How I spent this evening

I was sitting in my home office geeking away on the laptop and I hear my wife give a 'get over here right now, I need help' call -- I'm thinking 'kids', 'injury', 'fire' -- something along those lines. It turns out that we had a flying squirrel in the house.

About 9 years ago we had a family of flying squirrels take up residence in our walls and one of them ended up biting Griffin (18 months old at the time) and he had to go through a series of rabies shots. He had a fever reaction to the shots, but fortunately Tylenol/Advil kept the temperature down enough for the month. Over a few nights I caught all the baby flying squirrels and the mother (who all went off to the NH wild animal people for rabies tests on their brains [all negative] -- a neighborhood cat got one [the male?])

So I suppose Wendy does have a reason to be a little freaked out.

Contrary to what animal control may tell you -- 1) they are not nice docile animals, 2) yes, they are native to NH and 3) yes they do like to fly/glide. Just like the little bastard who climbed up our wooden beams and glided in the living room (twice!) tonight.

A long story short -- after chasing it around the living room/kitchen it hid in the closet near the front door. The closet just stuffed with all kinds of crap. After pulling a bunch of stuff out, Wendy let out a very impressive scream as the flying squirrel made a break for the front door and was gone.

It is an hour later now, and after thanking the the nice neighbor and policeman, I'm back in my office. But now drinking some Port.

Good night.

BTW, I'm pinning the blame on Addy and Emma for leaving the door open this evening and giving the beastie a chance to come in.

David Byrne & Tosca Strings: 'My Backwards Life' tour -- excellent concert!

Last night we saw David Bryne at the NH Capitol Center for the Arts and he put on an excellent show!

The show started with an Argentinian singer and keyboardist who did a 45 minute set. She sung in Spanish and had a bit of a Susan Vega sound going on. It was okay, but clear that the audience wasn't really into it.





After the intermission, Bryne and the Tosca Strings (4 violins, 2 Cellos, drums, guitarist and keyboard/drums) came on and started with one of his newer songs. The show got going with the next I Zimbra the crowd went wild. There were some strange transitions (bunch of folks dancing and then into a version of La Traviata) but the mix of classic Talking Heads songs (Mr Jones (with long jam session), Heaven, Life During Wartime, Psycho Killer [with strings!], etc), some songs written for movies, Rei Momo, Cuban/Latin style, Catherine Wheel, etc.

On a related note, there is a recording of a full Tom Tom Club concert in the Live Music Archive section of archive.org.

At lunchtime I going to pickup another copy of the Stop Making Sense DVD (first one was scratched to death, the VHS long lost among the Barney/Power Ranger tapes) and start to inculcate the music of the Talking /David Bryne/Tom Tom Club, etc on all the kids. Logan and Spencer will dig Byrne's dancing and Griffin already thinks Life During Wartime is 'cool'.

My office is now officially a Windows Free Zone

My office has been declared a Windows Free Zone


Office
Archaeologists will notice the 'Digital is a Software Company' coffee mug, the 'Compaq Solutions Alliance Test Drive Linux license plate' and the various 'hp invent penguins'

The Orange County Genealogical Society Quarterly / Volume 34, Number 1 Quarterly (May 2004)

[What is this?]

• July Meeting Cancelled, Research Room will be closed that day


• Death of Members: Marjorie H. Doland


• Reunion Notice:
  
  
  
  • BULL: The 137th Annual Bull Family Picnic - Saturday, 21 Aug
    2004
  
  
  • CONNELL-KENNEDY-MURTHA: The 36th Reunion - Sunday, 25 July 2004
    
  
  
  • MAPES: The 118th Reunion - Saturday, 14 Aug 2004
  
  
  
  


• Donations: Descendants of John Lee and Sarah Perine, of Westchester Co,
  NY; The Old Stone Bank -- History of Rhode Island;
  List of Names on Tombstones at the Brick Church in Montgomery, NY; Tuthill Family information; Descendants and Ancestors of Adam Overpeck and his Wife Elizabeth Mann, of Sussex and Warren Counties in New Jersey; Bucks, Northampton, Pike and Bradford Counties in Pennsylvania


• New in the Research Room: Settlers of the Beekman Patent, Dutchess County, NY Vol VII with surnames Hunter to Leavens;


• Queries


• Answers to Queries


• Ancestor Tables: Ancestors of William Fancer Denton


• Civil War Veteran


• My side of he Clement King line


• Bible Records: Edsall/Littel Family Bible Records


• Orange County, NY Spanish-American War Enlistments


• Where They Went: Pike Co, Pennsylvania


• Newburge Directory for 1858-1859 (Marlon, Edward -> Noe, Albert


• Orange County New York Early Marriages: Faulkner-Robinson -> Foulprouck-Conly


• Records of the Town of Wallkill, Orange County, NY: Births 1881-1909, Shafer -> Stanley

register1-dot.ll -- new report for Lifelines genealogy program

This week I whipped up a new report, register1-dot.ll, to use with Lifelines. It creates a directed graph of escendants from a particular individual. You then use 'dot' from the AT&T graphviz toolset to create a GIF, PostScript or other file.

Here is a graph from my immigrant ancestor Anthony Vincent Nozell.
I've removed the names of all living persons, but you get the idea.

"Descendant graph of Anthony Vincent Nozell (click for fullsize, it *is* legible)"

It is based on the existing register1.ll and register-tex.ll reports
and there is plenty of room for improvement.

Free State Project choose Grafton, NH as a Free Town; resident responds with a blog

An acquaintance of mine recently moved to Grafton, NH and discovered
that some folks from the href="http://www.freestateproject.org/">Free State Project have
targeted it as the first place to turn into a href="http://www.freestateproject.org/about/essay_archive/freetown.jsp">
Free Town based on
libertarian ideals. Just this week they appear to have closed on 237
acres of land for their homestead.

Well, he isn't very happy and after doing some research on some of the
people, it is very unhappy.

So is has started SaveGrafton.org
and started up a blog
to help get the word out.

Bill Moyers talks about blogs

Last night I caught the very end of NPR's FreshAir which was an interview with Bill Moyers. In response to a question about what sort of tv/print/web media he reads/listens to he said blogs 'is the closest we have come to, in a long time, to the history of the American media in the beginning' and then talks about the parallels of blogs and the early American press of the 1700s.

Skip ahead to about 36 minutes into the show and hear for yourself.

Some tips to (re)install grub on an HP ProLiant server

Yesterday I needed to fix the MBR of a ProLiant (Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 2.1) by reinstalling grub and grub-install just won't work.
grub-install assumes that the boot device is in the form /dev/hda or
/dev/sda and since most ProLiant use a SmartArray RAID controller its
boot device is typically /dev/cciss/c0d0.

So, in order to recover this is what I did:

* In /etc/grub.conf (a link to /boot/grub/grub.conf) uncomment the
line that looks like this:

     boot=/dev/cciss/c0d0
     

* Make sure /boot/grub/device.map is setup right and looks like this:

        (fd0)     /dev/fd0
        (hd0)     /dev/cciss/c0d0
     

* Run grub like this:

   /sbin/grub --batch --device-map=/boot/grub/device.map 
        --config-file=/boot/grub/grub.conf --no-floppy
   grub> root (hd0,0)
   grub> setup (hd0)
   grub> quit
  

Hope that helps!