Archive for September, 2006

New Lost City Ramblers

I should say something about the concert we saw last weekend. Mary, Laura and I went over to Berkeley to see the New Lost City Ramblers, who have been collecting and performing old-time, mostly Appalachian music since well before I was born. The leader is Mike Seeger, who is brother to Peggy Seeger and half-brother [...]

Well-being

It’s funny how discussions of child well-being policies seem to attract both the smartest, most compassionate commentators and the most self-absorbed idiots. This one is not an exception.

Berkeley Old Time Music Convention

We’re in the youth showcase at 11:00 a.m.

New Lost City Ramblers

And the Stairwell Sisters.

The words and the bees

Here’s something I’ve been working on as a support for training my documentation team to convert to XML, which is a bit more fun than it sounds like but requires some fairly fundamental rethinking of what a writer does. There is a labored and over-extended analogy with bees, but I think I might keep that [...]

Good night, have a good day.

At least two nights a week I have to get back on the clock after the kids are in bed, for phone meetings with the India branch of the company I work for. Most meetings are in our evening hours, their morning. My own team meets at 10 pm Tuesdays (10:30 a.m. Wednesday, India time) [...]

Organizing your books by color

The more you think about it, the less crazy it sounds.

St. James Sessions

Here are some magnificent tunes recorded live in the 1920s. Lynn Point made MP3 files of them so they can be downloaded.
My only quibble: Why they were transferred to cassette tape first, and then to MP3, I don’t know. Seems like there would be a noticeable quality cost there, even with good audio equipment. It’s [...]

Starr King website meeting

Look away

I’ve always got an eye open for musical role models that Laura might like. She has pronounced likes and dislikes already, but she hasn’t heard all that much. (She digs Arlo Guthrie enormously, and she’s been liking the very impressive Abigail Washburn CD we got recently, to give you an idea of how her tastes [...]

When I’m 64

Garrison on Salon.com: “Twenty-four people packed into the dining room for my 64th birthday dinner and made a steady dull roar from the salad course right on through the cake and coffee, and I hardly got a word in edgewise. People kept inquiring if I was having fun, which is irritating. The answer is no. [...]

Structured Procrastination

I have finally found a self-improvement, life-enhancement program I can get behind.

Lilly’s selected works

Did Rothko have MS Paint when he was a kid?
(Click picture for slideshow.)

Lilly at school

Lilly spent the last couple of weeks of the summer going to day camp at Starr King Elementary, getting ready to start Mandarin immersion kindergarten there. (Started now, and going well, thank you.) We had a couple of playground get-togethers to meet the other families in the program. It’s a nice mix of people from [...]

Word of the day

Disambiguate.
Got to be kidding. First person on my team to use this word gets 10 pushups.

Santa Cruz

Catching up on some of the summer activities: In the middle of August, on an impulse, we grabbed the last empty spot at the Henry Cowell campground up in the hills above Santa Cruz. We spent the weekend there hiking and goofing off, and then descended on the beach boardwalk on Monday for some intensive [...]