Meg · Stout

So I've been using ping.fm to update all my social
networks.

Unfortunately, I didn't read the manual... So all the stuff I intended for
twitter and Facebook also ended up on my blogs. I should go back and fix
that sometime (but not tonight).

I also realized that I was losing the connection with other folks, because
while I would get responses to my posts, I wasn't commenting on other
people's posts. Made for rather one-sided conversations.

So in a few days I'll look like I always knew what I was doing, with all the
untitled status updates removed from my blogs.

I couldn't help but be glad that Jaime Ford's Japanese Keiko and Chinese Henry fail to find married love in the 1940s.

As a half-white child of the 1960s (back when such things were illegal in many states), I recall the hatred and torment I received from my peers (though my peers never physically beat me). The pain a Chinese-Japanese child would have endured during the 1940s is mind boggling.

Even as late as 1963, my Chinese aunt was driven from her marriage, her church, and her adopted country because of inter-racial hatred (daring, as she had, marry a white man).

My aunt even attempted suicide, as Jaime Ford's characters never do.

But in real life, as in fiction, time heals much.

My aunt and her first husband are remarried Death and time have freed them from pain, bigotry, and the second marriages that followed their 1963 divorce.

They are happy now, and I am glad of it.

Last month I had a chance to tour a friend's garden, and saw his very nice
composting setup. He'd acquired 2-3 very nice compost tumblers over the
years from neighbors.

Alas, I don't have any neighbors offering such stuff up for free. Even on
eBay the least expensive compost tumbler I could find was well over $100.

A search of the internet provided inspiration. The post How to Start a
Compost Bin in the City (with Little
Money)<http://gatheringinlight.com/2007/10/15/how-to-start-a-compost-bin-in-the-city-with-little-money/>sold
me. My 20 gallon Rubbermaid bin cost $12, but I was able to throw in
an extra lid (to catch the compost tea) for free. Five minutes with the
drill, and it's done. The week's paper shreddings and vegetable bits are
now happily ensconced there together.

In other news, we will be building a rain barrel later this month. Then
we'll be able to combine water conservation with having 55 gallons on
non-potable water in case of an emergency.

I recently purchased a new-to-me iBook off eBay. The primary purpose was so
I could use Scrivener <http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html> , a
powerful novel-writing program.
My other motivation for buying the iBook was wanting something I could write
on comfortably.

I had lots of computer things on which I could type before:

2 desktop computer systems
2 Asus EeePCs (7 inch screens)
3 AlphaSmart Keyboards

I love the little EeePCs, but eventually had to admit that the keyboard is
simply too small for me to use comfortably.

I don't mind the desktops too much, but they are fixed in space (and a
precious commodity in our home of net-savvy people).

The AlphaSmarts are ultimately portable and battery life is measured in
weeks rather than hours - particularly important for really long plane
flights. The keyboard is adequate, but not pleasurable.

I would never have purchased a laptop merely to have a more pleasurable
portable keyboard experience. But since I couldn't have Scrivener on any
platform other than a Mac with OS X 10.4 or later, I "needed" a Mac.

This particular Mac is an iBook G3 900 MHz machine with wireless, a 40 GB
hard drive, and a 12.1" screen. It's delightfully intuitive. Now that I've
downloaded Scrivener and the Flip4Mac WMV player, I had everything I need to
import my writing and upload my audio files for transcription, as necessary.

I already have been able to import and organize bits and pieces that have
languished for months (Sept 2008 and December 2008 for my "Children of
Heaven" (COH) and "Pearl of Alba" (POA) novel projects, respectively).

With my POA manuscript, I experimented with dictating scenes, planning to
transcribe the audio files and then organize the transcriptions into a first
draft. I found myself with a backlog of audio files to transcribe at the
end. Once I had transcribed the files, I had several hundred interspersed
snippets of text and that's where I left POA in December 2008.

The tangled mass of snippets that seemed overwhelming without Scrivener now
seems entirely manageable and I'm energized to move forward. Hooray!

In February my buddy, Luc Reid, asked for volunteers with whom he could work
on some area where they wished to become more motivated.

I had three areas that came to mind:

1) Writing
2) Physical Health (e.g., diet and exercise)
3) Household Organization

I decided that the first thing I had to knock out was the household
organization thing. At the time I started working with Luc, about 50% of my
home was effectively unusable because of the "clutter." It has been this
way for years. But now, less than a month after Luc started working with me
(an hour a week over the phone), I have 90% of my home available to be used
as originally designed. The remaining 10% (the erstwhile family room) at
least has a clear floor even if it does contain >200 neatly stacked boxes
awaiting "defragmentation."

Can I just say now that I am completely amazed that this happened so
quickly. I thought it would take months.

[moment of appreciative silence]

So now I have the mental space to turn back to my writing.

I'm in the process of acquiring a Mac iBook so I can run Scrivener. I'll
be a proud owner of an iBook on 17 April one way or the other. The cool
thing about Scrivener is that it will allow me to work with the bits and
pieces I have on my "Queen of Alba" manuscript (QoA has been too daunting to
deal with up to now).

However, my first priority is to write my "Children of Heaven" book, which
takes place during the last years of Joseph Smith's life, seen from the POV
of three people who lived with him. I wrote a draft of this a couple of
years ago, back before I knew how to write or half of the historical
factoids. That original draft was important and necessary, but the book I
will start writing now is as unlike that first draft as a newborn is unlike
the blastula from whence it evolved.

Don't need Scrivener to write "Children of Heaven." I just need a healthy
dose of "butt in chair."

*Yippie Ki Yea!*

From frozen milk to something else entirely...

My husband and I sometimes make time to attend a local discussion
group, where topics involving Mormonism are aired. The discussions
are housed in the Potomac home of a well-to-do individual. It's more
like visiting an Italian castle than anything else. And the
refreshments are good.

And the company is invariably interesting.

At the end of the month the discussion group will host George D.
Smith, who recently published a book titled "Nauvoo Polygamy: '...but
we called it celestial marriage'." I note that he is, in fact, both
author as well as the founder and current publisher of Signature
Books, the imprint bringing out "Nauvoo Polygamy."

I understand George D. Smith is a fascinating person. And since I am
highly interested in Nauvoo and the emergence there of polygamy, I
decided to buy George Smith's book.

My family was involved in the emergence of Nauvoo polygamy. So one of
the first things I did was try to find my people. The first page
listed in the index gives a super-brief summary. The second page has
nothing at all to do with my family member.

What?

I will be reading the book, but I've already noticed several instances
where the author's choice of words or characterization is like
fingernails on a chalkboard to this reader.

I expect George Smith is more personable in the flesh.

If you want a review of the book and don't want to wait for me to read
it, my husband found a review here: http://is.gd/fMGE.

If you shop at Costco, you've noticed that the milk cartons are very
unique - more rectangular than the normal jugs in the regular
supermarkets.

So I got thinking there must be a good reason for that.

It would be sufficient reason if they were able to reduce the
packaging for themselves. Maybe the new carton means they don't have
to have those big plastic crates (the ones we used to seek out back
during college - they made great furniture for the truly
penny-pinching). That would be sufficient reason, but of no use to
me.

On the other hand, the new carton might be good for freezing milk.
But I didn't know if freezing milk is "done." Turns out it is
possible, best done with skim milk, and it changes the mouth feel
enough that you'll never find the dairy council recommending the
practice.

But I'm just a busy mother with kids who want their milk. If having a
frozen gallon or so around between shopping trips lets me buy all my
milk at Costco (less than $3/gallon), that would beat the $4/gallon we
are currently paying at the local grocery.

So I did the experiment. Milk expands when frozen, but the Costco
cartons are thick-walled and have bunches of "grooves" in the side
which allow for expansion. Plus the more columnar form of the carton
means the milk can expand upwards without being forced into a bottle
neck. In all, it worked pretty well.

The milk took a while to thaw. The milk ice is much more ice than
milk. We started drinking milk before the ice had thawed, and that
milk tasted like powdered milk. But when we let the entire gallon
thaw, it tasted normal enough.

So - freezing milk is a bit of a hassle. But for our family, it is
sufficiently acceptable given the $ savings.

I have to admit it. I have an addictive personality.

No, not that you are addicted to my personality, rather that I find it
very easy to get addi... absorbed in things.

So this freecycle thing. I suppose it could be considered my latest
addiction. But it's a good addiction.

I don't need the stuff filling boxes and crevices throughout my home.
It's like the material equivalent of fatty deposits over muscles or
lining the walls of blood vessels. It looks gross and inhibits my
ability to do everything I might wish. For those who've encountered
the Flylady crowd, they refer to it as CHAOS (can't have anyone over
syndrome).

Each day in 2009 I've found something I don't want to keep around, for
whatever reason. I list it on the Freecycle page. Usually by the end
of the 24 hours I have not just one person who wants my discard, but
many people. I don't have to do much, just bag it, label it, and
place it near the door. The stuff flies out of the house. I feel
like I'm making people happy, and I'm happy because that stuff clearly
had value to someone. I wasn't *crazy* to keep it around all that
time. Silly, perhaps, but not crazy.

Others in the family are catching the "don't have to hoard it" fever.
My married daughter tells me she started a freecycle group in her
town. My younger kids help me search for freecycle fodder, or have
offered up their stuff.

So today I come home and ask out loud what I should freecycle today.

"Dad says to freecycle the rollerblades."

This is my husband who still has boxes of mag tapes from the 1980s.

Oh. My. Goodness. There is hope yet.

It's a new year - arbitrary as that is.

Still it's a chance to make a break with the past and start new - like the
cleansing baptism or communion serve in some communities.

Rather than tell you the myriad things I hope to do, I'll focus on one area:

Footprint.

Here are a couple of ways I'm explicitly going to go (or stay) green.

*Recycling*. We are lucky to have places nearby where we can recycle paper,
plastic, glass, metal, electronics, and plastic bags. This almost doesn't
count as a new thing, because we're pretty well set up to do these things
now.
*
Freecycling*. Again, we're lucky. I don't know if this is an option
everywhere, but in our area there is an active freecycle group.

Last year I mostly remember the cool stuff we got - a futon mattress and
frame, a dresser, a refrigerator. In the past month, though, I've started
offering stuff up for freecycle - a loft bed, a violin, electronics.

My 2009 goal is to offer up at least one thing per day (on average). I have
boxes and boxes of stuff I keep telling myself I should go through. For
years. But in my quest to find something else fresh and desirable, I expect
to see those boxes dwindle appreciably over the coming year. It would be so
nice to be able to actually use the space I own. I'll also get a better
sense of what is actually desirable - I mean, if people don't even want it
for free, is it worth keeping/donating?

*E-gifting*. In past we've received large boxes at Christmas time, but no
more. This year the gifts we received were modest in size if mailed. In a
couple of cases the gifts were hand delivered.

Exchanging gift cards? You may say, "What's the point?" I find that
knowing we have a gift card or check frees me to get a thing I really want,
a thing I wouldn't get if it were just me and my own funds. I figure I'm
freeing the recipient from having to exchange items. And if I give a
particularly fungible giftcard, they can use it for necessities, if that is
really their greatest need.

Besides, I've found that's an easy way to help out folks when I become aware
of a need. Someone's computer blows up with all their files, someone is in
danger of being evicted. I give generously through official channels at
work and church, but there are times when you just want to help a particular
individual who is down and out. E-gifting lets me do that and extends the
potential scope of friends I can help across the globe.
*
Fight the "Bigger, Better" temptation*. I already live in a town home
within walking distance of school and (in a stretch) church, and shopping.
It's a modest commute from work, which I can do by public transit when not
required to drive myself. So I'll remind myself that is good. No
salivating over lovely single-family homes that would increase my commute
and require that we use a car to do anything and everything.

Beyond that there are the decisions about what to do with the home we have.
There's a line between necessarily maintenance and "but I *want* a new
floor, redesigned fixtures, the thing that will make my house look like that
magazine ad." I can embrace the value of 'neat,' 'clean,' 'well-maintained'
as sufficient, rather than feeling deprived because I can't gut and trash
everything and start fresh.

Feel free to tell me other things I should be doing, or that you're doing!

I was thinking about updating my website, and thought it would be good to
review a couple of sites that I admire.

I started noticing that folks had bios. For example:

> Stephenie Meyer graduated from Brigham Young University with a bachelor's
> degree in English. She lives with her husband and three young sons in
> Phoenix, Arizona. After the publication of her first novel, *Twilight*,
> booksellers chose Stephenie Meyer as one of the "most promising new authors
> of 2005" (*Publishers Weekly*).

Ah, to be a best-selling author... There's also the biography of the lovely
Joy Marchand:

Joy Marchand holds a B.A. in Classical Studies from the University of the
> Pacific. She lives in Salem, Massachusetts, where she takes photos of odd
> signage, churchyards and the occasional roadside shrine. Joy's poems and
> short stories have been featured in *Bare Bone, Writers of the Future
> Volume XX,* the *Elastic Book of Numbers, Modern Magic, Time for Bedlam,
> Polyphony 5, **Interfictions*, *Talebones, Apex Digest,**Interzone*, among
> others. Joy has also worked as an editor for *Shimmer*, a small magazine
> packed with quality short fiction and stunning artwork. She is currently at
> work on a road novel set on Route 66.
>

If I convolve the two, mine would read:

Meg Stout holds a B.S. in Physics from George Mason University and a M.S. in
> Product Development from Naval Postgraduate School. She lives with her
> husband and daughters in Annandale, Virginia. She is currently at work on a
> novel about the Saint Margaret of Scotland.

Alas, my job and formal training don't *go* with writing fiction. However,
I know that the scientific method and cultural analysis I learned informs my
writing method. So perhaps a better bio would be:

Meg Stout graduated from George Mason University and the Naval Postgraduate
> School with scientific degrees. As a novelist, she applies the scientific
> method to true stories, uncovering startling possibilities. She is
> currently at work on a novel about the Saint Margaret of Scotland.
>

So do I mention the novel about Elvira Cowles, plural wife of Joseph Smith?
Hers is the story that compelled me to take up the craft of writing in
my dotage,
I mean maturity. Do I mention my husband and daughters? My home in
Annandale, Virginia? My job at the Washington Navy Yard? The fact my
parent's marriage was "void and prohibited" at the time of my birth in the
state where I was born?

Probably not, but time will tell.

I'm at the Narita, Tokyo airport, sitting in the Red Carpet Club. This is
actually the first time I've ever flown business class, so it's a new
experience. Quiet, comfortable seats, power, internet, munchies, free
beverages. If I actually imbibed anything more alcoholic than orange juice,
I could get beer, wine, and hard liquor for free too.

This morning I ate breakfast at a Vie de France in Yokosuka, Japan. It's
amazing how well one can get on without spoken language, just a big smile,
nodding and bowing at the appropriate moments. The food was heavenly, but
the memorable thing was the little old lady sitting across from me.

My grandmother was a little old hunched Asian lady before her passing. And
this little old woman sitting across from me picking at her pastry was so
like my grandmother that I started to tear up. I could never talk to my
grandmother. She spoke a dialect of Mandarin that was incomprehensible even
to the Taiwanese folks she ended up living amongst after fleeing from Mao
Tse-tung's communist regime. Her only window to the world was through her
husband and children, who learned to speak the language.

My dad resented the way he was treated as a foreigner, so he decided to
liberate his children from racial discrimination by making sure we were as
American as possible. He refused to teach us Mandarin. In fact relatively
few people now even realize we are 1/2 Chinese (thanks to the genes of our
tall, blond, european-stock mother).

So I never, ever, had a conversation with my grandmother that extended
beyond smilling and nodding and bowing (and hugging) at the appropriate
times.

A few years ago my Taiwanese sister-in-law moved in next door. I was so
excited. Now I could have my sister-in-law write a letter to my
grandmother, and grandmother could read it and write back to me. I asked my
dad for Grandma's mailing address.

"Why?" he asked.

"So I can write to her."

He looked at me funny. "But Grandma can't read."

"I know. J--- will translate my letter into Chinese."

"English, Chinese, it doesn't matter. Grandma can't read."

It was like my world turned upside down. Dad must have seen how upset I
was, for he leaned in, as though to confess something.

"Meg, Grandpa was a soldier and can read, but he was dogmatic - rigid.
Grandma might not be able to read, but she was the one who was creative, she
was the smart one."

Dad tapped his forehead. "I, you, we take after Grandma."

So I sat there in the Vie de France, crying, thinking about Grandma, who has
been dead now for almost 6 years. Then I got up and bowed and smiled and
nodded and went out into the sunlit street.

I don't partake of news if I can help it.

But I came across the factoid that some young Polynesian men allegedly
attacked some gay rights activists who were picketing the Mormon temple in
Oakland, CA.

Since the Polynesian men were caught on camera ripping posters off the
temple gates one would assume they are Mormon.

However, since they were screaming epithets (and allegedly swinging punches
off camera), they were not acting Mormon. Whether Mormon or not.

I think of my first husband. His drill sergeant found out he was Mormon.
Called him into his office.

"I'm going to break you, boy."

First husband had seen the sergeant working over a fellow Mormon, a rather
scrawny young man. The sergeant had ordered the rest of the platoon perform
standing push-ups until the Mormon private agreed to smoke a cigarette. The
private stopped coming to church after that.

The man who would become my first husband stuck his chest out and drew
himself to full height.

"Sir, I smoke, I drink, and I whore around. But I know Joseph Smith was a
prophet of God. You can't break me, sir."

This is hearsay, of course. After all, I wasn't actually there, nor do I
have this incident on tape. But it goes to illustrate the point that people
from your group, whatever that group may be, can act in ways that make you
absolutely squirm.

Since the Polynesian men who are alleged to have attacked the gay activists
were caught on tape, they will doubtless be brought to justice. Since they
were attacking gay activists rather than random hoodlums, they will be
accused of having committed a hate crime.

But in the media, an entire church is being tried in the court of public
opinion.

Alas, we read the Sermon on the Mount tonight. And so I've been reminded of
His commandment:

"...behold I say unto you, love [all mankind, including] your enemies, bless
them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them who
despitefully use you and persecute you..."

And so tonight our family's prayer was that the people in LA [and
California] will all be safe and treat one another with respect.

It's not easy. I was so excited when I bought Dragon NaturallySpeaking and
the digital voice recorder. I thought I would be able to record while
commuting and walking and exercising, then be able to hook up the recorder
to the computer and walk away.

Hah.

Alas, background noise and other factors prevent Dragon NaturallySpeaking
from transcribing directly from the digital voice recorder with acceptable
accuracy. So it didn't work that smoothly, but I have found a way to make
this work.

What I have discovered is that I can be playing the voice file on my
speakers, and speaking the text into my headset. In a way this gives me an
opportunity to revise the raw speech that I may have uttered on the fly, so
the speech that gets transcribed by the computer.

It turns out that when I am commuting or walking, I'm able to talk
relatively quickly. Going over the recordings from the last couple of days,
I had in excess of 10,000 words. It is perhaps taking me twice as long to
get the computer to transcribe the information as it would if the digital
voice recorder files would get transcribed directly. But 10,000 words across
two days is much faster than I would be able to do if I were merely sitting
at the computer typing.

The other thing that is absolutely thrilling is to sit at the computer
talking at a regular rate and see the text get transcribed as I'm talking.
And that is something I would miss if I were merely plugging in the digital
voice recording or walking away.

So I've got my method now. And I am happy.

It's that time of year again - New writers will chomp at the bit to
start writing at 12:01 am on November 1, 2008, signing up to do the
literary equivalent of a marathon by writing a 50,000 word novel in a
single calendar month.

As one who "won" Nanowrimo in the past, I'm invoking the Zokutou
clause (http://www.zokutou.co.uk/theclause.html):

"If you have already attained the status of Winner, you do not need to
start a new novel, as your main aim is now to finish one. You can now
consider yourself a winner if, by midnight on the 30th of November,
you have either:

1. Written 50,000 words on one or more previous works.
2. Completed your novel's first draft."

I'm in the throes of actively working on my historical fiction novel
about Saint Margaret of Scotland, with an outside of Nanowrimo
deadline to finish something that will be judged by *other people* on
15 December.

I'm meg.stout at http://www.nanowrimo.org - see you in November!

After a week on the other side of the world, I've now had a long
weekend to play with all my new software and techno toys.

The good news is that I can talk at the itty bitty Olympus digital
voice recorder, then plug the sucker into my USB port and have Dragon
Naturally Speaking (ver 10, Preferred) make sufficient sense of my
noises that I can go on to edit it to a clean draft.

On the path to this achievement, I've decided I very much love Ubuntu
(which unfortunately can't run Dragon) and I very much dislike Windows
XP (which unfortunately is required for Dragon).

Total cash outlay:

Computer equipment - free to me
Ubuntu - free to me
Open Office - $35 for 3 year registration
Internet - already "own"
XP - $76 off eBay
Dragon - $89 off eBay
Digital Voice Recorder - $32 off eBay

So $232 all told (includes shipping) plus a lot of time I probably
wouldn't have spent writing anyway.

Ah, the time outlay. Did I mention that I very much dislike Windows XP?

But there it is. I am now without excuses. I even did a lot towards
outlining my historical fiction novels - the basic shell is there in
both cases with 85% or more of the amazing complications that make my
characters very unhappy (and me very happy).

In completely unrelated news, my girlies (10 and 12) both were
video-taped for upcoming episodes of Astrocast.TV . Sometime in the
future you and your star-loving friends around the globe will be able
to see said girlies asking 1) the age of Jupiter and 2) when will the
sun subsume the orbit of the earth, along with the answers from GMU's
Dr. Harold Geller.

First - I love gmail. I know I've mentioned that before, but I
really, really do love it.

One of the things I love is the ability to create groups, made sweeter
by the fact that gmail will proactively suggest the name of contacts
and groups that fit what I'm typing.

If I want to e-mail all my family members, I type "chiuf," hit return,
and all the addresses I've added to my "chiufam" group show up. If I
want to post to my blogs (at blogger and livejournal), "bl" is
sufficient. And so forth.

Anyway, creativity. Fortunately, unfortunately, my job gives my lots
of opportunities to be creative. Save the world creative. I love it.

Alas, my novels suffer. It's like I have a finite amount of
creativity per day. Some days the paying job sucks down the entire
allotment.

However, I am committed to writing a new novel this year, as well as
writing a new from scratch draft of my 2006 Nanowrimo novel as soon as
possible. I just reviewed my notes from the novel-writing workshop I
took with Dave Wolverton, and I'm jazzed. Great stuff. Motivational.

[FYI, he's offering two new workshops next April - one for writing
outlines and another novel-writing workshop. For more information,
the link is at: http://www.runelords.com/journal/?p=68 ]

I'm all fired up to get cracking on my writing again, and I'm hoping
that I can bring technology to bear. I have the little ASUS Eee
laptop(s), which allow me to type in many odd moments (commuting on
the metro, riding planes). A good (but insufficient) first step.

Now I'm going to see if I can increase my production using voice
recognition software. Dragon Naturally Speaking Preferred is looking
really good, which would allow me to either talk at my computer or
talk into a digital voice recorder (letting the computer parse it into
editable text later). I've got most of one novel composed as a
detailed outline, with a paragraph or two for each of the 75-90 scenes
that I envision in the work. The hypothesis (to be tested) is that I
can get my first draft in the computer by:

* Reviewing the scene description
* Telling the scene out loud to the recorder
* Having Dragon Naturally Speaking convert the audio file to text
* Editing the text
* Reviewing the next scene description, and so forth.

I know there are several best-selling authors who "write" this way. I
tried doing the audiotape/transcription (e.g., true cheapskate) way of
doing this, and it was sufficiently successful for a first draft.
Alas, the transcription part was too labor-intensive for me to
continue.

I have a few days before I'll be able to test Dragon Preferred and the
recorder, since I'm unwilling to pay the money I'd have to fork over
to buy these things new at a brick and mortar store. So I plan to
spend the next few days while product is enroute completing the
detailed outline for the first book and starting/completing the
detailed outline for the second book.

Once upon a time there was no spam. It was back in the old days when
hardly anyone had e-mail.

Over the next several years spam exploded. I think the first spam
e-mail I remember was a plea from someone from another country, for my
help to access a fortune, for which I would earn a hefty percentage.
Then there were the sex and porn-related spam messages. This past
year the amount of spam made e-mail maintenance a major chore. It was
like trying to weed the Amazon basin.

Then I switched to gmail. All traffic to my multiple mail accounts
all come in via gmail's spam filters. Where I had been getting
dozens, if not hundreds, of e-mails a day, now I was only getting
e-mail from people with whom I really wanted to correspond.

I was thrilled.

But now I have the habit of touching my e-mail several times a day
(required in the spam days).

Usually nothing new is there.

I realize that spam gave me a mission, it was a dragon that needed
slaying on a constant basis.

Now the dragon is dead. Scaly and uncouth as he was, I feel the lack.

There are other dragons I need to slay. But spam was the dragon that
crouched at a critical gate to my world, the dragon I could not lock
behind a door or cover with a sheet. Spam was a dragon that implied
humans outside my own circle, who I could revile freely. My other
dragons are either caused by me or people I like to love, so I cannot
loathe with utter abandon.

There's no parting phrase that I can use, since they all signal a
desire that the departed return or be blessed or go with God.

So here's to spam, gone now. To the dragon I loved to loathe.

I love technology that works, particularly when it is free.

I typed "Ubuntu download" into my browser, and up came the link to
download the CD image. Copy that to CD, then install.

It takes some time, but everything works well. In this case,
"everything" is a Dell 4550 with a 80 GB hard drive that was being
thrown away.

The internet works, documents work, all the ports and drives work -
I'm a happy camper.

Now to go and do something with the technology...

I do family history. Easy is not a term I usually associate with
family history. But this week is different.

As background, let me explain why an organization would go to such
pains to make family history/genealogy easy. The LDS Church (aka
Mormon Church) has this doctrine that we have until final judgement to
choose our eternal fate. Therefore they perform saving ordinances
(e.g., baptism) for folks who didn't get around to accepting these
ordinances during their mortal lives. A major problem in recent years
has been folks around the world repeating proxy ordinance work. The
thing is it takes 17 manhours (between travel, proxies, helpers, etc.)
each time ordinance work is done for a single individual. If we
pretend that people's time is worth $20/hr, that's $340. So it's just
plain wasteful to be repeating work.

The second major problem is Church members not doing their genealogy
because it's hard. That's actually a more pressing problem than the
waste.

Anyway, the Church has invested in multiple server farms, software
algorithms, and complex databases to reduce duplication and make
things easy. It's being rolled out at new.familysearch.org in stages,
starting with outlying LDS congregations, finishing the LDS
"deployment" in Utah, then eventually opening this stuff up to
everyone.

New FamilySearch became available to Church members in the DC area
this week. One "that was easy"experience happened with a young mother
who had asked me to help her. In an hour I'd gotten her registered on
the system, and we had her family tree extended out four generations,
including confirming the dates she had already on hand with references
now available on the internet.

The other "that was easy" experience was on Tuesday, when I went to
the temple. I took the ordinance sheet I had printed at home (like
how you can print an airplane boarding pass at home). The nice little
lady at the counter simply put the paper under the scanner, and the
printer immediately spit out the slips we use in the temple to track
what ordinance work has been completed. It was the first time this
lady had used the system, and she laughed out loud, it was so easy.

Easy is good.

Do letters to newspaper columns count as literature? I don't know,
but here's one I'm sending to the Washington Post.

At issue is the question of whether Fairfax County, one of the largest
school districts in the United States and serving one of the richest
per capita constituencies, will shift high school start times to
almost 9 am.

Recently one of the 15% of parents who prefer the current schedule
over the proposed later schedule wrote up her view that "Early
Bedtimes Work, Too, for Sleep-Deprived Teens." She cited studies
claiming later high school start times lead to no statistically
significant improvement in academic performance, bright computer
screens that make it harder for students to fall asleep (a non
sequitur in my opinion), and that a schedule change alone will not
solve the problem of tired teenagers ("High school students need 2.25
more hours of sleep than they get now. The new schedule would make up
about half that deficit.")

She sees the glass only getting filled halfway and declines to
consider that a benefit. I disagreed. We'll see if my view gets
published in the Post.