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| Local Happenings | Grace College | Other Stuff |
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| Michael Reagan came and spoke at a college lecture series. The series has
been an annual event for over 100 years, with people like Billy Graham, William Jennings
Bryan coming to li'l ol' Winona Lake. But anyhow, Michael is a fine fellow even if his
newspaper column treads on some toes.
The interesting part is how he got here, coming from California into the hinterlands. Seems that his flight to Chicago was uneventful. From there, things could have gone better. He got onto the plane to Ft. Wayne, and they sat at the gate. Then they announced "10 more minutes". And then, in about 20 minutes, they announced "10 more minutes". (Do they send people to school and train them to announce "10 more minutes" regardless of the problem?) Finally, they unloaded the plane and announced that there would be another plane scheduled to leave in 40 minutes, and there were 8 seats available. Technical detail: that plane was at the time headed for Ft. Wayne and had not landed yet so it could turn around and come back to Chicago, which is a 40-minute flight, then turn it around and 40 minutes back to Ft. Wayne. And then it's almost an hour to Winona Lake by car. So Michael Reagan says to a fellow standing next to him, "Wonder if I could find a private plane to hire." Fellow says, "I have a private plane, but it's in Ft. Wayne." Michael says, "How soon could you get it here?" Fellow says, "Well, I'd have to call." Michael says, "Here's my cell phone." So that's how Michael Reagan landed at our local (Warsaw) airport, 20 minutes before walking onto the platform to speak. So a few weeks later, we get a similar firsthand experience. A friend's husband died very suddenly, age 51. Suddenly, as in perfect health then a heart attack. Anyhow, we went to the funeral, carefully getting the church address from Mapquest. Well, OK, but the church has a new building. So we ended up at the wrong place. But so did a couple of other cars. We had a map. "Ernie" had a cell phone. Called the funeral home, Kathy got the directions and we had a "car"avan of three cars going all the way through town, got there late but we made it. Turns out that Ernie was best friends with the deceased for about 40 years, and his wife was a good friend of the wife. They drove 12+ hours from New Jersey and ended up at the wrong place but we guided them to the right place. Good thing we did not know where we were going at first. If one person has the resources and another has a cell phone, things can work out very well. The LORD knows what He is doing even when we get all upset and frustrated and nothing seems to be working. And another observation: if you have both the resources and the cell phone, things go smoother for you, but you may miss a great opportunity to help someone who is a long way from home. |
A performance major (Bachelor of Music) was
passed by the faculty after much discussion, research and wrangling. It will officially be
housed in the new School of Music headed by
Dr. Patrick Kavanaugh of the summer
MasterWorks program.
Got a good-sized class graduated. Hope we can replace them in the fall. Had a "bad" year recruiting a while back and next year we will graduate the smallest senior class in quite a while. We hope to see a few more new students (music, that is) than heretofore planned. No music recruiting could be done, of course, until all of the "I"s were crossed and the "T"s dotted for the new major. Or the other way around. Whatever. Anyhow, recruiting will happen here during the MasterWorks festival in late June through most of July. Dr. Kavanaugh says that they are within a couple of students of their goal for this fall, several having applied and been accepted within the last couple of weeks. Dr. Kavanaugh, in addition to directing the Warsaw Symphony, has a "Second Sunday" program each month. It is a variety of classical music, dramatic snippets (e.g. a scene from Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream"), poetry readings, and, last but not least, a hymn sing for the last 20-30 minutes. Marvelous! We gave all of the "Computer" graduating seniors a binary clock. Most people won't be able to read it, but it's "cool" for computer types. There are several models available on the Web, in case you would like one. Yup, the graduating class was a good size. After the ceremony, there was the usual round of pictures with the professors and such like. We have the graduation now in the "new" Recreation Center, which is actually a converted factory of sorts. One of the local industries, Medtronic Sofamor Danek, built a new factory and sort of left the building to "us". They make hospital equipment of various kinds. Anyway, we have several "computer" graduates who will be staying in the area. One is currently working for one orthopedic (artificial knees, hips, etc.) company and interviewing with another. He wants to do programming, and they're paying top dollar. A couple of grads are going into network administration and such, and a couple will be doing graphic design stuff "with computers". (Remember the good old days when Mom would brag, "Oh, my son's job has to do with computers somehow," and everyone oohed and aahed? Nowadays you can't find a job that doesn't "have to do with computers".) | Healthwise, we're doing OK now.
Probably need to lose a few pounds (duh!) after
all the parties, but mostly OK. Kathy's gout is always hovering in the background now, but
minor dietary cautions should minimize it.
Cats are still fat and lazy, but all these people tromping through the house have them worried. A robin started building a nest outside the living room window at about window-sill height, which was most interesting to the cats, but I think the robins finally wised up and found a higher place. Daughter Kriss got a job at Harvard, producing the video for the extension classes. Our daughter at Hah-vahd! Oh, my. Well, they also have a lot of professors they would never have admitted as students. Son Jonathan is still programming in the Lynchburg-Roanoke part of Virginia. Not much else to say about that except that gas prices are getting to be a major irritation for him. 
Kathy got new dining-room furniture (used). Nearly killed herself that day, between moving the old furniture to new places in the house, moving in the new, and cleaning for one of the parties. Spring cleaning in one day -- not recommended. Extra table space was really nice to have for the party -- also the six more chairs. 
Got the "sideboard" in the background as well as a (lighted) china hutch.
Took a few sessions with the drywall mud, but the water damage from last year's leaky roof is pretty much fixed. Some nails had rusted and worked loose and the drywall tape had let go, so it was a case of putting in some new drywall screws, scraping off the old mud and refinishing the joints, a few hours' work, total. Kathy wanted to repaint the room anyway, and this was incentive to get started. I think she's going to color-coordinate with cousin Jane's watercolor, which can be seen above. I used "Gimp" to change the perspective, correct the colors, etc. It's a freebie program, comes with Linux. It's certainly no harder to use than Photoshop and I find it easier -- except for that dandy little one-click "fix photo" feature that's sometimes really handy in Photoshop. But, as they say on TV, "Your mileage may vary," so the colors may be close on your monitor, or maybe not. Here at home, when I adjust the colors so one Web browser is close, another browser makes the colors look strange. |
Unintentional PlumbingRan some conduit from the Christmas Tree computer to the office, so I could put in network cable between the machines. I needed to cut out a furring strip, so I deliberately used the hand saw, not the power saw. Well, this is that saw I wrote about when we first moved in. Boy is it sharp! Nicked a pinhole in a copper pipe.So here I am running around shutting off the water and opening faucets to depressurize the system. How to fix such a thing -- easily? Went to the store and found the "proper" stuff, then had an inspiration. I bought one of those (what I call) "vampire" taps, that you clamp to the pipe. Well, I didn't use the valve part, just the clamp and gasket, and so far it's not leaking. The trail of water to the drain in the garage floor has dried up and I managed to finish the computer wiring. All of this just might be in preparation for ... Gulfport, MSAs you may know, Gulfport, MS is a few miles from New Orleans, and they were hit just as hard. They're not below sea level so it doesn't seem like it should be all that bad, but it is. We've sent several teams from our church to help rebuild, and the next one will leave soon.FEMA and the Red Cross are pulling out (bracing for the next hurricane?) and over 90% of the rebuilding is being done by Christian groups at this point. Methodists, Brethren, Pentecostal, Catholic, Presbyterian, you name it. The pictures brought back by the most recent group show that it looks as bad as the day after Katrina except for an occasional house that's been repaired. Shysters "fixed" many houses and left them uninhabitable. So the money is gone down a rathole and much of the work has to be done over. FEMA trailers aren't allowed in some towns (zoning regulations). The situation is just short of desperate even now. The rebuilding will take years, and those FEMA trailers will blow apart in a gale much less a hurricane. Wish I had a semitrailer load of drywall and electrical supplies to donate; all of the wiring and drywall has to be ripped out of houses (black mold inside the walls -- deadly to breathe -- and soaked wiring -- deadly to touch), and that finish work is what's so expensive. And the profiteering -- $12.00 a square foot to install drywall! Like $100.00 a linear foot! There oughta be a law! Or maybe there is.... | ||
Geek StuffWell, more hard drive adventures. Used one of the old drives from the (home) office for the Christmas Tree machine, and therein lies a tale.Until now, we had two SCSI drives (10GB) in the Christmas computer. One of them decided to die on me. No disgrace, I installed it in 1996 and it outlived two or three mainboards; I got it used on E-bay. Christmas music and all my programming was on the other (good) drive and also backed up on CDs. Just the operating system (Red Hat 9) was gone, no big deal. So I pulled out the dead drive and put in an IDE drive from the office computer. (And, by the way, since I put in the shiny new Western Digital 250GB drive, none of the drives goes "klunka-klunka" any more. Odd.) So I installed Red Hat on the IDE drive. No luck. Turns out that it wants to boot from the SCSI drive because of the BIOS (ROM) on the SCSI card. Bless Prof. Knopp who invented Knoppix! I shoved a Knoppix disk in the drive, booted it up, mounted the drives appropriately and copied all the Christmas stuff to the IDE drive, all 3 or 4 GB of it. Took a few minutes. Ever done a rm -rf * ? Deliberately, I mean. Wipes out everything in seconds. Lotsa fun! Not quite as good as the guys in the Special Forces who like to blow stuff up, but close. -- continued -- | Geek Stuff, continuedSo as I was saying, with the Christmas stuff on the IDE drive, I installed Red Hat on the SCSI drive.Didn't work. Red Hat *thinks* it has to put the boot manager on the IDE drive no matter what. Adaptec's controller thinks the boot manager has to be on the SCSI drive no matter what. Half a day of fiddling around later, I solve the problem. With the Christmas stuff safely on the IDE drive, unplug that drive so Red Hat can "see" only the SCSI drive. After installation, plug in the IDE drive and modify /etc/fstab by hand. See? Nothing to it if you can just figure it out. Took me a while, though. Old age.
And why run a cable, not wireless?
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So churches from all over the Midwest and down the East Coast are sending teams to do the work. Some Gulfport houses look OK on the outside but the drywall is ruined halfway up the walls and the insurance money is either gone or they never paid at all. One lady got $15.00. Some of our high-schoolers spent their Spring Break down there cleaning up yards and gardens, some of which were several feet deep in debris. Some houses are nothing but a concrete slab and maybe the fireplace still standing. They removed a couple of feet of debris from the slabs so rebuilding can start. And you know, the banks are foreclosing on the concrete slabs! Like people are going to continue making payments on a house that no longer exists? Ya, Right! I'd be willing to wager up to 4 cents that some banks are in big trouble. And how about those City Fathers who won't allow a FEMA trailer in town because property values might go down? Bureaucrats have no sense. Over 40 people are already signed up for the next trip. In one way, that won't make a dent in the need, but in another way, with hundreds of such groups, we will make a difference. That's what we're here for. Right? Well, I don't have a semitrailer, but I have a chainsaw, some drywall-finishing stuff and my lineman's pliers, along with a cordless drill that doubles as a screwdriver. I can help as the LORD gives me strength. Hope to have you a big report later. | ||
