Someone collected these things in the family a long time ago, so I’m scanning them in. Here’s a slide show.
Month: June 2006
A Cotuit Slideshow
About the header …
My attempts to avoid any graphical design on this blog went out the window last night when I fired up the scanner and started playing historical preservationist by running a stack of old family photos through the machine.
I came across an awesome horizontal panorama shot of Cotuit Bay taken around the turn of the century before the summer folks trashed the place and the village was a working port. This shot was taken, I assume, from the current site of Conrad Geyser’s organic garden looking east towards Osterville’s Grand Island (now some of the world’s most expensive real estate known as Oyster Harbors). The wharves and docks in the foreground are just stubs in the mud today, the old sloops and skiffs are long gone. Today this is a crowded mess of plastic boats and McMansions.
I live about 500 feet away. Here is a shot of my great uncle Thomas Fisher, a MIT civil engineer who I named my youngest son, Fisher, after. He’s sitting on what looks like an early version of the Cotuit Skiff. This shot was taken on the same beach as the panorama in the header graphic. right about where the “O” in “.com” is.
Over the years all the photo albums have been divvied up and spread to the winds. I’m issuing a challenge to all siblings and relatives that if they give me their old photos I’ll give them back a DVD stuffed with ALL of the the collection. One well meaning person, to my horror, has been trimming old photos to fit into frames. ARRRGGGGH! This stuff is priceless, at least to me and my family.
Okay, further Bluetooth successes
Having lit up the Bluetooth functions on my X60s, but still not knowing how in heaven’s name to get a Motorola Borg Headset to work with the fricking thing, I can at least declare some success in getting my Treo 650 to hotsync with the machine.
I would estimate 5 hours of frittered away time trying to get Bluetooth working on this machine. Not acceptable.
Okay, my X60s sees my headset
Major breakthrough. Wiped out all vestiges of bluetoothian b.s. on the machine, let it start back up, did a pairing, and ta-da!, there was my headset.
That’s about it. There is my headset. Can’t Skype through it. Can’t listen to Rob Zombie through it. But it lives. It lives!
and in futher Phuqital Labs news, I have managed to Ubuntu the world’s worst laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1200 — the one’s they give to prisoners just to mess with their heads — and lordy, lordy, I am an honest to goodness Linux weenie. Will start growing my beard tomorrow and am in the market for some birkenstocks and a recumbent bicycle (wait, that’s the LISP look), anyway, Morris Dancing can’t be far away now. Gotta say, GNOME is a pretty UI.
I am a geek manque.
PS: I almost climbed on my “other” bike today, the SnotRocket, but due to lack o’helmet, thought better and came inside and defragged a hard disk instead.
Just say “whoa!”
Better living through pharmacology has been my motto these past few days. I am especially enamored of a pill that I think should be remarketed as “Phuqital”, because whenever I eat one I could care less about anything.
I feel like an old man: my loving wife lays out all the days pills with the times I’m supposed to eat them, and that’s that. Next thing I know and I’ll have a plastic pill case with the days of the week printed on it.
Working at home has been nice. Household of kids, all out for the summer, one employed, one sleeping until noon, the other nagging me to install IM after years of being banned from the evil medium. And hacking away at the issues of Lenovo …
Right now the focus is Linux Linux and more Linux. I bought three more O’Reilly bibles and have settled on “Running Linux” as my primer. Downloading the latest Ubunto ISO image and will trash a Dull Inspiron 1200, the nastiest piece of plastic computing junk to ever cross my desk. Even the 12 year-old told me it was a POS, so I shall sacrifice it to the FDISK gods and see if I can make it sing the Ubuntu song. Speaking of Linux, talk about a bad press whaling. CRN tars us last week with a headline that we’re “shunning” Linux when nothing could be further from the truth. I mean cmon, Thinkpads are the platform of choice for the Opensource mob and don’t we know it. Retractions and corrections and amended pieces were run in eWeek, CNET, and elsewhere, but did that get the heat seeking geeks at Slashdot to post the same number of rants that they did in response to the CRN mess? Course not. The first brush to tar is the stickiest. I’d make a terrible flak.
Finished Philbrick’s “Mayflower.” Eh. It was okay. The King Phillip Indian War is a great tale, but somehow Philbrick didn’t whack it out of the park the way he did with “In the Heart of the Sea.” Working on the proposal for the Chatfield Book, but my concentration under the influence of Phuqital is somewhat lacking.
I rather be shopping for a new bike, but no word from the insurance goons. The bike shop told me the old baby — my Toby Stanton bequeathed LeMond ridden by Viktor Rapinski for Team Saturn — is toast. Which sucks. It was cool to be a fat man on a pro’s bike. Figures I’d be the one to lunch it on the front end of a Chevy Malibu.
Well, time for bed before I start crushing muscle relaxants under a juice glass on the granite counter and snort them ….
Time to sacrifice a goat — it’s 6.6.06
I know the remake of The Omen opens today. I wonder what other numerological events will take place on today, this day of sixes?
I know I feel better, have had a semi-productive morning, and am thoroughly flummoxed by O’Reilly’s Linux in a Nutshell.
WSJ.com – Google Plans to Release Spreadsheet Application
WSJ.com – Google Plans to Release Spreadsheet Application
This is truly significant. Writely was nothing spectacular. Calendar, okay, cool but not earthshattering, but taking on Excel brings back fond memories of the bloody spreadsheet wars of the late 80s. Back then BillG waited for Phillipe Kahn to slash prices and bundle the apps, once that was done Microsoft waded into the pricing game like a hippo into a tea party and before long Lotus 1-2-3 was a joke and Excel pulled off the biggest mass app switch in history.
Now, can Google get anyone to budge from their pivot tables?
Imagethief – Great China blog
I’ve been reading the Imagethief since my Beijing trip last month. This anonymous blog is written by a spindoctor who has recently been picked up by CNET Asia. I like it a lot, one of the funnier blogs in my blogroll.