The 2010 Olympics — Proudly Hosted by “My” Canada

 
One of the first things that caught my eye in the lead-up to The 2010 Olympics in Vancouver is the vista from the harbour that you see here on the right. And, of course, now that we've all spent 2 weeks watching the Winter Games, mostly this is not the view that we've gotten used to because most of the games were up in the mountains. But I still really like the picture (especially if you click thru for the full sized image).

I also really like these stunning pictures that highlight the last days of the Olympic Torch Relay, mostly as it passes thru various cities in Canada. And iff you have PowerPoint… these action shots or these from the Opening Ceremonies (with music!) are incredible and amazing. I sure wish I had been there!

And speaking of Canada… check out my sister, Nanci Phelan's blog article, “2010 Olympic Rings”, where she writes about the stained glass memory piece she created to honor The 2010 Olympics in Vancouver. Click thru / see the thumbnail on the left.

Likewise Canadian… the real reason I decided to write this article was so that I could host this link to where “Tom Brokaw Explains The Relationship Between Canada and The United States” — ostensibly to Americans but I suspect a lot of this might be news to many Canadians — in a pre-recorded short film that aired on NBC prior to the Opening Ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver. As I sat and watched the video I found myself feeling very moved — proudly in awe, in fact — because both of these countries are very near and dear to my heart. I hope you are able to see that video (see below).

So enjoy that footage while it's available. Between the time when I first decided to write this article… and now, some YouTube versions of it have been cut off — “ blocked in your country on copyright grounds ” — whatever that means and whereever that applies. So by the time you read this, you might get something similiar. If you have anything to say about our great countries — Canada and/or the USA — feel free to “Post a Comment” on this blog using the link, below.

Taken from the video… I especially liked JFK's quote to the Canadian Parliament, May 17th, 1961 : “  Geography has made us neighbours,    History has made us friends,    Economics has made us partners,    and Necessity has made us alleys.”

 

Donate a Tent to Help Needy People in Haiti

 
This article is my contribution to help out a friend — concerned in the wake of the 2010 Haiti earthquake — who has found her calling as part of the Haiti Earthquake Relief Effort… by leading the “URGENT CALL FOR TENTS ” drive for which you see the flyer below. Click thru to see the full sized flyer, or read below where I'm 'duplicating' the text so that it will be picked up by search engines.

Do You Have A Tent That You Would Like To Donate to Help The People of Haiti ? There are over 100,000 people without homes in Haiti. Port-au-Prince is in ruins and as you have seen on the news, everywhere there are vast cities of makeshift tents built of sticks, bed sheets and bits of plastic occupying any clear space. One of the Haitian people’s most immediate needs is temporary shelter to protect them from mosquitoes, heat and rain. The rainy season in Haiti is imminent. If you have a quality, family-style tent or light-weight sleeping bag(s) in relatively good condition that you would like to donate to the Haitian people in their time of need, a Pepperell resident is collecting them and delivering them to other volunteers connected with Partners in Health to get them to Haiti. For MA residents, please contact Karen at 978.433.8239 (or eMail her at karenm_807@msn.com) and she will arrange for a pickup — you can just donate without having to ship anything. Non-MA residents please check this article which describes the Massachusetts-based consolidation and shipping effort that Karen is using. Simply ship your tent(s) to “Mark Richey” using the contact info in that article. And contrary to what the article (currently) says… there is no deadline so please donate tents as soon as possible so we can make the most of every shipment.

This is a legitimate grass roots effort with National participation. See contact info above for more details.
 

Groundhog Day comes to Groton

 
Of course, it was just a matter of time. Just wait long enough after New Years, and before you know it   it'll be Groundhog Day. And no big surprise — Punxsutawney Phil today gave us the usual 'bad news' about 6 more weeks of Winter. Well, at least it's not 2 months!

So... as my debut article in the new "community blog" called “The Groton Line ”, I decided to try out juxtaposing two pictures that show something like "the Pammett Groton Woods" before and after the January thaw. Imagine... just two weeks ago the "glenn" in our woods looked like the image on the left, below, and now the snow's all gone as you see on the right.


Now... if only that meant that Winter were really over and done with!!

Rest asured I've lived in New England long enough to not be holding my breath about that. But if you are so inclined, join with me in "Think Spring" — as I do every year about this time  !!
 

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.)