Archive for the ‘Family’ Category

A golden view (& a little history of Minneapolis)

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010
A golden view

A golden view

So I’ve been a pretty good boy while here in Minneapolis, and have left my camera back at the B&B every day, focusing instead on important things like course prep. Yesterday, though, I gave myself one day of photography, focusing on St. Anthony Falls, the Mill District, the Mill City Museum, and the Guthrie Theater.

While I was in the Guthrie I made my first trip up to the 9th floor where the Dowling Studio is. The 8th and 9th floors are mostly for education and cutting edge work, and the architect felt that this called for yellow windows to ensure that the people working there always had a "sunny" view. I’m not sure I buy that argument, but I must say that they provide a really amazing view of the city, including this shot back across to the old Mill District and the great Gold Medal Flour sign. So the weird colors here aren’t my doing, and nothing in Photoshop, but are the result of shooting through several inches of yellow-tinted glass.

If you’ve been to the Guthrie, but never been up to the 9th floor, I definitely recommend it. To get there you have to catch an elevator at either the 4th or 5th floor (only staff can use that elevator to go to the 1st floor) and head up to the 9th floor. It’s totally cool to go there, because that’s how you get to the Dowling Studio, which is the third and much smaller theater at the Guthrie. I was there in the mid-to-late-afternoon, and the light was really interesting, but I suspect that it changes quite a lot all through the day.

In all my wandering around I also learned a ton about the origin of Minneapolis (which I’d known almost nothing about). I’d always assumed the Cities were here primarily because of the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers, but no! Minneapolis is all about the water power of St. Anthony Falls, the only waterfall of note on the entire Mississippi River. This initially powered sawmills which sliced up the northern forests into planks, and then drove the amazing flour milling industry that for 50 years made Minneapolis the largest producer of flour in the world.

Most of the old mills are gone, but there’s are bits of a few, including this old General Mills grain elevator and the shell of the adjacent mill that now houses the Mill City Museum.

Fascinating stuff, and a really fun day of taking photos.

Conveniently yesterday’s prompt from The Daily Shoot was

Make a photograph that features a sign of some sort today. Maybe a stop sign. Maybe an information sign. Or an advert.

Hey, I took a lot of photos of signs (many, in fact, of this wonderful Gold Medal Flower sign), so here you are.

Posted in Art, Dowling Studio, Drama/Performance, Family, General Mills, Gold Medal Flower, Guthrie Theater, Mill District, Minneapolis, Mississippi, Mississippi River, Phi, Photography, St. Anthony Falls, Travels, grain elevator, history, industry, minnesota, museum, photograph, signs | Comments Off

An excellent time at the Minnesota Fringe!

Saturday, August 14th, 2010
Promo shot for Speech! at the Minnesota Fringe

Speech!


Tom and I are living in the Cities for 9 days while he’s in the Shakespeare workshop at the Guthrie Theater, and quite happily our first week coincided with the last week of the Minnesota Fringe Festival. We saw some great shows, and with a little luck you can still catch some of the awesomeness, either tonight or as one of the encore performances tomorrow, where the best selling show at each venue gets one more show.

Tuesday we saw James T. Wilson, a two person show including Stanton Pavlicek in the title role. We know Stanton and his family from Morris (his dad was a huge help in building an enormous frame to hold up our gargantuan honeysuckle vine), and it was cool to see two 18-year olds just out of high school in this setting. The show itself was still struggling to become, and while there was a of potential, it’ll need some more work to realize that possibility.

Thursday we saw Speech!, an absolutely hilarious comedy about the goofy (and often twisted) world of high school speech competitions. The writing and performances were tres sharp, and the audience was rolling in the aisles from the start to finish. This show has received a number of well deserved nominations, including a best male performance for our friend and UMM alum Tim Hellendrung! Tim’s did lots of cool improv back at UMM (as well as being an excellent manager for the campus radio station), and has continued to develop at Comedy Sports in Minneapolis. It was great to see him do such a fine job in a great ensemble production like this. Big congratulations to Tim and the entire cast and crew!

Last night (Friday) we saw what will sadly be our last show, because we head back to Morris this afternoon so Tom can hang with his friends some before we come back to the Cities Sunday night. We went out with a bang, though, catching the amazing O(h) by casebolt and smith, a two person show unlike any dance performance I’ve ever seen before. They combined some great dance with liberal splashes of spoken word and singing, providing a rich piece of performance than transcended any simple notion of genre. There was wonderful (often comedic) commentary on both culture in general and dance in particular, creating a really fun experience that was also chock full of food for thought. They also received a number of nominations, and our group (two straight guys and a woman) all agree that a sweaty Joel Smith in Superman briefs is hot!

Promo shot for O(h) at the Minnesota Fringe Festival

O(h)

There’s a great section in this performance about intellectual property that inspired a long enough commentary that I’ve moved to it’s own post. It’s not often in my experience that a dance performance explicitly opens these kinds of doors, so check it out.

Posted in Art, Drama/Performance, Family, Guthrie Theater, James T. Wilson, Minneapolis, O(h), Phi, Shakespeare Workshop, Speech!, Tim Hellendrung, Tom, UMM, University of Minnesota Morris, alum, casebolt and smith, comedy, dance, intellectual property, minnesota, minnesota fringe festival, performance, theater | Comments Off

Looking for a couch (or 2) to crash on

Friday, July 30th, 2010
Red Couch Project Set 8 (17 of 19)

We promise not to be this hard on your furniture :-)

Thomas is one of the 20 or so kids from the upper mid-west that have been selected to participate in the Guthrie Theater Shakespeare summer workshop next month. Cool, eh? This means that he and I get to spend 9 glorious days in Minneapolis, with Tom going off to study acting with really top notch actors and directors, and I hang around doing course prep and verifying that people still say inane but distractingly amusing things on the Internet. (Sue, in the meantime, gets another 9 days of quality time with the cats.)

We got a pretty good deal at the Faculty House and will be staying there except they couldn’t put us up until the 11th. That means that we’re looking for a place or places to crash for the nights of the 9th and 10th of August. Anyone in the Cities got a couch or two we can plop on? We can arrive pretty much whenever on the 9th, and he has to be at the Guthrie by 10am both the 10th and 11th, so proximity to the Guthrie isn’t a particular necessity.

Also, if any Cities folks want to do lunch or dinner or some such, let me know and we can make arrangements!

Thomas in the MAHS production of "The boys next door"

Thomas, worrying about where we're going to sleep

Posted in Drama/Performance, Events, Family, Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis, Phi, Shakespeare, Thomas, Tom, summer workshop, theater | Comments Off

Massive road trip, days 7-11

Monday, July 12th, 2010

Day 7 started with a vist to Lewis and Clark College, which was interesting if not overwhelming for Tom. It’s a gorgeous campus and the study abroad stuff there is very cool, but it didn’t particular ring Tom’s bells.

We then spent most of the day hanging around Portland together, including a visit to the mighty and wonderful Powell’s City of Books (one of the last, great independent book stores) and checking in at GECCO to get my registration stuff. Tom totally loved Powell’s (“I could get lost in here!”), and has in fact spent large amounts of my money and his time there this week while I was at the conference. We also went out and saw Toy Story 3 that night, which turned out to be every bit as good as everyone’s said it is – lots of fun and very well written.

Day 8 was our last college visit in this part of the world, as we headed up to Olympia, Washington (2 hours north of Portland) to visit Evergreen State College. This was a real eye opener for both of us. I knew Evergreen was cool (and another of the small number of public liberal arts colleges in the U.S.), but didn’t know a lot of the details, and I think we both found the unusual curriculum and environment really interesting and thought provoking.

I had arranged beforehand to meet some of the computing faculty at Evergreen so we could learn a little more about their program as part of a program review we’re doing at Morris, so after the information session and tour we met up with Sherri Shulman and then headed over to meet her husband and fellow CS faculty, Neal Nelson. When Neal walked in, there was this very weird moment where we both those we knew each other but weren’t sure why. Duh, duh, and double duh – Neal was my undergraduate thesis advisor at Reed! I’d lost track of him when he left Reed in 1988, and I somehow thought he’d gone into industry so I wasn’t even looking to find him anywhere in our travels. Given all that and the the fact that his name doesn’t particularly stand out (and that I’m really crap with names), I totally didn’t consider the possibility that I knew this Neal guy we were going to see. After recovering from that somewhat awkward start, Sherri, Neal, and I had a really excellent conversation that ran a couple of hours easy. Lots of catching up on old times, as well as discussing undergraduate computing curriculum with limited resources in a public school – many thanks to both of them for all their time!

After returning to Portland, we went to Papa Haydn’s, possibly the best source of wonderfully scrumptious and rich desserts that I know of in the U.S. I had a wonderful Autumn Meringue and it was just like being a college student again (without the metabolism of a 20 year old). We used to walk out to Papa Haydn’s from Reed (maybe a 30 minute walk) several times a year and indulge, and was so cool to go back and find that it really hadn’t changed much in all those years.

That night was the opening reception at GECCO, so Tom and I hung around for a few hours eating little snacky things and chatting with various folks. Tom had never met most of my EC friends and colleagues, and he was very cool at meeting a bunch of strangers that are, even worse, all science nerds to a very high degree. Luckily it’s a really cool group of people, and I think he actually enjoyed himself.

By Day 9 I’d actually skipped out on the bulk of the first two days at GECCO, so at this point I essentially abandoned my son to the wilds of downtown Portland and started pretending to be a scientist for a bit. He spent most of his time hanging at Powell’s and reading books, while I listened to people talk about their cool evolutionary computation research.

That night I did actually skip out on the last session, though, and went back to Reed to join a bunch of faculty that have a regular Friday beer and food gathering at Woodstock Wine and Deli up the hill from campus. Jim had invited me to join them, and it was a great chance to meet some people I knew that I’d missed before (like Ray Mayer) and a bunch of other faculty that are new to the college since I was a student there in the dim past.

I wasn’t the only one meeting up with old friends, as Tom met up with Perry Webster from Morris (currently attending the University of Portland) and hung with her and a family friend pretty much the whole evening, which was a neat chance for him to spend a little time with people more his age :-).

Day 10 was much the same, although I stayed at the conference pretty late because the poster session and associated reception was that evening.

Day 11 (today) was the end of the conference, including eating lunch in the hotel sports bar with a bunch of very enthusiastic Europeans watching the World Cup final! Eli Mayfield (UMM ’09, now a grad student at Carnegie Mellon studying natural language processing) gave a talk today, and did a really excellent job. Tom and I went out to Jake’s Famous Crawfish with Eli and Bill Tozier. Jake’s was a great seafood house back in the day, and they didn’t disappoint, providing us with excellent food to go with the fine conversation. That was a great way to end our time in Portland!

Now we’re off to bed, and tomorrow we drive south to Tule Lake and Lava Beds National Monument. With a little luck we may hook up with Wayne Manselle in Eugen on the way!

Posted in Books, Computing, Family, GECCO, Phi, Reed College, Research, Science, Tom, Travels, evergreen state college, evolution, evolutionary computation, freedom of speech, independent book stores, lewis and clark college, liberal arts colleges, olympia washington, public liberal arts colleges, school, travel, university | Comments Off

Massive road trip, days 7-11

Monday, July 12th, 2010

Day 7 started with a vist to Lewis and Clark College, which was interesting if not overwhelming for Tom. It’s a gorgeous campus and the study abroad stuff there is very cool, but it didn’t particular ring Tom’s bells.

We then spent most of the day hanging around Portland together, including a visit to the mighty and wonderful Powell’s City of Books (one of the last, great independent book stores) and checking in at GECCO to get my registration stuff. Tom totally loved Powell’s (“I could get lost in here!”), and has in fact spent large amounts of my money and his time there this week while I was at the conference. We also went out and saw Toy Story 3 that night, which turned out to be every bit as good as everyone’s said it is – lots of fun and very well written.

Day 8 was our last college visit in this part of the world, as we headed up to Olympia, Washington (2 hours north of Portland) to visit Evergreen State College. This was a real eye opener for both of us. I knew Evergreen was cool (and another of the small number of public liberal arts colleges in the U.S.), but didn’t know a lot of the details, and I think we both found the unusual curriculum and environment really interesting and thought provoking.

I had arranged beforehand to meet some of the computing faculty at Evergreen so we could learn a little more about their program as part of a program review we’re doing at Morris, so after the information session and tour we met up with Sherri Shulman and then headed over to meet her husband and fellow CS faculty, Neal Nelson. When Neal walked in, there was this very weird moment where we both those we knew each other but weren’t sure why. Duh, duh, and double duh – Neal was my undergraduate thesis advisor at Reed! I’d lost track of him when he left Reed in 1988, and I somehow thought he’d gone into industry so I wasn’t even looking to find him anywhere in our travels. Given all that and the the fact that his name doesn’t particularly stand out (and that I’m really crap with names), I totally didn’t consider the possibility that I knew this Neal guy we were going to see. After recovering from that somewhat awkward start, Sherri, Neal, and I had a really excellent conversation that ran a couple of hours easy. Lots of catching up on old times, as well as discussing undergraduate computing curriculum with limited resources in a public school – many thanks to both of them for all their time!

After returning to Portland, we went to Papa Haydn’s, possibly the best source of wonderfully scrumptious and rich desserts that I know of in the U.S. I had a wonderful Autumn Meringue and it was just like being a college student again (without the metabolism of a 20 year old). We used to walk out to Papa Haydn’s from Reed (maybe a 30 minute walk) several times a year and indulge, and was so cool to go back and find that it really hadn’t changed much in all those years.

That night was the opening reception at GECCO, so Tom and I hung around for a few hours eating little snacky things and chatting with various folks. Tom had never met most of my EC friends and colleagues, and he was very cool at meeting a bunch of strangers that are, even worse, all science nerds to a very high degree. Luckily it’s a really cool group of people, and I think he actually enjoyed himself.

By Day 9 I’d actually skipped out on the bulk of the first two days at GECCO, so at this point I essentially abandoned my son to the wilds of downtown Portland and started pretending to be a scientist for a bit. He spent most of his time hanging at Powell’s and reading books, while I listened to people talk about their cool evolutionary computation research.

That night I did actually skip out on the last session, though, and went back to Reed to join a bunch of faculty that have a regular Friday beer and food gathering at Woodstock Wine and Deli up the hill from campus. Jim had invited me to join them, and it was a great chance to meet some people I knew that I’d missed before (like Ray Mayer) and a bunch of other faculty that are new to the college since I was a student there in the dim past.

I wasn’t the only one meeting up with old friends, as Tom met up with Perry Webster from Morris (currently attending the University of Portland) and hung with her and a family friend pretty much the whole evening, which was a neat chance for him to spend a little time with people more his age :-).

Day 10 was much the same, although I stayed at the conference pretty late because the poster session and associated reception was that evening.

Day 11 (today) was the end of the conference, including eating lunch in the hotel sports bar with a bunch of very enthusiastic Europeans watching the World Cup final! Eli Mayfield (UMM ‘09, now a grad student at Carnegie Mellon studying natural language processing) gave a talk today, and did a really excellent job. Tom and I went out to Jake’s Famous Crawfish with Eli and Bill Tozier. Jake’s was a great seafood house back in the day, and they didn’t disappoint, providing us with excellent food to go with the fine conversation. That was a great way to end our time in Portland!

Now we’re off to bed, and tomorrow we drive south to Tule Lake and Lava Beds National Monument. With a little luck we may hook up with Wayne Manselle in Eugen on the way!

Posted in Books, Computing, Family, GECCO, Phi, Research, Science, Tom, Travels, evergreen state college, evolution, evolutionary computation, freedom of speech, lewis and clark college, public liberal arts colleges, school, travel, university | Comments Off

Massive road trip, days 3-6 (oops)

Sunday, July 11th, 2010
Thomas and I and our trusty Honda Fit on our departure

The intrepid travelers depart!

Wow – lack of internet and the busy-ness of college visits and GECCO in Portland have once again put me behind on this. Enough so that my wonderful mother commented on it.

Oops.

Sorry.

It’s day 11, and I’ll try to get us up to day 6 today :-).

So, a quick recap, but generally no pictures because I’m even more behind on those.

View across Two Medicine Lake in Glacier National Park

View across Two Medicine Lake

On Day 3 we drove from Great Falls to Glacier Park Lodge on the eastern edge of Glacier National Park. This lodge is one of those great railway lodges in the park built about 100 years ago using enormous timbers brought by rail from the west coast forests. We’d booked ourselves on the Red Bus Secret Valley Tour, which drives you to Two Medicine Lake, takes you across the lake and back on a boat, and then swings by Running Eagle Falls on the way back. The weather was pretty cloudy and occasionally rainy, so the views weren’t those stunning clear shots you get on postcards, but still quite impressive in its own way (see the photo above). Running Eagle Falls was back out of the mountains a bit, and it was clear and sunny there, which gave us some nice views there. The photo below is from the river there, and illustrates the three main colors of rock that form the mountains of Glacier: Red, green, and yellowish-brown.

Stones in the river at Running Eagle Falls, Glacier National Park

Stones in the river at Running Eagle Falls

We had a really nice dinner that night in the lodge, looking out on the mountains, and then played cards and hung out in the grand lobby the rest of the evening. There are, indeed, worse things.

A panorama of the mountains of Glacier National Park as we approached from the east

Approaching Glacier

The highlight of Day 4 was the drive through (over really) the park on the Going-to-the-sun road. I drove us to the park entrance, (the panorama above is as we approached the park from the east) but Tom drove the entire Going-to-the-sun road. If you’ve never been to Glacier, the Going-to-the-sun road is a little 2 lane job winding through very high mountains — definitely not like driving in Morris — and Tom did an excellent job. It was again overcast so the views were less than steller, but it’s still an amazing and awe inspiring place. Logan’s Pass (the high point at over 6K feet as you cross the continental divide) was cold, probably in the 30′s (F) with wind chills well below freezing. The road had only opened two weeks before we crossed, and we stood there on July 4th freezing and surrounded by big snow banks. There are two main trails that leave from the ranger’s station at Logan; one was closed due to “unsafe snow” and the other still had several feet of snow on it. The latter is apparently wheelchair accessible when clear, but people were using cross country skis on it when we were there.

The driving ended with our arrival at Lake McDonald Lodge, where we stayed in a nice if simple little cabin accommodation. After lunch Tom decided to hang in the lodge, and I went out and hiked and took pictures for about two hours, mostly along a muddy horse trail up parallel to the lake from the lodge from the Sperry trailhead towards John’s Lake. We then had dinner, and spent another fine evening playing cards in the lodge. The Lake McDonald Lodge is a smaller affair, and we played on a table on the second floor with a view of the grand fireplace and an audience for the various guests that shared their musical talents on the piano and banjo. I could totally manage to spend many an evening there.

Day 5 was the big push from Glacier to Portland. That was a long drive so we swapped quite a bit, but I think Tom drove over half of the day. Tons of beautiful mountain views at the beginning, and we ended with several hours in the amazing Columbia Gorge. We also had some nasty traffic in Coeur d’Alene, which turned out to be because of a light aircraft that crashed in the median between the two sides of our interstate the night before! They had cranes out and were still cleaning things up, and that plus rubbernecking was wreaking havoc with traffic.

We were pretty pooped after all that driving, so we got checked into the PSU dorms (the student housing for GECCO, and a hell of a deal compared to downtown hotels), ate dinner at Hot Lips pizza :-), wandered a little, and crashed.

Day 6 was devoted to Reed College, both as a visit to a prospective school for Tom and as a major nostalgia trip for his father. We had an excellent day there, starting the information session and tour (and me mumbling about how things were 25+ years ago). After lunch we went to the library, where I gave them a couple of signed copies of the Field Guide and Tom and I got to look at yearbooks and student newspapers from my time there. The weirdest bit of that was Tom’s discovery of a front page piece I wrote about the campus nuclear reactor receiving some minor regulatory thwaps; I have absolutely no memory of writing the piece, but it’s pretty clearly my name and my writing style, so I must have :-). We then had long visits with Irena Swanson and Jim Fix in the Math/CS department, and Walter Englert in Classics. Walter was my first year Humanities prof, and a huge influence even though I only had him for one course. Irena and I overlapped as students and took at least one class together, and Jim is the sole computing faculty at Reed and it was cool to meet him and learn what and how he’s managing the computational side of the curriculum at Reed. I think Tom was pretty bored listening to me talk show with the Math/CS folks, but he really enjoyed meeting Walter and talking about Reed, colleges in general, and courses like Humanities. We went up the hill with Irena, her husband Steven (who also overlapped with me at Reed), and son Simon (who didn’t, since he’s 17) and had beers and conversation, and then Tom and I came back, wandered around a bit and collapsed!

Posted in Family, GECCO, Glacier National Park, Glacier Park Lodge, Going-to-the-sun Road, Great Falls, Lake McDonald, Phi, Portland, Reed College, Running Eagle Falls, Thomas, Tom, Travels, Two Medicine Lake, college visits, honda fit, travel | Comments Off

Massive road trip, day 2 – with pictures!

Saturday, July 3rd, 2010
Tom standing under "Salem Sue", a giant statue of a cow

How exactly do I milk this thing?

I forgot to mention that yesterday we got to visit “Salem Sue”, a ginormous statue of a holstein cow just off of I-94. Here’s hoping that wasn’t the highlight of the trip :-).

Sunset from Buck Hill in Roosevelt National Park

The end to a good first day

After dinner last night in Medora, we drove along part of the loop road in the park, ending out at Buck Hill, the highest point in Roosevelt National Park, where we got to watch the sun set. On the drive there and back we saw gobs of prairie dogs (a given around here), numerous bison, wild horses, and some deer.

That night a bison wandered through our campground around 11:30pm, even pausing to drink from the water faucet right across from our camp site. Reminded me of camping trips to the Wichita Mountains 30 years ago, where bison and cattle were regular night time visitors.

Morning sun in Cottonwood Campground, Roosevelt National Park

And it begins again

Sunrise was at 5:03am, and we were up and moving before 7 as a result. After some fruit and conversation, Tom decided to hang in the campground while I went off to take pictures and hike around some.

Bison rolling in the dust at Roosevelt National Park

Oh, that's it - right there!

I went down to the Lower Paddock Creek trailhead, where I encountered two large male bison who weren’t much interested in getting off the (one lane gravel) road for me. One in particularly clearly felt that our little Honda Fit wouldn’t stand a chance in a fair fight, and I was inclined to agree. I started backing down this little road, and halfway down encountered a big SUV heading the other way. I explained the situation to them, and they asked me to pull over a bit, and they’d just pass me and go have a look. Once they’d gone past, I decided to follow them in case they had better luck intimidating bison with their much bigger vehicle.

When we got there, the really stubborn fellow had already moved off the road, and the new folks were able to use their SUV to bully the other guy off as well. I took full advantage and swung into the trailhead parking area and headed out to get at least a little hiking in. When I came back out some 45 minutes later, they’d ambled down a bit, but had happily (for me) remained off the road. The photo above is the cranky one taking a bit of a dust bath – here’s hoping it improved his spirits!

After my safe return, we had a somewhat comical bought of tent folding and packing, and then an excellent breakfast at the Elkhorn Cafe in Medora. From there we began the drive across the great expanses of eastern Montana. I’d forgotten (or never realized?) how much “badland” landscape there is there – I’d always thought of it as much more flat prairie. The only other time I’ve driven across that part of the state it was farther north on US 2; perhaps the landscape is quite different up there?

We travelled most of the day on Montana 200, which large stretches of very little in the way of people or buildings. Towns like Lindsay are really just 8 or a dozen families at a crossroads a heck of a long way from anywhere. Tom did a lot of excellent driving, not all of it in the best of conditions (rain, a detour, semis passing in the rain on narrow roads, etc.), which was really nice.

The nice folks at the Days Inn where we’re staying in Great Falls recommended Bert and Ernie’s for dinner, and they were spot on. The food was wonderful, and our waiter was easily among the best I’ve ever had.

And, on that happy note, to bed. Tomorrow we drive to Glacier National Park. The weather looks wet and gurpy, so I’m not sure how things will play out. Fingers crossed!

Posted in Buck Hill, Family, Glacier National Park, Great Falls, Montana, Phi, Photography, Roosevelt National Park, Thomas, Tom, Travels, badland, bison, campground, camping, driving, holstein cow, honda fit, landscape, medora, photos, prairie, prairie dogs, trailhead, travel, wichita mountains, wild horses | Comments Off

Massive road trip: Day 1

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

And today, the adventure began. Tom & I left the house this morning for the first leg of our 3 week road trip.

Today was mostly spent on I-94, about 400 miles crossing western Minnesota and almost all of North Dakota. NoDak greeted us with a monster SW wind, but only 3 wind turbines to be seen as we crossed all that flat.

We’re camping tonight at Roosevelt National Park. It’s hotter than heck here, so we’re hiding in a pizza joint with A/C and wifi. Got the tent set up before dinner, though, & saw many prairie dogs & a pair of wild horses.

After this little break we’re going out driving/hiking for a bit before we lose the light.

Oh, and I hit a crow in flight with the bumper while doing 60! He was essentially unable to make headway into the wind. A first in several decades of driving.

Posted in Family, North Dakota, Phi, Roosevelt National Park, Thomas, Travels, driving, travel | Comments Off

It doesn’t pay to underestimate the kids

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

The children are our future (and we should be very afraid!)

The children are our future (and we should be very afraid!)


From Luke Wroblewski on Twitter:

My 17 month old son can start the iPad, unlock it, find (by navigating 3 screens) and run his favorite app: Dr. Seuss ABC.

When our wonderful son was about that age, he could turn on TVs at stranger’s houses; he’d figured out that it was the rightmost button (a pattern I’d never noticed).

The adaptability of young folks to what us oldies see as new and often confusing (or downright terrifying) circumstances may be the only thing that allows us to pull out of the many tailspins we’ve initiated. So when some politician babbles on about how “the children are our future”, see if their track record backs that up, and hold their feet to the fire if it doesn’t.

Posted in Education, Family, Phi, Sub-Evil Boy, TV, Thomas, Twitter, adaptability, age, children, future, iPad, kids, luke wroblewski, young folks | Comments Off

Thomas is heading to the Minnesota state finals for Poetry Out Loud!

Saturday, February 20th, 2010
Award ceremony at the 2010 Poetry Out Loud regional, Fergus Falls, MN

Award ceremony at the 2010 Poetry Out Loud regional, Fergus Falls, MN. Thomas McPhee (on far right) took first.


Last night was the 2010 Lake Regional competition as part of the national Poetry Out Loud competition. Morris Area High School (MAHS) had two students in the field, Thomas McPhee and Tim Ostby, and Thomas took first place! He and Ellen Ferry (who took second) will be among the 18 students from around Minnesota at the state finals in the wonderful Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, starting at 9:30am, Monday, 8 March 2010.

Thomas qualified for the state finals last year (along with MAHS student Alex McIntosh), so we had the good fortune to attend last year’s event. The quality of the performances was really exquisite, and I highly recommend the event to any fans of poetry and literature in the area.

Tim Ostby (the other MAHS student this year) placed fifth at the regional. Congratulations to him and all the other students that performed last night! While there were fewer competitors at the regional than last year, the quality of the performances was considerably stronger, and the venue (A Center for the Arts in Fergus Falls) was vastly better than last year’s (a classroom at a regional community college).

Thomas McPhee, David Johnson, and Tim Ostby at the 2010 Lake Regional for Poetry Out Loud

Thomas McPhee, David Johnson, and Tim Ostby at the 2010 Lake Regional for Poetry Out Loud. Thomas took first, and Tim took fifth.

A huge thanks to David Johnson, drama coach and english teacher at MAHS. Dave’s been a huge influence and support for Thomas in both theatre and Poetry Out Loud. It’s greatly to Dave’s credit that MAHS has had a student in the state finals of Poetry Out Loud each of the last four years (which is every year MAHS could have competed), with two in last year’s finals. Further, every MAHS student that’s gone to state has placed in the top 6: Anika Kildegaard took 2nd in 2007, Mary Hu won the state competition in 2008 and went on to the National Finals, and Alex McIntosh placed 4th and Thomas McPhee 6th in 2009. In fact Morris is the only high school in the state to place four students in the top 6 from 2007-2009, with no other school has placing more than two. Not a bad track record for a small rural high school. Thanks a ton to Dave for all his support and assistance!

Posted in Art, David Johnson, Drama/Performance, Education, Events, Family, Fergus Falls, MAHS, Morris, Morris Area High School, Phi, Thomas, Writing, competition, drama, fitzgerald theater, literature, minnesota, performance, poetry, theatre | Comments Off

I love my cool family!

Sunday, February 14th, 2010
It's a shame they don't get along :-)

It's a shame they don't get along :-)


Welcome to Valentine’s Day, that annoyingly commercialized annual reminder that we’re actually supposed to care about the special people in our life. As Cory nicely put it

Proving you really care about someone is an achievement that takes effort everyday. Chocolate and flowers on a single day won’t do.

All that said, I figured it wouldn’t be amiss to let my family know how fabulous they are, a non-commercial sort of way of course :-).

The photo up top is from 9 years ago while we were living in the UK during our first sabbatical; Tom was 7 at the time, and Susan hadn’t yet cut off most of her hair. The strip below is from our second UK sabbatical 7 years later; now he’s taller than her and looking suspiciously like a young man instead of a little boy. Both give a sense of how fun it is to live with these two — there’s no question that I’m a lucky, lucky man.

It's a shame they don't get along (7 years later)

It's a shame they don't get along (7 years later)

It was interesting to see how few photos I have of the two of them together outside of the sabbaticals. Those two years are documented in excruciating detail, while our day-to-day here in Morris is much more sparsely recorded. There are moments, like when Tom’s on stage, where I take a billion photos, but I end up with very few photos of the two of them together.

I think this helps illustrate the value of these years we’ve had away from home. There’s something about stepping out of your “normal” life, leaving most of your stuff behind, and making a life (even if for just a year) in a new place. It shaves off a lot of the distractions and, for us at least, meant we spent more and different time together. Some of that is in the form of being tourists together (which is where these photos come from), but it’s also in the form of walking together because we didn’t own a car, and being together because the apartment was too small for us to easily be apart.

(And I realize that having this sort of opportunity just oozes privilege; most people don’t have the flexibility or resources to do this sort of thing once, let alone twice. I’m lucky in many, many ways.)

Happy Valentine’s Day to Sue and Tom!

Posted in Events, Family, Phi, Photography, Sabbatical, Sub-Evil Boy, Susan, Tom, Travels, Valentine's Day, WeatherGirl, WeatherGrrrl, holiday | Comments Off

Flickr Uploadr is a pain, but Flickraw saved the day

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

Thomas McPhee as Arnold in the MAHS 2010 production of "The boys next door" as a one-act

Tom as Arnold in "The boys next door"


Flickr’s Uploadr is fine for small uploads, but tends to die consistently and unpleasantly when I have several hundred photos to upload, like those from Thursday’s opening of “The boys next door”, this year’s Morris Area High School one-act. It almost always takes me several tries to get a large pool of photos uploaded, which is a pain, but not fatal. This time, however, it chose to upload them in a semi-random order, so then it died I had 80-ish photos scattered all across the show, which meant I couldn’t just delete the first K from the list and restart the upload. Ugh.

Because it was late and I was in a hurry, I ended up just uploading the whole set (over several attempts), but marked them as private so people wouldn’t end up seeing two copies of that first group of images, figuring I’d sort things out in the morning.

The morning came, and it turned out that I really didn’t have a workable plan. All the pictures were on Flickr, but there was no good (i.e., automated) way to figure out which were the duplicates. If I could identify them, then deleting the duplicates and making the rest visible would be easy, but I didn’t have a clue how to find the duplicates using Flickr’s tools.

Sigh.

This would, however, be pretty straight forward in a script if I had all the data I needed, and this is where Flickr redeemed itself. They have a very rich API for accessing (and modifying) photos and their associated information (like tags), so if I could figure out how to use that I’d be golden. I’d poked a little with some Ruby Flickr libraries in the past, but none of them ever seemed very complete and they were always struggling to stay on top of Flickr’s changes and extensions to the API. A little searching this time, however, turned up Flickraw, which uses some really nifty Ruby metaprogramming to essentially build the Ruby part of the API “on the fly”, ensuring that it will be complete and up-to-date all automagically!

It turns out that Flickraw was indeed powerful, flexible, and easy to use. After authenticating (following the example on the Flickraw web site), I was able to use it to pull down a list of all the photos from “The boys next door”

my_owner_id = "68457656@N00"
play_title = "The boys next door"
my_stream = flickr.photos.search(
              :user_id => my_owner_id,
              :text => play_title,
              :per_page => 500)

I then split that list into the initial set of publicly visible photos, and the photos I’d uploaded after things got screwy and kept private (i.e., visible only to me):

public_photos = my_stream.find_all {|photo| photo.ispublic == 1}
private_photos = my_stream.find_all {|photo| photo.ispublic == 0}

My next task was to determine which of the private photos were duplicates of one of the public photos people were already looking at. All I really needed was the list of duplicates, but I decided to create lists of both the duplicates and the non-duplicates. I had to compare titles here because the Flickr IDs would be different; as far as Flickr knew they were all different photos. Happily, I had named them in a way that they each had a unique title, so if two photos had the same title, I knew they were the same shot uploaded twice.

dups = []
non_dups = []
private_photos.each do |photo|
  public_duplicate = public_photos.find { |pub| photo.title == pub.title }
  if public_duplicate
    dups.push(photo)
  else
    non_dups.push(photo)
  end
end

At this point, I could apply tags to all the photos in the two groups, and all the rest of the fiddling could be done through Flickr’s web tools:

non_dups.each do |photo|
  flickr.photos.addTags(:photo_id => photo.id,
                        :tags => "to_keep")
end

dups.each do |photo|
  flickr.photos.addTags(:photo_id => photo.id,
                        :tags => "to_delete")
end

I could have actually done everything with the Ruby script (delete the duplicates, change the remaining images to publicly visible, and add them to the appropriate set), but wanted to do that via Flickr so I could see what was happening as I went. And once the tags were in place, the work in Flickr was quite straightforward. The result: A set of 339 images that contains all the photos I uploaded, with no duplicates, all accomplished without deleting any of the original uploads.

Big thanks to Maël Clérambault, the author of Flickraw, for his excellent little library, and thanks to Flickr for providing this very nice set of API calls. (Now go fix Flickr Uploadr, damnit!)

As for the play – I just heard that they took second at today’s sub-sections competiton, which means they move on to sections next week, and Tom got a star performance award! Congratulations all!

Posted in API, Computing, Events, Family, Flickr, Flickraw, Phi, Photography, Ruby, automation, my photography, performance, programming, scripting | Comments Off

Saving money by doing more silly things

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

The iPod I fixed by banging it hard against a wooden chest

Our iPod works (again)!


As reported earlier, I managed to use a few drops of nail polish remover to postpone my iPod Touch’s trip to the great pile of electronic waste that is one of the banes of our modern world. In the comments Matt Carlson mentioned that he’d had a similar experience reviving an MP3 player with a stuck hard drive head by smacking it — smacking it so hard that it flew out of his hand!

Well, wouldn’t you know it, but we happen to have a nice 80Gb iPod Classic (pictured above) that died over the summer with the telltale clicking sound of a stuck head. So I tried out Matt’s trick & whacked quite firmly (& quite loudly) multiple times on an old wooden chest and voilà – it came back to life! We thought we’d be travelling without the benefit of our huge shared pile of music, but it’s worked beautifully for many hours (all the way down to Arkansas & back).

Huzzah! Big thanks to Matt for the suggestion – banging on hardware beats the heck out of having to buy a new iPod. Again, I was only willing to risk this because this puppy was well past warranty, and there was no chance of repairing it. Obviously beating the tar out of electronics is something one should think carefully about and do with some care; your mileage definitely may vary.

Posted in Computing, Family, General, Music, Phi, electronics, fix, hard drive, iPod, repair, stuck head | Comments Off

On the occasion of someone else’s 16th birthday

Friday, December 18th, 2009

Thomas with his parents in Toledo, Spain. June, 2007.

Thomas with his parents in Toledo, Spain. June, 2007.


Today is 16th birthday of our son: Thomas Sutherland McPhee.

16 years ago today, we were in Abbot Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis introducing a red, wrinkled little lizard boy to the world.

He was healthy but small (3 pounds, 12 ounces), and his size landed him in the neo-natal ICU for several weeks. We spent his first Chrismas in that NICU. Another family spent that day together behind a screen at the end of the room, saying goodbye to the last of a set of triplets. It was the only time we saw that child outside of its incubator, and the only time we saw the family hold it.

That day still shines bright, like my eyes when I think of it.

On my dresser is a photo of Tom at Thanksgiving when he’s two or three, eyes wide like his smile. To be honest, I don’t really remember the that kid. Those years have largely slipped away, turning into photos in an album.

No doubt more will join them.

But there’s so much I do remember. Places we’ve been. Things we’ve done. Pieces of who he is, assembling.

Reading together. Dr. Seuss. Haroun & the Sea of Stories. Early Harry Potter. Inkheart. Plenty of room between the trees.

Realizing that he’d somehow learned to read when no one was watching. (Still not sure how that happened.)

Realizing that reading out loud at night was just too slow. One of the first steps towards inevitable independence.

Walking together in our sabbatical year in Birmingham, talking about religion, and how eyes work. He was six or seven.

Writing songs and performing together. “Fat fly”, “Crab grass”, “Taco Man”. Open Mic. The Mutant Variety Show.

His wonderful attitude during the long series of rabies shots after The Bat Incident.

Our time in Italy. Gelato & pizza. Learning to spot annunciation paintings from a mile away. Deciding he’d seen about all the churches he needed for quite a while.

The family trip to Alaska. Climbing the hills around Polychrome Pass in Denali National Park; the wind cutting past us as we gazed out over that awesome valley. Celebrating Mac & Mutti’s 50th anniversary in Seward. His laughter, and grumpiness, and goofiness.

The way he made friends and settled in so quickly during both our sabbaticals in the UK. And the long hours on Facebook keeping up with his friends back home.

Our time in Spain. Going out for breakfast together in the morning. A wonderful day together in Madrid. “Guernica”. The “Black Paintings” of Goya. A day he planned.

Walking to school together talking about stuff, large and small. Waving at folks driving by.

Listening to music together. Discussing lyrics, and beats, and color. That high kid voice in our promo spots for the radio station, and the much lower voice I hear when listening to this year’s solo radio shows.

The many, many play performances. And band. And choir. And pretty much any opportunity to be on a stage.

6th in the State in Poetry Out Loud last year, and last year’s amazing One Act.

Dying your hair cool colors.

And so, so much more.

Today he’s sixteen.

He writes lines I would be proud to call my own.

He’s taller than his mother (but not yet taller than me).

He sings bass (or tenor – it all depends on the context).

He shaves, if not very often.

His room is a mess, but so is my office, so I’d best not throw stones.

He’s getting recruiting material from colleges, another sign that he won’t live in this house forever.

He’s old enough to drive, but not to go to the Doomtree blowout (and it’s not clear which he’d choose if it came down to it).

He cares. About the world. About others. About Making Things Better.

He’s our son, and a joy to have in our lives.

Happy birthday, Thomas. It’s been a fun and exciting 16 years, and we’re all looking forward to many more!

Posted in Events, Family, Phi, Sub-Evil Boy, Thomas, birthday | Comments Off

Enjoying a summer rain

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

Enjoying a summer rain (from Flickr)

Enjoying a summer rain (from Flickr)


I’ve just returned home after nearly a solid month on the road for business and family vacation. So, so behind on so many things (including photos and Flickr!).

Our last trip was a fine week with my parents in Arkansas, where we had much cooler weather than one might expect for this time of year. We even had one really nice, gentle rain, which was an excellent excuse to stay inside and read. Or sit out in the rain if you’re a ceramic frog :-).

Posted in Arkansas, Family, Flickr, General, Phi, Photography, Travels, family vacation, frog, parents, photos, rain, weather | Comments Off

A little weirdness in today’s family radio programming

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

Today is the start of the 2nd Annual sUMMer Jazz Experience, which Sub-Evil Boy will be participating in. Registration is from noon to 2pm, with a little welcome address at 2 for the families before they abandon their offspring to the Demons of Jazz Music.

Those keeping track at home will note that noon-2pm interacts oddly with our family radio shows on KUMM on Sunday mornings (Sub-Evil from 10am-noon, WeatherGrrrl & I from noon-2pm). Sub-Evil’s show should survive largely intact, but our show may get cut off towards the end.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but even hip radio DJs sometimes have parenting responsibilities :-).

Posted in Events, Family, KUMM, Music, Phi, Radio, Sub-Evil Boy, WeatherGrrrl, jazz, sUMMer Jazz Experience, summer camp | Comments Off