The Weather Didn't Constantly Change — It Was Always Windy

Holyrood, Kansas, 9:00 am, April 2, 2009:

5:30 pm, April 2, 2009:

9:45 am, April 5, 2009:

1:20 pm, April 5, 2009:

Neil Gaiman at the National Book Festival

A couple of weeks ago we went to the National Book Festival (the best thing the Bush Administration ever started) to listen to Neil Gaiman and to stand in line for three hours, getting alternately soaked and sunburned, waiting for him to sign The Graveyard Book and Neverwhere. It was worth the wait, Gaiman was extremely nice to us.

My wife says this is a really good picture, so I thought I'd share it.

A Long Time Posting

It's been a while since I've posted here. As some of you know, I'm taking a year's Sabbatical at Duke University. You know, get away from the paperwork for awhile, and start a new line of research.

And also look around a bit. I've taken bunches of pictures, way too many to put in this blog. For those of you that are interested, go over to my home page and look at

Duke University — Part One

Hopefully more pictorials will follow.

The First Night

Of course, I got tickets to the official opening game at Nationals Park, watching the Braves play the Nationals on Sunday.

Those of you outside the DC area might not know that they built the park with very little parking. As a 20-game ticket holder, I could have gotten a parking pass for $20-$35 per game, but it's a difficult part of town to get in and out of, so I decided to use one of the other two options: Metro, or the National's unique shuttle service, where you park (for free) in a lot at old RFK Stadium, and then take a shuttle bus to the new park, all for free. Must cost the Lerners a bundle. Tonight, I decided to take the shuttle, which winds out of RFK, onto the Southeast-Southwest Freeway (I295/395), past the Marine Barracks, and dumps you about three blocks from the stadium. All in all it went pretty smoothly, but this was a Sunday night. How things will work during rush hour is anyone's guess.

Since I had tickets up (way up) above first base, when I got to the park

I headed for the first base entrance, where I found a rather long line:

The problem, of course, was that Dubya was present, so we all had to go through metal detectors. That's fine, except the first base side only had four. After an hour or so, someone from the Nationals finally got a clue, and told us that in right center field there were twenty (count 'em, 20) gates, and small lines. Gee, thanks guys. There were dozens of Nats employees hanging around, saying “gee, look at the long lines” for an hour or more, and they finally say something at about 7:50, for an 8pm start.

I eventually got in, and up the the main concourse in time for the National Anthem

and, thanks to the wonders of TV commercials, up to my seat (second row from the top, though our regular seats will be much closer to the field) in time for the first pitch

Odalis Perez to Kelly Johnson, for a strike.

The Nats scored twice in the first inning, then made 24 straight outs before Ryan Zimmerman ended it with a walk-off homer with two out in the bottom of the ninth. During the game, I took a bit of a walk-about, and got this picture of the Anacostia waterfront, which looks a lot better at night than it does in the day.

All in all, the park looks to be a pretty good place to see a ball game. The main question is whether or not 40,000 people can get to it during a DC rush hour, or out of it after a day game. But as a place to watch baseball, it looks like it's going to be a winner.

Corfu, Greece

For some reason, not all of the pictures are displayed in this entry. I've uploaded the whole post to my personal web pages at
http://home.comcast.net/~mikemehl/corfu/
note that the pictures are significantly bigger there, so it will take longer to download.

Given our switch from Comcast to Verizon, I don't expect that link to stay up very long, so I've tried replacing the pictures in this blog. If they vanish again, I'll put them on my new web page, wherever that may be.

I spent the last week of August on the island of Corfu (Kerkyra), Greece, attending ISMANAM 2007 (which highly amused the immigration lady in London). The meeting was quite good, I learned a fair amount and, as with all good meetings, made contacts with people I'd never met before.

But I don't want to talk about that. I want to show you some of Corfu:

• My hotel, the Louis Corcyra Beach, is a “resort” hotel. The view is quite nice:
  
  
  
  but the rooms aren't what you'd think of as American quality: there's a window air conditioner, the beds are small, and the floor is tile. If you want a resort that has fancy American style hotel rooms, for about the same price (or cheaper), go to Cancun. They did have a reasonable American-style (eggs, ham, bacon, etc.) breakfast included in the price (110 €/night).
• The Louis Corcyra is in Gouvia, which is sort of the Ocean City, Maryland, of the island. That is, lots of bars, lots of tourists running around. This time of year it was mostly Brits, and every bar had a giant TV showing Premier League Soccer. I wish I'd taken pictures of the night-life, but all I have are shots like Thursday Morning, 10 a.m.:
  
  
• Some of the hotels (but not the Louis C) have internet access, at a rate of about 6 €/hour. (1 € ≈ $ 1.40, at least last week). A better deal, after 6 p.m., at least, is to go up to Dassia (about 3 km from Gouvia) and stop at Great Shakes, a British pub serving Indian food prepared by a Welsh chef. They have free Internet access. Well, not exactly free, you're expected to buy something, but for 5 € you can get:
  
  
  
  which you can nurse for an hour or more. Good curries, too.
  
  (Note the abomination on the glass, required by the EU's slavish adherence to the metric system. I love the metric system, but some things are sacred.)
• More interesting was Corfu City itself. I got to spend most of last Friday there, waiting for my plane to take off. Here I stayed at the Cavalieri Hotel, a refurbished 17th century mansion. The room was nicer than the one at the Louis C, cheaper (75 $euro;, with a smaller breakfast buffet), and had a bed that was way too soft, and a really small, two-level, bathtub that almost killed me (and may still, my ribs still hurt from where I fell).
  
  
• Corfu contains several museums. I spent a half-hour (that's all it takes, really) in the Archaeological Museum, which features exhibits from the last 2,600 years. I particularly liked the lion from the 7th century B.C. tomb of Menecrates (the poet, I think):
  
  
  
  and the Gorgon pediment from the temple to Artemis:
• Corfu is dominated by two forts, the Old Fort and the New Fort (duh). The Cavalieri is near the Old Fort,
  
  
  
  which was originally built by the Venetians, who controlled the island in the 15-18th centuries, and modified by just about everyone who since. The fort is on an islet that was artificially separated from the mainland.
  
  
  
  It's a long way up. Take a look at the view coming into the fort,
  
  
  
  and then a view of the cross from the level of the clock tower (but off to one side),
  
  
  
  and then look at how tall the cross itself is:
  
  
  
  Finally, take a look back at the town, from the top of the fort. The Cavalieri is off to the left just behind the park:
  
  
  
  
• For one last shot, let's see if Blogger really can upload movies now:
  
  

Galen Frysinger has much, much, much, more about Corfu, along with just about every other place in the world.

(Pictures taken with a Canon PowerShot A550, downloaded to this computer using gthumb, though digikam also works.)

Holyrood Cats

For reasons that escape me, this blogs pictures of our cats are very popular. In a shameless attempt to get more hits, Linux & Things presents:

The Cats of Holyrood, Kansas

Taken on a recent visit. Note that slight resemblance to our cats. These however, are only about eight months old, though the black one has already had one litter.

Installing Ubuntu Feisty Fawn With Dual Boot

As a counterpoint to my Windows Re-Installations notes, here I'm going to give a blow-by-blow of my installation of Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) on that Hal's Evil Twin. HsET is an old (2003) Dell Dimension 2350 computer, with 512MB memory, a DLink DWL-G510 wireless card, a Microsoft Wireless Keyboard/Mouse combo, plus a Wacom graphics tablet which also serves as a wireless mouse, and connected to a Canon printer. The goal is to set this up as a dual-boot machine, and not have to run an Ethernet connection from the DLink router downstairs up to the computer, i.e., get the wireless running. Then Spouse, who likes Linux because it boots up a heck of a lot faster than our Windows machine, can read email while I'm composing pointless blog entries.

This is still an incomplete story, so stay tuned for further developments. Right off the bat, let me tell you that I don't have the Wireless connection going, yet.

First, we need media to hold Ubuntu. I've pretty much filled up the Seagate 120GB disk with Windows stuff, so I connected a Maxtor 40 GB disk (HsET's original disk, as it turns out) as a second drive:

The duct tape isn't the only thing holding up the disk, the cable is quite stiff and keeps everything upright. The tape is just to keep things from jostling around when the box gets moved.

For some reason we have to set the jumpers to make the Seagate the Master and the Maxtor the Slave. Setting both to Cable Select just gives you a computer that doesn't boot at all, even though both of the drives are attached to the same cable, in proper order.

So here we go:

1. The target disk is now /dev/hdb. I find it easier to format these things before installing the distribution, so I loaded up a GParted Live CD to set everything up. I decided on these partitions:

   Mount Point	File System	Size
   /boot	ext3	1 GB
   /	ext3	12 GB
   /usr/local	ext3	5 GB
   /home	ext3	19.29 GB
   swap	Linux Swap	1 GB

   (note: GParted found Microsoft Wireless keyboard/mouse, but not the Wacom tablet)
   GParted is quite easy to use, and I find it helpful to see what I'm doing, rather than trying to do it by cylinder number with fdisk.
2. Burn a Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) Live CD.
3. Boot it.
4. Weird. The text screen resolution went Apple ][: 40x25.
5. However, the GUI is fine. Wacom mouse works out of the box, as does the wireless keyboard.
6. There is a warning message that we're using a Restricted Driver for the WiFi card.
7. Try to set up wireless interface, connect to house 802.11g WPA personal network. Timed out. Though this is ultimately a deal-breaker, go ahead with the install and worry about it later ...
8. Click the Install Button.
9. Language: English.
10. Time Zone: EDT (New York).
11. U.S. English keyboard
12. Set up partitions as above. (Manual install.) Does it really have to rescan the disk every time you click the mouse?
13. Format everything, even though it's already formatted (it's Required by Ubuntu).
14. Temporarily, at least, set Windows as the default boot device. See how at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=408520.
15. Reboot to Windows: Works (including wireless).
16. Reboot to Linux: Works, except for wireless. It can even see the NTFS and VFAT files on the Windows partitions.
17. To do:
    • Fix Wireless
    • Check printer drivers: Dapper's drivers did not do well with the Canon printer.
    • Update, load up software that we might want. This mostly involves things such as Java and Flash, and Feisty's pretty good about helping with that installation, once we have an Internet connection.
    • Move Spouse's files from downstairs upstairs.

To be continued ...

Not Your Average Museum

While taking Child₁ to GatorLand, we found the Florida Museum of Natural History. By and large, it's just like every Natural History Museum you've ever seen: dioramas of the past life in the area, from dinosaurs to pre-Columbian, some fossils (impressively big ancient Great White jaws, you don't just want a bigger boat, you want a bigger museum), etc. However, they've also got the fantastic, amazing, stupendous, outstanding, fantastic — oops, I said that — Butterfly Rainforest, a screened area filled with, well, butterflys. Thousands and thousands. Oh heck, I'll just post a few pictures:

Some just show off:

Some like to feed:

But sometimes nectar just ain't enough — these are bananas, mostly:

A few other inhabitants are allowed — next time we'll get some pictures of the koi, as well:

Sometimes you just want to sun yourself on a rock:

The inhabitants are so friendly, they didn't want us to leave:

Anyway, go. I've heard they release butterflys on weekends at 2 p.m., so try to get there for that.

Cats On Porch

Update on our cats. You've seen them before. If they seem more nervous now, it's because they share the house with:

• Two dwarf rabbits
• Two rats
• Two fish
• One Ball Python
• One mouse (formerly known as "snake lunch," upgraded to pet)

Pecking Order

The funny thing about these pictures is that the black cat outweights the white cat by about five pounds, yet we never see the white cat groom the black cat. When they were kittens, the white one was bigger than the black one. Plus, he's always had a more aggressive personality (translation, the black cat is scared of his own shadow). So the pecking order established in childhood remains.

Pictures From a Small Town

As mentioned, we spent Thanksgiving in Holyrood, Kansas, pop. approx. 450. I grew up there, so watch it. I thought a few pictures might be in order:

• This is Main Street on Thanksgiving Day. Not very busy, true. On other days, there is activity around the bank and H&B, the local phone/cable/internet company. (DJ says they'll have a home page real soon now.) Otherwise, it looks pretty much like this all the time. The consoldated elementary school is at the end of the street, over the hill.:
  
  
  
  
• All Kansas towns feature a high-rise grain elevator. This one's operated by the Holyrood Coop:
  
  
  
  
  
• And, of course, you always need water:
  
  
  
  
  
• Oil used to be the main industry around here, but now it's mostly gone. However, the recent increase in oil prices (thanks, Dub) has made it profitable to pump out what's there. At least, pumpers are working all over the place:
  
  
  
  
  
• When not working the fields, it's nice to have a hobby. Centuries from now, after enough of these have escaped, people will probably figure that these are native birds, just like pheasant:
  
  
  
  
  
• This was taken about 5 pm on Nov. 24, a few miles west of town. The city is to the right, you can just see the elevator near one of the telephone poles: