• General Life Update

    Posted on by Don Comment

    Meantime, what else has been going on?

    Well, Ben and Jenny are on their way East. They are relocating to somewhere near us, and have spent the last month preparing for the move, basically getting their affairs in order and saying their goodbyes. They don’t really have much to bring with them (everything they own fits in their car), so they are taking a bit of a grand tour, sightseeing and visiting friends, and expect to arrive in the Philly area by March. They’ve been traumatized and their future is still somewhat up in the air, but I am starting to feel a bit less worried about them.

    They will probably not be staying with us as we originally thought, but we followed through on our emergency bathroom remodeling job anyway. There wasn’t that much that needed doing, just a new vanity light and a new coat of paint (and a new sink while we’re at it), but we let it all sit for years until the Ben and Jenny Emergency made us leap into action… Our contractor should in fact be done today or tomorrow.

    Yesterday was an Iris day, and I also visited my Mom.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day

  • The End Of The Trail

    Posted on by Don Comment

    I haven’t been diligent about it, exactly, but I have been progressing on my Native Paths project, slowly but surely, and just yesterday I finished — I digitized my last path.

    (This was part two of my project, the second pass through the book. I have pretty much followed through on my workflow: for each path I’d photograph the map in the book, clean the photo using GIMP, georeference it in QGIS, and finally digitize the foot paths (and any native villages or other notable places I’d find) by tracing them from the map. I’d also check the description for any cross-references between paths, which I’d also add to the database.)

    A friend asked the other day what I would do with the project, as in how I would present it to the world, and I really didn’t have an answer. My original motivation (at least, as I remember it now) was not to produce something for other people to see, but to gain an understanding of the book Indian Paths of Pennsylvania for myself. I guess it’s time to take stock of what I’ve learned on this journey…

    I think I accomplished what I set out to do, which was to gain a better understanding of Wallace’s book, its scope and its limitations; I also have a better understanding of the world the Pennsylvania natives lived in. And in the end, I also improved my GIMP and QGIS skills — I got a lot of practice cleaning, georeferencing and tracing those trail map photos!

    I still have a few GIS projects I can play with — I can use the native paths project to plan some bike tours, and I also have a few “ground-truthing” things I want to do with my Sals maps — but the truth is, I have reached the end of a long, engaging, and sometimes onerous process, and I am feeling a bit of post-accomplishment blues. Oh well, something will come along, GIS or something else.


    📂This entry was posted in looking back tech talk 📎and tagged

  • Plot Twist

    Posted on by Don Comment

    The story of this year is already turning grim…

    Ben and Jennie live in Altadena. They called Tuesday night to say they had to evacuate, literally at a moment’s notice and with not much more than the clothes on their backs, to escape the Eaton fire — they (and their cat) got out safely, and were at her Mom’s house a few hours away.

    Wednesday afternoon they called to let us know that their home and all their possessions, and in fact their entire neighborhood, were just gone. Clothes, furniture, books and artwork, their bank and grocery store and favorite restaurant… They lived in an enclave of tiny little cottages, and were very close with their neighbors; I expect that community will now be scattered to the winds. This is just plain awful.

    They spent the last day or so at a friend’s cabin near Joshua Tree to escape the fire pollution, and are now staying at a big AirBnB with her extended family. I don’t know what their immediate plans are, but they said they’ll take a month or so to deal with whatever needs to be done, and then relocate to the East Coast. They’ll stay with us when they get here.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day

  • Remembering My Uncle Frank

    Posted on by Don Comment

    RIP Frank Barth III (1942-2023)

    I wrote this post in January of last year, but never published it. Some additions and light editing, and here it is:

    My Uncle Frank passed away a year ago last summer. I really couldn’t write much about it at the time, but here’s a post to at least mark and remember his passing.

    Frank was my mom’s younger brother, the middle of three; he was just a few years younger than my mom. Here are a few photos I have from my mom’s photo book. These were taken at a park in Brooklyn, maybe Prospect Park.

    Uncle Frank, 1942
    Uncle Frank with Mom, 1942

    I have another photo from before my time, what looks like a vacation photo of my Uncles Pat and Frank as teenagers:

    Pat and Frank, ca 1958

    Here are some of my own photos, taken many years ago (and years apart):

    Uncle Frank With Christine’s Parents
    Me, Mom, Uncle Frank, Aunt Pat, And Dad

    The first was at my cousin Frank’s wedding circa 2003, and the second is when My uncle Frank an Aunt Pat visited my parents in maybe 2011 or so. This might have been the last time I’d seen either of them alive and in person: they lived in Florida, Aunt Pat had health issues and passed just at the start of COVID, and Uncle Frank followed her not all that long after.

    Uncle Frank and Aunt Pat had three kids (Patricia, Eileen and Frank), our families were about the same age and we spent a lot of our holidays together, but I hadn’t seen them in years; Uncle Frank’s funeral was a bittersweet reunion. Here we are together, my cousins, brothers and me at the post-funeral luncheon:

    family members posing
    Chris, me, Patricia, Kevin, Eileen and Frank


    📂This entry was posted in day by day looking back 📎and tagged

  • Procrastinating Already?!

    Posted on by Don Comment

    Happy New Year!

    Today will be the day I do my usual New Year things (hike, blog my greetings, etc). Yesterday was a day for the family: Emmi & Kyle came over with Iris, and we spent the day hanging out, Zooming with Ben & Jenny in LA, cooking and eating (including our New Year’s pork & sauerkraut), and opening up yet more presents. It was a long but very pleasant day.

    This is what I wrote just about five years ago, it kind of sums up how I feel right now: I’m glad to turn the page, but I’m not sure things will be getting better anytime soon. As always, we shall see.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day

  • Re-Re-Re-Litigating

    Posted on by Don

    I saw recently that FreeCAD, the engineering program I played with once or twice in the past (it wasn’t ready for prime time), well it finally just reached its first official release version. I thought I’d give the new version a try, so I installed it (using Flatpak — probably a mistake, but it was the easiest choice in the moment) and got it running pretty quickly. The program looks the same, maybe a bit more polished, but it definitely works much better. That got me thinking…

    There was a work project I automated years ago, then extended the automation; and then (after I retired) I decided to re-do the whole thing using FreeCAD and Python. Looking back, the actual project was a little bit boring, but playing with the programming was fun, and so I found my old programs, re-worked them a bit, and it worked great.

    I won’t bore you with new pictures.

    One difficulty I did run across was that FlatPak builds apps isolated in their own little sandboxes, with their own version of everything they might need in the sandbox with them, and the version of Python shipped with FreeCAD did not have some of the library moduless my original script needed. And I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to install a library module in the sandboxed version of Python.

    All I needed from the library module was a root-finding function, and in the end it was actually easier to just write my own function than continue messing with the libraries. Strangely enough, my script now runs slightly faster despite my function being less efficient (bisection in Python vs Brent’s Method in C++ or whatever), probably because I got rid of the of the slowdown of having to load that library. Once again, for small problems, small brute-force solutions have their (small) advantages.

    (I don’t remember where I got the idea, all those years ago — I may have pulled it out of my ass made it up myself — but back in school I always thought that the magic number was 3000: when dealing with less than 3000 items, just use the brute-force approach.)

    I also went looking for some of the models I made in my last go-around with FreeCAD. I found a few and moved them from my old laptop to my new one — backing up the old laptop along the way, I don’t think it’s long for this world anymore — but the one I wanted to find, a model of a forged tee I made, was nowhere to be found. Oh well, I guess I can re-litigate that one too, if I really want.


    📂This entry was posted in looking back tech talk

  • Obligatory…

    Posted on by Don

    So here’s my (by now sort of traditional) Thanksgiving offering:

    Enjoy! And for those who may prefer a more traditional holiday, uh, tradition:

    Happy Thanksgiving everybody! Don’t eat too much, that’s not the point.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day

  • Some Downtime

    Posted on by Don

    I’m out on the town right now on a tour of coffee shops. I’m currently at Johnny’s Bagels, after a visit to Bitty & Beau’s, just tapping away on my laptop and enjoying the human parade in front of me — or “enjoying;” the people near me are squabbling about their food at the moment. Anne is still out of town through tomorrow.

    I visited my Mom yesterday. It wasn’t a working visit, just a “visit” visit but I did help her with a few household tech things (printer, etc); I also gave her the digital picture frame I picked up for her a few weeks ago. (I put my photos on it, the ones of my dad I brought to the funeral, and also the ones Chris brought.) I think she was pretty happy with it.

    On the way home last night I started thinking about historical markers, especially the ones relating to the Walking Purchase (my drive home essentially follows the route of the walk), so when I go home I went to the Pennsylvania Historical Marker Program, downloaded the Walking Purchase marker data, and added it to the geodatabase I started for the Walking Purchase. (Technically it’s a geopackage, and I currently keep it as part of my Native Paths project. Speaking of which, I am starting to see the end of what I’ve been doing with the native paths. Not sure what comes next.) I was reading “Promised Land” this morning, but that’s a little too depressing to read in big chunks.

    I’m getting ready to head back home, and watching the windy street out the window. It looks a lot more like November now, cloudy and blustery, and cool if not absolutely freezing. After weeks of warm and sunny, which was nice at first but became more disquieting as the weeks passed (and the drought conditions, and the wildfires and burn bans worsened), it was a pleasure to have two days of “wintry mix” last week. Even walking in it was nice — of course, I was dressed for it.

    Well it’s not raining right now, but I’m dressed for what we do have. Off I go.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day

  • Getting Ready for Thanksgiving

    Posted on by Don

    This is what I wrote, twenty years ago.

    Right now I’m home alone. Anne’s sister Lorraine came down from Tamaqua last night (they were expecting snow), and they took off early this morning, picking up Laura on their way to a “sisters weekend” in Massachussetts. I might visit my Mom tomorrow, if I hear back from her, but otherwise I’m on my own… I am currently wearing a nice heavy wool sweater and eating fish chowder, and I will probably go for a walk in the drizzling “wintry mix” soon, to drop off some overdue library books. Thank goodness the weather has finally become more seasonable, though it is less fun outside now, and we still have a long way to go before the drought conditions are over.

    One other thing: I just signed up for Bluesky. I never subscribed to Twitter, and I’ve been on Mastodon for years but it’s kind of boring (though this might be down to how I use it); we will see about the new kid.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day looking back

  • Another One Bites The Dust

    Posted on by Don

    So we flew out to Altadena last week, and saw this happen…

    Congratulations Ben and Jenny!

    We flew out early last Wednesday morning, meeting Emmi, Kyle & Iris, and David & Noemi, at the airport for our 6:30 flight. We were all flying together, Allentown to LAX by way of Chicago, followed by an hour or so drive to our hotel in Pasadena. (Anne and I also gave one of Ben’s friends a ride from the airport to where he was staying, but we were still checked in at our own place by around 4:00.) Dinner was at a local salad restaurant, and that’s where Ben and Jenny caught up with us.

    The next few days were sort of a routine: up early and breakfast at a local cafe, then fun time with Iris — we really got to know the local parks and playgrounds. Afternoons were spent doing touristy things: Thursday at the South Pasadena farmer’s market (followed by a dinner party at Ben and Jenny’s), Friday at the Santa Monica Pier, including a trip to the aquarium where I got to pet a shark. (Coming home Friday night was also our first real taste of LA traffic…)

    Saturday started with our typical morning routine, then we were off to the wedding venue, a park near Ben and Jenny’s home in Altadena. We got there a bit early and helped with setup, met more of Jenny’s family etc, and finally the big moment came. The wedding ceremony was lovely, and very personal, a mix of Quaker and Iranian Jewish traditions, with the mountains of the Angeles National Forest as backdrop. Afterward we all went to dinner at one of their favorite local restaurants.

    This was unfortunately where Iris reached her limit. She’d been a real trouper up to this time — on the flights, in the hotel and around town, but she’d finally had enough and started melting down; Emmi and Kyle took her home not long after we arrived. We stuck around quite a bit longer — the food and the company were great, and Jenny’s family were an incredibly fun bunch.

    Sunday morning we were all scheduled to go to the nearby town of Ojai for some sightseeing and a visit to the hot springs, but Anne and I offered to stay back with Iris to give her some chill time (and her parents some grown-up fun time). She got in a three-hour-plus nap, and then we just had fun playing in the hotel lobby and watching cartoons (and eating cookies) in our room. The downtime did her, and us, a world of good.

    Emmi and Kyle came back to the hotel around 7:00, with Ben and a bunch of fun stories about their time in Ojai. We had dinner in our room, then went down to the hotel bar where we met Jenny and some of their friends from the wedding. This was a little bittersweet, our last time all together — we were flying home in the early morning — so we laughed and talked, and stayed up maybe a little later than we should have…

    Monday was a long day, and it was all business: driving to LAX through the leading edge of rush hour, flying to Newark, and finally taking a bus back to Allentown. We were home by 10:00 PM, and we were toast.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day 📎and tagged