All posts by djones

cocoa with santa, day, nerd

What’s a nerd to do?

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So what does a died-in-the-wool nerd do on a day like today. Well …

I spent time with my spouse. It is so nice to have her home for a few days. Nothing can compare with that, but I won’t let it stop me from boring you with the rest of my day.

I watched a bit of the CU versus Nebraska football game. Interesting to say the least, even if Nebraska did win. Out here in the part of Colorado known to some as the armpit of Nebraska, the division is probably 60/40 for CU over Nebraska, so some people we a bit unhappy at the ending.

Journeyed down to the church. This evening was Cocoa with Santa. The youth room in the church is decorated as a north pole fantasy with a live Santa to give a small gift bag to every child. Out in the kitchen they had pie and homemade cookies and cocoa and coffee and gingerbread cake with whipped cream for all to indulge in. My better half convinced me to have some coffee while she snarfed sampled the cookies. Got a chance to visit and watch the kids in line as they waited for Santa. The church gets 300-400 kids every year for the event (and probably twice as many adults).

Visited the phone store to investigate the options for our son. He’s tied up working in the mountains over the college break and wanted us to check on changing his phone since his current one is on it’s last legs. Of course it involves an upgrade in capability and service, just by chance.

Went shopping and spent longer in line waiting to check out than shopping. Makes one wonder why stores can’t plan ahead a bit and have enough cashiers on hand for high volume days. Some people abandoned their prospective purchases and left. $$$ out the door if you are a retailer.

And finally the real reason I’m a nerd – I spent most of the day re-writing my backup software for the network here at the house. After upgrading the servers to the latest and greatest Solaris and moving to ZFS based file systems and adding in a few different windows platforms, my old backup software based on ufsdump/ufsrestore just wasn’t an option anymore. It isn’t a lot of data since the disk farm is less than .5TB, but I like to keep it all backed up to the tape library with copies transported off site for safety. You wouldn’t believe the number of times my mania for backups has saved the rear-most portion of my anatomy. I’m getting too old for rear-end-ectomy, so I just do the backups. Time to return to watching the tapes cycle through the tape library robotic loader – excitement beyond belief!

dead turkey

The Turkey is Dead

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Yet another brutal day of turkey and diet massacre is over. All that is left is our friend on the right and he ain’t talking.

Read the Urban Dictionary for an alternative definition of dead turkey.You’ll have to read it to believe it. Go ahead – I’ll wait.

Are you truly grossed out now? Good – my work here is done.

Back to sleep off the turkey that now stuffs me (as opposed to turkey stuffing?).

golf, Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving Traditions

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Everyone has their own special traditions for Thanksgiving. Some are family traditions, some are historical, and some are just plain odd. I happen to have both a traditional family one and and odd one.

The family one is pretty standard – we gather to overeat, maybe watch some football, maybe play some cards, and generally just chill and relax. With both Mother and Mother-in-Law here in town, it generally means venturing to one of their homes for the day. Once in a while it has been at our place, especially while our son was still at home. In a few more years I suspect it will be here once again. But for now it means venturing the *huge* distance to their houses. (8-12 blocks max – that *huge* was sarcasm just in case you are humor impaired.)

My odd tradition is one begun amidst a group of my friends a number of years ago. It at first started as a joke and then grew into a tradition. Every Thanksgiving day, we gather on the golf course and play a game of cross country golf. Our rules are pretty simple. Each person stands on a tee box and calls the green and the par for the upcoming hole. I.e. I might be on the first tee and declare the hole to be a par 8 to the 3rd green. After that “hole”, the next person does the same until all of the group have called a hole. Given that the weather is typically in the teens and about half the time there is snow and ice on the ground, the golf is not the object of the game. The real objective is a chance for us to enjoy some comraderie and exercise (this is a walking event) before we adjourn to our respective traditional Thanksgiving celebrations.

It started when several of my friends’ sons were in high school. They are now approaching thirty and make it a point each year to play Thanksgiving cross country golf. In some cases I suspect that the golf tradition is more important than the meal. For at least some of them, it is the only time during the year they even pick up a club. Over the years we have gained several other players, including some out of town guests that now make the journey to play.

One year it was in the 70’s, one year it was -4. Makes no difference, we just tend to call shorter holes to make up for the bundles of clothes and gloves we have on. Some years we have to pick a post or tree as the hole and declare the ball in if we get within a few feet. That happens when the snow and ice have buried the greens. Needless to say, this is a game where many balls are lost.

It is strange to contemplate this odd Thanksgiving tradition, but we enjoy it none the less. So what is your odd Thanksgiving tradition?

Francis Bellamy, Pledge of Allegiance, YAT

YAT

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Yet Another Tuesday. We had a city council meeting tonight, a regular session as opposed to a work session. Once again attendance was sparse – just the press and city employees in the audience. No, I take that back, a representative of the Ministerial Alliance was there to present the invocation, but then he left before we got past the Pledge of Allegiance .

And now to expose how oddly my mind works, mentioning the Pledge of Allegiance brought forth the full power of trivia. One of the questions in the Trivia Contest was “What did Francis Bellamy write for the quadricentennial celebration of Columbus Day in 1892?” Admittedly, this stumped most of the teams (ours included). Have you guessed with the extra context of the first paragraph? That’s right, Francis Bellamy penned the original Pledge of Allegiance we all recited through out grade school (and before every city council meeting here). Now that this bit of trivia has been embedded in my mind, I’ll probably never forget it.

The interesting part is the background and the revisions the pledge has undergone. The original pledge, published in 1892, read

I pledge allegiance to my Flag and (to*) the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

with the (to) added in October of 1892. Mr. Bellamy had originally thought about including the word equality along with liberty and justice, but he realized that at the time the school superintendents were dead set against racial and sexual equality.

The back story here is that in 1892 Francis Bellamy was chairman of a committee of state superintendents of education as a part of the National Education Association .  That is why he was writing the Pledge in the first place. Isn’t interesting how the battle for equal rights coming in the next century was already apparent in the half century following the civil war. It is painful to see how the rights of women were lumped with the rights of Negroes and denied without thought.


The American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution led a charge to change the wording at the 1923 and 1924 National Flag Conference . They changed the Pledge’s words, ‘my Flag,’ to ‘the Flag of the United States of America.’  Bellamy was still alive at the time and disliked the change, going so far as to protest against it. He was ignored.

In 1954, Congress after a campaign by the Knights of Columbus , added the words, ‘under God,’ to the Pledge. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, Francis Bellamy had died in 1931. So no one knows what his feelings may have been about the change.

Now some 116 years after the original was written, we recite the modified version:

I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

I don’t know, which version do you like the best?

SAD, sunset, twilight

Twilight (not the movie)

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Today Molly and I got out for our walk a bit earlier than normal. We were in time to enjoy the twilight during much of the walk. At this latitude, the sun falls behind the single story houses to the west of the park at about 4:10pm this time of the year. That leaves the time from then until sunset at about 4:30pm in twilight, where there is a lot of backlight from the sky and ground scatter, but no direct illumination. Tall buildings like the grain elevator in the distance get that golden glow during this time of day. Any dust in the air is emphasized and turns reddish as the hour approaches sunset.

I personally like the twilight. In summer, it happens as late as 9:30pm and signals the beginning of the days cooling off out here on the plains. In fall, it reminds me that winter is on its way. There is a bleakness of the bare trees and the indirect light that foreshadows the coming of winter. In winter, the increasing lateness of the occurrence with the lengthening of the day brings hope for the revival to come. In spring, the backlighting emphasizes the coming of the buds and leaves on the trees. So the nature and timing of the twilight is another cue to the changing of the seasons, another clue that like is cyclic.

Given that it is pitch dark around here by 5:30pm at this time of year and will be dark by 4pm or so on the shortest day of the year here, twilight is a gift. (You do remember that Dec. 22 is the shortest day of the year don’t you?) I know that my friends who suffer from SAD find the twilight depressing, Whether this is a conditioned response to the coming of winter or an actual reaction to the light is an open question. So do you enjoy the twilight? Or are you already hiding inside with the lights on? Planning on sitting in extra light to avoid the depression?