the day, before iPods, I had small MP3 player that could hold four CDs. Most commonly, I'd put the playback on a loop and listen while trying sleep on the red-eye back from California. This was one of the albums, along with Jimi Hendrix's Blues, U2's Rattle and Hum, and Peter…

• WBCN-FM: March 15, 1968 - New England Music Scrapbook (Monday, Mar 17 at 08:00 PM GMT)

  Happy Belated Birthday, 'bcn. WBCN-FM: March 15, 1968 - New England Music Scrapbook I found the station late one night in April of '68. They played the long version of The Doors' Light My Fire, which caught my attention as I was spinning the FM dial. The next song, Paul Butterfield's…

• Van Morrison - Hymns to the Silence (Monday, Mar 17 at 10:24 AM GMT)

  Title track from one of The Belfast Cowboy's best albums.

• Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense (Tuesday, Mar 11 at 09:05 PM GMT)

  The sound track to their concert film is a great collection of music for walking or other exercise. The rhythms are strong and the musical and lyrical hooks are great. For example, here's Life During Wartime.

Mission Accomplished, as long as you're not thirsty.

From a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross - Iraq: Millions struggle to cope with the impact of five years of war:

"The water supply has continued to deteriorate over the past year. Millions of people have been forced to rely on insufficient supplies of poor-quality water as water and sewage systems suffer from a lack of maintenance and a shortage of engineers."