Quote, May 21 2013 – Sometimes simplicity is best, but not easiest

“All children want is something stable. They want to know that you love them. It doesn’t have to be love with big computers and fancy clothes and all of that. Just that you care.”

As for rules, “I’d insist that they have to do something with their lives—and actually they have.”

- Joyce Dumont, quoted in the article “This North Dakota Mom, 77, Reared 69 Kids”, by James R. Hagerty, The Wall Street Journal, May 11 2013 (site last accessed May 21 2013)

No, I don’t have kids. And I know a lot of parents get quite irritated with advice or opinions coming from people who don’t have kids of their own.

But I’ve been around kids, and I agree with Joyce Dumont’s opinion.

This will sound odd, but to me kids (especially little kids) are a lot like puppies: more than anything else, they want to go with you and do what you’re doing. They want you to notice them and hopefully care about them.

I had a friend in Portland who was in his 50s when I knew him. This man had a couple of failed marriages behind him and had spent a lot of time as a single parent. He said at the time he was short of money and so took his kids to every free thing he could find – which meant a lot of time outdoors in various parks, on the Oregon coast, and places — but he always felt guilty he couldn’t give them fancier stuff.

He said it was amazing to him when his kids became adults and his daughter commented one time that he had been the best dad ever, he had done so much stuff with her and her brothers, it hadn’t been like some of her friends who were packed off to one camp after another — away from their parents — all summer long.

Quote, April 15 2013: The Public Fight vs. the Private Fight, some thoughts on fights in general, and the difficulty of finding people who balance feelings and consequences

“In all my years of watching (and participating) . . . I have never once seen a situation where “talk” accomplished a damn thing. In fact, idle talk often creates the opposite reaction to what was intended. . . .

. . . He probably thought he could talk, and markets would obey him. Some egg is going to hit Jack in the face. The “rule” in these matters is that you don’t pick a public fight that you can’t win”

- Bruce Krasting, “The Scariest 50 Hours”, Bruce Krasting, post dated April 13 2013 (last accessed April 15 2013 for this post)

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I tend to refer to different types of disputes as different “Fights”. This comes from a seminar I attended years ago on the fighting systems of George Silver[1], where we discussed how Silver referred to various different conflicts as different Fights.

So, when I occasionally make comments in conversation about the public fight versus the private fight, both of those are capital-F specific types of Fights[2].

Useful tools for digital photographs

These are some useful links and tools I stumbled across recently.

I like taking photos and went fully digital almost 10 years ago, so I have lots and lots of digital photos. However, I have limited experience with all the thousand-and-one ways you can manipulate photos digitally, or all the information you can get from a digital photo file.

PhotoME doesn’t do any type of image manipulation. But it WILL show you just about everything it’s possible to find out from a digital photograph regarding the camera’s settings. In the case of some digital cameras, they embed a surprising amount of data into their picture files — what type of camera, both model and manufacturere; which lens; which exposure; was a flash used; and a ton of other stuff.

PhotoME will work with images in many different file formats, including JPEG, TIFF, GIF, PNG and most RAW file formats.

I’ve already played around with PhotoME a bit, it’s pretty impressive. Extremely easy to download and install too.

(NOTE: that camera data is referred to as EXIF data, it is embedded in your digital pictures by your camera. I am not certain, but I think there are applications and programs which can remove that EXIF data from your digital photographs, in case you don’t want the entire world to know which cameras you use.)

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EXIF Viewer is a plugin for your Firefox web browser. It can show EXIF data of pictures on your computer if they are in JPEG format, and also pictures displayed in Firefox from other sources (such as web pages).

I haven’t tried EXIF Viewer yet, it looks interesting but is limited to JPEG files only.

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Stolen Camera Finder is a web site that will help you track down a stolen or lost camera, based on the camera serial number in EXIF data from pictures from that camera.

(Obviously, if your camera is lost or stolen before you get any digital pictures from it saved to somewhere besides the camera, and you didn’t bother to write down the camera serial number, then you’re probably out of luck.)

This is another service I haven’t tried, but I thought I’d put up a link to it while I’m writing this post.

Quote, April 11 2013 – Something I hadn’t read before; an article I stumbled on by accident and am still thinking about

Medical researchers have long puzzled over schizophrenia’s late emergence (it was first diagnosed in 1911, in Switzerland) and its prevalence in the industrial world, where the illness is degenerative and permanent. (In “primitive” societies, when it exists at all, it is typically a passing malady.) In 2005, when Jean-Paul Selten and Elizabeth Cantor-Graae, experts on the epidemiology of schizophrenia, reviewed various risk factors—foremost among them migration, racism, and urban upbringing—they found that the factors all involved chronic isolation and loneliness, a condition that they called “social defeat.” They theorized that “social support protects against the development of schizophrenia.”

- Susan Faludi, “Death of a Revolutionary”, The New Yorker, article dated April 15 2013 (yes, I know I read it on April 11 . . . must be going to appear in the April 15 2013 edition of The New Yorker, but I’m not sure what date it was published on the web)

First off, I would like to warn anyone thinking of following that link: the paragraph I posted is the only paragraph in the article that’s really about the causes of schizophrenia. The rest of the article is about the life and times and death of Shulamith Firestone, someone who was a radical feminist in the 1960s and 1970s.

Secondly, I am personally not a big fan of radical feminism. I realize that not too long ago, it would not have been easy — or even possible — for a woman to get a degree in electrical engineering, and not long ago it was considered to be socially unacceptable for a woman to be unmarried in adulthood. I am glad that today my gender does not determine what college degrees I am able to study and that I am not judged by my marital status.

But for all that, I feel feminism achieved many great things and then went way too far trying to unmake and remake the world.

With all that out of the way, I would still really recommend the full article.

Recipe: Light and refreshing cherry chipotle salad

I like tart cherries in cherry pie and cherry cobbler, but wanted to see if I could find any uses for them that are not a sweet dessert. So when I stumbled across a recipe for a salad made with tart canned cherries, I decided to try it (with some variations).

This recipe is mostly based on the “Chipotle Cherry and Black Bean Slaw” recipe which is at the recipes section for Oregon Fruit.  (Or perhaps that should be OregoN Fruit?)

This recipe turned out really good.

From the obituary for someone I didn’t get many chances to talk to, but often heard a lot about

He truly woke each morning with a song in his heart. He provided a role model for all. Humble yet wise, smart and yet unassuming, he always expected the best of himself and his kids. He will be remembered as the man who taught us to snow ski, water ski, windsurf, hunt and treat people as equals regardless of their social standing. Every cribbage game well played, ski run enjoyed, joke well told and poem recited by memory provide a testament to this remarkable man.

From the obituary for Carter Williams, Great Falls Tribune, April 3 2013 (site last accessed April 7 2013)

Carter Williams was a friend of my father and grandfather. I’ve met him a few times and he had always had interesting things to say.

He was 95 when he passed away last week.

The following is from part of his obituary. Hopefully all of us are as thoughtful during our lives and leave as much of an impact on others.

Tech stuff: A rather humorous and poignant post on The Register about being the local computer geek who fixes everyone’s computers.

As I like to remind noobs, our sparkly IT-enhanced world was largely created and is still run by people in their late fifties and early sixties, and the giants on whose shoulders they stood are now little old geezers who wear their trousers too high.

- Alastair Dabbs, “I am NOT a PC repair man. I will NOT get your iPad working”, The Register, publish date March 29 2013 (site last accessed April 6 2013)

Be careful who you’re around if you follow that link, the post does contain some profanity.

Even so, it’s a humorous and poignant story about being someone who gets called on by all the neighbors to set up their various pieces of technology. Modems, printers, computers, laptops . . . Dabbs has been asked about all of them.

This part made me laugh:

one of the older partygoers is about to tell me that some new-fangled technology is too much for him to cope with now that he has reached the age of a hundred and ninety-eight or something. “In fact… it’s still in the box!” he cries, in the mistaken belief that this is funny. I humour him by laughing as if I hadn’t heard the line before.

Naturally, I suggest that he would have more success if he takes the iPad out of its box, reads the instructions and – what the hell, let’s throw caution to the wind – switches the [redacted] on. But it’s all useless: what he really wants is for me to do it for him. So I feign interest and offer to set up his iPad at some point in the near future, at which he feigns surprise and accepts with feigned gratitude.

I’m not there . . . yet. I’m not yet the person who sets up all the neighbors computers . . . I just set up some of my family’s computers occasionally, and definitely set up the MP3 players for my Mom and Dad. And decide what type of gadget to use as an MP3 player, and what app, and what program to burn some of our huge stack of books-on-CD onto MP3s that the MP3 players I’ve picked out can actually play.

And I’m not . . . yet . . . the person who leaves a gift from the younger relatives in its box because I don’t want to both learning yet another new piece of gadgetry. I can see myself reaching that level one day, and I can also see myself staying as I am, not a super-early adopter, but someone who often checks out new things after the first wave of early adopters has had a few years to work out the bugs and establish yes, this is an actual useful piece of hardware or software.

But it is always nice to help those who would struggle mightily with something that easy for you (one of the reasons I’m currently devoting about one day a week to helping a young friend work his way through an online college course in introductory philosophy), and sometimes the gratitude of others has unexpected benefits.