hey jud

Remember back when I was momnut and posting on megnut? Well take a look at Meg and then at my picture to see a megnut metamorphosed into a momnut. Always before, Meg has looked more like my sister Marcia, but suddenly with the new haircut, it's almost like looking at a picture of myself.

So when I finally got my picture to show up so Peter could see it on his office PC, I said 'Woo hoo! woo hoo! - it's finally working'. And he said, 'What? now you're talking like Meg too?'

Lately I've been thinking about why there's been such a long hiatus on heyjud and resolving to end it, not just with pictures but with more written expressions of my daily musings and concerns. And then I go back on my resolve and leave heyjud blank again. A huge inspiration though, has shown up in yet another Donald Murray column, a writer to whom I've linked before. This latest one telling about how he approaches writing his weekly column, and writing in general, should be enough to get me over the hiatus hump.

And now that my new resolve is out in the open, stay tuned for more regular posting.

Played three hymns with four sharps. That's how the September 6, 1944 entry ended in the diary Meg and I found when we visited last Friday with my Mom and Dad in Orange. I had seen my Grandma Pete's diaries before but I hadn't known that my Grandma Engel also kept a diary, and that's the one we found on the shelf. This one short entry brought me right back to my favorite summertime visits, when Grandma Engel would take me with her to church while she practiced the organ for the next Sunday's service. And when I got old enough and had enough piano lessons behind me, she'd even let me play the organ a bit. Of course she seemed so wonderfully accomplished, I love discovering from this succinct entry that she too, had to work at remembering the changes required for four sharps, and felt enough pride in the accomplishment to mention it in her diary. I feel so connected again to my Grandma Engel, just from this tiny new insight.

The guy was skipping across the intersection to get to the other side before the light turned green - a grown man, skipping. And what an effective way to speed up beyond a walk but not have to break into a run. He made it across and made my day one with a new outlook on what a 'proper' image was all about.

What a thrill for me to see and hear Tim Berners-Lee speak last night as part of the Cambridge Forum series. I noticed the event announcement in the Globe Thursday morning, and thinking it might be crowded, I arrived early enough to get a good seat up close. The room probably held 100 people and by the time things got started, all the seats were filled.

The presentation, Technology in the 21st Century, began with a fifteen minute overview providing a foundation for audience questions to follow. His concept was that of a two-part web, made up of documents for reading, and their data which requires further processing. Today's web provides a thin layer over the top of everything, enabling easy access to documents without being concerned about where they actually are, what type of machine they are stored on, or what path will reach them. Tomorrow's web, which he calls the semantic web, will also provide a thin layer, but a layer which allows the data within the document to be readily accessed and processed. For example, if I had found the announcement of this talk on a web page, I would have immediately recognized the speaker's name, confirmed my interest in attending and picked out the pertinent information to get me there - the date and time, the location, and the happy fact that it was free. Lacking a PDA to type it into, I'd write it on my calendar. I'd doublecheck with a map utility to be certain that the address was right where I thought by the Harvard T-stop, or, if I were driving my dream car with the fancy GPS system, I would plug the location into that. From the web I can get all the necessary information, but I have to connect it myself, with my calendar and other systems to process it. The next big step on the semantic web will be when the data itself can be processed, when you can just point a PDA at the web and have it automatically enter the data into your calendar, GPS or whatever. In answer to a later audience question, he foresaw the arrival of 'always-on' access as the key to this change.

He also posed a social issue for audience consideration. Where all of the initial protocols (tcp/ip, ftp, http) were built for the common good, with the web now seen as a money maker, the rush is on to patent devices and even software, an idea he likened to patenting a thought. Standard languages are what allow everything to work as a single web, but tension is growing between intellectual property rights and the desire to keep the web free. His work with the World Wide Web Consortium provides his take on how this should all go, and an audience question about whether computers should be value-free added the answer that they should be like a piece of paper, just an unregulated receptacle for information.

It was so neat to see what a regular nice and funny guy he was, and it was such a stimulating talk that I was kind of surprised that there weren't absolute throngs of people trying to get in. I guess the inventor of the world wide web is just another guy in Cambridge.

If you're interested in more than just my quick notes from the talk you can actually get an audio tape of the whole thing for $12 from www.cambridgeforum.org.

Scenes from Thanksgiving Day in Orange, including foraging for Christmas decorations, happily completed car wash, archer at the ready, puzzling together, very relaxing reading and focused on Game Boy. Seems to have a common thread with families everywhere.

Sunday's post-Thanksgiving brunch brought lots of family to Braintree to eat heartily yet again and to pose for the first in a new venue for step shots. Everyone is shown in the picture, thanks to next door neighbor and photographer, Bill Fraser. Prize for the furthest distance traveled went to Kit, Kia and Jered visiting from Bainbridge Island, though we all missed Linda and Moebius who stayed behind on Nantucket. Louise also stayed behind and missed being one of the lucky few who got to attend another Patriot's game in the rain. At least they won this time.

Last year my paper white narcissus bulbs were duds. They didn't grow very tall and I didn't get a single blossom. This year I apparently have super bulbs, the way they're zooming up already. I started them the Friday after Thanksgiving, which is usually just the right time to have them in full blossom for Christmas. At the rate these super bulbs are going though, I'm afraid they may be over and done with too soon for my holiday decoration plans.

On the other hand, I planted mache at the end of September from seeds I brought back from France, and it's growing oh so slowly. Perhaps that timing will be right for a Christmas dinner salad though.

Mad River memories are cropping up everywhere these days. Featured first on Boston Magazine's list of spots for hitting the slopes, the writeup on Mad River Glen simply said, 'If you haven't skied it yet, you should'. Then the mail brought a brochure titled just like my favorite bumper sticker, Mad River Glen Ski It If You Can, and full of information about how the Cooperative works and the legend it's continuing. And this morning NPR reported the death of George Harrison, who wrote our family's skiing inspiration song. Back when we rented a condo at the Battleground, we always popped in the tape, forwarded to 'Here Comes the Sun', as we pulled out through the covered bridge on the road up to the mountain. Heading to our hoped for nirvana of powder on the slopes and sunny blue sky overhead, we were disappointed by the weather more often than not, but never by the skiing at such a magical place.