An old friend

My wife's friend B. from her workplace called recently asking for her. She was working, so B. talked to me about a computer problem she was having, concerning a reply that she had gotten from a singer whom she had emailed recently. I solved her problem, but I also found out that the web site of this singer is http://www.everon.50megs.com. I looked up that web site and ran into an old friend, Dan Fogelberg.

I remember that his song "Nether Lands" was one of those used for something called "Free Form Dance" at my Unitarian church back in the early 1980's. We would meet at the church and clear the furniture out of some of the religious education classroom areas (it was an open-court type setting). We would play some songs and then dance to them as we see fit. There were variations, such as dancing around in circles around someone or having one person freeze and another dance around the frozen person. I found the whole thing enjoyable and "Nether Lands" was used frequently as the song we danced to. It was a good choice, with dramatic melody and dynamics changes. I liked it so much that I bought Dan Fogelberg's album. Sadly, the free form dancing went away by the mid 1980's and I have never seen it again.

Tonight I got out my Daniel Fogelberg record and played it. Yes, record. It was a 33 1/3 rpm vinyl LP disk. I got out our 29-year-old phonograph and hooked some boombox speakers to it and played it. I remembered quite well the strains of that old tune. It brought back the days of the free form dance. I was pleased to find out that he is still recording and performing, and that he is a favorite of a friend of ours.

Maybe one of these days free form dance will return to my UU congregation. In the meantime I will play my phonograph and remember.

Storm

This area of the country is affected by a prolonged drought. The forecast was for more of the same: high in the mid 90s, low in the 70s, and a 20 percent chance of an isolated thunderstorm. Well we got our 20 percent today. Boy did we ever. It showed up as a little blip to the northeast of here, but then I heard the thunder. I went outside and saw several vivid strokes of lightning in a row towards the northeast. I went in, wondering how big this was going to be. The blip on the radar showed signs of growing as well as heading to the southwest, a direction that storms don't often take in this neck of the woods. But soon I heard the thunder get louder until it BAMmed!!! almost after the brilliant flash. Then it poured. At first slowly, but then it started filling up the rain gauge until it was up to an inch. Several power blips occurred; I hoped that we were not going to have an outage with the power company on strike. Then the sky started falling. Clack, clack, clack, instead of the usual pitter patter. It was pea-sized hail. I was wondering if it was going to get any bigger. But it didn't. After a while the storm abated, came back again, and then went away. The weatherman said it was heading down I-85, but the next radar I saw of it, it was gone! Poof! Not a speck on radar.

The storm appeared, grew, boomed, poured, flashed and hailed, then it went away without a trace. Like something that just happened in the day. An ephemeral flame. A quantum particle. A brief thought in the mind that fleets the next time one thinks. And although we got an inch and a quarter and the torrent hit the reservoir, most areas went dry. And so the drought continues, and we need rain badly…

Winning speech contests

I attended a Toastmaster meeting recently in which two speakers talked about winning speech contests. One speaker gave a talk on how to evaluate another speaker. This does not seem to be about contests, except that one of the upcoming contests is about evaluation. He used a football analogy which did not always fit. The other one spoke about humorous speech contests; his humorous remarks kept our attention on him. He did say we should avoid "blue humor"; it will never win. But it did win one year at a regional conference where a speaker talked about her passionate desire for a candy bar. He said the speech had no purpose or message. To me it did - it illustrated how the flaws in our society's sexual ethics lead some to weird pursuits. He said a speech about bathroom functions wasn't funny. But it drove the audience to stitches. But he was right - the contestant did not win. I would not have selected that one as the winner either. All this shows we can't make hard and fast conclusions about things. We can't categorically say that blue speeches are inappropriate or will not win, or that they will win. It depends on the audience, which brings up an important speaker's maxim: know your audience.

Waking Up

One of the things I did at SUUSI was to take a song-writing workshop from Peter Mayer. He played in concert at SUUSI, but I never got to see him because I preferred to contra-dance. But I saw him at the workshop. He gave us the fundamentals of song-writing, inlucing rhyming, developing ideas, and developing music for the ideas. I came up with two ideas, namely a dance in a storm and a ballad about John Walker. Unfortunately, both of these ideas have already appeared in song.

Today I played one of his CDs and got attracted to "Dancing Song", in which he and his partner dance for their lives, and "Waking Up", about getting away from some of the unnecessary stuff we do in our lives. The last one would make a good theme song for next year's SUUSI, with a theme of "Simple Gifts".

Press Button to Destroy Evil Empire

About 25 years ago I read a Mad magazine parody of the movie Star Wars. It showed the final scene when Jedi fighters swooped down to the center of the Death Star with the mission of destroying it from inside. In the Mad version there is a button at the center of the Star saying "press button to destroy evil empire". I also see this gimmick used in a number of other places. For example, the ending of Independence Day shows a plane going up into the center of the invader ship seemingly pressing the button that destroys the evil empire. I see some humor in this; it is that the fearsome bad guys have seemingly purposefully made it easy for the good guys to destroy them. It dehumanizes the enemy. Just press the button and see them blow up. It makes it seem easy. Some of our leaders may think it is easy to win a war simply by pressing the right button. Further, it is a metaphor for some of the problems we encounter in our lives. There often is no button you can press that will solve your problem. No button that can bring you your ideal mate, no button that can give you an A on an exam, no button to increase the worth of your stock portfolio, and no button to eliminate poverty and its causes. Just press the button and it will destroy your evil empire. Just like I press a button up in the upper right corner of this form to publish this blog. Self-destruct, Evil Empire!

Back to real life

I am back from SUUSI. I came up with two ideas for songs, talked with a Barney doll, and contradanced and squaredanced at night. I gave my own two workshops; they were well-received. I went on two great nature hikes, to Dismal Falls and upper Cascades, both in the Blue Ridge. Some of the ideas I got at SUUSI: "I love you with all my gut."; "You can't lean on yourself."; "If you fight for what you believe, you could get hurt." The last night was one of the wildest in my life, and after SUUSI I visited the Bedford WW II memorial to the backdrop of a threatening thunderstorm, BOOM!! - made it really dramatic.

Blog from SUUSI

Here I am at SUUSI. I need to come up with ideas for a song in a workshop that I am taking. I gave my stories of the sky workshop yesterday. Today is the halfway point of SUUSI, and am going on a nature hike today. A high point was listening to Relative Viewpoint, the group who sings a different Pledge. I met a woman who has ahd misexperiences like I have had, including of course Planeattack (9/11). Basically I am here to recenter my life, as are many other people here in Blacksburg.

Moon in Clouds

Tonight I went to a star presentation near the center of my home city where we show the public the stars. It was a muggy night with occasional storms, and I could see flashes in the distance from a distant thunderstorm. The only good objects out tonight were the Moon and Venus. So I showed the public both of these objects. But what intrigued me the most was the pattern of clouds in front of the moon. At times the Moon would light the back clouds, while being covered by a front cloud. That looked like a real glory. In fact, it looked very much like some astronomical objects, such as the Lagoon Nebula. I will remember this night as the night of the Moonglow.

Send the robots (or rabbits) after them!

Today an unusual thing happened when I tried to call home at lunchtime from work. I got a message saying that the number I called had Call Intercept and that I had to say my name after the beep. Then my wife at home had to press a number to get me. This is my Call Intercept service, which I got to block calls that come from things like "unavailable" and "private". The vast majority of these are telemarketers and junk callers, which is the reason I got the service.

What happened is my workplace changed its phone system so instead of coming up with a trunk number when I call home, it comes up "unavailable". That set off my Call Intercept. Why my workplace would want to identify or confound itself with telemarketers beats me. If I did not have Call Intercept, the call would come up as "unavailable" and the answerer at home would assume it was a telemarketer and not answer. Fortunately, the service comes with a password. I enter it and instead I come up as "priority caller". It still blocks telemarketers, so I am going to keep it.

I have a similar problem with web pages. When I access a web page, sometimes I get pop-up windows. So I obtain Analog-X's Pow! and Pow! those windows out of existence. However, I find that sometimes sites I want to see get Powed too so I have to turn it off. Email is an eternal problem, with its flood of spam. So I get a robot to handle that. That robot is the Rules Wizard of Outlook. I tell Outlook, for example, to delete messages whose subject contains "million", "anyone", "viagra", "credit", and so forth; I did an analysis which shows these words appear much more frequently in the subject of spam than in the subject of legitimate mail. Once in a while legitimate mail gets hit by the Wizard, so I go into "Deleted Items" and rescue those messages.

A woman who I met tonight, who I shall call L, came up with the best solution of all. Send a virtual rabbit after the spam, to nibble on the spam and gobble it up before it hits my mailbox.

The New World Trade Center

Today six designs for a new World Trade Center were publicized. I looked at them, and they seem similar to each other, but I do have definite preferences among them. I suppose half the bloggers in the world will be commenting on the new designs, so here is my opinion of them, along with the one that is my favorite:

1. Plaza. I like the tall building in this design. We need a tall building of some sort to inspire us. There are four other moderately tall buildings which give a sense of mass. The design could have made better use of the blank space near the tower footprints, and the big tower seems separated from the others. I would give this design three stars (on a scale of 0-4).

2. Square. This one has a large open space, a huge trapezoidal courtyard, and a cylindrical 80-story tower. I don't like this one as well because of the cylindrical tower - it reminds me of some industrial building instead. I give this one two stars.

3. Triangle. This builds a building where the North Tower was. I hope this will be a memorial and museum! The tallest building is unusual, as though one put a Pez box on top of the tower. I find this design wanting in some respects, so I give it two stars.

4. Garden. Very high tower is a plus for this design. The footprints are left bare, and the buildings are connected together. Although I prefer box or Art Deco style buildings to pyramids, this one appeals to me a lot and I give it three and a half stars.

5. Park. There are interesting concepts in this design. An obelisk in the courtyard marks the memorial to those who died here. The four tall buildings are attractive and give a sense of protective warmth to those in the memorial area. The really tall building is thin, so not impressive looking from the east or west, and it seems to be hidden away from the rest, as though protecting it from some scourge from the water west of the city. I still like the design and give it three stars.

6. Promenade. I find this really attractive, with its sidewalks, four pillar buildings with give the area a feeling of structure and strength, and there are twin towers within them. The towers could have been higher and wider, but the other aspects of this design, including a small memorial building within the structure, and the excellent use of space in an area made hard to design in by the desire to keep the footprints clear, make this my favorite design and I give it four stars.

There you have it - I vote for design number 6, World Trade Center Memorial Promenade. It will add to the beauty of the New York skyline. However, I also like designs 4 and 5. We will see what they decide.

Packrats and pastburners

First, a few short snippets. I heard a media maven say that the airlines are all in the same boat. How can airlines be in a boat? They fly planes. The maven meant that the airlines were all in the same plane. I find that there are so many conniptions to using Microsoft Access that I feel it is an Access of Evil. We just had an incident in Iraq; maybe it was a case of "you zero us in, we zero you out."

Now the feature blogentation: One thing I find hard to do is to get rid of all the stuff I have accumulated in my lifetime, much of it junk. I.e., I tend to be a packrat at home. My attic is crammed with papers, and it takes time to sort through them all. But every once in a while, a record is needed somewhere, and I can find out what I was doing with it in 1983 or something. I would not have it if I had been throwing out all my stuff all along. It seems to me that a pattern like that should have a name; i.e., packrat should have an opposite. So let me invent one: pastburner. That will be my latest non-word of the week.

A pastburner is a person who continually throws out all or most past stuff and lives with only the present records. People who live in the here and now, mainly perceiving (P) types, tend to be pastburners. But I am a pastburner at work, for one good reason. During the last 12 years, there have been many reductions in force, moves, remodelings, and reorganizations and it seems that many of these put me in surroundings more cramped than before. This forces me to throw out stuff, and yes, it has hurt at times not to have the old records. Then again, what good are the old records? And what good are the present ones? The future often is different from both. Maybe we should question those who would want these records - other people, or perhaps, even ourselves.

Inconceivable disk drive

In my mathematics page, I describe several levels of numbers. In particular, literary numbers are numbers written with between one hundred and twenty billion zeroes after a 1. I call them literary because literary works can be thought of as big numbers, if you assign a value to the digits and use place notation. Literary numbers are also the numbers of disk drives. If a computer's disk drive has 340 MB of storage, then the number of possible configurations of that disk drive is about 10 to the billionth power, a 1 followed by a billion zeros. It would fill 8 encyclopedias. My current disk drive has 80 GB of storage. That is really huge! There is no way I will know everything about this computer. The number of configurations of that drive is about 1 followed by 34 billion zeroes. That exceeds the limit of 20 billion zeroes that literary numbers have. This number is inconceivable instead. Just think of it. I am typing this on an inconceivable computer, a computer with an inconceivable number of configurations. We have yet to see an inconceivable tornado, but we are seeing inconceivable computers. There is no way I will know everything on this computer. Computers have come to the place where they have taken an independent existence, above and beyond what our minds can conceive. It's a little scary. Could a world controlled by computers be around the corner?

Wild Ride

The stock market took a wild ride today, down, and then up. Kodak said it would have better than expected earnings, but the market went right on down anyway. People are getting too ebearient about the market, more so than economic conditions warrant. It did recover nicely, however. The Dow was up 4 points just two minutes before the closing bell, but in those last two minutes it lost 16 points! Now because of that I will hear violins instead of trumpets on Marketplace tomorrow morning. Well, at least I won't hear pianos.

Tie Games

I didn't watch the Baseball All-Star game as I was doing other things last night, such as preparing my workshops for SUUSI. But I had been a long-time fan of baseball, more so than for other team sports; in general, I could care less about televised sports events, except running and some Olympic events. I have been an old-time fan of the Rochester Red Wings and consequently the Baltimore Orioles. But one reason I have been disinterested is because I don't like rooting for a team; I get depressed when that team loses. And there is one thing about a baseball game: it is structured so that always one team wins and the other loses. It is a win-lose game. If the game is a tie, extra inning after extra inning after extra inning is played until one team wins.

So I got a bit of a surprise this morning when I found out that the All-Star game ended in a 7-7 tie after 11 innings. Like many things in the 21st Century, this game was weird. It was arbitrarily ended, with the score a tie. There was no winning or losing team. And the fans could not take it. They complained that they were cheated because a team did not win. It almost seems that they would prefer their favorite team lose than have the game be a tie. They wanted their money back. Sorry, fellas. The ball team and its owners promised you 9 innings when you bought the ticket, and these two teams gave you 11 innings. I say you got more than your money's worth. There is such a big desire for winning in our society that people can't tolerate a tie game. When they get one, they complain about it, although admittedly the abrupt ending of the game because they "ran out of pitchers" seems a little strange; past teams have played up to 15 innings in All-Star games. There wasn't even a Most Valuable Player. Come on. There should be some player who was most responsible for helping his team to tie.

But the main thing is that people were disappointed by a tie game. I like a tie game. Both sides can come out as winners. Both played well, and the other team could not defeat them. That's ideal. A tie is win-win, and should make all the fans happy. There are ties in other games. A chess game need not end in a win. Many games played by grandmasters end in draws.

To me this passion for winning is potentially harmful, since if there is a winner, then there is a loser, and the losers are made to feel bad. Activities are the best when everyone is a winner. If people acted as though making everyone a winner was a top priority for every person on the globe, there would be no international conflicts or wars. What a world that would be.

Nonwords and gobbledygook

I certainly got my fill of non-words and hifalutin language today. I do have a non-word web page, but I recognize there are useful nonwords that increase meaning and understanding and non-useful ones that don't. Among the latter is stockage, meaning the inventory you have on hand. Microsoft Word kept redlining it as though it were misspelled. I thought at first that stockage" was a useful non-word, until I realized that there was a word stock which means the same thing. Why do people have to add the -age? It's meaningless, like foundationment or activitization. Another one is resourcing, the present participle of the verb resource. Generally I don't mind nouns used as verbs meaning "to provide with a", such as hatting, but this one is too general. What resource is being provided? The one I found really unusual was unvaulable. This is evidently a misspelling, but of what? The non-word unvaluable, which means worthless? Or did the author mean the word unavailable?

But all wasn't bad. I came up with a possible name for the replacement for the World Trade Center: call it Ground One.

Quote of the Day

Sometimes I like to quote particularly interesting things I have heard. I call this the "quote of the day". Today's quote of the day is from Jody Brown, a cattle rancher, and goes "If animals weren't meant to be eaten, then why are they made out of meat?" To which I would reply, "Then what are you made of?"

I heard "I could have danced all night" on TV tonight. To me this symbolizes the mood you get into when you get really excited about someone or something (it doesn't have to be dancing or a partner of the opposite sex) so much that you can keep going and going on with it, while other people keep saying you got to stop or you'll wear yourself out. In the song the housekeeper keeps warning Eliza, "Don't you think you should be in bed?" But she's not in that mood. She keeps singing, "I could have danced all night." This may help you discover the passion in your life. If you can keep going on and on with it and not get tired, that is what you should be doing for a living.

Success from Life Stages

I continue to plug along in setting up my SUUSI workshops - I came up with a plan for giving this year's Stories of the Sky. Yesterday I completed a similar presentation for SUUSImatics, which will consist of seven "vignettes", some of which will be highly interactive. I also reviewed over my Toastmastersaccomplishments and found that I have given 100 speeches to or for Toastmasters clubs since I joined Toastmasters in 1986. I need 4 speeches for another Competent Toastmaster and two speeches about clubs for a Competent Leader award. I need two speeches for Advanced Toastmaster Bronze, but they could be two important ones. One calls for me to sell something (myself?), and the other calls for me to give a motivational success speech, like Zig Ziglar or Dr. Phil.

To me most success seminars sound alike, so I don't care to hear them. There are a few good ones around, such as Steven Covey, Steve Andreas, and Charles Faulkner (the last two are authors of "Neurolinguistic Programming"). But if I were to give one, how would it go? It would contain bits of wisdom from the most successful moments of my life. I divide my life into eight "acts", so I found a success principle from each. The list I got was:

Toddlerhood, Investigate it - it might be interesting
Childhood, Seek rewards
Adolescence, Consider all possibilities
Young adult, Take all possible actions
Settling down, Blaze your own path
Getting a promotion, Find a good group of people
Freedom Forties, Do what you like doing the best
Middle Age, Do it!

and the slogan I came up with just this past year: Just add one. I now need to make this into a 15-20 minute speech, which I will do sometime later this year.

True Patriotism on April 15

We have just passed July 4, the most patriotic holiday of the year, with flags, bands, fireworks, and holiday travel. All of this was enjoyable, while we preached the virtues of duties and blessings of this country. I feel, however, that if you want a real test of patriotism among Americans, which will force us not just to talk the talk but to also walk the walk, I think Independence Day should be celebrated on April 15. That would be the real test. The real test would also occur if the tax year were moved a quarter and July 4 made the day our 1040's had to go into the IRS.

Fourth of July Run

One of the most characteristic icons of Independence Day is the firework. This holiday, and New Year's Day are the two holidays in the year when we launch fireworks displays. My father would take us all to places to see fireworks, but usually I saw them in the distance from the car. I found this a little disappointing. He did take us down to Conesus Lake once to see fireworks, and I could see them closer then. Since then, I have tended to shun fireworks displays on Independence Day because of the huge traffic jams that result afterwards.

I had thought of bicycling to fireworks displays, but I found that running and walking are just as good. I run and swim for exercise, and last year for the first time, I ran after dark to hunt for all the fireworks displays in the neighborhood. Now I know that maybe these displays, created by people that live in the neighborhood, may be both illegal and dangerous (indeed, I did see one firework intended to go up in the air tonight instead go sideways), but still they are there and if I go out and run and walk at night I will find them. Last year I saw an impressive display that included rockets that exploded high in the air like public fireworks shows do.

I ran this year but it was not as productive, but I still found a crowd of people around a cul-de-sac in my neighborhood. They were launching firecrackers, Roman candles, and an occasional rocket. Further, I saw people walking back and forth. Evidently others want to go out to see these neighborhood displays. After these displays petered out, I ran around the neighborhood trying to find more displays but when I approached some cracking it would go quiet, only to pick up again as I run away from the place. It was an enjoyable run, good for keeping in shape and losing weight, and I get to see real fireworks (instead of the television variety) without having to drive into a traffic jam.

My next night run in the neighborhood will be what I call the "Yuletide fantasy run", when I run around to see all the displays of colored lights in the neighborhood.

Fourth of July

This is the first Fourth after 9/11, so in a sense one can describe this day as (0-)1-4-9-11. As it turns out, these integers have an interesting property. If you put these measurements on a ruler and only these, you can still draw or measure a line of any integer length up to 11 except 6. For example, 7 is 11 - 4, and 3 is 4 - 1. Such a ruler is called a Golomb ruler, and it is an interesting problem to find the minimum Golumb rulers of given lengths.