Ubuntu is here!

The easiest OS install I ever did! I love it!

Prints are done

Cold finally over right after Christmas.

I picked up some prints of an ink wash Katie did right before Christmas. Here's one:

Merry Christmas!

and Happy New Year.

Got another cold; let's hope it goes away by Christmas day.

Our hard drive has been recovered and the websites are almost all rebuilt. Norton Ghost arrived and will be put to good use to avoid this happening again.

The Christmas marathon begins

Just getting over a bug, and now it's Christmas. Shopping started, work peaking, ice balls falling from heaven. Happy Horrordays, indeed.

Visiting Portland, ME for MECAH for Katie. Will keep you posted.

New PC is working fine, now just have to recover what I can from the old Hard drive and pray.

Homecoming 2007

It's official: Williams beat Amherst 20-0. Go Ephs!
Had good time at a house party afterwards - thanks Kristen!
Check out the photos below:
A walk up Spring Street after homecoming win
Girls gone wild

My dorm senior year
The church in the center of campus
New library

Holy Cardinal, It's Art Spiegelman

Went to the Wesleyan - Williams FB game today in a N'oreaster. Left at halftime where the Ephs had a sizeable lead (we won, 33-13, go Ephs!) to see Art Spiegelman in the chapel. Wow, what a great lecture. He raced through the history of comix, with lots of educated comments about his and others' work. Borat Cohen on satire was the next lecturer in another building, but most of stayed well past Art's scheduled ending and missed Borat.

Art won the Pulitzer prize for his comic Maus.

Art Spiegelman

And here is a link to the Wesleyan student blog:
LINK

Maus

Ride tonight!

If the weather permits, we'll ride in costume at NoHo. Pics later.

In the meantime, here is a self-portrait of Katie:

Katie at the Appy show

Here's Katie and her horse at the local Appy show.

Buffett!

Had a great time at the concert!

Labor Day Boating

Jack and Jimmy were kind enough to invite family and friends down to their house on Niantic Bay. The band played and fun was had by all.
Jimmy's antique boat was launched the next day. It held water, but had a bit of trouble later in the bay and needed a tow back from brother John.

Fanboat with classic styling

This was a cool fan boat we saw parked at our local American Legion hall.

Greenwhich cemetery grave shots

Visited family graves late last month in preparation for Crouse reunion next month.

Photos:

Bike show and swap meet

Enjoyed the Great bike show and swap this year. Thanks to all who came out from all over the Northeast. The Clams and Melon Farmers played all day. Daren even came across the pond to visit all. It didn't even rain for once!


The show

The clams



The bike museum. Katie was chief of security this year.

The melon farmers classic rock

Scot on a vintage Harley Sportster

The award winning British Velocette police bike from the 1940's. Won last week at British bike show.

Rob's birthday

Traveled to Main Line PA for Rob's 50th birthday. Had lots of fun.

Managed only a few photos as the light or weather was never right.

Downtime

Back from the beach cottage and relaxing.
Took Musclebikes in Old Home Days parade in East Hampton with band party after.
Working on Grid Girl story.

Some work from Katie

An impressionist style horse


















And a portrait

Fox 61 video link

Hey, they put our video from May 15 up on google video! Check it out!

Retro bikes

A Hole in the Ground

Link to article in Palm Beach Post about folding of company that was developing condos on site of the old Rutledge Inn, our family's hotel.
Here is a shot of the old sixties style place:

Now it's a hole!
Here is the link:
Link

And some text:
RIVIERA BEACH — The pink walls of the 1960s-era Rutledge Inn, for years the only hotel on Singer Island, fell to bulldozers last year. Owned by three generations of the Crouse family, the hotel was razed to make room for Mirasol Beach of Singer Island.
Mirasol Beach was to be an 18-story condo resplendent with spa, fitness center, library, theater, lounge and billiards. No more. Last week developer Taylor Woodrow Plc pulled the plug on the project.
"I wish we had never sold it," 77-year-old Doris Crouse said after being told of the developer's decision. "It's just like I lost my best friend."
Among the regulars during the Rutledge Inn's happier hours was Jupe Hash. She was disappointed when the hotel was demolished and is disappointed again that it has been shoveled under for nothing.
"It's just dirt now," she said.

Fox 61 ride

Last weekend we were interviewed by Fox 61 for a feature on collecting.
Jimmy and Wanda are the big bike collectors around Hartford. Here are a few shots of the ride around the capital.
The camera dude mounted a small video camera on Katie's bike and got some cool action footage.
Special will be 3 minutes long and will air sometime on the 10 o'clock news in May, with teaser ad footage during lead-in shows, perhaps American Idol. More details to come.

Cinco de Mayo was great!

We had four bands and a great party at our house.

Here is a shot of Wanda's new band, Hey Steve and The Melon Farmers.

It'll never work...

Just read an overview of web "beams" by David Galernter, a Yale prof of computer science. The idea is to provide a customized beam of info that is only relevant to you or your group, from cradle to grave (well, at least from somewhere in the past into the future). Your documents and pages would be served up as a parade from past to future. Your PC would only serve to view this info, not store it. You could access it anywhere. The info would be safe from hackers and eavesdroppers. The idea builds on another web 3.0 idea called "Lifestreams."
Nice idea, but it will never work. The idea is to have some structure to the info on the web, and to make it feel as if you control it so you feel empowered. The technology would enable these things, but they would have to be used and directed properly to work. And that is the problem. Right now the web is built from the bottom up, which is messy but effective. To lose that would be to create a directorship (awfully close to dictatership for me). I don't see people buying into this.
When Windows was being developed, there was lots of competition. IBM's OS/2 was just one other alternative. Windows won because it put a messy but effective interface on top of current simple computers and operating systems. The internet and the web both work this way.
After working in the IT industry for a long time, as well as knowing human nature, I think that people will look for the next effective, simple answer or improvement and to hell with this new control scheme.

Submitted to 400words.com

It's been awhile since my last post...sorry 'bout that. Been fighting a bug, and busy otherwise with taxes and estate work.
Submitted a story to 400words.com about breakups. Hope Katherine publishes it.
My next plan is to write something for the Writer's Digest short short story contest. They say they get over 8,000 submissions a year so I may be drowned out in the noise, but it gives me something to aim for.
Will post a link to my story if 400words puts it up.

Cayman photos

Here are two photos from our swim with the stingrays in Cayman.

Here's Katie swimming towards one.

This is me petting one.

Man gone down

This appears to be a great book. Heard an interview with the author on NPR and will have to run and get the book. The book transcends race and talks about life. The descriptions and characterizations are amazing. And this is his first novel!

http://www.amazon.com/Man-Gone-Down-Michael-Thomas/dp/0802170293/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-2249135-0637637?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1172842512&sr=8-1

We're back from Cayman

Pictures to come.

www.400words.com published my little blurb about my first job.

Turning 50...

...and feeling good. Had a big talk today with Wanda about where I stand in life and career and we both agree that flashy, splashy people get all the press and influence too much.
Here is a great link to that thought regarding technology. The linked blog is about a book by David Edgarton, The Shock of the Old.
http://www.hughpearman.com/2007/01.html

Here is some from the link:

There are certain bits of received wisdom that nobody normally challenges. Such as: we live in an era of constant, accelerating change, that innovation is the key to economic survival, and that we all travel everywhere by personal jetpack. OK, I made that a bit obvious. That's the problem with yesterday's futures. They're so yesterday. Yet the same people who were so sure about the jetpack future didn't have the slightest inkling that by 2006 we would be flying to Budapest for lunch on a whim, for pocket money. On planes seemingly little different from the machines the world's elite used to fly in the 1950s.
What's happening? Why do things not change according to the headlines? Why is white-heat-of-technology Concorde a fading memory while the utterly conventional Boeing 737 rules the skies? Why won't vinyl records go away? Why are killer diseases such as malaria not eradicated, as everybody assured us they would be in the 1960s? Why don't we live in titanium pods, served by robots? Because people were thinking jet-pack when they should have been thinking bicycle.
This is the fertile territory explored by Professor David Edgerton of Imperial College in his new book, The Shock of the Old. In it he eviscerates our obsession with novelty. It's time, he argues, to look at the history of science and technology in a new way. It's blindingly obvious, really. Instead of recording the history of when devices and processes were invented or predicted, why not look at the way we really use things?
For Edgerton, the problem is not that technology has been ignored - we can't get away from accounts of it - but that those accounts have been idealistic rather than pragmatic. They incline towards glamour, drama, spectacle. The humble soldier's rifle - Lee-Enfield or AK-47 - was massively more important in 20th century warfare than the V2 missile or the atom bomb, he points out. But a basic killing tool like the rifle doesn't make good television - or good political capital - like the V2 missile or the atom bomb. Weapons of mass destruction, anybody?
"A lot of our understanding of 20th century global history is shaped by a very particular understanding of technology that may not be that useful," he remarks. "I'm not saying that there isn't very, very dramatic change. On the contrary, I want to highlight the fact that there is change. But in terms of the technology that is actually used, it's very different from the stories of invention and innovation that are told. Those stories are very narrow - our creativity is much more general than we think."
In other words, we've got it all wrong. Corrugated-iron sheeting and bicycles feature more prominently in all our lives than the Apollo moon missions and nuclear submarines. "For example, motor car technology continues to change. Steel-making technology continues to change. Textile technology continues to change. And all those are changing our lives today," he says. Glamorous, no. Important, yes.

Great weekend, bad weather

Cuzzins came to visit for the weekend. Visited the CT shoreline for some photo ops, but the weather was dreary and mizerable all weekend.
Best Clam show in recent memory though!

Relaxing

Not perky after the holidays, and fighting a bug. Quiet weekend off.

Posted a short anecdote to 400words.com. Let's see what happens.

Happy New Year!

Greetings to all for 2007.