Dave's Taurus ID

Memory Loss - USA Today Coverage

2011-07-20T11:39:00.000-05:00

Mary Brophy Marcus has an excellent series of articles this week in USA Today on Alzheimer's disease.
If you have followed this theme in my blog, what's new and exciting to me is the recent reports relating memory loss to depression and diabetes.

Here are links to the articles. First is a report on the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in Paris. I think the article is one of the best written I've seen on any topic.

http://yourlife.usatoday.com/health/medical/alzheimers/story/2011/07/Early-lapses-in-memory-shed-light-on-Alzheimers/49506150/1

Second is an article that shows images of the kind associated with treatments described in the book, "Pictures of the Mind", by Miriam Boleyn-Fitzgerald.

http://www.usatoday.com/yourlife/health/medical/alzheimers/2011-01-19-alzheimers19_ST_N.htm?csp=obinsite

Extreme Writing Makeover - How do you write numbers?

2011-07-14T16:03:00.001-05:00

Pick a number, any number.
Do you believe the numbers?
I have a number in mind. If you do not have a number, we will use mine. (This line makes the difference between you, the billionaire manager, and me, the analyst).

This is week #44 of a 52-week online writing course, "Extreme Writing Makeover", led by publication coach Daphne-Gray Grant. If you have not followed up on previous mention of her course in this blog, I urge you to do so. No matter at what stage of learning you are as a writer, you will learn to write better and faster, beginning with week one of her course.

This week's headline: "Don't numb your readers with numbers".
Last week: "Why and how you must eliminate cliches".
The first line in this blog post may be a cliché. The bit about analysts and managers was like a cliché at 3M. I heard it often. I was the analyst.

Notice how many ways I wrote numbers in the preceding two paragraphs. 3M has to be written that way. The corporate name is 3M, not 3M Company, and not the name spelled out, Minnesota, Mining, and Manufacturing?

I paused in the writing here, copied and pasted my work into Microsoft Word 2010. I have the grammar and spelling checker ready to analyze as I type. There are no errors highlighted for any of my numbers. There is a problem with the spelling of cliché without a diacritical mark.

Numbers dominated my careers as a U.S. Air Force Weather Officer, and as an analyst at 3M.
When I retired from 3M , I saved a huge three-ring binder we published as a user guide. The guide explained how to use the service measurement system I programmed. More than one hundred pages displayed images of menus, criteria fields to be filled in by the user, and examples of every report the program could generate. I wrote the content of the guide. I wrote the logic in hundreds of computer programs that ran in the background. A professional IT programmer made it all work online. We hired a professional publishing service to finish the layout and print it.

Imagine an audience involving fifty-two countries. Supply Chain Management specialists, all of them managers or supervisors represented transportation, distribution, warehousing, inventory management, customs clearance, and so on. They had to understand the numbers. They communicated to executives who don't read reports past the first paragraph, and will not read anything longer than one page.

Somehow, I was a popular guy with management, because I could communicate meaning. I had the numbers they needed. A picture was worth more than a thousand words, especially in a video conference. Our Japanese team depended on the graphics projected to be the same format every month. They had the benefit of a nine-hour time difference to read the printed reports I sent before the meeting, and the reports had to have the same format every time.

Language differences were important. On one occasion our U.S. team leader sat in a video conference room in Brussels at midnight, with a German team leader at his side, while the Japanese team were assembled at 8 AM in an office near Tokyo.

Why? We had accomplishments to report. We had saved the company millions of dollars. We had reduced the time it took to move exports from the middle of the U.S. to Europe or Japan. Shipments via truck, rail, and ocean could get to Europe in nine days, where it used to take forty-five days. To Japan, we could do it consistently in thirty days, where it had been as much as seventy-two days and unreliable.

We had a story to tell. That is the lesson for this week. Try not to start a report with numbers. Tell the story.

There is more to a story. Capture the audience. Here is the lead posted on Facebook yesterday by Tom Skilling, WGN TV weatherman. He posted a colorful graphic to go with it.

"This is a stunning forecast--not one you see everyday. The immense dome of hot air, depicted on this Sunday evening upper air forecast is to take shape across a huge swath of the US. 90+ deg temps are predicted in sections of 34 states by late this weekend by our computer forecast models. Chicago's 141 yr observational record shows the area's hottest wx has historically occurred from July 16-29."

Here is the link to my publication coach:
http://www.publicationcoach.com

Pictures of My Mind - Dreams and Rumination

2011-07-13T17:16:00.000-05:00

Here is a story I may include in my memoir, Pictures of My Mind. I don't pretend to be a rigorous scholar. What I have in mind here reminds me of what Emmanuel Swedenborg might have recorded in his journal in the 1740's. He was a scholar and a scientist. He was convicted of heresy by the Swedish Lutheran Church for promoting such thoughts. Here is how my mind thinks. Here are my experiences of thought and memory functions today.

It is July 13, 2011, 5:10 AM. A robin is on the lawn on the lakeside of our house. I put on my glasses to see the robin that was just a dark object I knew was not usually there on the lawn. I take note that the Sun has not risen. A week from today will be a month after the Summer Solstice already. The Sun had risen by 5:10 AM a month ago.

I observe such changes as the rising time of the Sun, the quality of daylight at any moment, what is happening in Nature, and what is happening on the lake. Any of these observations support my creative writing practice. Professional writing coaches make money telling you to practice such observations.

Before I pulled back the covers and left the warmth of my bed in our guest room, I think I was in a peculiar state of awareness. I think I was awake. I think I was ruminating. I know I had been dreaming. I congratulated myself for observing so many creative thoughts. I thought I should allow that flood of creative imagination to flow uninterrupted.

I already had forgotten the dream content by the time I was aware that I had been dreaming. It did no good to follow lucid dreaming practice, to have a journal at hand to write out the dream. In fact, I had prepared myself for lucid dreaming last night. I had been writing about it, typing and quoting a lucid dream website into one of my memoir documents on Microsoft Word.

It does not work every time to write out my thoughts immediately after waking up. I have not recovered the dream content. I have not recovered the content of the flood of creative thoughts. I conclude that that hour may have lasted only a few minutes. The flood of creative thoughts was like a different level of consciousness, still in the dream state. Not every memory training practice overcomes memory loss.

It may be an accomplishment in training my mind to record such observations. Awareness of a flood of creative thoughts appears to be a separate function, distinctly different from the dream state function. Images and stories from the dream state appear to be different from the flood of words coming through rumination.

Lucid dreaming practices

“Lucid dreaming is the experience of being completely aware within a dream that you are, in fact, in a dream.”

“First, tell yourself before you go to sleep that you WILL remember your dreams.”

“Sleep cycles are 90 minutes long on average and REM sleep occurs at the end of the cycle. So if you set your alarm for any 90 minute interval after you fall asleep, you will most likely end up waking up during a dream, making it easier to remember.”

I took these quotes from a website called High Existence. The complete “Lucid Dreaming” topic may appeal to you for memory training. http://www.highexistence.com/lucid-dreaming/

The 90-minute cycle caught my attention. I followed that cycle during my workday at 3M. It helped meet deadlines. It was essential for me to take a break while writing user guides, fiscal procedures, and computer programs for data analysis. I would stop working on a high priority, and do something else to refresh my mind.
For my dream work, I do not set an alarm to wake up. A thought is enough to pre-program myself to wake up. I learned from a man who practiced Sufi meditation that we can make use of those middle-of-the-night waking periods to accomplish many things. Once I bought an Oreck Vacuum Cleaner after watching an infomercial at 2 AM. Mostly likely, I will be aware that I am dreaming at the end of the first 90-minute cycle around 12:30 AM, and again after 5 AM.

Bedside Journals

Most important for remembering dreams, I keep a journal on my bedside table. Most of my journals are general purpose. For several years I set aside a plush orange-colored journal specifically for dreams. The touch and feel of the soft cover makes it easy to find in the dark. I can always find a pen on my dresser. Dreams recorded in my general purpose volumes can be detailed, but often are fragmentary. No matter what kind of journal I use, if I have recurring dream themes or dream images, I make note of them at the end of the dream record.

What's Blossoming?

2011-04-05T21:16:00.000-05:00

Remember my posts based on Reverb10 prompts? I still get a prompt from Reverb each month. "What's blossoming?" is today's prompt.

Today we toured Thomas Jefferson's Monticello at Charlottesville, VA. Last week we walked the Capitol Mall twice at the beginning of Cherry Blossom Festival. We toured Historic Jamestown and Williamsburg this past weekend. In that brief span of time, the temperature jumped from the 40's to the 80's, and trees leafed out in a hurry. Suddenly we were washing tree pollen off the windows of our van.

Here are a few samples of photos. If you happen to make it to the Cherry Blossom Festival sometime, the best views are from the Franklin D Roosevelt Memorial, looking across the Tidal Basin toward the Jefferson Memorial and the Washington Monument. You don't want to miss the FDR memorial anyway.

Jefferson Memorial

FDR Memorial

Monticello

Historic Jamestown

Extreme Writing Makeover - The Artist's Way

2011-01-28T14:48:00.002-06:00

How many first-thing-in-the-morning assignments can you squeeze into your day? Can you get out of bed half an hour earlier for each new self-help program that wants a commitment?

Oversubscribing to everything continues in my learning mode. We're not even half way through the 52-week online writing course, "Extreme Writing Makeover".

Last week I started back-to-back ten week art classes, Wednesday and Thursday evenings at the Grand Marais Art Colony. The first time I took a Life Drawing class was a year ago this month. Until now, January through March was all the time I had for creativity courses. Life Drawing has no instructor, but Neil Sherman, a very busy artist, monitors the evening, and he draws.

A course based on the book, The Artist's Way, subtitle: "A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity", is instructed - by Kelly Dupre. You also may find her at work at the North House Folk School in Grand Marais. Only four students registered. That fits the definition of a Sacred Circle, according to the author, Julia Cameron.

As the instructor and we students introduced ourselves for the first time, I agreed that our coming together was meant to be. Like synchronicity, unlikely circumstances bring people together, and in this case can be explained by common interests in creativity.

I read Julia Cameron's books more than fifteen years ago. I immediately followed The Artist's Way by reading The Vein of Gold. I studied both on my own. I also studied Drawing On The Light From Within, by Judith Cornell, about the same time.

I hadn't thought about The Artist's Way as a recovery program. I got with the program right away the first evening. "The Morning Pages" task wants that extra half hour first thing in the morning, three handwritten pages in a journal. I've been doing that for over twenty five years. Now I have some useful recovery tasks to write about. I have some unlearning to do.

I blurt. I write about those negative responses. Go to the top of this blog post to read one of my blurts. Did I write three pages every morning this week? Why not? I had good reasons why I didn't. I won't beat myself up for missing the mark. That's a recovery step. I always wrote something. The time required to write three pages ranged from 40 to 55 minutes.

Extreme Writing Makeover wants me to write better and faster. That first in the morning journal writing I do in 20 minutes. This week my Publication Coach, Daphne Gray-Grant, wants only five minutes.

I drift off in my own thoughts while writing. I'm in Dave's World. When that happens during a conversation, one my friends sometimes brings me back by saying, "Earth to Dave!" Returning to focus also is a recovery step. Intense focus happens for me during a life drawing exercise. I'm in the zone. That's healthy. At home, working with intensity the other night, the sound of my wife cutting a sheet of gift wrapping paper was like a shotgun going off. That's not healthy. I'm irritable.

Among my blurts, there were two things I was unwilling to share within my new Sacred Circle that first night. The level of trust we established was amazing, but we must trust each other much more deeply to get past the intimate darkness.

Reverb10 - Things for 2011

2010-12-30T14:51:00.000-06:00

I have another list of things. We're coming to a deadline tomorrow. Bring the review of 2010 to an end. Plan 2011.

Looking back on the daily reverb10 Prompts since December 10, I can't answer many of them with one-liner responses. Some commenters on Twitter thought there was too much repetition in the Prompts. Two of the Prompts wanted a list of Things - 11 Things I don't need to do again in 2011, and 5 minutes of memories from 2010 I don't want to lose.

Twenty years ago, a good friend and massage therapist was working me over on the table. She said, "There are too many shoulds in life." She also described what she is, a psychic surgeon. Be careful what you tell someone on a massage table. It can become embedded in your memory forever.

My list of Things as 2011 begins are not just shoulds, they are musts and must sees. It's like Death and Taxes time for me. I expect to live another 25 years. If not, I have a good spiritual philosophy to take care of an early departure.

I mentioned in answer to another Prompt, that I am among the first wave of Baby Boomers to turn 65 in 2011. I must do certain things beginning in February, three months before Medicare takes over my health care. If I don't follow up on the assumption that my 3M Retiree benefits automatically do certain things when I become eligible for Medicare in May, it will be very difficult to do over later. Here's one case where doing it right the first time matters.

There are things I always must do in January and February for tax preparation. I could do the whole thing myself, but a good, trustworthy accountant in St. Paul gets a bundle of paperwork from me every year. There hasn't been a time in the past twenty five years when significant changes in the tax laws, or life changes, didn't require an expert tax accountant.

Travel was the subject of another reverb10 Prompt. The negative Thing in 2010, nothing worked out as planned. It was our 40th wedding anniversary year. We took one very good road trip to Branson, MO., and Bull Shoals, AK in the Spring. We had planned a romantic get-away in July at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, an upgrade to the way we saw the island on our honeymoon. Death and near-death of family members canceled that trip. We already canceled a cruise to Norway for June 2011. We can't afford it.

Travel plans for 2011 are more flexible. The big ones are a Spring road trip to Williamsburg, VA, and Savannah, GA., and The Circle Tour of Lake Superior in the fall. Norway could come into play. A friend who lives there says she can do the cruise for 1/10th of the cost of the one we had booked, plus airfare.

Not everyone who reads my blogs is aware of the Baha'i Faith, unless you click on the links listed on the sidebars. Planning is a major part of Baha'i life. We all just got a 16-page Message from the Universal House of Justice. It prepares us for two Five-Year Plans that will influence spiritual and social development in every community, Baha'i or not, through 2021. I must read it, study it, and actively engage with a global community. Between now and the end of April, this is a major commitment. Must or what? It's as important to my spiritual reality as breathing, eating, and sleeping are physically.

Ultimately, all of the creative arts, writing, and community action I'm committed to doing in 2011 are in the context of the Baha'i Plan.

Reverb10 - Prompt December 25 - Photo Op

2010-12-28T11:25:00.000-06:00

The Prompt:
Photo - a present to yourself. Sift through all the photos of you from the past year. Choose one that best captures you; either who you are, or who you strive to be. Find the shot of you that is worth a thousand words.

This photo has been my Facebook Profile for months.

Paul M. Walsh, professional photographer, spent an entire day at Split Rock Lighthouse Historic Site.
Brendan Anderson from the Minneapolis area is Jack Sparrow, the Pirate.
On the left, Pete Dunda, my coworker, tour guide, historic site interpreter, had many more photo ops than I that day.
More often than not this Centennial season, I too was in a U.S. Lighthouse Service, 1920's era uniform.

More than 5,000 visitors attended the big birthday party on July 31, 2010, including several hundred descendants of the Keepers who served there from 1910 to 1969. A candle light procession of Keepers and families was followed by the lighting of the beacon at sunset.

Hundreds of amateur and professional photographers crowded the rocky beach a quarter mile away below the 130 foot cliff. More were in boats and yachts in Little Two Harbors. A grand display of fireworks behind the tower over Lake Superior, and all the blue digital camera displays made a magnificent scene.

Of course, the Centennial celebration included events from January through November. I was on the job from late April through October. More than 135,000 visitors attended. The final day of the regular season was October 24. It was the end of my tenth season. Again, I was in uniform, and I lit the beacon at sunset one last time.

Reverb10 - Prompt December 26 - Soul Food

2010-12-27T21:11:00.000-06:00

The Prompt: What did you eat this year that you will never forget? What went into your mouth & touched your soul?

Another photo I might have posted as a memorable moment was a local event at Round River Farm, near Finland, MN. My wife and I get half a share per week of locally grown veggies. Community Supported Agriculture.

Not only does locally grown lettuce, carrots, potatoes, kohlrabi, and squash taste fresher, the healthy feeling is noticeable. Knowing the friends involved feeds the soul.

The growing season in Northeast Minnesota runs from mid-June to early October. Along the North Shore of Lake Superior, master gardeners can do it, but I have failed miserably at gardening. My gardens have been located in sunny spots 200-300 feet away from the shore. Three miles away from the lake at elevations more than 900 feet above the lake, rich soil can be found. Round River Farm uses wind power, solar power, and reclaimed waste water. I volunteered to help with the planting (hoop houses) and soil preparation starting next April.

The hosts, David and Lis Abazs explain.

Chard

Community Support

Hoop houses

Reverb10 Prompt - December 27 - A Moment of Joy

2010-12-27T15:16:00.000-06:00

In September I posted on Facebook a photo album of the Amery Fall Festival. The birthplace of both my parents was on farms withing five miles of Amery, Wisconsin. Many of my cousins were present for the annual festival. I hadn't been there recently. After the festival, many more of us gathered at my cousin's farm near Balsam Lake, about ten miles north, for a reunion. The reunion may become an annual event. We're all getting old.

The moment was at the food fair after the parade. Thousands swarmed the stands; churches, small town community clubs offered their best. Besides the sight and the aromas, I saw a wide community that had revived. It wasn't that great ten years ago.

The Reverb10 assignment:

December 27 – Ordinary Joy
Our most profound joy is often experienced during ordinary moments. What was one of your most joyful ordinary moments this year?

Reverb10 - December 21st Prompt - Winter Solstice

2010-12-21T09:25:00.000-06:00

The heading for today's Reverb10 Prompt says "Future Self".
Here is the writing assignment:

"Imagine yourself five years from now. What advice would you give your current self for the year ahead? (Bonus: Write a note to yourself 10 years ago. What would you tell your younger self?) (Author: Jenny Blake)"

Why did I change the title for my blog post today? Winter Solstice is what Reverb10 is all about. I do this every year; reflect on the past, review long-term goals and personal values, and plan the short-term year ahead. My experience tells me that if a resolution is made on New Years Day, will it be broken immediately.

Life circumstances change rapidly. Rapid change could be the theme of my life. Even more in the next five years, I think.

I am among the first year Baby Boomers. We turn 65 in 2011.
It's Medicare time, but politicians may repeal the new Health Care Bill. Add uncertainty to what I expect in the next five years.

The quickest way to solve the Social Security and Medicare problem is to kill us all off. Take away our ticket in the door to every medical facility, not to mention the imposition of extreme increases in out of pocket co-payments for those of us who manage to get supplemental coverage.

Sixty years ago, men were physically worn out by age 65. Life expectancy was only 73 for a male, as I recall. Ten years ago, my wife and I made a financial plan, and we made an early retirement decision based on investments and projected income. We would never run out of money if we lived to be 90. We are among the lucky who did not have a mortgage. We own our home. There will be no foreclosure in our future.

Ten years ago, I had already lost a significant amount in the stock market when the tech bubble burst. I didn't learn my lesson. I lost twice since that time. Blame the politicians again, and corruption in business, hedge funds in particular. I didn't invest in hedge funds, but the market was manipulated in away that normal investment reasoning couldn't anticipate. My investment advice to myself, keep it simple. Buy low, sell high. Ignore the talking heads on CNBC.

A year from now Worldshift 2012 will have happened. Right about now at the Winter Solstice, according to some doomsdayers. I see Worldshift 2012 as a positive outlook. I think it's a plan that will take us to 2021. I'm an idealist. I plan to be healthy and happy five years from now.

Reverb10 - Prompts 19 and 20 - Avoidance and Healing

2010-12-20T18:48:00.000-06:00

Like burning the candle at both ends, I'll jump to the most recent Reverb10 Prompts, on avoidance and healing.

The details are too personal to post on a public blog. What I should have done is water under the bridge. I can't do it over, and I hope there isn't a next time. The consequences were painful. The prescribed healing suggested by my counselor was in fact avoidance.

What I have going for me in 2011 includes a loving companion, and strong friendships. Avoidance contributes positively. New social networks are developing in creative arts. Soft pastels and drawing are new to me. More art workshops, and opportunities to display new works already are on my agenda. Writing faster and better, the goal of Extreme Writing Makeover, a 52-week online writing course, has 37 more lessons.

One thing we can all avoid in 2011, already on many political agendas, is short-term thinking. Everything I mentioned in the previous paragraph is relatively short-term. Ongoing, life-long goals and commitments remain the long-term framework. I don't mind lofty ideals and the label of idealist as part of my Taurus Id.

Reverb10 - Catching up, One-liners

2010-12-19T15:16:00.000-06:00

One way I can catch up with Reverb10 Daily Prompts are some one-liners I worked up as potential titles for blog posts. Five days have passed since I posted on the December 1 prompt. Among other things, what I have been working on with Microsoft OneNotes to support Reverb10 deserves its own post. I created an electronic notebook just to capture the daily prompts, and my first impressions. I also used the new notebook to compile 76 highlights from a review of my 2010 handwritten journals.

Here are the results for Daily Prompts through December 2nd through the 10th.

December 10 – Wisdom

Active membership Grand Marais Art Colony

December 10 – Wisdom Wisdom. What was the wisest decision you made this year, and how did it play out?

December 9 – Party

Mavis Staples Old Town School of Music

December 9 – Party Prompt: Party. What social gathering rocked your socks off in 2010? Describe the people, music, food, drink, clothes, shenanigans.

December 8 – Beautifully Different

Being there

December 8 – Beautifully Different. Think about what makes you different and what you do that lights people up. Reflect on all the things that make you different – you’ll find they’re what make you beautiful.

December 7 – Community

Round River Farm

December 7 – Community. Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010? What community would you like to join, create or more deeply connect with in 2011?

December 6 – Make

I Make Art

December 6 – Make. What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it?

December 5 – Let Go

Deaths of Friends and a Nephew

December 5 – Let Go. What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why?

December 4 – Wonder

Impulse

December 4 – Wonder. How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year?

December 3 – Moment

Centennial July 31 Split Rock

December 3 – Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).

December 2 – Writing

Facebook games

December 2 – Writing. What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?

Reverb10 - Prompt for December 2 - Writing

2010-12-19T15:05:00.001-06:00

Writing. What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?

Much more could be said about how Facebook has changed the way I communicate with friends. At first glance, it all contributes to writing.

Zynga Games became an obsession. Mafia Wars was the first one I detached from, and it wasn't easy. How do you let go of fantasy wealth, billions of dollars a day accumulating whether you play or not? Then I noticed teams of high tech players had organized. Just by making a play and drawing attention to myself, I would be attacked hundreds of times in one second. Someone had discovered a secret unavailable to me.

I also noticed that in my relatively small Mafia Family of 76 players only three were active. I got out, and removed the application from my account. I had my wife look at it from her account a couple of months later. My character name was still in play, but I was anonymous.

I'm still active in FarmVille. The same obsessive detachment issues apply. I have active farming neighbors. Not as many social, ethical identity conflicts plague me as in Mafia Wars.

I just started playing a new game CityVille. The start of a game is a pleasurable challenge.

I have discipline and a priority method for dealing with communications of any kind, whether Facebook, email, or phone calls. This morning, I had been away from the pc for more than 48 hours. None of my highest priorities suffered.

Reverb10 - One Way to Summarize 2010

2010-12-15T11:24:00.000-06:00

Thanks go to my daughter for providing a link to Reverb10 in her blog a few days ago. I made the commitment this morning, but I spent a lot of time yesterday preparing for it. Refreshing my Twitter account was the final step this morning.

The header #Reverb10 says "Reflect on this year & manifest what's next". "See what comes next" has been an ongoing theme for me for at least ten years. I have retired at least three times during that period. "Laugh when you say 'retired'" is another theme. The process I follow is Plan, act, and reflect. Sometimes I need a reminder like Reverb10.

As I dug into Reverb10 yesterday, I noticed not very many participants, thousands already, have posted comments. Maybe that's because I hadn't committed myself. I'll go back and see what opened up.

The prompt for December 1st wants one word to summarize the year 2010. Someone said, "catchup". Cute, and that's what I have to do, catch up on fifteen days of prompts.

This morning the word I chose is "One". Too easy? No, it's profound. Yesterday I would have chosen the word "creativity". Today's December 15 prompt has author Patti Digh saying "Creative is a verb: If you're alive, you're creative." The assignment for today is tougher, I may take another fifteen days to imagine it.

Why "One"? On the first page of my January 2010 handwritten journal, I quoted a Baha'i Prayer. My highest level goal for the year was to focus on God. If you know anything about the Baha'i Faith, you should remember the word "unity". The highest level principle; God is One. Divine Unity. "Creative": The Primal Point; all creation proceeds from a single point.

As soon as I stated that goal, another theme for the year developed, estrangement in the community. Estrangement infected me personally, and every aspect of my community, local to global.

When I write my summaries of 2010, and there will be several, I will not dwell on the unpleasant things of life. How can I not mention earthquakes? I avoid partisanship like the plague, but I engage the political process. How can I not be infected by the process?

I saved the link to Reverb10 to the end. You may lose this page when you click it.

http://www.reverb10.com/the-prompts/

Read, Writing, and Research

2010-12-14T16:45:00.000-06:00

For weeks my Extreme Writing Makeover lessons have been about research. This week the assignment wants research on something I know nothing about.

An earlier assignment had me create an electronic booklist. The purpose, read widely, and keep track. I explored a simple PC application called Evernotes. I didn't like it, so I went back to something I knew, I created an Excel spreadheet. Another assignment encouraged us to take electronic notes while browsing the Internet, or simply to collect inspirations as we write. Last week, as I looked through my Windows Explorer Documents folder, I found OneNotes. A month ago I tried an Internet browser called Opera. It's Norwegian, so I liked it right away. In the narrow left side panel of the browser I found a Notes icon, similar to one of the features in OneNotes. Facebook has Notes.

Zero in on OneNotes. The first time in you find a Personal Notebook, a Work Notebook, and another devoted to Getting Started with OneNotes. Each Notebook has tabs across the top. Your Personal Notebook has tabs for private information nobody else should see, and others for recipes, books, movies, travel, and so on. Guess what? The notebook and each of the tabs is a Microsoft Template. Click a link to Microsoft online for more templates. I was overwhelmed by all the people who create templates. I did what I always do, I took the template and adapted it to things I want to track.

Research something I don't know about? I'm familiar with most of the features in OneNotes. Many are common to each Microsoft Office product. I simply haven't used them.

I did come to the same dead end both with Opera and OneNotes. If you want to synchronize notes files between two or more PC's you must send a link by email. Try it. You need to be your own IT administrator to finish. Both want to know the Pop address and the SMTD address from your Internet Service provider for sending and receiving email. Now try to find those addresses for gmail or Yahoo mail. Things have changed since the last time I had to know how to do this. My first try to set up gmail to work with OneNotes froze the PC, and I had to reboot. Having spent a whole evening with my family IT expert (I'm supposed to be that at home) trying to restore the settings in the Dlink Router that serves the Internet to all PC's in our house, setting Pop and SMTD addresses gets into a level of IT expertise I don't enjoy.

Simply put, Microsoft and Opera both work with the Cloud. You should not have to send a link via email. You should not have to know about advanced settings. You should store the files out there on the cloud.

Let's try the cloud here. I could have done the same with a link from OneNotes had I prepared the review there. Following is a book review I posted on Goodreads this afternoon. In a sidebar to my review, HTML code was provided. I insert it here.

Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1 by Mark Twain

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read only the free ebook sample from the Amazon Kindle Store.
I may purchase the printed hardcover edition.
More importantly, I registered online to http://marktwainproject.org.
As you will find on the home screen, they have the latest electronic edition of the entire first volume of the autobiography, complete with annotations, commentaries, and appendices. It's free.

The sample I read prepared me for the online features. Besides the text of the autobiography, you get highlighted links to every supporting document. Every Mark Twain electronic book prepared by the Project is available.

Read the Introduction. You will learn that Twain worked on autobiographical materials for nearly forty years. What appear to be many starts and stops, became a valuable resource, thousands of pages. Every work of fiction is autobiographical, as are the travelogues, such as Innocents Abroad. Each autobiographical topic has an original annotated version that was published in magazines or newspapers. Each book he published allowed for extension of the copyright by adding fresh material to newly released editions from expanded versions of the original autobiographies.

If you hold a bias against historical fiction as a reliable interpretive resource, put your bias aside. The background supporting material is here. For example, I have an Edison Amberola (cylinder record player), a 1908 model. Mark Twain wanted to use a much earlier version of an Edison recording device, but Edison told him to wait his turn to get one. Eventually, Twain used one for dictation, but gave up after a few days, having already recorded over four dozen cylinder. Each cylinder holds only about 3-5 minutes.

My real interest is in writing my own memoirs. Like Twain, I have all kinds of autobiographical material published already in five blogs. I have more than twenty years of handwritten journals. Should I emulate Twain or Benjamin Franklin for storytelling? Either might be a smart move and good practice. Twain hated Franklin's style. I wouldn't try to emulate Twain's Eastern Tennessee dialogue.

View all my reviews

What to do in January? Ski or Sun?

2010-12-06T12:30:00.000-06:00

Yesterday we drove MN Highway 1 to Ely. Fresh, deep powdery snow covers the ground just seven miles north of Finland, MN. From a railroad crossing called Murphy City to about 12 miles west of Isabella, the highway follows the continental Laurentian Divide, about 2200 feet above sea level. That's about 1600 feet above Lake Superior, where my wife and I live on the North Shore. We have less than an inch of snow on the ground at the shore. A mile east along Highway 61, more snow; it seems each small river emptying into the lake attracts its own lake effect accumulation.

Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center, six miles from our place, and 1000 feet higher elevation, offers one of closest places to go cross country skiing. Easy trails follow Sawmill Creek to the Baptism River. Nearly 1500 school children travel to Wolf Ridge every week, staying there for three or four days. The trails are groomed for them.

The City of Silver Bay, 12 miles west of our place, grooms trails that link to miles of trails in Tettegouche State Park. Skiing from the Penn Blvd access reminds me of the slopes of Mt. Bachelor near Bend, Oregon, minus the 13,000 foot volcano. The trails are lined with spruce and birch. You can ski a short loop for half an hour, a mid-range loop for an hour, or a difficult loop for two hours. To ski all the way to the Trail Center at Tettegouche, you want a vehicle parked at both ends. It will take you all day one way.

A Superior National Forest Lodge (you can't stay there) on Lake Gegoka, 8 miles west of Isabella on Highway 1, offers the best cross country skiing in the area, I think. The loops of various lengths are groomed. You can ski the loops for an hour or all day, ski across the lake or around it. Not exactly virgin timber, but close.

When we returned home from our day in Ely, we hit the Internet, and were ready to click the submit button to spend our Travelocity Hotel Gift Card for a few days in Sedona, Arizona in January. We were there in February 2007, but only for two nights and one day. We want to take a road trip this time in our new Honda Odyssey. Total cost, about two weeks to see everything we want to see on the way, and roughly $2000. You easily could spend twice that much in Sedona alone at one of the nicer resort hotel/spas. We also have a cruise of the Norwegian coast in mind for June, which would cost the equivalent of five trips to Sedona. We can't do both. Besides, the trip to Arizona would be a gathering with friends from the Chicago and Los Angeles areas.

My wife has been second guessing the Arizona trip. She likes January in Minnesota. We have an active social life here. I will register for a ten week series of sessions at the Grand Marais Art Colony, 45 miles further north on Highway 61. We ski once a week at least. Normally, the third week in January is the coldest and snowiest. Most years I have spent two hours a day that week plowing our 300 foot driveway with my John Deere lawn tractor. Last year it was warm and it rained.

The National Weather Service in Duluth just reported the second snowiest November on record, 29 inches. Only five inches fell here in Little Marais on the shore of Lake Superior, but less than a mile inland at elevations more than 600 feet above the lake, more than a foot of snow is on the ground. Cold and snowy is my forecast guess for this winter.

For more information on cross country skiing, see the internet links below. Andrew Slade publishes "There and Back Guides." He published Skiing the North Shore in 2007. His earlier guide published in 1997 shows how quickly the fees for a ski pass have risen. Individual season pass, $5 in 1997; husband/wife three-year pass $21. 2007 individual season pass $15, no discount for couples. Now, $55 for an individual three-year pass. You'll want read Andrew's blog, and the Minnesota DNR link for information about trails and fees.

Andrew's blog There and Back

The DNR link MN DNR Ski Pass and Trails info

Do You Still Play Zynga Games?

2010-11-25T13:22:00.000-06:00

A November 18, 2010 USA Today article about Zynga branching out on its own caught my attention. Do a Google Search on Zynga and USA Today, and there is more to read and wonder about. Yahoo and Zynga have had a new business relationship since May. Mafia Wars and Fishville are available on several Yahoo apps.

I learned one memorable thing as a result of my simple search on Google. Zynga's profile statement appears in any search result, "Connecting the world through games". That's a positive profile.

Social gaming is why I liked Zynga games. Then they became obsessive time wasters. I began to question my own ethical values. I became very good at Mafia Wars. Maybe I learned something from the Godfather movies. On the dark side, maybe my game skills are innate. Often I would get wiped out by 60 powerful abusers in less than a second, as soon as I made a move.

I played Zynga Mafia Wars on Facebook until two months ago. I still play Farmville, but have cut way back on the time spent.

Any recent headline article about Zynga mentions millions of players.
Look a little deeper before you invest in the proposed Zynga IPO on the stock market. I had 76 family members on Mafia Wars when I removed myself from the application on Facebook. I played the game for almost two years. Only three of my family members actively played the game when I dropped out. Others were listed as Unknown, but I could see who they were by their character names. My wife was in my Mafia Family. I recruited her just to accept any gifts I sent her. I was still listed as a member of her Mafia Family after I removed myself from action. Now she is listed as Unknown. Active participation by 5% of the millions quoted as players would be a guess on the high side, I think. Maybe a higher percentage of players are active on Farmville, but I don't have 76 neighbors actively farming.

I would like to see more published research on Zynga. How do we find the reviews and complaints by Zynga players who left because they felt abused by other players? How many players experienced identity theft on Facebook after using a credit card to buy Facebook Credits, or Farmville Cash, or Mafia Wars Reward Points? How many pay cash directly to Facebook for anything? How many simply left the games due to slow response time on the Zynga network servers?

Last night we watched the movie "Letters To Juliet". One of the leading actors, Amanda Seyfried, played Sofie, a Fact Checker for the New Yorker Magazine. Who are the fact checkers for USA Today, or Gallup News? How can I become a fact checker for my blog posts? Research before I publish makes sense.

Now That Midterm Elections Are Over

2010-11-16T21:13:00.000-06:00

I took the title of this blog post from a headline news article in Gallup Daily News. "Now that midterm elections are over...".

I made three interesting discoveries of news sources this past weekend. How did I find the Gallup website? My first new discovery was The Daily Beast; a hotspot on one of their headlines took me to Gallup. Another discovery was the Huffington Post.

http://www.gallup.com/Home.aspx

http://www.thedailybeast.com/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

I don't see the word "poll" in the website identity statement "About Gallup",

"Gallup Daily News reports empirical evidence to leaders and decision makers worldwide about how the world's 6 billion citizens think and behave."

As if I didn't have enough headlines and commercial news blogs to capture my attention via Google Reader, but there I oversubscribe to everything, deliberately.

The Daily Beast and Huffington Post have attention grabbing, sensational, and controversial twists on the news. If I believed the headlines, I might have changed my vote in the general election. Now that the general election is over, I fearlessly read between the lines. I think I'm knowledgable about most current events, based on print subscriptions I receive in the mailbox at the end of my driveway; USA Today and The Economist. I have an opinion.

TMI - too much information. How many times have you heard that phrase recently?

The description "sea change" has become cliche. My observation looking at the inland sea in front of me - wave patterns on the water change hours ahead of a major storm on the lake. My 10th grade World History teacher taught me to read between the lines. In my opinion, the midterm elections may have been the sea change.  Telltale signs suggest the storm has just started.

Remember what a telltale is? In Moby Dick, a current read for me, the telltale is a lamp above Captain Ahab's table. Ahab doesn't have to leave his quarters to know a sea change has happened. Dictionary.com and Answers.com give a nautical meaning as a piece of thread or ribbon revealing the wind direction relative to the motion of the boat.

Another change making headlines on The Daily Beast and elsewhere is the new messaging features offered by Facebook. Apparently, I'm one of 400 million people who are waiting for authorization to try it. Will Facebook replace email? I don't think so. Will the demographic of everyone over age 30 be cast aside, ignored by Facebook? Will I be sorry I didn't spend $9000 more for my new Honda Oddysey to get every imaginable electronic gadget to deal with social networking?

The Off Season

2010-10-25T14:19:00.000-05:00

The season ended yesterday, October 24, 2010, at Split Rock Lighthouse Historic Site. For my swan song, I played the role of Keeper in uniform. I lit the beacon at 5:55 PM CDT, six minutes before sunset. In real life, the Keeper would have had the light on half an hour earlier. The light at Split Rock was abandoned forty-one years ago, and has not been used since as a navagation aide to shipping.

Two more special events are scheduled. The light will be on November 5, from about 5:30 PM to 9 PM. One of the Minnesota state climatologists will present an evening program on November storms on Lake Superior. The first presentation at 6:30 PM is a sellout. Tickets are available for the 7:45 program.

On November 10, the light is lit for the Edmund Fitzgerald memorial program.

Not quite the same, but a major storm is taking shape now. The configuration on the forecast models reminds me of the storm that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald, November 10, 1975, and the historic Mataafa Blow, November 26-28, 1905.

Conflicting forecasts appear in today's models, and in the official text of the posted storm warnings. In 1905, the official forecasts were issued by the Weather Bureau in Chicago, 600 miles away. The Weather Bureau in Duluth had professional staff, and relatively modern communications, but 29 ships were wrecked or damaged on Lake Superior on November 28. The storm started out as a warm one, but was followed by a blizzard that came across from North Dakota. Winds in Duluth were recorded at 60 mph, and the temperature fell to -13F in a few hours.

Like today's forecasts, the November 9-10, 1975 storm showed a track across western Lake Superior. The Edmund Fitzgerald took a more northerly route than normal, hoping to take shelter at Thunder Bay, Ontario if necessary. The storm hit on the east end of the lake, well past that point. A tugboat nearby the Fitzgerald recorded west winds near 100 mph. Troughs between the steep waves were estimated at forty feet deep.

Tomorrow, the storm forecast begins with east winds gusting as high as 50 mph, and then shifting to the southwest. Wave heights forecast tomorrow are no more than 12 feet, but big enough to sink a typical 1905 vessel, much smaller than the Fitzgerald. If the storm winds maintain an easterly direction for more than four hours, the waves will be bigger. There would be 300 miles of open water (fetch) to pile up the surf against the Duluth waterfront. If a strong southwest wind builds on Wednesday, I might expect shoreline damage in our Little Marais neighborhood on the North Shore.

To add to my concern, the forecast for North Dakota tomorrow calls for heavy snow and blowing snow. Why would that not reach Lake Superior? The surface temperature of the lake is in the upper 40's, which would lessen the potential for snow along the shore. If the wind direction is west, Upper Michigan would get the heavy snow.

The Off Season began with many of the North Shore businesses in Minnesota shutting down for the season this past week. Among other things for me, it means I can work on creative things, like writing lessons mentioned elsewhere in this blog. Here are a couple of new links to other blogs I've collected in that context in recent days.

Word Lady http://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/

Unclutterer http://unclutterer.com/

One thing about my blogs, I preview before I published, but there are too many typos. I may not notice the dropped letters or the missed words until weeks later.

Fall Colors Past Peak 2010

2010-10-10T11:26:00.000-05:00

Power Writing and My Reading List

2010-10-05T16:59:00.001-05:00

My serious efforts to improve my writing began with an online subscription to Daphne Gray-Grant's Power Writing newsletter. I receive my weekly assignments for Extreme Writing Makeover from her on Fridays. This week's newsletter came today. She has the two in sync sometimes.

Today's newsletter covers improved reading habits. As with the writing assignment for the week, she has suggestions about what to read, when to emulate (copying practice), and how to keep track of what you have read.

Below are two of the seven tips she provided today. I find it difficult to detach myself from my spiral-bound notebooks. I have plastic storage binsful saved since the 1980's. It would be a long winter's task to create a personal computer log, go back and enter the book lists, and the book reviews I've written. What I enter on my desktop pc has to be available on my notebook pc. The list of books I have read on my Kindle already exists in two places, my spiral-bound notebook, and online in my Amazon.com archives.

Recently I discovered the benefit of Google Documents. I knew about cloud computing features. I can keep my pc logs in sync by using the Google cloud for file storage. Even as I write this blog post, I find it more difficult than writing my thoughts in my journal. Other lessons and practices cover this subject, how to write faster and better.

"5) Keep a record of what you have read. I have kept a book journal for the last 20 years. I don't always remember to record every single book but I try really hard. My journal used to be a spiral-bound notebook; I switched to a computer-based record about five years ago. I record the name of the book, its author, the publishing year, the first sentence of the book (sometimes a bit more) and one or two of my own thoughts. It takes me less than five minutes and I cannot tell you how many times this record has proven to be inordinately useful.

"6) Have a good system for tracking the names of books you want to read. I like to have my 'future reading' list with me at all times, ..."

My future reading list may be found in some of my handwritten journal. Often I have only a mental note of what I've read on the USA Today Best Sellers list. I try not to miss the Thursday edition. Occasional browsing of the top 100 free items listed on the Kindle Store has been a better source, not only to review, but to quickly download what I want.

As for what I want to save on my bookshelves, I am a collector, but not obsessive. Not only do I like the look and feel, but I want the real thing at hand for some of my favorites. Sometimes I'm surprised that I did not collect all the titles in a series. There are plenty of opportunities to get rid of books I no longer want.

Extreme Writing Makeover Lesson 4 - Voice Analysis

2010-10-01T17:44:00.002-05:00

My Publication Coach, Daphne Gray-Grant, provides a link to a website that tests document readability.
http://www.online-utility.org/english/readability_test_and_improve.jsp

I typed in the text from a couple of paragraphs from the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. I realize that the language of the 18th Century is not familiar, but easy enough to understand. It's a smaller sample than the 500 words suggested.

Franklin writes longer sentences than the three authors quoted in the lesson. His sentence structure, word length and number of syllables is similar. My coach suggests 8th grade understanding. Franklin's text requires junior year in college.

Here are the results. I think the level of understanding required to comprehend the results is higher than mine without further exploration of the website. I think it's a useful tool.

Number of characters (without spaces) :	805.00
Number of words :	191.00
Number of sentences :	6.00
Average number of characters per word :	4.21
Average number of syllables per word :	1.40
Average number of words per sentence:	31.83

Indication of the number of years of formal education that a person requires in order to easily understand the text on the first reading
Gunning Fog index :	15.67

Approximate representation of the U.S. grade level needed to comprehend the text :
Coleman Liau index :	8.08
Flesh Kincaid Grade level :	13.32
ARI (Automated Readability Index) :	14.34
SMOG :	13.00

Flesch Reading Ease :

56.26

List of sentences which we suggest you should consider to rewrite to improve readability of the text :

All our cash was now expended in the variety of particulars we had been obliged to procure, and this countryman's five shillings, being our first fruits, and coming so seasonably, gave me more pleasure than any crown I have since earned; and the gratitude I felt toward House has made me often more ready than perhaps I should otherwise have been to assist young beginners.

I tried another selection from Ovid's Metamorphosis, an ancient poetic prose style I said I wanted to emulate. The results were similar to the test of Franklin's style.

Are we dumbing down? The three sample provided by the lesson require further homework. Each has a particular audience in mind. Readers of Ovid and Franklin may expect higher level writing than from our mass media publishers.

Extreme Writing Makeover Lesson 3 - Reading

2010-09-30T22:08:00.001-05:00

Daphne Gray-Grant's week 3 lesson emphasizes reading widely, copying and practicing writing styles I want to emulate. Here is the homework I will focus on.

HOMEWORK:
Part 1:
Identify the type of writing you want to improve. Blogs. Memoirs. Fiction.
Identifying some excellent examples of this kind of writing. Find a place on your computer or in a file or bookshelf where you can store it.

Part 2:
Set some reading goals for yourself – it’s a good idea to commit to read x number of pages per day (you set the “x”). Then create a file on your hard drive and keep a diary about what you’ve read. All truly effective goals are measurable and recordable. And, yes, reading is important enough that it should be measured.

My interest in memoirs has revived in the past two weeks, since the Carlson Family reunion. This week I added several titles to my reading list on the Kindle. One of the free ebooks is The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, in which the Introductory Note says that this is one of the best memoirs ever written. I'm reading it now. I agree it's good, and interesting. That's reason enough to emulate. Make my story interesting to someone reading 300 years from now.

Concurrent to this writing course, my daughter is taking a course in writing fiction. I read mostly fiction. From a brief conversation with her, I conclude that I read commercial fiction. I keep a log of what I read at the back of my handwritten journal. I write book reviews for myself in the journal. I will add fiction to my list of goals for improved writing. Now the challenge is to be more discriminating between commercial fiction and good writing. I would choose Stieg Larsson for good writing, and Jayne Ann Krenzt as an example of commercial fiction that I might emulate.

The Kindle has allowed me to add other genres to my reading list quickly. I often choose fiction before I finish a title from another genre. One of the goals I may never achieve is to actually finish reading a book every week. Some of the titles are books that stand alone within a compilation. I don't always give myself credit by listing those standalone titles. I may read one or two hours a day. One feature I like on the Kindle is I can always go back to where I left off, sometimes a week or more later.

To be specific, The Works of Ovid, Aesop's Fables, Grimm's Fairy Stories, The Jungle Book, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland all are on my Kindle, and worthy of emulating.

Writing Practice Not Happening by Keyboard

2010-09-20T14:01:00.000-05:00

Last week I said I would make daily journal entries on this blog instead of in my handwritten journal. It doesn't work.

The lesson following the goal setting lesson emphasizes the need to plan before you write. Rather than the old 80-20 rule, my Publication Coach wants 40-20-40. Forty percent planning (and research), twenty percent first draft at the keyboard, forty percent final edit.

I did two different writing plans. One I typed into a draft blog post, for my eyes only. I had the mind map in mind, but I typed the theme and the threads I wanted to cover. I will post the final this Wednesday, the end of summer. I have a deadline. The subject is a climate summary for my region since April 1. My research includes my own data collected from my weather station, and my daily reports to the State Climatology Office. I collected monthly summaries online for official reporting stations in my region. All that in 30 minutes, because I am an expert at this kind of analysis. The report has the content mostly done. The draft blog post can be typed quickly. Will I need 30 minutes to edit the final? Probably.

The second plan tied two events together from last Saturday, the annual Amery, WI Fall Festival, and our Carlson Family reunion, which was deliberately planned for the same date. I made a handwritten mind map in my journal. One 8 1/2 X 11 page has enough substance to cover several chapters of my memoirs, which have gone untouched for years. My immediate project is a blog post tying the two events together, in about 500 words, with photos. The mind map took 30 minutes. More planning is required.

I should add a fourth step to the plan, type, and edit. I need to reflect on the overall goal, the objectives, and the progress of this course. Keep track of the lessons, and the readings. Take notes. Make adjustments.

Lighthouse Jack

2010-09-16T20:58:00.000-05:00

In yesterday's blog post I mentioned Jack Graham, the storyteller, lighthouse historian who has been volunteering at Split Rock this month. He has his own website. Here's a link to his lighthouse page.
http://www.pajack.com/lighthouse.html

Try the various highlighted links he provides. Check out some of the other pages indicated on the left sidebar. Sign his Guestbook.

Why I am a Keeper

2010-09-15T22:26:00.000-05:00

This season at Split Rock Lighthouse Historic Site must be historic. The number of visitors who paid to see the lighthouse averaged about 1200 per day for two months, July and August. The attendance for the three day Labor Day Weekend was over 4,000.

What a shock when the the attendance dropped to 232 the day after Labor Day. Even during this brief lull before crowds arrive to see fall colors, attendance has been running about 100 more per day than a year ago.

A week ago two visitors spent a few extra moments in conversation with me. One man was the Navy pilot who found the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald in November 1975. He said he had flown a P3 from Great Lakes Naval Base near Chicago to Sault Ste Marie, Michigan, but could not land at that airport, so he went to Sawyer Air Force Base at Marquette and began the search from there. With sophisticated submarine hunting technology on board, he found the wreck right away.

As we talked further, we discovered that he had been on a short term deployment to Lajes Field in the Azores in 1972 at the same time that I was there as an Air Force Weather Officer. He may have been the pilot on the P3 I flew in as part of a cloud seeding team, trying to end a serious drought on the islands. Small world.

Moments later a retired Coast Guard Lighthouse Keeper engaged me in conversation. He had been stationed at the Devil's Island lighthouse in the Apostle Islands, 32 miles southeast of Split Rock, in 1968 and 69. He has maintained friendship with the Keeper who closed Split Rock Light Station when it was decommissioned January 1, 1969.

Most of this month, Jack Graham and his wife Tobi (Sue) have been volunteering at Split Rock. I get paid for what I do. Jack and Tobi are storytellers, but Jack also is the most knowledgeable lighthouse historian I've met.

The 100th birthday of Split Rock Light Station on July 31, 2010 undoubtedly was the highlight of the whole season, when a couple of hundred descendants of the various keepers were there, many of them visiting for more than 12 hours.

I have about five weeks remaining in this my 10th season as a tour guide/interpreter at Split Rock. This season is a keeper.

Practice, Practice, Practice

2010-09-14T21:37:00.001-05:00

Extreme Writing Makeover

Lesson #1
Set a goal.
I will write a daily blog entry here.

I signed up for a 52-week course offered by my Writing Coach, Daphne Gray-Grant. I paid for the Premium version, and downloaded several of her works in pdf format, plus an mp3 presentation.

Here's a link to her products.
http://publicationcoach.com/mystorehubpage.php
Am I excited about it? Yes. As often happens, I am obsessive about something I really want to do. I read "72 Ways to Beat Writer's Block" in one sitting.

Two objectives underlie my goal to write here daily. I already write daily. I have a hand-written journal, with spiral notebook journals going back at least 25 years. I answer emails first thing in the morning. I treat Facebook as I would email, because so many real friends communicate that way. I learned to write short status messages on Twitter, and do the same on Facebook. I learned to write profile statements on LinkedIn.

My first objective here is to enter my daily practice using the keyboard. The hand-written journal will be what it always has been, but a later priority in the day. The daily keyboard practice can be as simple as a file of topics for the hand-written journal, such as dreamwork, astrological analysis, movie and book reviews.

My second objective is to do the daily practice as a blog entry. I have five blogs on line. The most recent entry prior to today is over a month old. In fact, this objective is the same as my overall goal.

Pulling the Plug on Ning Social Network

2010-07-14T21:54:00.000-05:00

Please note the new blog, Baha'is and Friends Of Lake MN.
http://bahaimn3640.blogspot.com/

The Ning social network I had created for the same purpose in October 2009 will be deleted. Many of you who participate in Ning social networks know there will be a minimum charge of $2 per month to manage and maintain a network. We can't justify the expense.

As our new blog says in the header, friends, neighbors, and visitors to the North Shore of Lake Superior are welcome to contribute content and comments.

My first posts to the new blog are strong statements about the Baha'i Faith, including my own testimony of How I Became a Baha'i.

If you are not a Baha'i, I encourage you to post your own understanding of spiritual reality. How do you apply spiritual principles to community development?

Where is all the Spam on Blogger coming from?

2010-02-20T10:14:00.002-06:00

Is it my fault for not disabling the new gmail related Buzz application? I've hardly touched Buzz, but since I enabled it, I'm getting daily spam as comments to my blog posts. Some of the blog posts to which the spam is directed have been long gone. How does anyone see these old posts once I delete them?

How do I know the comments are spam? It's the same endless stream I get on my Localnet Webmail account. The Localnet is my oldest dial-up email account, seldom used, but I keep it for a select bunch of subscriptions I want to see. Localnet had a good spam filter. 25 spam a week is not a big deal, but Localnet was cleaner until recent weeks.

The bigger problem with spam in Blogger comments, there is no clue as to who the sender is. At least in Yahoo Mail and gmail, you can see a bogus address, or a poorly worded subject line.

Kindle User Update

2010-02-15T11:33:00.003-06:00

How long before I lose interest in the new electronic gadget?

Once a day I turn on the Kindle wireless service to see what's new.
Kindle Nation Daily provides an alert for free books. Also provided are free previews of books to buy. Unlike the general offerings of the Kindle Store, the alerts do not provide the lengthy sample of each book to allow for a decision to buy. The service could be cleaner, and some of the "alerts" go back two years.

I have read most of the samples I downloaded earlier. I have enough to read already, so I'm not going on a buying spree.

My current read on the Kindle is "Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love)" by Ovid, which is a compilation of three books written around 2 BC, and translated by John Dryden. I'm into the third book. "The Works of Ovid" include 23 titles. Dryden is a pleasure to read. The poetic beauty of Ovid is a pleasure.

I'll go on to read the electronic book, "The Age of Turbulence", by Alan Greenspan. I'm also reading the new hardcover book, "The Swan Thieves", by Elizabeth Kostova.

I may have more to say about Ovid in another blog post. A 21st Century feminist would not appreciate Ovid's instructions to men. 17th Century writers such as Bunyan and Dryden were far from learning the fundamental Baha'i principle I follow - the equality of women and men. Many men and women are still following 1st Century traditions that differ little from what Ovid said. Ovid is right on as I understand my own base instincts.

Kindle Is a Gift

2010-02-11T12:12:00.007-06:00

I received a Kindle 2 as a gift from my daughter and her husband. I'm impressed with it, and not ready to declare the death of bookstores and libraries.

The first purchase I made was Alan Greenspan's "The Age of Turbulence". It's a good example of a book I'll read once. I can save a tree and my own shelf space by reading the book electronically. I made the book purchase decision the same way I browse our public library or Barnes & Noble. The Amazon.com Kindle Store allowed me to download a free sample of the text. I liked the book, and bought it.

Greenspan's book is a memoir. The sample provided is the "Introduction". He starts the book with a well-written story, his experience of September 11, 2001, when his flight to Washington, D.C., was ordered to return to Zurich. I am just as interested in his experience of economics during my lifetime, and his introduction suggests it will not be a dry story.

The Kindle Store has free books, others cost as little as 99 cents. Most current titles and those on the best seller lists are $9.95.

I downloaded a free selection called, "The Game of Logic", by Lewis Carrol. I recalled that Carrol had published a 19th Century periodical for young people that included games of logic. I haven't spent much time with it, but what I read can be useful for proofreading your own blogs. Ask yourself if your text says what you mean.

While in Chicago I had browsed the shelves of a used bookseller, and saw a dog-eared copy of a book of Ovid's poetry. The Kindle Store had several variations that I had not seen elsewhere. For $2.39, the book I bought included translations by Christopher Marlowe, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Chaucer. Those more familiar with ancient works might have expected it, but for me it was an unexpected find.

Not everything I found in the Kindle Store was what I wanted. I ordered a free trial subscription to Investor's Business Daily. I was familiar with the print edition and the online edition, and had paid hundreds of dollars for an annual subscription. I dropped my subscription a few years ago to try other publications. The Kindle edition is $5.99 a month. Unfortunately, the content was not what I expected, not the same sets of daily charts and graphs I wanted. Canceling my free trial the same day was no problem.

Most useful, we can use the Kindle and our PC's in tandem to work with the Kindle Store and manage the Kindle itself.

Kindle is more expensive than gifts we usually exchange. I was reluctant to buy Kindle myself, because I wasn't convinced that I would pay to read electronic books with such a device. Much of what I read in USA Today, and heard on CNBC was negative about the profitability to Amazon.com. Negative news about Amazon came again as Apple released the iPad a couple of weeks ago.

I gave the Kindle a day-long test from our hotel room at the Palmer House in the Chicago Loop. Charging the battery took three hours. The brief printed instructions that came with the Kindle said I could register the product online, and I could browse and make purchases from the Kindle Store on Amazon.com while the battery was charging.

First I explored the electronic User Guide. I already had an account on Amazon.com, so registration of the product was easy. More than twenty five years ago I bought my first IBM PC, and quickly learned the importance of "Read the manual!" One of my 3M coworkers chastised me for failure to learn MS-DOS before using the PC. How many PC users remember the disaster that was the DBase II User Guide, probably the poorest ever written? The Kindle electronic User Guide is easy.

My understanding was that AT&T wireless service was required to use the Kindle online. The signal in our 18th floor hotel room was at maximum strength, five bars, and not a hint that it was AT&T providing the service. Amazon manages the service.

Here at home in Little Marais, on the North Shore of Lake Superior, AT&T has minimal, sporadic service, but there is a cell phone tower with AT&T on it a mile to the west. I get only three bars signal strength, but that's good enough. I don't have a service contract with AT&T, and we don't need it to use Kindle. Our Internet service provider is Verizon National Access Broadband.

I have much more to learn about the Kindle 2. Occasionally, I download PDF files to the PC. Kindle provides a USB cable to transfer such files from the PC to the Kindle. It's the same cable that charges the battery, and the power plug pulls apart from the USB connector. I didn't know such a cable existed.

What Happened to the Golden Compass Sequel?

2010-01-27T17:37:00.006-06:00

Why haven't I seen or heard any news of a sequel to the movie, "The Golden Compass"?

The Golden Compass was released in late 2007. My wife and I watched it for the first time last week, January 22, 2010. The final scenes strongly suggest a sequel is forthcoming, wherein Lord Asriel would break through the barrier between parallel universes. The corrupt Magisterium would prevent him from doing so.

My favorite character was Lyra Belaqua, played by Dakota Blue Richards, who will soon be too old to play the same role in a sequel? She's such a strong, young actress, I hope to see her in more movies. A sequel to "Avatar" would be perfect.

"The Golden Compass" is a good movie to watch immediately after viewing "Avatar". After that, go back and watch "The Lord of the Rings" movies. The underlying theme of good vs evil obviously is similar, as are the mystical symbols, mythical characters, and magical devices.

"Avatar" was the most expensive movie ever made? Critics in USA Today panned the movie before it was released, and said it would never make a profit. After three weeks in the top 10, a friend in Israel said the theaters in Haifa were still sold out, even at the late night showings.

Critics said "Avatar" had no story. I think the story is fantastic. Esoteric spiritual themes are heresy to many conservative Christians, and just as unbelievable to atheists. (Read "the Historian" by Elizabeth Kostova to explore that subject). The final battle to destroy the Tree of Spirits, symbolic of the Kabala, and symbolic of the eternal Living Word of God through which all physical and spiritual creation comes into existence, somehow got a sexual interpretation from Robert Colbert.

"Avatar's" personification of evil is the military industrial complex, with no recognition of God, and no need for support by a religious authority. Some critics said "The Golden Compass" is an atheistic presentation, where oppressive domination by church and state ultimately are defeated by a common, innate understanding of moral good.

I disagree. I think every age faces a catastrophic end. Leaders and institutions corrupted by self-interest destroy themselves. Outmoded laws and traditions are abrogated. A fresh impulse of Divine Will sends forth a Chosen One and heroes. Root principles of Faith are renewed and exalted. A new world comes into being. I think "Avatar" and "The Golden Compass" are exciting presentations of current events.

National Security Weakness Exposed in Duluth

2010-01-27T13:33:00.007-06:00

A steam pipe broke on the east end of Duluth yesterday morning, January 26, cutting communication services to Northeast Minnesota, said KQDS Fox Channel 21 News at 9 PM. Communications of all kinds were cut for about 12 hours to all of Lake and Cook counties, and the eastern half of St. Louis County where Duluth is. No 911 emergency service, no cell phone service, and no internet service was available from 10:15 AM until 10:20 PM.

Surprisingly, our local 226 exchange from Silver Bay was in service, and we could watch DirecTV, which requires a land line phone connection. There was no public emergency activated by local TV stations in Duluth until 8:45 PM.

We could have called the fire station in Silver Bay, but how would we have known to do so in an emergency? Residents of the Finland area could not make a phone call to their fire station. What would Finland residents do if a personal emergency prevented them from going to the fire station?

What would anyone do in an emergency on Highway 61, where cell phone coverage is poor in the best of times? Yesterday, it was a 165 mile corridor from Duluth to the Canadian border with no emergency coverage. That's a national security and a homeland security threat.

Why is there no alternative communications channel or a bypass around a known central weakness in Duluth? Plenty of funds have been allocated to Homeland Security to patrol that corridor from Duluth to Thunder Bay, which leaves no doubt that this is a National Security issue.

As it was, emergency services performed well in Lake County. A friend who manages emergency response of all kinds in the county was driven by another friend from Silver Bay to the county offices in Two Harbors. Other friends who are EMT's went to their assigned posts at fire stations in Silver Bay and Finland. Still, until yesterday, who would have known to go to the fire station for help?

Another security weakness was exposed in the lack of local TV coverage of the emergency. I had concluded last year that it was a political and business decision by the Duluth Chamber of Commerce not to provide digital TV access beyond 40 miles of Duluth, and no service to most of Lake and Cook counties. The standard political, business line was, that if it didn't rent a hotel room or sell a meal in Duluth, then there would be no coverage beyond Duluth.

That was particularly evident in ABC local channel 10 WDIO TV in Duluth. Either the misinformation was deliberate, or no effort was made to report the nature of the emergency. While channel 21 had given a plausible explanation, and emergency information, the alert was not issued until 8:45 PM. Channel 10 said the communication problem was sporadic, and the problem was in Ely, not Duluth.

I made one more check of our Verizon National Access broadband internet service at 10:20 PM, after turning off the poor reporting by WDIO TV. Service had been restored, and the Verizon signal was the strongest I've seen. Whatever the fix was, I hope they keep that level of high speed internet service. I had been checking hourly throughout the day, because internet service is that important to our business.

Today's Date Binary to Decimal is 26

2010-01-10T11:41:00.002-06:00

I've lost my skill at converting binary numbers to hexadecimal.
Here's a link to a converter.
http://compnetworking.about.com/od/basicnetworkingconcepts/l/blconvertbases.htm

Blogger History - Julie and Julia

2009-12-26T12:33:00.003-06:00

I joined Blogger about a year ago. It seems like I've been posting entries forever.

Watching the movie "Julie and Julia" last night, I wonder what I was doing seven years ago, when so many already were into Blogger. I had not heard of salon.com, but it's out there, and full of the latest content.

The setting for the movie script could have been yesterday. The dialogue about who writes and reads blogs hasn't changed. The terrorists, the targets, the grieving, and the frightened are the same as in 2002. The oppressors are the same as the Joseph McCarthy death squads of the 50's.

Food! What a contrast in movies, between "Julie and Julia", and "Cloudy, with a Chance of Meatballs", which we watched the night before. That one could give you nightmares. And then, there was the restaurant scene from Monty Python's "the Meaning of Life", which I vowed never to watch again, but there it was in the "Monty Python Documentary II" we watched last Tuesday.

Was there anything to watch on TV this month? We've gone through more Netflix movies this month than we had in the previous six months. There was no lack of in-person social networking with various family and community Christmas celebrations.

Writing Coach

2009-11-18T20:35:00.003-06:00

I subscribe to a weekly newsletter by publication coach, Daphne Gray-Grant. This week she provides a link to Dr. Wicked. I can't find a way to pass on what she recommends without copying and pasting from the newsletter. I'm sure she would rather you subscribe to it. If you are too busy to keep up with your blogs, I recommend a subscription to both the Publication Coach and Dr. Wicked.

When I posted a link to Dr. Wicked on Facebook, my daughter, who is a writer, asked whether I was planning to write a novel. No, I write blogs. I want to write faster, and more often. One of the rules I try to follow is to compose first, quickly, without regard to grammar, punctuation, or spelling. Come back later and edit. That fits the scheme of the Dr. Wicked tool.

http://writeordie.drwicked.com/

http://www.publicationcoach.com/

Here's what she says about Dr. Wicked.
1) Dr. Wicked doesn't give your "internal editor" any time to engage. You're too busy typing to start sliding down the slippery slope of self-editing. As I've said many times before, write in haste and edit at leisure. Your best writing is often the fastest. And even if it isn't top-notch, you'll have a first draft to edit. That's better than a blank page, isn't it?

2) The implicit threat of Dr. Wicked (screen changing colour, obnoxious noises) keeps you plugging away at writing even when you'd rather be doing something else. I don't know about you, but I'm easily bored. I flit from idea to idea and task to task like a hummingbird zipping through a field of wildflowers. Finding the discipline to write for more than 15 minutes is always a challenge for me. But when I sit down with Dr. Wicked I know that my time is always running out.

3) Dr. Wicked forces you to focus on what you're doing -- writing. This ensures you ignore all the other more attractive distractions.

Spiritual Memoir Practice: Journeys Part 2

2009-10-14T10:58:00.004-05:00

To restate the Spiritual Memoir Practice from my Oct 13 post,

Recall a small journey. As I write the story, be aware of how the external journey mirrored my soul's journey.

This short journey had a preliminary stage that began in the Azores in 1972, where I began oil painting. In July 1992, I participated in the Visual Journals Workshop, led by Hazel Belvo at Grand Portage, MN. I had taken only a few formal art classes prior to that. The Visual Journals Workshop was a life-changing experience.

The small journey begins in Minneapolis. There was an art fair in the park across the street from the Minneapolis Institute of Art, along 3rd Av south of Downtown. The Grand Marais Art Colony had an exhibit, where I picked up literature about their programs.

My wife, Denise, encouraged me to sign up for the workshop, because she had just started her job as Head of Reference at the Minnesota Historical Society. She did not get a vacation that year, so I took a week off on my own.

We were still living in the Battle Creek Neighborhood of St. Paul, so it was more than a six hour drive to the Naniboujou Lodge, where I stayed, about half way between Grand Marais and Grand Portage. The Naniboujou Lodge has been a favorite place to bring visitors for lunch ever since.

The first morning of the workshop, I struggled to find the place. I went to the Grand Portage Casino Hotel, and was directed to the Trail Center several miles away up Old Highway 61. I drove to within a quarter mile of the Trail Center and made a wrong turn. I didn't find it, so I drove back to the hotel, where I learned that the first session was already in progress in a suite in the hotel. I had been misinformed at the hotel registration desk. I was breathless and stressed out, but Hazel welcomed me.

As it turned out, I was the only man among eight women, some of whom were celebrities in the art world. Hazel gave not a hint that the workshop was intended for women only.

Turning short and missing by a quarter mile seems to be a recurring pattern for me. I can't think of another example, but overcoming struggle, the high stress and anxiety is a problem. It's a barrier to that part of the mind that prays and meditates, does art, and is aware of the reality of God.

I teach the principle of spiritual consciousness to the 5th graders at William Kelley Elementary School in Silver Bay, in my annual five weekly sessions for the Masterpiece Arts Program. I don't spend a lot of time on spiritual principles, and whether it's allowable in a public school or not, I make it real and practical. The principle is to balance the mind, usually described as left brain analytical and right brain creative. I think it is more dynamic, a whole brain multifunction. I promote the principle as a means to success in all kinds of academic excellence. I think it is critical to spiritual awakening and development for elementary school children and older youth.

The Visual Journals Workshop provided rewards for four days. The method and practices started each morning at the Trail Center, a log frame building in the wilderness, heated by a wood stove, which we needed even in July. We took daily field trips to sketch scenes by direct observation. The following morning we would finish the sketch, color it, or do a related sketch in some other medium. Then, tell a story about it, often quite personal.

One day the field trip was to the Witch Tree, one of the most sacred spots on Earth. Hazel's ex-husband George Morrison was there with his own art group, offering tobacco to the tree. Our class sat at scattered spots on a gateway of granite blocks in front of the tree, or at the waters edge below.

I learned much later what high level celebrities were present that day. What an effort it had taken to acquire that spot, protect, and preserve it. It was an honor for any of us to be there.

The experience was akin to being among the giants of the Baha'i world. On several occasions, I felt a spiritual reality in which I was honored by being in the presence of such giants, yet equal to them. Why was I there? I did not feel worthy. It was the same ethereal, almost out-of-body experience in which the eternal spirit functions beyond the physical, but a moment of total consciousness.

Another field trip was to Partridge Falls on the Pigeon River. It too is a sacred place, and a historical place at the end of the eight mile grand portage, the trail the voyageurs walked from the fort and trading post on the Lake Superior shore.

Melvin Sherer was our guide. He was in training to become an Elder of the Grand Portage Ojibway Band. He is a leader now. I have not seen him since that four day workshop. He was with us every day.

That day we sketched at scattered spots above and below the falls. I noticed a severe thunderstorm approaching from upstream. It was moving rapidly, and I could tell from the cloud formation that there would be violent winds. I warned Hazel and Melvin. Thank goodness they believed I knew what I was talking about.

Some of the women were too old to rush up the river bank, and hurry along the trail back to the van. The trail was rugged with exposed roots. The tall pines swayed wildly overhead, cracking loudly as they knocked into each other. We got back to the van just as large hail began to fall. Melvin drove us as fast as possible, while avoiding deep potholes that would soon fill with flooding rain up to the wheel wells.

How many realms of spirit and nature can you experience in one place, with one heavenly group of people? I have no doubt that I was in a Native American world of Spirit and Nature of a legendary kind. I have no doubt about the Divine Oneness of that reality.

Spiritual Memoir Practice: Journeys Part I

2009-10-13T21:00:00.010-05:00

I posted to this blog on September 10, 2009 what I intended to be a weekly series on "Writing the Sacred Journey", by Elizabeth J. Andrew. I have handwritten many of her practice exercises to my personal journal, several times a week, often in the middle of the night. I can thank a Baha'i friend of Sufi background for the inspiration to write in the middle of the night. He might prefer prayer and meditation, but journal writing is like that for me.

I can also thank an eight year old girl who visited Split Rock Lighthouse this past weekend with her father, who proudly told me that she has been practicing cursive writing. I hope I encouraged her by praising her potential as an artist.

Art has been in the forefront of my community activities since October 5. Sandi Pillsbury Gredzens, who chairs the Grand Marais Art Colony board, led workshops in the School Forest in Silver Bay for students at William Kelley Elementary School. I assisted with the sixth grade. The weather turned cold and rainy the second day, so the final session was held in the Science Room. The subject was sketching landscapes, and within that, understanding how to view and use the horizon line.

I had taught the same students last winter in five weekly sessions as part of the Masterpiece Arts Program. They remembered the horizon line from an exercise in which they copied the Mona Lisa. (Remember what Dan Brown said about the Mona Lisa in "The DaVinci Code"?) I also reminded them about a local artist, the late George Morrison, who always sketched, or carved in his woodblock masterworks a horizon line a quarter of the way down from the top of the page or the block. It helps to remember such a useful rule, and then make up your own rules later.

What about the journey?
Here I am sixteen years after a short journey I made in 1992, the subject of last night's spiritual memoir exercise. The instructions: Recall a small journey. As I write the story, be aware of how the external journey mirrored my soul's journey.

That journey was in the realm of spiritual awakening, akin to my experiences of spiritual rebirth in 1957 and 1973. Born again and again. How many times are we allowed such a vision of our eternal spirit at work in physical consciousness? The object of my short journey was a four-day Visual Journals Workshop, led by Hazel Belvo at Grand Portage, MN.

Hazel is a key personality in the history of the Grand Marais Art Colony. She is Sandi Gredzens' current mentor. I count Sandi as my mentor, but it's not a formal relationship. If anything, the relationship will lead me into a serious commitment to the Grand Marais Art Colony. Setting my priorities to make that happen has been a problem for sixteen years.

Here is a link to the Grand Marais Art Colony website. Read about Hazel Belvo and George Morrison. Notice the list of board members, including Sandi and my Little Marais neighbor, Joyce Yamamoto.

http://www.grandmaraisartcolony.org/about.cfm

As with any creative effect, whether an experience of the living Word of God or a creative act of my own, there is mystical unity, an impulse that influences a vast community for years afterward.

Part II of this subject will be the exercise I wrote last night.

Writing the Sacred Journey

2009-09-10T20:39:00.002-05:00

"Writing the Sacred Journey: the Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir", by Elizabeth J. Andrew, was an anniversary gift from our daughter, Kari.

"Gate of the Heart: Understanding the Writings of the Bab", by Nader Saiedi, I bought at the 50th Green Lake Baha'i Conference the week before our anniversary.

Both are appropriate for the moment. I haven't posted much on Blogger about my religious beliefs. Dave's Travel Blog is in fact memoir writing. I've done more on the Baha'i Faith, and more memoir writing, in my WordPress blog. See the sidebar to this blog for links.

"Writing the Sacred Journey" brings me back to some of the basics of journal writing I learned more than twenty years ago. Write as if no one would ever read it. Don't think about the bias of the audience or critics. Don't worry about grammar; go back and edit later if you feel like it. One thing I haven't practiced is the self-discipline of daily writing. Blogs help in that regard, but now I have five blogs, and it can be months between updates. I'd rather write about the weather.

Those of you who do follow this blog will notice that I changed to a simpler template today. That's to get your attention, as well as to comfort your eyes. I noticed right away that this template does not offer an underscore to highlight the title of a book.

"Gate of the Heart" is tough reading. I'll buy anything Nader Saiedi writes on the Baha'i Faith. I hope to do several posts as I make my way through the book. "Logos and Civilization" is another of his works, on the mystical writings of Baha'u'llah.

The Writings of the Bab, and the Writings of Baha'u'llah, are the Word of God. Not only is that my statement of belief, but certainty comes from reading the Writings. In fact, that's all you've got to go on to prove the existence of God, or that the written Word is divine revelation. It is fundamentally important that you prepare to read the Writings by placing your trust in God, as you do with any prayer.

In brief, the "Bab" is a title that means "the Gate". He describes His Eternal Being with many such titles. Perhaps the most important concept to grasp from Saiedi's book is the title "Primal Point". Literally, the primal point is the first mark of a quill pen as it meets the paper. In the Primal Point all Creation begins with a mere indication of the Will of God. All of Creation, all created beings, and everything that we can know about God is in that Primal Point. Proceeding from the Primal Point is the Creative Word of God, the Logos. Read the first chapter of the Gospel According to John.

One of the most audacious things the Bab did was to stop midway between Mecca and Medina, and issue a Revelation that in that spot He is the Gate between the House of Divinity and the Shrine of the Prophet (or servitude). His mission on that pilgrimage was to announce to the secular and religious leaders of Islam that He is the Promised One.

Such statements have everything to do with the ongoing persecution of Baha'is in Iran. The Bab was shot by a firing squad for these challenges to fundamentalist leaders of Islam.

Split Rock Lighthouse Weblog update

2009-08-17T08:53:00.006-05:00

Lee Radzak writes about bikers in his latest update to the Split Rock Lighthouse weblog. I was on the job as a historic site interpreter/tour guide at Split Rock much of the time during this peak visitation season. Lee is my manager. Lee's view of bikers is positive, but different than mine. He encourages bikers to see the lighthouse. I follow the procedures for ensuring that visitors have a good experience.

Bikers coming to Split Rock are as numerous as German tourists. Split Rock is a "must see in America" in German travel literature. Bikers at Split Rock were the subject of a Travel Channel program a couple of years ago.

During the Hell's Angels rally week in the Carleton/Duluth area, Lee had the interpreter staff double up in the Lighthouse and the Head Keeper's Dwelling. It's not a bad idea on peak visitation days anyway. Problems arise in the lighthouse if more than 20 people try to get into the lens room on their own, without a tour guide to move them along. Claustrophobia from squeezing that many bodies into a space designed for three workers, and panic on the spiral staircase blocking movement up or down, happens sometimes.

Visitors who pay $8 admission just to be there, get upset when we block the door to the lighthouse when the tower is full. According to a summary posted from 1999, the lens room fills with people every seven minutes for eight hours during a peak season day, with or without a tour guide.

Visitors get to see more at Split Rock than at some historic lighthouses. Many of the sites I've visited limit the number of people to six or twelve in the lens room. Some lighthouses have the lens room blocked off, and one at a time, visitors peer up through a manhole through a plexiglass barrier. Some lens rooms have a modern acrylic aircraft beacon, rather than the original Fresnel equipment, which may be on display somewhere else. The original equipment has been in place at Split Rock for 99 years. Some lighthouses allow visitors to go on the deck outside the lantern room, only a few at a time. At Split Rock we don't, because the outer railing is only up to your knees, no safety barrier. I wouldn't do the keeper's daily cleanup on that deck without a safety belt attached to the window handholds.

Having an interpreter stationed in the lens room or in the Keeper's Dwelling for more than 1 1/2 hours at a time on a peak day is not good. If an interpreter is present, crowds in the lens room expect a presentation, even though they chose to tour on their own. One day I had regularly scheduled tour groups of 32 and 36 visitors in the lens room. Normally I don't experience claustrophobia in the tower, but with those two groups my heartbeat raced, and it took several minutes after they left to regain normal breathing.

The goal for a scheduled tour group, either in the Lighthouse or the Keeper's Dwelling, is to have the group in the door and out the door in seven minutes. There is not much time for an interpretive presentation after moving 25 or more people up and down the spiral staircase in the tower, or somehow positioning the group between the dining room and parlor in the keeper's house.

If you know the principles of operations research, you probably have ideas about how to move crowds through a building. I've seen examples at the Edison Ford Winter Estates in Fort Meyers, FL., and the Frank Lloyd Wright Home in Oak Park, IL, where time-stamped tickets queue the groups at intervals throughout the day. If we could do that every fifteen minutes at Split Rock, less than half the current number of visitors would get up the tower on a peak day.

Those time-stamped visits we've made occupied a good part of a day, and we had to find something else to do for hours before our assigned time. Visitors to the North Shore have many more things to see, and we encourage them to go beyond Split Rock, as far as Grand Portage if they have time; that's a two hour drive from Split Rock. Many visitors are not willing to come back later. You could spend a half day walking the trails in the adjacent Split Rock State Park, but not everyone is a hiker.

More bikers were present last week than during the Hell's Angels rally. As Lee mentions in the weblog, many were following the Circle Route, about 1700 miles around Lake Superior. I answered many questions about how long a drive it is from Split Rock to Bayfield, WI. (About 3 hours). South Shore residents may not be pleased that I recommended the Wisconsin Highway 13 route that hugs the shoreline east of Superior, rather than the faster, high volume traffic route, U.S. Highway 2 to Ashland, and then north on Highway 13.

Here's the link to the weblog.

http://discussions.mnhs.org/splitrock/2009/08/16/lighthouses-and-motorcycles/

Seeking Alpha - investment tools

2009-08-14T10:16:00.003-05:00

I have been trading stocks for about 15 years on Ameritrade. I have larger amounts invested in Scwhab under a 3M retirement program. I make my own decisions about when to trade and what strategies to follow. I'm not an expert. My wife and I suffered 40 percent loss in about two weeks at the end of September 2008, a common experience for many investors.

My wife will never again invest in stocks or stock-based funds. The alternatives are very slow growth.

I restarted investing in April 2009. I did not take the risk to get back in the market when the bottom was reached on March 9. My investments have grown about 15 percent since April. Very good, I think.

I have used Yahoo Finance for years to monitor my active portfolios and track a wide range of categories. This morning, one of the headlines by Seeking Alpha was about the fact that Yahoo attracts by far the most viewers of news content, far above network tv, or MSNBC, ABC online, or Google.

I followed the link to the Seeking Alpha website. It's one of the best designed, easiest to use investment resources I've seen. I registered this morning, and now have a profile as useful as any I have put out on my blogs. Here's the link.

http://seekingalpha.com/?source=headtabs

What other tools do I use? The Street.com, The Shark (ETF Weekly Newsletter), CNBC online, Morningstar.
Also useful are the tools within Schwab and Ameritrade. Fallen into disuse, Motley Fool, CBS Market Watch.

More Things- Nbr 46 Web Junction

2009-05-28T11:45:00.004-05:00

It's still true that I have finished the More Things program.
Thanks to Ann at Metronet, I have functional access to Web Junction. I will explore and post.

Below is a link to Digital Generation: Educators. a blog dedicated to education and the electronic classroom. Vicki Davis is featured in the video at the top of the page. She's Cool Cat Teacher on her own electronic classroom blog. I follow her on Twitter, and I follow her blog posts via Google Reader. She's at the top of my list of favorites discovered via the More Things program.

The first item under Sage Advice gives the essence of what I think Web Junction does.

"My students have taught me a lot about technology, but one of the most important is that over use of one-on-one educational software can be drowning, isolating, and frustrating for them. They challenged me to continually seek for the perfect formula that takes advantage of the power of multimedia software but at the same time stimulates hands-on and collaborative learning, and develops their group and social skills."

Collaborative learning is the direction I would emphasize by taking Web Junction, and the More things on a Stick learning program, to the wider community. Keep the Web Junction itself for the professional library community, as Digital Generation has done for educators.

Collaboration between like-minded interests - libraries, historical societies, museums, artists, environmental educators, loggers, miners, meteorologists, supply chain management specialists. You name it, and there is a resource in the community that wants to participate.

http://www.edutopia.org/digital-generation-educators

More Things- Nbr 44 Economy

2009-05-18T13:41:00.002-05:00

Say It Visually is a useful reminder to make your blog attractive, as well as easy to read.

I saved Frugal Dad, FuelEconomy.gov, and Gas Temperature Map for future reference.

Feed the Pig was entertaining, though not useful to me. I tried every tool. It's a good example to go with Say it Visually.

The .gov sites offer good online reference materials. How quickly things have change! To ignore/scoff at the compound interest lesson is short-sighted. A savings account or cd yields nothing at the moment, other than more security than your shoebox, but the principle is valid.

Banking 2.0 may be useful to some. I reviewed each of the sites in the Learn section. Our experience reinforces the need for self-discipline.

We do online banking with Wells Fargo. We do not pay bills electronically. We balance the check register off-line. We enter income, savings, daily cash, check, and credit card expenditures to a hand-written 14-column journal. My wife keeps her business journal on an Excel Spreadsheet.

I use Yahoo Finance portfolios and related research tools to consolidate information from several brokerage accounts and my 3M retirement 401k. TDAmeritrade, Schwab, Wells Fargo, and 3M all provide useful tools. At times I've paid for premium services from Morningstar, Zacks, Investors Business Daily, and the Street.com.

I tried Quicken a couple of times, as it came bundled with other pc software. We don't use it. I know several people involved with non-profit organizations who use Quick Books, and still struggle to get the balance sheet and summary reports in a form that board members can understand. It helps to have an accountant set it up, and make sure the IRS and State Attorney General get all the paper forms and attachments they need.

One thing I might I add to this Thing is a list of useful blogs and rss feeds. I consolidate mine in Google Reader. My favorites are

The Economist http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/

The Economist's View http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/

CNBC's Bob Pisani http://www.cnbc.com/id/20398120

More Things- Nbr 43 Internet TV and Video

2009-05-13T21:21:00.006-05:00

For Thing 43, I reviewed my use of Hulu, ABC.com, and YouTube.

Free on-demand has not had much impact on my wife and me. The same limitations on access to true broadband service regarding music online apply to TV and video. Creatures of habit, we often resort to video tape when we record programs to watch later. For some reason, our DirecTV installer advised us not get the additional line required for DVR/Tivo.

Our neighbors two miles west in Little Marais recently upgraded Dish to include DVR, and after the initial promotional package expires, they have decided to cut back on some options.

Our daughter and son-in-law in Woodbury have a complete Comcast package that provides for DVR, On-Demand movies, on-demand Netflix, XBox360 or Nintendo Wii, and high speed wireless internet service. I wouldn't move to the big city for it, but if it's available I'll buy it. My wife would not buy the complete package.

I have been using Hulu since I saw the commercial for it during the Super Bowl. The first shows I watched were episodes of Legend of the Seeker, and Life on Mars, going all the way back to the pilot episodes. It's a well designed internet application.

Right away on Hulu I discovered that ABC TV current series were available only from ABC.com. It too is a well designed application. You can view episodes as soon as they have aired on TV. ABC.com recently launched a music service.

On-demand Netflix via Internet or DirecTV has the same limitations I mentioned in my previous post on high speed internet service. Verizon National access is fast enough for viewing, but the 5 gigabyte per month file download limit quickly is consumed by a few movies.

DirecTV, XBox 360, Nintendo Wii, and Netflix on-demand services all cost something. None of this is free. Some media critics and stock analysts see all of these advances as threats. Analysts usually point to lost ad revenue. Hulu, YouTube, and ABC.com all show commercials before you can watch a program, besides the ads in the sidebars.

In general, as a result of the More Things on a Stick program, I recognize web 2.0 features on TV and in movies that started long ago. All media are improving therefrom.

More Things- Nbr 42 Music 2.0

2009-05-12T15:59:00.005-05:00

As I began the Learn list for Thing 42, I had Creative Media Source playing the latest Prince three-cd album Lotusflow3r. Creative Media Player was the default when I loaded the cd's, and I used it to copy the three discs to the pc. Do I plan to share on the internet? No.

I have digitized several hundred albums, and copied to our pc's from our private collections. I have vinyl albums I gave to my mother in the 50's, reel-to-reel tapes, cassettes, and cd's. I have over 200 cylinder records for our 1915 Edison Amberola, with no other way to digitize than to play them and record with a mic.

More often than not I will use iTunes to listen to anything on the pc. I'm impressed with the internet radio features. I do not plan to get an iPod or an iPhone, and do not need one for internet radio.

I also like Windows Media Player. Today I worked my way through Reciva Radio Portal. It's a multi-step process to find and sort a genre, click on a selection, choose a player (even though iTunes is my default), and hope there is something to hear. Several attempts failed. One thing Windows Media Player does is show you an icon while it attempts to play whatever you select. iTunes and Firefox together give you a small Reciva window that does nothing if there is nothing to hear. iTunes works great as a standalone internet radio application.

iTunes Radio button gives you a complete list of genres with dropdown menus, including most of the stations I found on Reciva. iTunes shows the kilobytes per second speed for each station. Some of the stations offer a range of streaming rates. I found 128 kps works sometimes and other times has too many pauses to fill the buffer. 256 kps HD stations require true broadband speed (see comments further down). Slower speeds work fine for talk radio; 64 kps is adequate for music. I quickly built a radio playlist I called Radio. Click and drag any station I like to the playlist, while I'm listening to it, and all the stations I want are ready to go next time. All of the station choices presented by iTunes worked.

I mentioned CATVids in another blog post as the most complete library cataloguing software for media of all kinds.

Internet radio we have not used much on our pc's, because true broadband service is not available in Little Marais. We're lucky to get a strong signal from Verizon National Access broadband. Signal strength varies from about 250 to 800 kilobytes per second. 800 is great, but not fast enough for some YouTube or Hulu TV on the internet. True broadband by definition should be greater than 1.2 megabytes per second. The speed via Verizon varies from minute to minute and from station to station.

Bring my pc to my neighbor's house 600 feet to the east and you can't get Verizon. AT&T installed a cellphone tower two miles west, but won't offer wireless broadband without political coercion from the Lake County Board. Your iPhone or iPod works fine here. QWEST has fiber optics underground along Hwy 61, but wants at least $4000 to bring broadband service to your house. Legislation and funding for wireless infrastructure isn't as simple as laying more cable and building more towers. Arguments for supporting small, rural populations, the potential for job growth, educational and business development, and 50,000 tourists driving through on a summer weekend are dismissed.

In the past couple of years, most of my music purchases have been online via iTunes. If I want the physical album, I still go back to Amazon.com. How green things have gotten! The Judy Collins album my wife bought for me last week had minimal packaging, published eight years ago. It still had a sleeve we threw out to get at the jewel case. The Prince album had a slim three-slot fold-over cover. Much of what we buy online, we download. No packaging unless we burn a cd to keep in the car.

More Things- Nbr 41 Mashup Your Life

2009-05-11T12:45:00.003-05:00

I registered for Lifestream.fm, Superglu, and TabUp. Productivity boosters? I don't see it.

Lifestream I did not like and will not keep. It's one of several applications I have, like the job search social network LinkedIn, that offer to send invitations to your entire email contact list. Our Yahoo contact list is too big and out of date, but my wife and I share it for many reasons. Like any direct mail scheme, if I invite 200 people, 2% willing participants would be a good response. I know too many people who won't appreciate such an invitation. A glance at the general listings of status messages on Lifestream, it's a flood of useless comments, worse than unfiltered Twitter. Once into Facebook or LinkedIn, there are better ways to keep up with like-minded "friends" you've never met.

Superglu warns you that only three guys are there to manage the program and it's slow. What's
slow is the time to set up the feeds from your websites. Get Blogger, and the main blog associated with your username comes in fast. Follow up with WordPress, and "waiting for" runs in the status bar forever. Same thing trying to work the settings menu. I'll keep at this one, however, to make Blogger, WordPress, and Overbooked Ning available from one login on Superglu. Frankly, there is not much advantage in that. Having several tabs open in Firefox is not a bother.

TabUp says it's much like iGoogle, and it is. I don't see a reason to use both.

More Things- Nbr 40 Mashup the Web

2009-05-10T17:41:00.011-05:00

Not sure what to do in this Thing that hasn't been done in other Things.

I recognize mashups when I see them on TV, having become familiar with the concept through More Things.

Executive Editor ZDNET on YouTube - excellent! That should be on a public or academic library list as an electronic classroom resource.

I used Google search as a starting point for Lunchbox, Wheel of Lunch, and Walkable. Find the street address for a place you know, copy and paste into the search window for the mashup application.

Tried PandoraFM more than a month ago, and again today it stalled while trying to add a few stations based on Artist. Splice wouldn't come up. I like BlipFM. Also got a solicitation to Hearts of Space, with a free-on-Sunday come-on, and more expensive subscriptions. Of course, all of these comments fit Thing 42 as well.

What's mashup about Lunchbox? A Google map application. It was too specific on some categories and very broad scope on others. I zeroed in on Woodbury, MN, east of St. Paul, because I'm familiar with most restaurants there. "Steak" got results Twin Cities wide. "Barbeque" pinpointed the Famous Dave's I expected. My old home Zip Code 55106 on the East Side found Yarusso's Italian restaurant on Payne Avenue without me specifying any category. Nearby Serlin's Cafe was not on the map, and not found via the breakfast category. An opportunity to add your favorites and review them would be useful.

I suppose the colorful spinning wheel is the mashup for Wheel of Lunch. The "Seafood" search for 55802 Duluth gave me a full wheel including Culver's, Coca-Cola Bottling Company, plus the restaurants you would expect. One search is all you get. You have to close the Wheel of Lunch tab and start over to do another search.

Walkable gave Downtown St. Paul a score of 86 of 100 when I entered the address for the Science Museum of Minnesota. Main Street in Downtown Stillwater is "Walker's Paradise". Good Google maps application.

Interestingness was interesting only because it reminds me of Cool Iris, which I prefer and have been using for a long time. Cool Iris qualifies as a great photo mashup, with all kinds of features. It works with your own photos, every imaginable commercial photo source (like Interestingness does), with thumbnails, blowups, and slide shows. Visual Headlines was not interesting. I've praised Picasa's virtues over Flickr elsewhere.

Here's a Warholizer from Big Huge Labs. Thumbnail size is what I get.

Table of sunrise sunset times for any location in the world was an interesting Big Huge Labs/ Google Maps application. I got it right the first time, pretty close to Little Marais. The scale of the map was too gross.

We interrupt this program

2009-05-07T08:33:00.004-05:00

How's this for a memoir scrapbook photo from the 60's? My sister on the left. Grandma Carlson with her 80-something birthday cake, and my cousin Beatrice on the right.

"63 That's easy to remember" is my Facebook status message for today. My birthday. If you were in the Twin Cities area in the 1950's and 60's you know this tagline from the KDWB AM Radio promos. "Channel 63, That's easy to remember.

KDWB and WDGY were the two rock stations. Neither has changed format in the direction that I have since that time.

More Things- Nbr 39 Digital Storytelling

2009-05-06T10:41:00.009-05:00

First attempt with Smile box. Easy to use.

Make a Smilebox scrapbook

How about another photo collage from Picasa? Link from Pacasa on my pc and Picasa Web Albums was not as friendly today. PC did not recognize my password. What is the story in this?

I have been doing this kind of blog post right along in Dave's Travel Journal. My WordPress blogs are the general purpose type that derive from over 25 years of personal journals, now enhanced by tasks learned in More Things on a Stick. See the sidebar for links if you haven't been following my other blogs.

The best academic application I have been following via Google Reader and Twitter is CoolCatTeacher. She wins awards and gets interviews for her work with electronic classroom. Every gadget and link to commercial services imaginable is in her blog sidebars.
http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/

More Things- Nbr 38 Screencast - Final

2009-05-04T16:16:00.005-05:00

Here's my screencast of a portion of the Split Rock Lighthouse Historic Site tour.
I used Screencast-O-Matic to produce it. I also tried Picasa, but it did not provide voice-over audio as an option, only a musical background. I looked briefly at ScreenToaster, but quickly gave up, as it failed to explain how to frame and capture an image; at least I could not make it work intuitively.

http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cQhf2oeEd

This morning I found Adobe Premier Elements already installed on my laptop pc. I had forgotten about it. It has an excellent tutorial. I recommend a closer look if you already use Adobe products. I don't need the suite of products, so I have Photoshop Elements, Premiere Elements, and have misplaced somewhere Adobe Air for video conferencing.

To use screencasting in a library setting, I think the MNLink tutorials were a good example. A menu of short clips created with Screen-O-Matic might be good enough. Else, you need a dedicated person on staff or contract with someone who has the skills and time. Well-written content is important. Does everyone remember how bad the DBase II User Guide was? That set the standard for me for Bad.

Who owns the content? I did not use any of Lee Radzak's slides. My content is my own, but I have an issue in my own mind to represent the MN Historical Society well. What music background is free in the public domain? I might like "I Want to Marry a Lighthouse Keeper" in the background, but can I share my mp3 in a blog? Probably not.

My Split Rock Tour took several tries over two days. Part of the time was consumed by selecting and adding photos from various Split Rock folders that span 7 years. Using Screen-O-Matic meant starting over each time I thought of a change in sequence. My first attempt resulted in more than 10 minutes, and a 22mb file, too big for YouTube. My final cut was still too long, about 10mb, and impossible to view on a blog post with Verizon National Access relatively high speed internet service. The first three minutes play without interuption, but the rest of it filled the buffer with less than 30 seconds to view at a time.

I did not write a storyboard or a script. I told the story as I do it on tour. You don't do it with notecards. My audio voice-over took several tries, as that was the most time consumming element in the movie. I used some creative writing techniques to shorten the talk. Give credit again to Publication Coach Daphne Gray-Grant, whose newsletter I get by email each week. Here's a link to her website.

http://www.publicationcoach.com/index.php

More Things- Nbr 37 update

2009-05-03T07:32:00.002-05:00

Here's a link to another commercial website for Bodo, Norway, that features a slide show behind the title frame. A friend of ours is moving to Bodo from a town further north in Finmark. Bodo is a beautiful, growing city, and their website displays several of the Things we have been doing.

http://www.visitbodo.com/?sp=GB

More Things- Nbr 38 Screencast

2009-05-01T17:44:00.004-05:00

I really like the MNLink tutorial Search by Library

Having watched my daughter spend an hour at her professional editing suite to get the sound of a hoe scraping a garden patch, for a newsreel bit that lasted only seconds, it's a dizzying chore. She also lines up the professional voices for narration and voice overs. It takes skill as well as a familiar voice. Matching background music to the mood of the piece makes a big difference.

At 3M, I wrote drafts of content for an online Service Measurement System; a user guide, quick reference card, and online help screens in context of what users would try to do. A screencast would have helped. We had the budget to hire professionals to bring my knowledge to a finished product. It took a year.

For my next post, I will attempt a portion of the Split Rock Tour slide show from Thing Nbr 37. Give the talk, and provide the guidance a new interpreter would need.

More Things- Nbr 37 Photo Tales complete

2009-04-30T10:59:00.005-05:00

A few more comments and a slide show from Picasa; I consider this Thing complete.
I couldn't be happier with the results from the combination of Picasa desktop and web.

As for telling a story with photos, I will do more with Dave's Travel Blog. See the sidebar link. It's easy enough to choose how to display a photo within text.

I mentioned in another blog post my use of CoolIris (Firefox add-in) to do a wall display or a slide show of my own photos, or a host of other commercial providers. I use it all the time with photos displayed by friends on Facebook. CoolIris provides a small icon on the first photo within anyone's album. Click the icon and it brings up the album in a wall display.

I've struggled for years to get Microsoft Office Powerpoint to do what I want. A couple of presentations I've made are great. Adobe Photoshop Elements is my favorite for scanning historic photos and slides, and uploading new photos from a camera for editing. Microsoft Picture Manager often is my choice for photo prints.

Use it in "my" library? Actually, my wife and I did a slide presentation at the Grand Rapids, MN Public Library last Fall, at the invitation of one of our friends who is on the library board. We presented a history of Split Rock Lighthouse, using my own Powerpoint presentation, and presentations prepared by Lee Radzak, our employer and MHS Historic Site manager.

Here's my Split Rock Tour slide show without words or captions.

More Things- Nbr 37 a photo mosaic

2009-04-30T10:45:00.003-05:00

Here's a first attempt at embedding a photo mosaic. I created a collage from my own photos using Picasa on my desktop pc. I chose one of the several collage format options. Uploaded the finished mosaic to a new web album on Picasa. Created a link, which provided html code to embed.

Looks great to me.

From Lutsen trail

More Things- Nbr 36 Comic Relief

2009-04-29T17:03:00.006-05:00

Firefox has a very good background generator, "Personas"

http://www.getpersonas.com/store/recent.html

The most useful background site in the Learn list of links was the Image Chef "how to" instructions for Twitter: Settings, Design, change background image. My preference is to use my own photos. Here's my latest if you aren't a follower.

http://twitter.com/quirkydave

I tried each of the password generators. I prefer a scheme of my own. I still have a terrible time keeping track of usernames and passwords. The best way I have found is within Firefox - Tools, options, security, saved passwords, show passwords, and then do a screen print.

I placed a Read Poster in the sidebar of this blog. It may look like a partisan statement. It's an attention getter. Have you observed in checkout line tabloids how popular President Obama's image is. Children of all ages, just old enough to speak, through age 90+, are mesmerized.

Back to Image Chef, I placed a Taurus symbol in the sidebar, but I was stumped by the possibility of an icon. Any advice on how to choose a memorable, marketable icon?

I like Timetoast. Did a short one and will come back to it.

Make Beliefs comix looks easy, and similar to the Dilbert mashable feature I get in my gmail every day. I'm not that kind of creative to come up with an original comic, but very quick to fill in an alternate Dilbert dialog.

See my Dewey block in the footer.

More Things- Nbr 35 Books

2009-04-26T17:13:00.012-05:00

This will be my third and final post on Thing Nbr 35. Certainly it will not be my last visit to items found in the Learn reading list.

Library Thing looks promising for creating a book catalog. The rest of the content, as well as other social catalog services of the kind, are variations on apps I started using on Facebook. weRead was my first. Overbooked Ning is my favorite, and may be the best way to organize a small online book club.

This weekend I registered on Bookarmy. I used the search function to load 39 titles from my own shelves. I published reviews of three of my books. I began socializing by oversubscribing to several like-minded forums, and providing feedback to the developers of the site.

I skipped books on your phone. Can't imagine it.

Reading Trails is like the way I choose books to read. The Browse Tags is useful.

The Book Calendar daily feed looks interesting. It would go along with a link to the New York Times best sellers. I read USA Today best sellers lists every week.

Living Social, as I use it on Facebook, has an unfortunate tie to IQ Quizes, which can easily cost you $19.95 a month for an unintended cell phone subscription. Only the fine print tells you the cost and how to avoid it.

Podcasts are the way to go for audio books, although tapes and cd's are still popular. I don't do that.

Book Swap would be useful if you can localize it to your own community.

I think one of the most supportive things a small town library or a branch library can do is host a book club. There are two in Silver Bay. One keeps the library open after hours one Monday night a month. The other meets off site. Six to ten members is sustainable. Some members walk to a meeting, others drive an hour to get there. The same people who show up for book club often volunteer for everything in the community. The active community is wide and influential, and becomes a justification for library support by the city and county. We need the Arrowhead Library System to get ten copies of the same popular title at once.

I have a peeve about the search schemes provided by online book clubs. The book cover graphics and publishers are not the same as the ones on my shelf. If you were a commercial seller hoping for a hit on the edition you are selling, I skew the statistics by selecting the first cover that appears. Seriously, some of my favorite editions are long out of print. Dog-eared or not, they are classics. The volume of Tennyson poems I borrowed from the Duluth Central Library probably should have been secured in a rare books room. The illustrations were that good.

Netflix is great not only for ordering and rating movies, but sharing with family and friends, and for adding content to My Yahoo or iGoogle.

CatVids is a costly software package that catalogs any kind of media, including archived hardware. It's rich in features you would recognize in web 2.0; links to capture an online album cover or a film trailer; stores whatever data element you want in a standard database field or a freeform field of your own creation. Search with boolean logic, or sort and browse pages of records. Anyone can use it without fear of breaking something. It's great for a nonprofit wide area network, but how would you port thousands of records to something better on the web?

Over ten years ago, my wife and I were part of a team that used CatVids to catalog the entire Baha'i Media Services collection at the House of Worship in Wilmette, IL. Several thousand items were relabeled with a numbering scheme that pinpointed their location, whether they were in use on someone's desk or in the rafters of the archives. The staff was there to help; an archivist, an IT professional to set up file sharing, producers, editors, supervisors, and volunteer library professionals from around the country. I customized the application to meet staff requirements. None of that crowd can be described in plural today, because of severe budget cuts. The system outlived the missing, and is maintained by two or three people. We'll return as volunteers to clean it up.

More Things- Nbr 34 Competition

2009-04-24T17:13:00.005-05:00

What is the primary function of a reference librarian, or a reference library? Public or private library? Fee-based services? All kinds of questions to consider when you define your specific role as a library professional. You answer reference questions. You point to resources, including those on line. You might have a forklift deliver boxes of historic artifacts, and assign someone to stand at hand to make sure nothing gets damaged.

Two of the links in the Nbr 34 reading list are keepers. The others are worth reading once.

An incredible list is provided by the first link in Thing Nbr 34, "online reference sites".
The feature article "Evolution to Revolution to Chaos" provides a complete agenda to support funding and human resource development, whether it be a state library advisory board, or setting direction for a small library.

From the list of online resources, Information Please caught my eye. I bought my first Information Please Almanac from the St. Paul Pioneer Press when I was in grade school in the 1950's. I never questioned its completeness or accuracy. Now it's on line. Wikipedia has been criticized on the points of accuracy and user contributed information. For some people wiki is the first reference choice. I prefer Google search.

If you are the sole library professional managing a small town public library, like Silver Bay, your main competition for funding may be the municipal liquor store and tavern. The liquor store is a profit center for the city. The library is a cost center.

My wife volunteers frequently at the Silver Bay Library on Mondays. The librarian is alone that day. She sets direction for the hours my wife spends. Often it's processing inter-library loans, and shelving items left in the book drop over the weekend. My wife chairs the library board, knows the political process from local to global, and couldn't be more supportive. She does not answer the phone, check out books, or provide help at the public computer terminals without direction from the librarian in charge.

The public computer terminals at the Silver Bay Library are busy. Many of the users can't afford a computer, or can't get high speed internet service at home.

The Lexington Branch of the St. Paul Public was the first successful neighborhood computer center I saw, years ago. University Avenue at Lexington was not a safe place for children and youth, but they occupied every available terminal. It was a community center.

The Duluth Central Library also is a busy public computer center. What is the likelihood that St. Paul or Duluth can afford to upgrade those terminals every three to five years as they should? Budget cuts don't even allow for hours of operation when most users might be there, evenings and Saturdays.

I think special libraries, whether academic or dedicated to a narrow field, demand reference librarians. The qualified human resources might come from diverse professional backgrounds. Even a high school dropout who developed a niche website might qualify. Whether a librarian or a geek, the avatar that looks like a hero from Legends of the Seeker might suggest as much as a profile photo about the personality behind the mask.

My wife was a librarian at James J. Hill Reference Library in St. Paul for 17 years. She was Head of Reference for 9 years at the Minnesota Historical Society. All of those years she was an active member of the Special Libraries Association, and the Minnesota Library Association. I attended several workshops at SLA national conventions, and was not surprised to find presenters I recognized from professional conferences I attended at 3M's expense.

Generalist is not a good attribute according to a 3M Personnel assessment I had. Intuitive is not a popular attribute with some. My wife's Myers-Briggs doesn't fit the profile of a librarian. She's an extrovert. I'm an introvert, but I talk to strangers in elevators, and on Twitter.

Qualified volunteers are not substitute librarians. It can be a trap suggestive of slave labor when a city council suggests unpaid staff to offset budget cuts.

More Things - Nbr 45 Cloud Computing

2009-04-23T11:23:00.003-05:00

I can jump ahead and sign off on Cloud Computing, although there is more to read. I already commented on other posts for this Thing.

First an update you probably read in the news. Sun Microsystems was not acquired by IBM. Oracle has made a winning offer. Java is what they wanted, but all kinds of new cloud applications are possible, with new Oracle applications to fit.

I spent hours working with g.ho.st Virtual Computer. Very interesting, but painfully slow.

http://g.ho.st/

The email application looks promising. It is easy to set up POP connections to other email services, but you must click the Refresh icon to update each service.

The g.ho.st Service Bulk Upload was very slow, even with a super-high speed internet service at my daughter's house in Woodbury. You probably don't have time to backup your most important file folders this way. I put some old photo albums out there I want to share between three pc's. The screen refresh rate is ok for viewing individual photos. There are better ways to do a slideshow presentation.

The Welcome screen is a good one for taking a tour of the services; also the Getting Started Wizard.

I took a quick look at each of the Microsoft Office services: Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheets, and Zoho Presentation. Again, too slow for creating and updating. You could use them to read archived files stored on your g.ho.st Drive.

In brief, there is more Cloud Computing coming. Familiarity with the concept and the tools is useful.

More Things - Nbr 32 Maps again

2009-04-23T11:06:00.002-05:00

Got a test tornado warning this morning on my desktop Weather Underground gadget. I clicked on the warning button and found a wealth of weather information, some of which I had completed for my own use long ago. Here's a link to Wundermap, which will look very familiar. Browse around and set up favorite locations that you would view frequently.

http://www.wunderground.com/wundermap/?lat=38.54817&lon=-95.80078&zoom=4

The wealth of Weather Underground includes your local climate data. Be careful with it, because some locations are not what they seem. For example, one of the oldest recording stations in Minnesota was Beaver Bay, since 1857. The current records for nearby Silver Bay are the airport, which is neither reliable nor representative of what's happening on the North Shore. The airport is in a mountain-like valley about three miles from the lake. That's a big difference. Likewise, Brimson, north of Two Harbors has current records and is one of the oldest recording sites. Isabella has very old records, but there has been nobody there to provide data for at least two years.

More Things- Nbr 33 Travel 2.0

2009-04-11T12:25:00.005-05:00

I went ahead and started a new Dave's Travel Blog. See the following link in the sidebar. http://davecarlson-travels.blogspot.com/

In the sidebar to my Travel Blog, I provided three more links to professional travel journals published by local writers I actually know.

Andrew Slade of Duluth self-publishes "There and Back" books, and has a blog by the same name.

Beryl Singleton Bissell lives on the North Shore at Schroeder. Road Writer blog has months of posts of her trip to Italy, including a fresh entry today, April 15. It's creative writing at its best. Also link to her commercial website, and find her memoir, The Scent of God.
Travis Novitsky lives at Grand Portage and has one of the most beautiful photo travel journals, plus a link to his commercial photography website.

Also in the sidebar is a link to the Little Marais Area map I created for Thing Nbr 32.

My first blog post is a copy of a series I started on Word Press, called 100 Places, with a few my own photos inserted.

From the reading list, "What is Travel 2.0?" is one I'll keep at hand.
http://pages.citebite.com/g1o3c9n4k2mur

My daughter in Chicago traveled to 29 cities in one year as part of her job a few years ago, and she became an expert in creating itineraries, using services such as Travelocity, and Orbitz. My other daughter is an attorney for a major Minneapolis law firm. Besides arranging their own business trips, she and her husband have traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East, where not only the creative itinerary is required, but cellphones, Blackberries, and internet cafes are necessary. The five of us have done well collaborating on family vacations.

My wife and I learned by experience, and with the help of a professional travel agent, to contact hotels and rental car agents directly, after doing the background with online services. Special promotions often are unpublished. Online reservation calendars are notoriously out of sync with actual availability.

As for the commercial travel services online journals, we've not found them helpful.
Travel with Gusto is better. http://www.gusto.com/

Also IgoUgo http://www.igougo.com/

More Things- Nbr 32 My Google Map

2009-04-09T15:57:00.003-05:00

Little Marais Area.

View Little Marais Area in a larger map

I had used Map Quest for years. Good for driving directions, and pinpoint destinations. I'm impressed with Google My Maps.

Mashups would be based on need. I don't see a static use for libraries outside of major metro areas. Custom local maps such as mine would be useful.

My daughter in Chicago uses a cellphone tool that provides specific location and arrival times of CTA (busses). She can ride the El, look ahead to meet a bus, or have a taxi waiting when she arrives at her station.

More Things - Getting Ahead - Nbr 35 Books

2009-04-08T10:46:00.004-05:00

I was already into my Overbooked Ning, so here's the link to my first blog post there.

http://overbookers.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?user=1g3c2lecsf2ko

When you get there, also take a look at My Page, and see one of the most user-friendly profile screens. It was easy to set up. Only the registration step was confusing, because I already had a Ning account, and they wanted me to sign in rather than create a specific Overbooked account.

There are many more tasks and readings for Nbr 35. In brief, the Ning is better than any of the Facebook applications, such as weRead and Goodreads books. Long ago I cleared the Facebook profile blocks of favorite books, movies, etc, because it took forever to scroll down to other blocks. My usual practice with favorite books and movies was to list what I had read or seen during the current year. Keeping the list of favorites relatively short on Overbooked, I started with the books that caught my eye on my own shelves.

As you will see, my Overbooked blog entry has a current context; threads that lead from books to travel, tours of historic sites, and volunteering at major museum exhibits. I've seen some creative librarians do the same in library book displays.

Do I see the demise of hardcopy books? No. There's another meaning to multilevel libraries. How many pieces of hardware are you willing to archive, like the Bell and Howell movie projector, and microfilm/microfiche readers, to keep up with rapidly changing formats?

More Things- Nbr 31 More Twitter

2009-04-04T18:43:00.005-05:00

As I said in my post for Thing 27, Power Twitter is a favorite. I had not used Tweet Deck much, but came back to it Friday and installed it on a new desktop pc; a recent update had greatly improved the application.

I tried a Twitter Widget in the sidebar from Widgetbox. Not terribly impressed, because it only displays my status updates, nothing from friends and others. Linda Wadman has a few Twitter badges in her sidebar, and I will revisit those sources. I wonder if anyone can make a widget out of the panels on Tweet Deck, which would allow filtering and display of my favorite Twitter friends and commercial tweets?

Widgetbox and Mashable have become favorite resources gleaned from Thing 31 sugggested readings. Not all of the lists and links are useful. Many of the authors cover the same ground. For example, a MashableTwitter Lists site for Artists interested me, a few professional artists were promoting themselves or galleries; mostly a rehash of Twitter basics.

http://mashable.com/2009/02/23/twitter-artists/

From Tweeters Directory, Just Tweet It, I picked Religion as category of common interest to see who shows up. I had not much in common with those already posting in the category. Artists was better than on Mashable. Registration was a lesson in quickly drafting a meaningful profile statement, and not user-friendly.

http://justtweetit.com/artists/

From Mr Tweet I picked up several new followers right away on Twitter. One named Kamper had an unusual gravitar, so I clicked on his/her web link which brought me to Tweet Later, a long list of Twitter productivity resources. LisaDawley is an online educator from Boise State with interesting blog posts, much like a life coach; hundreds following, but not so overwhelming as a celebrity.

http://onlineeducators.blogspot.com/

I signed up for another commercial social networking application called Linkedin. You may find it a useful job search resource for various library types. The content and layout are user-friendly. My son-in-law has developed more than 60 contacts in a year, and I got two contact invitations the first day.
http://www.linkedin.com/home

I also registered for Dilbert.com, where I had been following a blog by Scott Adams. Again familiar content, tools, and layout.
http://dilbert.com/blog/

There is more to do, but I will move on to nbr 32.

More Things- Nbrs 30 and 31

2009-03-30T20:49:00.005-05:00

Somewhere between RSS feeds, Delicious tools, and Twitter, I wanted a better way to link one blog post to another. Still haven't found a way for a Blogger sidebar link item to open in a new window.

What I did find was Citebite. http://citebite.com/

Highlight text in a blog post.
Copy and paste to the text block in Citebite.
Copy and paste the url for the blog where indicated.
Click the button "Make Citebite".
Copy the result, a new url created by Citebite.
Paste the new url in the body of the post you are working on, or create a new sidebar link and paste it there.

Citebite works like tinyurl, except you can use Citebite to point to a specific quote.

More Things - Commercial sites

2009-03-28T11:45:00.002-05:00

One of the fun Things I got into while I was away from an 80 hour power outage at Little Marais, is a commercial NBC TV Network site for "The Office". Now I am an employee of the Duluth Branch of the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company.

http://www.dundermifflininfinity.com/groups/dmi-us-mn-duluth

Check it out and get yourself hired.

My point is, the site uses many of the tools we are exploring, not all of them as user-friendly as some of you are doing. And, it's wildly successful as a commercial site.

More Things Nbr 30 Delicious

2009-03-18T10:11:00.002-05:00

Delicious now has a place among my most valuable tools.

I spent a few minutes with "inSuggest" and quickly added bookmarks I want for my weather blog on WordPress. Also I used the filter to see what my tags of local interest would find. I had spent time creating tags with underscores (ex. Little_Marais) only to find that the filter broke them into individual words (little and marais).

http://bookmarks.insuggest.com/

The Delicious Tag icon (adjacent to the left side of the Firefox address window) dialogue box is useful for assigning popular tags used by others. "Weather" is common; "WX" is useful to me personally. One problem, however, is the text color within the Tag dialogue box is the same as the background color; you can't see the Title or anything you type. The list of popular tags has text in bright blue, so you can get the job done.

"popacular" is useful for finding new resources, like filtering what's hot from what's not hot.

http://popacular.com/

Delicious Bookmarks sidebar, like gmail, provides a different context for doing work I've always done with a tree structure. What would I do without the traditional Firefox Bookmarks menu?

I spent several hours working through the bookmarks I imported to Delicious; 43 screens of bookmarks, many items duplicated. I worked through 15 screensful, and will get back to it later.

I'll add more to this post as I read through the rest of the DO items.

More Things Nbr 30 RSS Feeds and Filters

2009-03-17T10:25:00.005-05:00

I experimented with Feed Burner and Feed Rinse.
Feed Rinse is really tedious to set up Feeds and Channels. Setting up Feeds, I created an xml file from Google Reader and successfully imported it to Feed Rinse. Dealing first with each of the participants in More Things, my first attempt resulted in multiple occurrences of the first blog on my list, 23 Things to Distract. Subsequent selections resulted in nothing, so I proceeded one by one to select, filter, and save changes. I saved a few and then created a Channel called Thing. Had to repeat all the steps already accomplished setting up the individual feeds. Finally, I clicked on the RSS icon and sent the results to Google Reader. Message from Google, none of my filter criteria had a match. My criteria was "allow if title contains Thing", which most of our posts do. Further attempts showed no indication in Google Reader that Feed Rinse was active.

Feed Burner did not recognize my Google Account username and password on my desktop pc, after I had created the account from my Dell laptop and saved the password via Firefox. I will try further to create feeds on Feed Burner, but so far cannot view the results.

Another post coming re Delicious.

More Things - Getting Ahead

2009-03-16T11:00:00.006-05:00

Thanks to Linda Wadman's comment on providing clickable links, I tried a few things on the Compose screen for creating and editing posts. Most were obvious, but I hadn't noticed.

1. Below the Title block is a Link block. Copy a url to that block, and the title of the finished post is a hot button that opens a window to that website. "Add enclosure link" provides endless opportunities for more links. Nothing obvious in the post tells you there are hot buttons for these links.

The above screen print is foggy, click on it to see it in full clearly

2. Also obvious, you have two tabs "Edit Html" and "Compose", each with a similar looking Link Icon on the toolbar. The "Compose" screen Link Icon opens a small dialogue box into which you may copy the url of interest. Click OK and a hot button (underscored text) appears in the body of the post. Do as many of those as you like, and each will open a link in a separate window. That's what I wanted!

The link icon from "Edit Html" resulted in html brackets and code surrounding the chosen url, but only a blank space appears in the body of the finished post.

Now, to go with this specific blog post, I would like to copy and paste a screen print of the "Compose" screen. I found a way to do that in WordPress, not great, but the same approach did not work here.

Another lesson learned, respond to Linda's comments. She's good! And she motivates by example.

Looking Ahead - Thing 35 Books

2009-03-15T22:10:00.013-05:00

A friend sent me a link this morning to an interesting online book source.

http://www.arcamax.com/books Many more Things of interest on the Home page.

Then there is my Overbooked Ning. Link provided awhile ago in the sidebar to this blog.

Slowly I am approaching Thing 35 in sequence of tasks. Here are links previously mentioned.

Brewster Kahle's openlibrary.org.

1. Here's a link to the article in The Economist, March 7-13 issue; "The internet's librarian".
Are any participants in More Things involved in his Open Library projects and the Internet Archive? Use the links in the lower right sidebar of the article to dig further.

http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displaystory.cfm?STORY_ID=13174399

2. One resource I have been using to read books online, and download, is
The Literature Page

http://www.literaturepage.com/

Project Gutenberg is along the same lines

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

More Things - Nbr 29 Google Tools

2009-03-14T08:34:00.008-05:00

Here's the most complete source I've found for Google products.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/

I thought I was finished with Thing 29 Google Tools. I had set up Google Desktop long ago, and continue to explore new gadget. I have explored more gadgets from iGoogle. I prefer My Yahoo plus Firefox toolbars. I tried Alerts, and got an incompatibility error message from Firefox 3.0. Likewise incompatible Web History, and Firefox has it's own history Library Tool.

Gmail deserves plenty of effort and exploration. One thing that is easier on Yahoo Mail is feeding the Contact file directly from an icon following the sender's address.

Picasa is my favorite application. It works very well from the software I downloaded to the sluggish old Dell desktop pc.

USA Today had an article yesterday, March 13, about Google phone and voicemail over the web. Looks like a promising alternative to Vonage and Skype; easy to set up conference calls. Don't see it on the Google options lists anywhere.

Alternatives to Google Reader. A Facebook invitation from the Association for Baha'i Studies, a very high level, global scholarly group with strict standards for blogs, brought a recommendation to try NewsGator Online. After an hour setting up, I manage more easily and filter better with Reader. NewsGator is appropriate for those who use iTunes or the iPhone, because that's what they are promoting, and they are enhancing service. For the web, it's a very long list of commercial media news sources, and a lot of duplication of NewsGator's own feeds.

I'll try to put the standards for blogging in the sidebar.

More password problems consumed hours as I set up new accounts on Google related options. Within Blogger itself was the worst of it, wanting to confirm new passwords with my original Localnet.com email (now my secondary email) and with gmail. The password validation word pattern in these confirmation steps are the most difficult to read. One password change does not immediately apply to all Google accounts. Even Picasa did not get it, and it uses a short form of the username instead of an email address.
Solution: Surprise! I went to the desktop pc in the next room, and Picasa already had the new password on the pc software and was ready to run in tandem with the online application. The laptop where I was doing all the work was the problem. Get out of Firefox; get back in. Everything worked.

Not quite as serious as passwords, but along the way while setting up various Google accounts and the primary Google profile, the profile information was not shared by all. Profile photos were blank or unique to each profile, some had a photo, others I had to upload. If you are trying to market yourself uniquely by application, you can be more focused in what you list in each profile.

More Things - Nbr 28 Customized Home Page

2009-03-13T12:52:00.002-05:00

Familiarity brings me back to My Yahoo! homepage. Even though my wife and I each have a Dell laptop PC, and share an older, slower Dell desktop, now used more as a server, we will use whatever Windows account is up and running on each others pc's. She wants to see My Yahoo! Her business depends on it.

Long ago I customized MY Yahoo! with services and feeds we want to see first thing everyday. I do change the news service feeds. Not long ago, Time magazine let their Quotes of the Day languish with no updates for weeks. I replaced with an NPR News feed. I had had NYTimes and BBC News rss feeds on the Firefox toolbar, but now I use Google Reader instead.

Nobody does customizable Financial portfolio screens better than Yahoo! That and Yahoo Mail as our shared personal email account are reasons to keep MY Yahoo! at the front.

Firefox browser makes all the difference in the world. The way I customize toolbars, and maintain bookmarks make good companions with a customizable home page.

I commented in another post about iGoogle being sluggish. It depends on what gadgets you put in there. Dynamic feeds slow it down. I keep it up on my Dell desktop.

As before, iGoogle is most useful when you have many Google related applications, as many of us do. Again, I can get at gmail and Facebook as fast from my toolbar as having them open a new window(tab). More about Google and gadgets in Thing 29.

I found the reviews of NetVibes and PageFlakes useful. In a way they are for a niche audience. Most interesting was the review by Cnet, which I haven't read for years. Strange that it's content was not complete; even though it's headline said Live.com, there was nothing about it in the article. And, I'm more and more impressed with Mashable.

The School Library Journal article on textbooks 2.0 style has application to what I would like to do as a volunteer for the Masterpiece Arts Program in Silver Bay. I want to do a session in the library computer lab, where I control what the students will see; explore the world of art related web resources. The PageFlakes layout looks good.

More Things - Nbr 27 Twitter

2009-03-12T09:15:00.002-05:00

I had accomplished many of the Twitter things long before I joined More Things.
Several of the new things I use I can thank Linda Wadman for leading the way from Twitter itself. Most useful has been Power Twitter. Interesting, but put aside after a short trial, Tweet Deck.

Yesterday I tried a few Twitbacks, sent one directly and automatically to Twitter while Twitter itself was down. Not really impressed with the result, but I'll keep it.
As for the Twitter group feature, I see facebook announced the same "new" approach. I think the Ning social network designed specifically for Library professionals is a better way, but you could do both.

My use of Twitter concentrates on friends I know in real life, who have interesting commercial blogs and websites. I keep one out there for the Organic Consumers Association, whose national mailing address is Finland, MN, and I know some people there. The commercial feed from OCA easily filled the screen with updates every few minutes, so I narrowed it down; how, I don't remember. I prefer Google Reader for following such large-scale feeds.

One Thing that did not work on my WordPress blogs was a commercial Gravatar site, which failed during account set up, saying carlsondw@gmail.com was already taken. Not likely.

More Things Nbr 26 - Ning

2009-03-08T10:15:00.003-05:00

I joined Ning, filled out a unique profile (compared to my other profiles), and made a link to Facebook. I didn't know how to get a "page" on facebook otherwise.

Ning looks really promising. One spin-off I'm considering with various website and blog possibilities is a marketable Weather Service for the North Shore of Lake Superior. Ning looks to be an easy way to get started and practice with tools.

This morning I got one of those annoying notifications from PBwiki that More Things Nbr 29 had been updated. Kathy Lasley made an interesting comment, and I wanted to reply. I couldn't find her anywhere as a participant in More Things. The search functions on PBwiki and Ning don't find her by name. The only clue was her email address is on a Nett Lake school account. I replied to that address.

A few minutes later I came back to my own blog and saw that I have a sixth follower, Kathy. Her blog is "Sticking 23 Things". I like it.

Do we have a directory of users, blog names, and email addresses?

More Things - Nbr 24 - Getting Ahead

2009-03-06T08:14:00.003-06:00

I realize my posts under Nbr 24 get into later numbered tasks. I feel I have more to do getting what I want to show permanently.

Today, I used tinyurl to put a set of useful Weather Links into my sidebar. I have credentials as certified Meteorologist, a graduate certificate from Oklahoma University. The American Meteorological Society (AMS) seal is what our TV weather personalities should display when they claim to be certified. I'm not that. The only thing available when I was an Air Force Weather Officer reporting on AFRTS TV was a simple graphic title on screen and my recorded voice.

The first item in the Weather Links announces a big storm coming next Tuesday, March 10. That link is not dynamic. I have to be vigilant to keep those announcement current. The other weather links are dynamic; they change whenever NOAA updates their sites.

My profile photo yesterday linked to my Picasa url. Who knows why it failed this morning? I went back to a static photo upload from my PC.

I struggled with attempts to change to a new blog template. Not even my current template is listed under the blogger layout Pick a new Template tab. I see some good ones in use by other participants in More Things. The few links provided "for the curious" I probably didn't give enough time, but I did not find what I wanted, a 3-column layout that preserves existing gadgets. Thank goodness saving the current layout as a file on my PC worked as it should.

More Things - Nbr 24 - Picasa and iGoogle

2009-03-05T14:37:00.002-06:00

After a week playing with iGoogle as my Firefox home page, I found it sluggish, put it away in my bookmarks, and went back to My Yahoo!

Found Picasa Web Albums and brought a short slide show to this blog. Will explore the Picasa download application.

Enhanced Twitter with PowerTwitter and Adobe Tweet Deck. More followers coming along.

More Things - Nbr 25 - Plug-ins

2009-03-04T12:07:00.003-06:00

"Twenty Usability Tips for Your Blog" I will keep at hand. Along with Mindmapping, to speed up the writing process.

I haven't yet seen how to get plug-ins into Blogger posts. I added an invitation and rss button to the top of the gadgets on the sidebar. I'll try some other plug-ins on my WordPress blog.

One supervisor at 3M advised regarding management by objectives not to list more than nine things, and then narrow that down to four things. When I see Twenty Tips, that's exhausting. There are at least four tips to spend more time doing. Another supervisor made things simpler. Decide what you are going to do and what you are not going to do.

I see a few more More Things followers on Twitter. No more on this blog yet.

More Things - Nbr 34 - Invited authors

2009-03-03T17:18:00.004-06:00

Jumping ahead.

I invited my daughter, and a friend who maintains a professional blog, to publish on my WordPress blog. No takers yet.

Moments ago, I invited two library professionals to collaborate with me on this blog. One is Amy in Gilbert, the other, Cheryl at Hibbing. Not many participants in More Things are providing direct email addresses, which is the only way I can see to invite authors to post on Blogger.

Has this kind of collaboration been done already in the first 23 Things?

Cheryl's post on Number 34 struck a chord with me. My response needs more than a comment. It goes way back to 1964 when I was a Student Aide at Hayden Heights Branch Library in St. Paul. One day, a very experienced reference librarian sitting in the back office, overheard me answer a customer's question directly. I knew the answer, and where to find it. Mrs. Powderly was very upset with me for not letting her do her job, but thankfully her wrath was not heard by the public.

Fast forward to the 1980's, and I had developed about 200 programs to analyze 3M International customer service performance to over 50 of its subsidiaries. It was a complicated reference tool that only I could run. I designed the database, and collaborated with IT professionals to do it. I was crossing professional boundaries to provide a valuable service. By 1990, we had developed an online menu-driven application, where anyone could gather their own statistics, or use my canned reports. I'm enjoying many of those experiences for my own purposes on the web.

So, where is the boundary between professionals here? I'm the invited participant, but until this post, you had no idea that I have reference skills and experience.

More Things on a Stick - Nbr 24

2009-03-02T18:22:00.003-06:00

Ready to move forward with new Things, I have accomplished already the tasks for Number 24.
In the past ten days, I've done several variations on the appearance of both of my blogs, Dave's Taurus ID, and PartlyDave-More Things.

Avatars I like, and have updated my profile for this blog, Facebook, and Twitter, getting rid of the Florida palm trees and Venus beach blanket after returning to Minnesota.

The most useful change came from Thing Number 13, as I replaced my long-term My Yahoo! home page with a new design from iGoogle. The big time saver comes by displaying three boxes along the top, so Google Reader, Yahoo mail, and gmail are always open, and displaying the top five or so new items. I already had worked for a couple of months with Google Reader in tandem with Taurus ID dashboard, managing the blogs and rss feeds so the latest updates go to the top.

Minor Things

2009-02-27T08:11:00.002-06:00

Finally got to read my gmail inbox. Password remained as I had set it, but wasn't accepted for several days. Funny, since I could get right into Blogger with the same gmail account settings. Same thing on Twitter. Couldn't see Cheryl Kay's Twitter gadget until this morning.
Anyway, I found several useful email messages from active Things participants.

One new item on this Taurus ID sidebar is a link to Minnesota.com. They are looking for participants, and promotion on our blogs. Think about it. At least the concept of library professionals committed to learning useful web tools would be helpful to conflicted managers in the public service arena.

I have been applying minor changes to both of my blogs, based on experiences posted by others. I'm not seeing an increase in followers on either blog.

Tinyurl is the most promising of the new tools. I used it to redirect and shorten some url's of interest. The links I show on my sidebars under Blogs and More now have meaningful titles, giving the name of the blogger, suggesting what the content is.

Organizing and Following More Things

2009-02-23T21:33:00.003-06:00

I'm impressed! It took me an hour to click on each NCLC blog, and list myself as a follower of anyone who had posted on More Things in the past month. Some bloggers are really active. Everyone but me is a librarian; I'm married to one.

I had more password problems. I failed to write new ones down, am using my wife's laptop pc while we're in Florida, so the passwords Firefox saved are on my pc at home.

One mystery to me is the time delay in activating and updating gadgets. I put a slideshow link on my sidebars to Flickr yesterday in blogspot and WordPress, and only 3 of 14 slides appeared. This morning all 14 of them appeared. I changed nothing.

Dave's 23 Things preview - new to me

2009-02-18T21:34:00.002-06:00

Flickr, and Del.icio.us, I've hardly touched since I signed up. I use a Firefox add-on called Cooliris to send up Facebook photo albums to look like a slide show. It will be interesting to try the blogger sidebar gadget to bring my photos in with and without Flickr.

Podcasts I have not tried.

wiki is completely new to me.

partlydave.wordpress.com is my other blogsite. More substantial posts go there. One thing I like about blogger is the flexibility of fonts. I can't figure out how to do that with HTML code on wordpress. On WordPress I like the categorization of posts.

Dave's 23 Things preview

2009-02-18T17:40:00.003-06:00

I registered "Dave's Taurus ID" as my blog for More Things on a Stick before I read the instructions. My blog name does not say Things. Look around my preexisting blog posts to find the astrological meaning, and more things about me than the About Me button can hold. I will follow the instruction not to register more than one blog for More Things.

Quickly browsing 23 Things was not quick. ABC Evening News in the background was too interesting to concentrate. Among the many tasks mentioned was Productivity Tools, which I have used in the context of blogs and other social networking applications. Most important was the Power Writing newsletter by Daphne Gray-Grant. See http://www.publicationcoach.com
Staying focused and keeping my posts brief can be a challenge.

Concurrent with the invitation to Join Many Things, the Minnesota History Center Volunteer staff sent an email meant for museum professionals. It would be a stretch to include myself in such a group, so I did not contribute to the discussion about Social Networking as part of the job. Managers and supervisors remain conflicted about the time spent at work doing what we are doing in this learning program.

The concern is valid. My part of tax preparation has to be finished tomorrow, so I can hand the package off to our accountant on Friday. Also a priority tomorrow is my fourth of four classes teaching 5th graders as a volunteer for the Masterpiece Arts Program in Silver Bay.

Writing blogs deserves priority. Learning about new tools is exactly what I had in mind when I started. I said that in my list of priorities for 2009, another blog post. Years ago I took classes offered at 3M from Franklin-Covey, and I still use those productivity tools, beginning with daily prioritizing and putting my personal growth at the top of the list.

More Things on a Stick

2009-02-17T21:26:00.004-06:00

More Things on a Stick began a second round of a popular learning program on January 20, promoted by Minnesota Multicounty Multitype Library Systems. My wife, who chairs the Silver Bay Library Board, brought home a flier about it today. I have two days to register.

The first round encouraged library staff to learn about and experiment with Web 2.0 tools. The second round opens the experience to others.

My first test encountered a possible hijack of my registration form by SurveyMonkey.com. At least the registration instructions, FAQ, and generous getting started information did not mention SurveyMonkey as a step in the registration process. Another step requires access to an account on wiki.com. Again, there was no indication that wiki got through to my gmail account. Maybe this is an intelligence test, like being dropped in Midtown Manhattan without a clue about expectations. Just see what comes next always spurs me onward.

One thing I learned from the registration process itself is my Silver Bay Public Library belongs to the NCLC Multitype region.

25 Things - Not!

2009-02-09T09:59:00.001-06:00

A facebook friend commented negatively on Feb 5, 2009 about the Notes lists proliferating on facebook. He provided a link to a Time Magazine article by Claire Suddath, "25 Things I Didn't Want to Know About You". USA Today had an article along the same lines, but without the usual media cynicism about fads.

One of my first facebook friends to post a "25 things" list, touched me with the phrase "because I wanted to know more about you". He might have meant the emotional plea personally, but the phrase is part of the boilerplate instructions. It took me two weeks to compose my list, which I posted on blogspot and facebook yesterday.

The Time posting was full of negative criticism, stereotyping the social networking world in a tone approaching character assassination of anyone who participates. I found it divisive. I'm inclusive. I try to avoid contentiousness in discussions, whether political, religious, or in any arena of social justice or community action.

The USA Today article recognized the powerful influence social networking is, a mass change in global communication.

I came late to the social networking party. Beyond facebook, I started posting on Blogger, and populating Google Reader with a wide range of interesting professional and commercial blogs, as well as my friend's blogs. My daughter had been paying a premium for a Typepad blog for a couple of years, a blog that became a casualty of the economic crises. I found more of my authentic friends (friends I actually know) using Twitter, as well as facebook and their own websites. I started another blog on Wordpress, to explore the features and links to a vast array of blogs.

What may be questionable and dangerous about the facebook lists can be "viral", as the Time article said. Any other online venue that asks us to forward an emotionally charged message to all of our friends, or to allow access to our entire list of email contacts, I immediately delete and mark as spam. Apparently, facebook has a computer server network capable of withstanding the flood of chain letter lists.

Unfortunately, Facebook and some of the Google applications lend themselves to easy mistakes by the user that can lead to computer viruses and all of the other things spam blockers and spyware try to catch. I started a Google gmail account yesterday. On my first email compositions, I noticed the top of the frame scrolling messages for the very same services and products I have been sending to my spam bucket for years.

Among the worst offenders has been the Republican National Committee, and their variations. How did they find me? By following my father's death notice in 1999 to my home address as I moved from one place to another. He never used a computer, but often manned a phone bank in St. Paul for local Republican candidates. When his personal and frequent cash donations stopped, I started getting the same strong-armed requests, questioning my patriotism and party loyalty. His snail mail versions went on for eight years after I returned the first several months worth marked "deceased". The latest Republican spam from headline senators and celebrities asks me to keep up the pressure against any show of support for President Obama. The language is morally bankrupt verging on treason.

Only slightly less troubling is the unknown bias of Time Magazine, and Claire Suddath specifically. One of the tools I picked up on from a blogging writing coach reminded me to use mind mapping. One chain starting from "Time Magazine" leads to "undisclosed bias" to "political bias" to the dumbing down of America. Another chain goes from Time's struggle to survive to its attachment to the "old world order", which leads to their certain failure. Another chain starts with undisclosed bias and leads through special interests, power plays, corrupt business practices, and fronts to organized crime.

How much of this mind map would be the same if I started a chain with facebook? Half a page of positive links, and cautions, but most links lead to useful tools and creative potential.

25 things about me

2009-01-25T14:37:00.001-06:00

If you think too much has been posted on this theme, skip the instructions.

Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged.

1. Our move to Little Marais in April 2001 was the best move we ever made.

2. The first photo of me on the North Shore of Lake Superior was August 1946 in a fishing boat with my dad.

3. My second favorite home was in the village of Praia da Vitorria, Terceira, Azores, Portugal.

4. "I could live in France for a month without worrying about money" (what movie did that quote come from?), I would do that every fall. Tough choice between Cannes and Avignon.

5. One of the toughest choices on becoming a Baha'i in 1973 was complying with the law requiring total abstinence from alcohol, while living on an island in the Azores where some of the best wine in the world cost ten cents per liter, from a farmer who lived just up the block.

6. The next hardest thing to learn as a Baha'i is has been to comply with "avoid partisanship like the plague", and engage the process for effective political action.

7. I started smoking a pipe while in the Azores, because the grizzled old Portuguese weathermen working with me looked too cool. One of the men carved a pipe for me out of a whale tooth.

8. I started oil painting while in the Azores. My transformation to "serious" artist resulted from a "Visual Journaling" workshop at the Grand Portage, Minnesota Trail Center, led by Hazel Belvo.

9. I played cornet from fourth grade through high school. I hardly touched the instrument after that, and finally donated it to a New Orleans relief effort supporting fine arts for youth, after Hurricane Katrina. I couldn't get a buzz out of it anyway.

10. My appreciation for a wide variety of good music dates from those early years in school band. I listened to rock, classical, and jazz on the radio as a preteen. I began collecting LP's in the 50's, and continued collecting every format change since; reel-to-reel, 8 track, cassettes, CD's, and iTunes downloads.

11. My dad had a good Firestone multi-band radio, including shortwave. My earliest obsession was listening late at night to clear channel AM stations and international shortwave broadcasts. I logged hundreds of call letters. I've never been without a good radio.

12. When I visit a new place, I drive around the city, walk the downtown streets, and explore the natural surroundings. If public transportation is available, I ride the El, the Tube, or the buses to see where they go.

13. I prefer the wilderness, but I get along in the big cities too. I could live in Chicago, certain LA neighborhoods, Pasadena, Santa Monica, Santa Barbara, but I would have to get out of town frequently.

14. As a weatherman, I quickly learn how to analyze and forecast the weather where I live. 90 percent accuracy was expected in Wichita Falls. 70 percent was the best we could do in the Azores, because satellite and digital forecasting was primitive in ,the middle of the Atlantic in the 70's. On the North Shore of Lake Superior it's a joke to say you can forecast, but I try.

15. Self-reliance always has been a priority. Today it means I wish I had solar power and some other alternative to the Cooperative power grid. Today, because we are faced with a serious two-day ice storm (Feb 9-10, 2009).

16. My dad was a master gardener. I have failed at every attempt at gardening in Little Marais, but practice Finnish sisu. ( I am Finnish only in my imagined common heritage).

17. I won't sing solo or duet, because my first experience was with my sister and I standing in front of Santa Claus, and making a ridiculous recording of Silent Night. I enjoyed singing in a choir.

18. Social networking is much more than a passing fad. I must be an active part of this rapid, massive, global change.

19. Social networking and blogging are the next phase in developing myself as a user of computer-related technology. The first phase started in 1965. The shock and awe phase was on a tour of 3M computer facilities in 1963, ten years before I knew I could work there.

20. My spiritual awakening as a child was while lying on bedrock crisscrossed with veins of quartzite, a star-filled night, feeling the music of the spheres, somewhere near where I live now.

21. I have experienced ongoing spiritual and personal transformations. Two were of the born-again kind. Common to all transformations was the sense that I must.

22. I wonder about the "I must". I view my self as a created natural and spiritual being. The only limitations imposed by "I must" are physical, or self-imposed.

23. Aurora borealis has been a symbolic blessing meant for me (with Denise sometimes). The appearance of a bald eagle along the shore does the same. A pure white snow goose swam by the morning after my father died.

24. I adopted one practice from the Celestine Prophecy. Watch for someone every day who has something for me, and I in turn have something for them. Watch for opportunities.

25. "Be anxiously concerned with the needs of the age you live in", is a Baha'i practice I encourage everyone to follow.

First Day a success for President Obama

2009-01-21T14:44:00.000-06:00

As posted elsewhere on Twitter and Facebook, my wife and I hosted a viewing party for the inauguration. Friends arrived about 10 AM CST, and were chattering away until people started to emerge from the Capitol. All were silent as the Vice President took the Oath of Office. No one spoke until President Obama finished his address. I found the transcript right away, provided on Yahoo! by the Associated Press, and made copies for everyone.

Another friend, Nancy Wong, who is a professional photogrpher, posted an excellent album on Facebook. Actually three days of photos, and the best of the shots were in the midst of the crowd on the Mall.

We enjoyed a potluck brunch, snacks and desserts. Friends hung around until 4 PM. The parade seemed anticlimactic. After everyone left, I cleaned up and watched Jeopardy.
My wife and I tuned in again later to watch the Neighborhood Ball. Excellent!

I got about 2 hours sleep before I popped awake at 12:30 AM. Watched Poker After Dark until 2 AM. Wondered if anyone called the new President at 3 AM EST. I’m sure he was ready to take the call.

Wayne Frame was at our party, also could not sleep that night. Several of the women were out for a morning hike at 10 AM, usually a 3 mile roundtrip to a campground at Tettagouche State Park. What is it about Inauguration Day that stimulated the neighborhood women, and agitated the men?
Three other neighbors went ice fishing up the Gunflint Trail. Success there; Ellen Hedin caught a 5 pound lake trout (big for a Boundary Waters lake), and had help from Art Fenstad pulling it out of the hole in the ice.

My wife and I went cross country skiing on the Baptism River Trails at Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center. Beautiful! That cured my day-after lethargy.

Unfinished business. I wondered why there was a delay in Senate approval of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. Senator Kerry gave a good speech on CSPAN, and the lead opponent, Senator Cornyn of Texas made sense until he suggested that the Clinton foundation should no longer accept donations from foreign contributors. I can see the point about lobbying for the favor of the Chief U.S. Diplomat. Contributions coming out of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, for example, carry the questionable perception that the U.S. covertly supports the education of terrorist youth funded by the same sources. The very purpose of the Clinton foundation is to solve problems that governments are unwilling or unable to address directly. If the foundation is an effective problem solver, it should allow a global effort.

Skip to the one week delay in approval of the nomination for Attorney General, and we see the same old partisan roadblocks that will be used to campaign against every new program the President puts forward. Who’s thinking of country first in such delays? Can you see the headline now about what was not accomplished in the first 100 days? Or, by February 17?

Thoughts about the Year 2009

2009-01-02T11:28:00.000-06:00

1. My wish for 2009 is rapid recovery from every crisis.
2. President Obama's inauguration can't come soon enough. Thankfully, his strong leadership already is effective. His complete cabinet selections and White House Staff assignments were made earlier than any other President-elect. There still is serious partisan opposition, but he has done what he can to take charge on Day One.
3. The lame duck activities of President Bush are disturbing. It's like a scorched-earth policy. What seems like necessary government "bailout" may turn out to be a scheme of corruption designed to reward a select few very wealthy individuals. It has been a pattern throughout the Bush Administration to put the economic squeeze on the most impoverished and middle classes for narrow, extreme political purposes. President Obama may have to use executive priviledge to stop the damage.
4. President Obama has world opinion in support. His detractors will second-guess every statement and action.
5. Economic chaos is global. Isolationists and protectionists already are promoting interests that would lead to total collapse, and it would take a generation to recover. Depression mentality is noticeable in ourselves, mostly a positive adjustment of priorities, accompanied by active support in our communities of interest.
6. My belief is that the Hand of God actively makes global change. Some is obvious. The outcome is not obvious. Some of the most painful adjustments are natural consequences of rejecting the Creative Word of God, and the current specific directive to promote the unification of mankind. National and religious leadership is responsible for the suffering of millions, and for working in unity of thought and action. The forces of extreme fanaticism are losing the battle, but causing great damage to the whole planet.

My interest and priorities.
1. Teach the Baha'i Faith.
A. Devotional gatherings and home visits with friends. Expand to others.
B. Studies circles with clusters of friends in Ely, and in our home.
C. Support intensive growth programs: Rebecca, Sean, and Kari.
D. Support National Baha'i Fund.
E. Teach in the natural course of conversation.
F. Daily prayer, scripture reading, and meditation.

2. Personal Art
A. More oil painting.
B. More photographic projects.
C. More drawing/sketching.
D. Completion of the Carlson Family DVD.
E. Priority to Masterpiece Arts Program, Mr. Tom Frericks 5th grade class in Silver Bay.
F. Develop relationships with friends at Grand Marais Art Colony.
G. Develop relationships with friends at Grand Portage.

3. Social networking
A. Creative blog work.
B. Explore Facebook applications.
C. Extend Facebook friendships.

4. Work
A. Support Denise's book indexing projects.
B. Return to Split Rock Historic Site as Interpreter.
C. Assist Wayne and Jennifer at Spirit of Gitche Gumi B&B, Gift Shop, Coffee Shop.

5. Fun
A. Twins Spring Training, trip to Sanibel Island, FL, end of February.
B. Cross country skiing
C. Ice fishing
D. Snowshoeing
E. Hiking
F. Canoeing
H. Scrabble Night

6. Family visits
A. Diane and Clyde Ekar
B. Cheryl Barrows
C. Lucille Gust
D. Kathy and Lester Carlson
E. Karen and Jerry Danielson
F. Nancy Warner

Year 2008 review

2008-12-29T15:52:00.000-06:00

Here are my listings for 2008 as I record them in my personal journal.

Three stories top my list.
1. Our Pilgrimage to the Baha'i World Center in March.
2. Barack Obama elected President
3. My daughter Rebecca's appearance on Jeopardy.

The bad news list
1. Global economic chaos
2. Our retirement investments took a hit ranging from 35-50% on various funds.
3. Major earthquake in China kills many thousands
4. Galveston, Texas area still has not recovered from Hurricane Oscar.
5. The major storm track from the southwest to the northeast across the U.S. pounded the same path of destruction over and over; tornadoes, floods, ice and snow storms.
6. Millions of Americans have lost their homes due to corruption and collapse of the financial markets.
7. Millions more are losing jobs.
8. Political corruption has only begun to unravel.
9. Myanmar devastated by Indian Ocean cyclone, and oppressive government refuses to allow relief.
10. Congo, Rwanda, and Dafur, Sudan - all scenes of genocide.
11. Al Qaida attack on Mumbai, India
12. Death of my cousin Richard carlson.
13. Death of friend, Jack Malan.

Personal highlights
1. Volunteer at Split Rock Lighthouse Historic Site, instead of paid interpreter.
2. Work at Spirit of Gitche Gumi B&B, Gift Shop, Espresso shop.
3. Cousin Charles Halverson's 80th birthday party, Rice Lake, WI.
4. Trip to Door County, WI.
5. Trip to Bayfield, Madeline Island, WI.
6. Labor Day weekend and week following. 38th wedding anniversary. Kari's 30th birthday. Photo shoots of Carlson homestead, Town of Lincoln and Amery, WI.
7. Volunteer at Minnesota History Center "Vatican Splendors" Exhibit in St. Paul.
8. Election judge at Little Marais Community Center for Lake County Unorganized Territory #1.
9. Visits with daughter Kari and friends in Chicago, May and November.
10. Getting relatively higher speed Internet service and setting up a simple LAN to serve it from desk top to laptop pc's.
11. Social networking on Facebook, and setting up this blogspot.
12. Being invited to teach the Baha'i Faith at Marshall School, Duluth.

Climate and climate change

2008-12-11T13:45:00.001-06:00

December 10 marks the beginning of a seasonal pattern. When I first moved to Little Marais in 2001, I analized the daily frequency of snowfall in Northeast Minnesota, and found that every day from December 10 to January 17 there is a 30 percent chance for one or more inches of snow. My analysis covered data records for 10 years from several reporting stations available online from the State Climatology Office. I'm sure that office has more complete statistics than what I used, but my results prove to be useful. This year's pattern started about a week early.

I provide daily observations to that statewide database. There are over 1300 such observers. There is a grid of sensors collecting detailed hourly temperatures throughout this northeast region. The Department of Transportation has its own sensors monitoring precipitation, including snowfall.

I have no doubt that rapid climate change is real. None of my following comments supports delay or second guessing of the urgent need to go green.

Climate data collection and analysis has improved dramatically in the past 10 years. Some of the weaknesses in the data remain the same, but do not change the results or conclusions. For example, I have three weather stations within 200 feet of each other, and there can be as much as a fifteen degree temperature difference between them due to Lake Superior lake effect. The difference is even more extreme as you move one or more miles inland. I make a judgment about representative data whenever I send a report.
Inland automated weather stations do not make judgments. The official National Weather Service data for nearby Silver Bay is from an airport located three miles inland, essentially in a protected mountain valley. Likewise, the Two Harbors readings are from an inland airport. Grand Marais has two automated stations. The one at the harbor reports similar conditions to mine in the winter, but the surface temperature of the lake often is warmer here from July through September, and it makes a difference. The airport at Grand Marais is several miles inland and over 1000 feet elevation above the lake. This hour the lakeside station is 8 degrees warmer than the airport. On an extremely cold day, the difference can be greater than 30 degrees.
What data should we use to conclude that the average global temperature has changed by one degree?

The State Climatology Office has methods to resolve the extremes and the differences. Satellite sensors provide detailed accurate information. There is little doubt about what's happening in climate now. Other means are required to analize conditions over the past 16,000 years, which is the period you need to cover in my region.

I mentioned in my blog entry on Economics that the Sun is the Major Force influencing our climate. I don't think that gets enough press. There are plenty of climatologists who contribute on solar activity and the Earth's responses. Another subject I haven't seen in the press, but probably has coverage if I did a search, is the potential massive release of methane gas from melting arctic tundra. What and when does that add to the greenhouse? What about the unusual warming of the deep ocean floor of the Pacific? Was that short-term or current? It's my armchair guess that these forces are major contributors to rapid climate change, more rapid than burning rain forests and spewing industry in China, India, and the U.S.

Economics

2008-12-06T14:46:00.001-06:00

This may not be the best time to admit that I have a BA in Economics, from Macalester College in St. Paul. I also have graduate certificate in Meteorological Engineering, from the University of Oklahoma. Both institutions may invalidate my certificiates based on my entries to this topic. I like the first Richard Daley's regard for experts, so I do not call myself one. My record as a successful weather forecaster is not great, but it's better than most TV weather forecasters in the Duluth Market.

Weather forecasting and attempting to forecast a way out of a global financial collapse have some dynamics in common. There are multiple layers of complexity. There is a tendency to ignore The Major Force (the Sun) imposing change on the global system. We often fail to notice a major change before being swept away by disasters. Then we stop our ears at the clang of the Earth ringing like a bell.

One of my favorite weather observers described the Indian Ocean Tsunnami and its after effects as that bell. There may or may not be an esoteric relationship between natural disasters, political change, terrorism, and multiple layers of complexity emanating from that same region.

By the way, if you try to sell me something because Netflix, DirecTV, and facebook identify me with the Duluth Market, you haven't done your homework. Duluth dominates, but we're on our own for jobs, economic development, or services of any kind in Lake and Cook counties of Minnesota.

I have been following some of the blog postings from the Economist, "Free Exchange" and " The World in 2009". They're not all outrageous, but here are two

One expert hopes the economic downturn marks the end of such "fads" as nutritional supplements and organic foods. She hasn't done her homework at American upscale markets or among the "buy local" crowd.

Another expert thinks a total ban on imports of all kinds should be imposed to bring about an immediate spike in American GDP. If you want a really Great Depression that idea would be a fast track to it. A rats nest of bureauracy would spring to life. It would take more than the 40 years it took to undo the consequences of protectionism imposed during the 1930's. If you work in the U.S. Department of Commerce or the European Economic Community in Brussels, you might think the idea sounds like fun. At least you would get renewed attention from multinational giants who know how to work the system. How about returning to the gold standard instead of the petro dollar standard. Would that be like vaporware in the tech bubble?

Masterpiece Arts

2008-11-28T09:40:00.001-06:00

The Northern Lake County (Minnesota) Arts Board sponsors the Masterpiece Arts program in the Silver Bay area schools. I have been among the volunteer artists/teachers who provide art classes in elementary school classrooms at least once a month. I have concentrated on the 5th grade for the past five years, and have filled in for other volunteers in grades 3 thru 6.

My practice has been to do an overview Powerpoint presentation in December, and then four or five weekly sessions in January-February. My overview covers what I do as an amateur artist, and also recent travels that have current or historic art interest. My overall theme for the weekly sessions is color, starting with basics such as color wheels. Last school year, for example, several volunteers included something about the Washington Color Field of the 1950's. I brought in examples of current manifestations. The prior year, I concentrated on master artists who had lived or worked in the Provence Region, where my wife and I toured in October 2006. Each of the last four years, my classes produced a large canvas acrylic painting based on these color themes. Many of the other classes have several years of large canvas works on display on the hallway walls and at the main entrance to the school.

I have been gratified by the support and cooperation of the teachers, as well as association with the volunteers and guest professional artists. For a very small population, total 11,000 in Lake County where I live, and 8,000 in neighboring Cook County, we have an amazing resource of artists and a supporting wide community.

Attached are a few of my own works, never intended for sale.
I will use this topic in Dave's World to prepare for this year's sessions.

Cypress swamp pre-Katrina near New Orleans.

Rocky Maze, Superior Hiking Trail

Thanksgiving 2008

2008-11-27T08:09:00.000-06:00

Today is an anniversary day.
In 1968, Denise and I became engaged. We married 38 years ago.

In 1905, the most devastating of Lake Superior storms, the Mataafa Blow, wrecked 29 ships. Expand the dates to include Nov 26-28 to account for the duration of that storm. As interpreters (tour guides) at Split Rock Lighthouse Historic Site, we highlight that storm above other disasters on the Great Lakes. The loss of life from a capsized ferry at Chicago was greater. A 1913 storm on Lake Huron resulted in as great a loss of life from shipwrecks, but not as many wrecks in a single day as the Mataafa storm. Mataafa was the name of a ship the got stuck sideways trying to get through the ship canal into the Duluth Harbor.

Nov 26-29 is a recurring period of great storms on Lake Superior, including several since we bought our place at Little Marais in 1993.

Today is relatively pleasant. A vigorous line of snow squalls will pass through before Noon. The wind will not approach sustained speeds above 60 mph. Waves will not exceed 30 feet. The temperature will not drop from +60 to -13 degrees F in a few hours.