Service and Love — Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 2010

 
Yesterday when I went into the Unitarian Universalist service at our First Parish Church of Groton, the "banner" that you see below had been proudly placed front and center in the sanctuary. Produced by the dedicated hands of one of our members, the banner shows the dozens of organizations that members of the Church work with — providing service to our community.

The entire service, today, was inspired by the life and teachings of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. By his own leadership-by-example, he demonstrated unequivocally that “Love is ultimately the only answer to mankind's problems” — even when doing so flies in the face of our other instincts, and even when it seems hopeless. Another pervasive theme was that “Service ” provides us all a pathway to greatness. Anyone — no matter what your life situation — anyone can be of service, not as an "isolated act" but rather as a way of being, day-to-day. I was very inspired by the service. It left me reassessing the ways in which service is a part of my life.

After the heart-felt and very moving reading by Paul Harter, Jr — excerpts from MLK's “Presidential Address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference” in August 1967 — some in the congregation stood up in affirmation and many joined us in spontaneous applause. I was also moved by these excerpts from MLK's speech, “The Quest for Peace and Justice”, delivered on the occasion of him receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, on Dec. 11, 1964 — in the reading by Dave Hill. Likewise, Rev. Elea Kemler's sermon, “Reflections on Service”, was also very inspirational.

As we all look back on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 2010… let us reflect upon the values and teachings of this great man. And let us rededicate ourselves to Service as our fundamental action, and Love, as a context for living.
 

Christmas 2009 — Gifts that Get Given Away Twice

This year for many of my Christmas presents I used stamps.com (in the USA, and its Canadian counterpart) to create real postage stamps — featuring my own pictures that I knew would be special to each of my loved ones. Images of the stamps are presented in the wildly flashing Intel 3D cube navigator, below. I also used the stamp images to create my sweetie's 2009 Christmas Tree Ornament — featuring the stamps glued onto a wooden cube, resting in an ornamental woven basket — shown at the bottom right, below. Hence came the whole idea of using my old 3D cube navigator for the web-based stamps presentation.























Use the 3D cube navigator (on the left) to explore the 6 stamps I created :
 • Move your mouse into the center of the green background frame (to the left) to “drive” and “look at” each of the images.
 • As you move the mouse within the moving 3D cube frame, you are in “drive mode” and the manipulation is done solely via mouse movement — without mouse clicks. For example, hold the mouse towards any corner of the frame and notice that the cube begins rotating in that direction. The rotation follows you around as you move the mouse, and is faster or slower depending on how close you are to the center of the cube.
 • Click on any cube face; it "zooms out", showing you the stamp image. A subsequent single click continues the rotation.
 • Double Click on an image face to get more detail — to see the original picture the stamp was made from. When finished, use your browser's "Back" button to return here to the cube navigator.
 • In “drive mode” the rotation stops whenever you move the mouse outside of the green background space, and resumes when you re-enter it.

Yes… this is what I do on a holiday weekend when it's snowing outside and I just feel like playing. Happy New Year 2010 !!
 

The 2009 Groton Community Christmas Concert

 
Having missed a year singing with my Groton Community for the holiday season, last September I decided to join the choir again because it's so satisfying to give this gift to the community — to kick off the Christmas season. An incredible community outreach… choir members come from Groton, MA and these 13 surrounding towns: Ashby, Billerica, Chelmsford, Dunstable, Littleton, Pepperell, Shirley, Townsend, Tyngsboro, and Westford (MA) and Mason and Nashua (NH).

During the 2^nd weekend in December it was my pleasure and privilege to sing with 75 adults and 35 children in the 35^th annual “Groton Community Christmas Concert” — created and directed by Edie Tompkins, shown in the snapshot here on the left.

As a fund raiser this year, an innovative GCCC supporter created the framed hand-written score that you see in the picture of Edie's original composition “Down The Bethlehem Road ”, and the masterpiece was awarded to the lucky person holding the winning ticket. We sing this song every year as the concert encore. Check out this YouTube video clip of Edie directing this song during the final performance this year. Hopefully she won't mind me reporting her quip when I told her I'd taken this instead of singing: “If I'd known you were doing that I might not have been dancing !”. And I really like the kiss she blows to the choir as she walks away when it's over!

Since I am on stage for all of what the adult choir sings, I wasn't able to get much video or many snapshots of the concert itself. Nevertheless you can check out this Flickr album (or SlideShow) of mostly candid shots that I took during the warm-ups just before each of the performances. If you prefer video… this YouTube search lets your chose from all the video clips that I have posted from this year's concert, or you can see all of my GCCC clips over the past several years by clicking here.
 

My Dream Machine - a DeskTop Quad-Core Processor

 
I finally did it… I went out and bought a new desktop machine, ostensibly because the C: drive on my XP machine bit the dust, but really it was because my machine dated back to 2004 and I was just fed up with trying to keep it up-to-date with its dwindling set of hardware resources that just weren't cutting it any more.

So I bought myself a new HP — Pavilion Desktop with AMD Athlon™ II X4 Quad-Core Processor, pictured here if you wanna see the snapshot page from BestBuy, which I grabbed because these things change all the time.

Since my laptop (running Vista) is a Dual-Core, I knew for sure that I wanted to have at least 2 CPUs because otherwise it's really not possible to run any of the modern operating systems these days. But what I found when I went looking was that for "pretty much the same price" (as a beefed-up desktop) you could get a machine like I got, which has 4 CPUs, as you can see clearly on the left. Clearly? Yea, because the "CPU Usage History" (the Windows Task Manager) shows you what each of the CPUs is doing, with time on the horizontal axis.

Man, it's just not possible to flat-line this machine — at least, I haven't found a way to even slow it down! To get the picture on left (i.e. to "burn up" as much CPU as possible), I ran my usual 80-or-so processes but added in AutoStitch, a well-known image processing application that could easily render a single-CPU machine "useless" for the many minutes that it would take to stitch together a set of snapshots. In this case the rendering that took "15 minutes" before now takes about 30 seconds and there's still lots of CPU left to do other things while that's happening. e.g. Here's a panorama of the Amphitheater in Pompeii, produced by AutoStitch from 15 snapshots that Jilli took when she was in Italy recently.

Of course, this machine has a lot more going for it than CPU; that's just the feature that's easy to "make a picture of". I'm happy with the greatest o/s ever (Windows 7), the 1.6 TB of storage (on 2 disk drives), surround sound, the 6 GB of RAM, FireWire, and more USB's and etc. than I could ever use. (Yea, right. I know it's just a matter of time until I've figured out how to use all this. But I wanted to write about it while it's still way more of a computer than I've ever dreamed of.)
 

My reRoofing Project

Having put off "calling a roofer" to reShingle our 30-year-old roof for "a decade" — mostly because of the $10k estimate we got for that two years back… this Fall I decided to do it myself — as you see in the picture to the right which I got my buddy to take just in case no one believed me. It was a long job — much harder work than I had imagined, and it took me a lot longer (204 hours) than I had anticipated. But the good news is that I didn't do it alone (see below), and we had a really great six-week sequence of glorious New England Fall Days during which the weather was perfect for doing good hard work outdoors. See this Flickr album (or SlideShow) for the photo documentation of the whole event — with beautiful Fall snapshots, the real reason I couldn't put off the reRoofing project any longer (rotten plywood), detailed pictures of exactly how to go about doing the many intricate steps (as I constantly called on my buddy, Rob Augart, who does this for a living in his own business Augart Construction, in Winchester MA), the aftermath of taking saunas on many of the days after all the hard work was done, how I took on reShingling the roof of Lady's dog house to match, and finally Lady helping me fold the tarps cause it was so windy.

What is not so obvious in the pictures is the real reason for me taking on the job myself — that my total cost was about $3500, including that I paid the 3 men who helped me for the 133 hours of work that they put in, mostly working with me. Very much to my surprise… relative to the $10k estimate, it was like I paid myself around $30/hour for the work that I put in. Of course, none of this would have been possible if I had a real job !

On the left is my main man, Eugene (Butch) LeDonne, who will proudly tell you that he did all of the heavy lifting even though the truth is that I did my share too. And on the right is Serge, my Roosky comrade, who was hired as a roofer ostensibly because of his outstanding height… but really it was because I did indeed have an ulterior motive — it wasn't entirely out of generosity or need.

When all was said and done, I realized that this job was a really great way for me to spend time with my men, enjoying the great outdoors, getting good exercise, and feeling the satisfaction of a job well done at the end of each day.
 

New England Fall - Gaye's Memorial Brick

All Fall, as I've been working so much outside (on my reRoofing project), I took a bunch of "New England Fall Foliage" pictures which I've posted here. (TBS) It seemed like Fall was really late this year, but maybe that's just because I spent so much time outside watching the colors develop, little by little.

As we get near the end of Fall, another "big event" for me is going to see Gaye's brick, in the memory garden right beside our Unitarian Church in Groton. I hadn't been there in a long time, so I took the picture on the right so that I could post it in my blog.

Austin's “Wilderness ReUnion” — 30 Years Later

 
On this weekend in July — which just happened to be my 58^th birthday — my dear friend Austin had long planned a reunion of many of our long-time friends whom we hung out with over the years when he and an assortment of "hip people" ☺ lived at the very top of the highest hill around, in Littleton, MA. We called it “The Wilderness”, shown right here on the map. From the aerial view it looks like there are lots of roads and houses around, but once you get up there you see nothing except trees and the fabulous view shown on the right… and it feels like the rest of civilization has just vanished.

See the Flickr link below for pictures; video clip highlights include Austin's dream — getting an “old farts bike” and Mark's “Fossilized Dinosaur Bone Marrow” pendant story !!

I couldn't summarize the significance of this event better than in the words of The Man of the hour...

“ Well, it certainly goes without saying that the MAGIC of The Wilderness is very very real and we can be assured that it will always be. We had more than a wonderful afternoon together and most of us are wondering when we can do it, again. (For those of you who were unable to come, we missed you but, rest assured, we talked about you!) Thank you to Everyone for contributing to our special day. The company was the best bar none, the food was delicious and nourishing and the time shared was much too brief. The "Save The Wilderness Fund" jar was full of almost $200.00 (!!) which I will be presenting to New England Forestry Foundation (who provide stewardship of The Prouty Community Forest) along with selected pictures from the attached collection. Thanks, You Guys! Special thanks to Kevin, Sarah and Karen for their stealthy picture-taking and Super Kudos to Kevin for gathering all the photos and putting them together [in Flickr] for all to see (How does he do it?). Remember Folks that The Wilderness land is part of The Prouty Community Forest and, while we may not be able to go INside the house, we CAN explore the woods, take in the fabulous westward vista [panorama] and meet up for impromptu picnics ANYTIME we want! We don' need no steenkeen' permission!                                 — Wishing you Wilderness Magic each and every day, Austin Sheatsley”

Thanks for doing all this, Aus !!   I actually liked your car in the Wilderness ReUnion picture (see the original)… but did a little Digital Media Magik to take it out, above, to honor you for your commitment to “The Wilderness” being Wilderness.