Our House
Well, the temperature started dropping at the end of January. By my birthday,
it was below zero at night. Kept throwing wood into the stove at an alarming
rate; so glad we got in all that oak and hickory last summer!
I guess it was on Jan. 31 that son Jon called. Said all the paperwork was
done at Liberty and he would graduate in May. YESSSS! Paperwork has been
moving through the bureaucracy for nearly a year now since he finished that
last class. Sort of reminiscent of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant
(a la The Little Prince if you remember that children's book). But it's done.
| At TOL Bookstore/Coffee HousePhoto by Becky Knepper
Click for larger image
Next day he called to say that he totaled his car. Van turned left in
front of him and he hit it at about 50 MPH. We're really thankful for
air bags. So far, both of our "kids" have had accidents where the air bags went
off. But then there are the foot and ankle injuries. (A young man in our
church has been in a wheelchair since before Christmas with two broken
ankles; it's a common injury nowadays.) Anyhow, Jon had an ankle injury
and a bruised leg but he could walk, slowly.
I was debating whether to drive to Virginia in spite of the cold and snow,
just to help Jon get around to find another car, retrieve his belongings
from the wrecked one, insurance, medical, etc. etc. And then Kathy and I
were sitting in our favorite Mexican restaurant when I happened to think,
and sure enough my driver's license expired that day, my birthday. Well,
I didn't want to go right then anyhow with lows predicted to be below
zero, but that confirmed that decision. Jon stayed with friends and they
helped out a lot. (Driver's License place is closed on Mondays, so I was
sitting out front huddled in the car, in a snowstorm, when they opened
on Tuesday.)
Christmas display waited for warmer weather before we took it down. The
negative temperatures weren't so bad, but just walking to the woodshed when
it's zero Fahrenheit with a 20-knot wind is bone-chilling even when you
have long underwear and dress in layers. There were only a couple of weeks
of that, though. And we switched on the big heat pump to keep the outer
parts of the plumbing system from freezing (like the main storage tank,
for instance, or the water softener). The mid-February electric bill was
just about double the mid-January bill that included the Christmas display. Hard
telling how much money the wood stove has saved us so far. Super Bowl
Sunday it got up to maybe 3 above zero. Filled the wood box at least
twice. (We had to "watch" the game out of patriotic duty, it being
Indiana and all that. "Watch" is perhaps too strong a word. "Had the TV
on" is more accurate. I actually finished reading a book during halftime.
But then I'm not a fan of "Prince" anyhow.)
On the 10th, we played at the Tree Of Life Bookstore/Coffee Shop. Possibly the best
gig we've done to date. Nice atmosphere, comfy couches, and we were up
front at some little distance from the espresso machine (Whooooooshhhhhh!)
so we didn't have much, um, "percussion?" to accompany us. Several friends
came by, including Terry White who snapped some photos and had us in his
blog
before we had our mochas at the break. It must have been photo night or something;
| Students on scavenger hunt find professorPhoto by Kathy Barnhart
Click for larger image
a group of college girls approached us and said, "You're a professor, right?
We're on a scavenger hunt and we need a picture of us with a professor!" So
Kathy took a picture of me with them.
Next morning, at least two people said they saw us in Terry's blog. Must be
a popular thing to read blogs on Saturday nights, at least during zero weather.
Wasn't but a couple of days and we got an invite to play a "short set" (is there
such a thing?) on campus for a sort of "Night On The Town", so we played some of
our "jazziest" stuff. The students actually dress up; coats and ties, dresses and
heels, really a good-looking bunch. The "short" set turned into half an hour, then
student groups were backing out left and right by Thursday so it turned into 8:30
to 9:45 which was
fine. We finished by doing some 12-bar blues ("Franky and Johnny") with J.D. Woods
and then he did his folksy thing for a while, followed by David Thornton playing
the keys and singing. You may hear more about David in the future; he has a great
voice. And a young lady joined him for "Over the Rainbow" and she is terrific,
not this popular, breathy, can't-really-sing-no-breath-control kind. Both of
those kids were in the play that was also happening that evening.
Nice view out the windows, yes? Look closer; those are backdrops. But you knew
that. Anyway, one of the students joined us with his saxophone for one set, and
then he joined David later. The students loved it. We finally got home around
midnight after packing up all our stuff. Most fun we'd had for, well, a week
or so. Keeps us out of the bars.
Well, what did y'all think of the Daytona? Hmmm. If you missed it, it was
a great race. If you don't care, it probably wasn't. But my favorite came in second
by about 4 feet or 0.02 seconds whichever comes first. A real photo finish. Fortunately,
I don't bet on races. The two main favorites to win collided rather spectacularly but
I don't think after probably a dozen cars wrecked here and there that anyone got hurt.
The NBA All-star Game was the same day, had its all-time lowest number of viewers.
Oh - my favorite? Mark Martin, the old guy, of course.
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Grace College photo
Weather
Can't get by without mentioning the blizzard.
Used part of that cord of wood in the
garage until the wind stopped blowing. High temperatures were anywhere from 3 to 15,
wind chill below 0 at best,
and every trip to the woodshed involved shoveling. Actually had to dig out my overshoes
and shovel a path out the back driveway when the wind stopped. Wind would fill up any
shoveled paths so we sort of had to slog to work anyhow. It was only about shin-deep
with knee-deep drifts,
nothing like those poor folks in New York state with 11 feet. Roads were bare in spots
and a couple of feet deep in others; just depended on the lay of the land. It was all
very exciting for the students from the Deep South, some of whom had never seen snow
up close until they came to college. One girl got a real suprise; she thought you could
walk on top of snow. One step and she was in up to her knees!
One good thing, I suppose; the blowing snow plugged up any air leaks at the bottoms of
windows and doors. Had to lean on the one door pretty hard so we could get out of the house.
Kathy hired a couple of kids to come and shovel enough so she could get the car out.
I had shoveled some of it, and I shoveled some more after the kids left. If you were careful
and seesawed back and forth a few times, you could get the car in and out of the garage.
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Geek Stuff
Continued working on my "computer on a board". When the weather would
permit, I worked on it in the garage, making sides for its "box" and
cutouts for the fans, diskette, CD-R, etc. We decided to enclose it so
no one would steal the memory and so on. When it's near zero outside,
the garage is much too cold to be a woodshop. Need an old woodstove or
a converted oil drum like Kathy's dad had down on 2nd St. in Colville.
Good weather to stay by the fire and program instead of freezing out
in the shop.
We took the covers off the diskette and CD-R drives so the students
can see them at work. The hard drive has a little window where you
can watch the armature that moves the disk heads. It's all pretty slick.
Most people have no idea what goes on inside their "magic box".
I think I mentioned getting a 17-inch LCD monitor for like $30.00 on eBay.
Had no stand and no cable, but we wanted to mount it on the wall anyhow
and cables are cheap. So we are putting the computer and the monitor up
on the wall in the hallway where it will educate a few people (this is
allowable, it being a college and all that) and maybe even recruit a few
students. Probably have it run a slide show for a screen saver or something
like that, with photos of the labs and sort of "geek-oriented" stuff.
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Just for fun, I installed SuSE 10.2 on the old laptop -- the one that runs for maybe 15
minutes on its batteries so has to be plugged in all the time. Interesting process.
- Ran "defrag" about 3 times before all the files were moved to the same area of disk.
- Downloaded, burned and used "gparted" (Gnome Partition Editor)
to repartition the drive. (Disk boots to some form of Linux, only about
28 meg as I recall.)
- Installed SuSE 10.2 from downloaded ISO images. (You only need
the first 3 disks unless you want to install the Swahili language or
something.)
- Turns out it won't boot with the PCMCIA wireless card in it.
(Remove card, boot, log in, and replace card. Then you can get to the
Internet. Sort of...)
(PCMCIA? Means "People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms".
 )
- Chose the German language for installation, just to be different.
Also makes errors more fun because I have to translate them, then fix the
problem. Keeps me on my toes. (Why do the messages sometimes say "Komputer"
and sometimes "Rechner"? Sometimes "Computer" for that matter.
They all mean "computer" as far as I can tell.
As in "reboot the Rechner" or "shut down the Komputer" and so on. Regional
differences among programmers?)
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Frost tree on window
- Any advice on the PCMCIA problem would be welcome. It's a minor
vexation in that I'm still using Win2K most of the time so I can get to
the Internet. Oh--card works fine with Windows.
- Win 2K? Yes, because
of the age, memory and speed of the laptop (1GHz, 256MB). Still works,
though, and is really handy so I can sit by the fire and run Remote
Desktop for my "real" XP machine upstairs and/or SSH for the Christmas
computer. I suppose I *could* get more memory for the laptop,
but why bother? I have a "good" laptop in its docking station at the
office, and it's the one that goes to conferences with me.
Concerning Vista: We're installing it on a couple of machines just for
fun, machines that aren't mission-critical. Maybe we'll use it for a
couple of our dual-monitor programming machines.
I have one student building
Linux from Scratch.
Now there's a concept! You download the latest source code of everything
you want, including the kernel. Then you install the kernel and a minimal
system on a hard drive and compile whatever else you need. You then have
a system with only what you want, not a 5-gigabyte commercial install that
has everything but the kitchen sink, and they're working hard on getting
the sink onto a DVD-ROM. There is a book, and you can get a CD from the
link above. But there is also the additional advantage that, if you're
an expert of sorts, you can avoid any "back doors" where hackers can invade
your system; and with minimal care you can stop worrying about viruses and
worms.
Actually, the commercial sets are great for most of us; they come with a
Microsoft Office-compatible suite called Open Office, Web browser, all the
stuff we really use. (No, really! Open Office reads & writes Word documents,
Excel spreadsheets and Power Point presentations. I don't use it at school
because they furnish Microsoft Office, that's all.) Open Office is also
available for Windows, by the way, and it's free at
Openoffice.org, or the CD is
available from Amazon.com. (Go for the whole 10 bucks and get the 2.0 version.)
A version for Vista should be out shortly.
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So what books have we been reading? I've been reading "computer books" such as Dreaming In Code
(see photo above) and Linus Torvalds' memoirs. (He's about 37 which is ancient in computing -- so
what am I? A dinosaur?) Who's Linus Torvalds? Well, you either know about Linux or you don't....
I'm having my students read books, so I'm reading books like crazy and trying to figure out what they
should read next fall.
Went to see the movie 'Amazing Grace'. Highly recommended if it comes to a theater near you. It's
"Christian" which means "stay away" to most people I guess. But it was as well attended as 'Ghost
Riders' the day we went. Story of William Wilberforce, who was instrumental in stopping the slave
trade in England, at a time when the atheist philosophers like John Locke were saying that those
stupid Christians should not be messing with "the natural order" of things like slavery. I'll let
you decide whose opinion was correct. But see the film! You'll laugh a little, cry a little. Best
film since 'Dead Poets Society'. (Sorry, guys, no explosions, and the worst violence was a guy
whipping his horse.) Got positive comments even from some of our most discriminating friends, one
of whom knows the producer. I reckon they can't discuss it in public schools because the word
"Christ" was used, not as a cuss word. Leave religion out of history and suddenly nothing makes
a lick of sense. Christianity is the only religion that came out against slavery. And the atheists
and agnostics thought the slave trade was just ducky, bringing in lots of loot for the aristocracy.
John Newton appears a couple of times, the composer of the song Amazing Grace. Newton, a former
captain of a slave ship, was saved by the Grace of God and spent the rest of his life serving
his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. (Please don't confuse this movie with 'Amazing Grace and Chuck'
from 1987. That would be sad.) If you're interested, we could discuss the (un)Civil War and its
alleged causes, but let's keep this upbeat for now.
Kathy has been reading some fiction; in particular, two books by Ted Dekker and Bill Bright, co-authors.
Can't put them down. Recommended.
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Frosty Friends
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