• Category Archives looking back

  • As in “looking back in time,” things which have a historical connection.

  • Another Look Back

    Posted on by Don Comment

    So here I am, just hanging at the local coffee shop. The living room is getting painted and the house is a disaster, Anne is watching Iris, who is currently suffering from a virus, at Emmi & Kyle’s (where I can’t go because of the dog), and I really just had to get out of the house for a bit.

    Anyway, here is what I wrote twenty years ago. (Funny, I remember those annoying conversations, but I didn’t remember them happening on the same night.) And, here is what I wrote ten years ago. I had already made the transition to this site by then — crazy how time flies.


    day by day looking back

  • Trogdor and Frutiger Aero

    Posted on by Don Comment

    I decided to finally update my “new” laptop’s desktop background, and found a bunch I liked on various sites. A few were silly — memes as Egyptian hieroglyphics , etc — but I noticed that there was a sameness, a theme to most of my picks: a mix of nature and sci-fi images, including quite few nature/sci-fi mashups. There were a few in other colors (mostly orange) but the predominant color schemes were green and blue. Not quite Frutiger Aero, but close…

    I also ran across Homestar Runner the other day, another throwback to the Aughts. The site was heavy into Flash animations and games (to put it mildly), and with the demise of Flash I figured Homestar Runner was gone as well, but there it was, using a Flash replacement called Ruffle. I actually found the old Trogdor episodes and played the theme song until it drove Anne from the room.

    I guess it’s now time to memorialize the Aughts. I miss them, but it was a very different world.

    PS Happy Birthday to my granddaughter!


    cultural ramblings looking back tech talk

  • It’s Been A While, My Friend

    Posted on by Don

    Whenever we visit my Dad’s grave, I take a little walk to see if I can find my friend Mike’s final resting place, but I’ve never had any luck. My Mom and I were at the grave yesterday, and I had my usual fruitless search, but this time, on the way out, I stopped at the grounds-keeper’s office and asked for help. The guy told us to follow him, drove out — to a completely different section of the cemetery than I’d remembered — stopped his truck, and directed us to Mike’s grave. So much for relying on memory…

    gravestone
    Mike’s Grave in Old Tennent Cemetery

    I’d never seen the headstone; the last time I was there was for the funeral, just before Christmas in 2003. Now, twenty three years later, my Mom and I were there to place a rock on the stone. We stood by the grave for a bit, reminiscing, and then we headed home.

    Here is something I put together just after he passed, a photo collage for his girlfriend, and here are some things I wrote about Mike over the years (though some of the links in that link may be broken).


    day by day looking back

  • An Entangled Bank

    Posted on by Don

    It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

    Charles Darwin, “The Origin of Species”

    I saw that quote when I was looking at what I wrote ten years ago — no idea why I quoted it back then, Darwin Day is in February. Meanwhile, this is what I wrote twenty years ago. Strange to think that the two main characters (other than myself) in that long-ago Thanksgiving are no longer with us.


    day by day looking back

  • Blasts From The Past, and Sad News

    Posted on by Don

    Speaking of Sals and maps, this is what I wrote fifteen years ago. Also, this is what I wrote twenty years ago.

    RIP Debbie

    I got the sad news the other day that my cousin Debbie passed away late last week. (Her obituary is here.) Her brother Eddie called and told me; he was (understandably) pretty broken up about it. It’s a tough blow for my Mom too, she and Debbie had become close in recent years. We’ll be going to the wake on Wednesday.


    day by day looking back

  • The End Of The Trail

    Posted on by Don

    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.


    looking back tech talk 📎and tagged

  • Remembering My Uncle Frank

    Posted on by Don

    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


    day by day looking back 📎and tagged

  • 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.


    looking back tech talk

  • 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.


    day by day looking back