|
Jump
to Most Recent Update
|
|
|
Sunday, December
24, 2000
|
As we're getting ready for the big night in our household I
thought it appropriate to share two of the more popular
Christmas stories:
Twas The Night Before Christmas
And with an eight year old in our own house:
Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa
Claus
Enjoy your holiday.
Twas
The Night Before Christmas
by
Clement C. Moore
'Twas
the night before Christmas,
when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring,
not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung
by the chimney with care,
In hopes that ST.NICHOLAS
soon would be there;
The
children were nestled
all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar-plums
danced through their heads;
And Mamma in her 'kerchief,
and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains
for a long winter's nap, -
When
out on the lawn
there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my bed
to see what was the matter;
Away to the window
I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters
and threw up the sash.
The
moon on the breast
of the new-fallen snow
Gave the lustre of midday
to objects below;
When, what to my wondering
eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh,
and eight tiny reindeer,
With
a little old driver,
so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment
it must be Saint Nick.
More rapid than eagles
his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted,
and called them by name:
"Now,
Dasher! now, Dancer!
now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on, Cupid!
on, Donder and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch!
to the top of the wall!
Now, dash way! dash away!
dash away all!"
As
dry leaves that before
the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle,
mount to the sky,
So up to the house-top
the coursers they flew,
With a sleigh full of toys -
and St.Nicholas too!
And
then, in a twinkling,
I heard on the roof,
The prancing and pawing
of each little hoof.
As I drew in my head,
and was turning around,
Down the chimney St.Nicholas
came with a bound.
He
was dressed all in fur,
from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished
with ashes and soot!
A bundle of toys he had
flung on his back,
And he looked like a pedlar
just opening his pack;
His
eyes - how they twinkled!
his dimples, how merry!
His cheeks were like roses,
his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth
was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of his chin
was as white as the snow.
The
stump of a pipe
he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke, it encircled
his head like a wreath.
He had a broad face,
and a little round belly,
That shook, when he laugh'd,
like a bowlful of jelly.
He
was chubby and plump;
a right jolly old elf;
And I laughed, when I saw him,
in spite of myself.
A wink of his eye,
and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know
I had nothing to dread.
He
spoke not a word, but went
straight to his work,
And filled all the stockings -
then turned with a jerk,
And laying his finger
aside of his nose,
And giving a nod,
up the chimney he rose.
He
sprang to his sleigh,
to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew,
like the down off a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim,
'ere he drove out of sight,
"Happy Christmas to all!
and to all a good night!"
|
Yes,
Virginia, There is a Santa
Claus
New
York Sun Editorial, 1897
We
take pleasure in answering thus prominently the
communication below, expressing at the same time our
great gratification that its faithful author is
numbered among the friends of The Sun:
I
am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is
no Santa Claus. Papa says, "If you see it in The
Sun, it's so." Please tell me the truth, is there
a Santa Claus?
Virginia O'Hanlon
Virginia,
your little friends are wrong. They have been affected
by the skepticism of a sceptical age. They do not
believe except they see. They think that nothing can
be which is not comprehensible by their little minds.
All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or
children's, are little. In this great universe of
ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect
as compared with the boundless world about him, as
measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the
whole of truth and knowledge.
Yes,
Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.
He
exists as certainly as love and generosity and
devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give
to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How
dreary would be the world if there were no Santa
Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no
Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no
poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence.
We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and
sight. The external light with which childhood fills
the world would be extinguished.
Not
believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe
in fairies. You might get your papa to hire men to
watch in all the chimneys on Christmas eve to catch
Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus
coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa
Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa
Claus. The most real things in the world are those
that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever
see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but
that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can
conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen
and unseeable in the world.
You
tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the
noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen
world which not the strongest man, nor even the united
strength of all the strongest men that ever lived
could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance,
can push aside that curtain and view and picture the
supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah,
Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real
and abiding.
No
Santa Claus? Thank God he lives and lives forever. A
thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000
years from now, he will continue to make glad the
heart of childhood.
Merry
Christmas and a Happy New Year!!!!
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Monday, December
25, 2000
|
Christmas
has arrived at the Tucker household and I must say it
was quite a day.
Thankfully our
kids are not one to hit steps before daylight wanting
to see what's under the tree for them. In fact,
they're rather amazing. Katie was awake first
this morning, but didn't wake her brother up at some
ungodly hour. Andrew came to life around eight
A.M. and this is where they are truly amazing.
Some kids would tear off to the basement and start
ripping open packages, but not these two., They
wait paiently until the adults can surface, get a cup
of coffee and head for the festive area. I am
always amazed at their patience.
And speaking of
package, we are also blessed in that area, as you will
see in the photos below.
We hope
you and your family have enjoyed the day as much as we
have.
|
|
This is the
quiet before the storm. A shot in the base- ment before our early morning
attack.
|
|
|
| Our
living room houses the stockings as
well as gifts for out of town
family. |
|
|
|
And the
table is all set for the afternoon feast of roast beast.
|
|
|
And the
aftermath from the early morning activity.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Thursday, December
28, 2000
|
It's been a lazy couple of days around the
Tucker household. We are, after all, on holiday
break. We've been staying up late, watching movies,
surfing the net and sleeping late. A perfect vacation.
Suzy and her family lived a good portion
of their early years overseas. Her father was with US
Steel and they lived both in the Bahamas and in Brazil where
they enjoyed the beaches and countryside. Suzy's mom
took a ton f photos on slides and over the last couple of
years Suzy's dad has bestowed them upon her. They've
been sitting around in a box and she's been wondering what she
might do with them some day.
Enter the next step. One of the
things Suzy's brother gave her for Christmas was an Acer
ScanWit 2720S film scanner. He admitted there was an
ulterior motive. He wants her to scan the slides from
their youth and burn them to a CD for him and their dad to
enjoy in Florida.
The scanner is SCSI, so I decided I
would pull it out last night and see what kind of problems it
might give me fitting into my current SCSI chain. The
unit came packed with a propriety SCSI card and a cable with
25 pin connectors on each end. You would expect something
that was manufactured in 2000 to at least have the mini-50
SCSI connector.
However, this worked out very nicely.
In my current SCSI chain I have a scanner and photo
printer. The scanner has a 25-pin SCSI out, which had
been feeding the printer, so I set the film scanner between
the two and connected the printer to the new device's SCSI
out, restarted the machine and bam, Rubble saw all three
devices with no problem.
I then installed the scanners twain
software and with that came the first small hiccup. The
unit came bundled with Adobe PhotoShop 5 LE, but I already
have the full blown version of PhotoShop 5.5 installed on
Rubble. However, in order to use the "instant
scan" feature of this device, it's requiring that LE be
installed, so I installed it. I can see the new device
and can scan with my big version of Photoshop, so I hope
there's some setting within the scanning software that will
allow me to blow away the PS LE. Haven't really messed
around with that part yet. I was
impressed with our first scans, but somewhat surprised on how
large the files were. I scanned one slide at 2700 DPI
just for the hell of it and produced a file that was more than
350 megs. Back off bozo. We'll find a happy medium
for our slide scanning project. The
device will also scan film, but I haven't gotten that far yet. A
friend of ours wanted to get her son a CD Receiver for his
car for Christmas, so I volunteered that would be no problem
and pointed her to the Crutchfield
website. She had shopped locally, but of course
found a better unit at a better price from Crutchfield. I
also volunteered that Suzy's brother and I would help with the
installation over the holiday and that would save her another
$50 or so. I had remembered how impressed with the
completeness of Crutchfield's package and their
instructions. A couple of years ago we installed a new
CD deck in Suzy's Mazda MPV and it was a snap. Figured
this would be just as simple. However,
this time we were installing in a Ford Taurus and my first
indication there would be a challenged was in the ordering
process. You had to order some kind of adapter
kit. I figured this was some kind of small adapter that
would fit between the factory connector and the radio.
Wrong. I knew we were in further trouble when we opened
the box and there was a big spool of cable. A connector
with 9 colorful strands of 18 gauge wires 18 feet in length to
be exact. We set about the task
and got the old radio out of the dash with relative
ease. It was a little challenging getting the
temperature control switches on the new faceplate, but no big
deal. We then became a little
stymied what to do with this huge batch of cable. And,
to my surprise, Crutchfield's instructions were a little vague
here, so a call to their tech support and we quickly found out
we would have to take the car half apart and run this cable to
the trunk. For some reason, Ford put this control until
in the trunk for the radio and we had to run both this harness
and the antenna cable under the carpet from the trunk to the
dash. The biggest challenge
was we never did figure how to get the back seat out for a
neat cable run, but found a way to snake the cable through.
Getting the molding away from the carpet required a panel
tool, which not many people have laying around. However,
Crutchfield was helpful in suggesting to use a putty knife for
this task. After getting this
cable run done the rest of the installation was pretty much
straightforward. Unfortunately, this installation job
that I assumed would take about an hour ended up taking most
of the afternoon. I think the three of us spent about
four hours on the project, but in the end he had a nice new stereo
in his car. We didn't even think about working on the
speakers, yet. I want to
increase the storage capacity on my network, but I think I
am going to have to do some more research. Most of my
drives are ATA 66 (and my bus for that part). However, I
want to installed one of the large capacity drives, which I
notice are ATA 100. I'll admit I haven't kept up with
this technology, so here's my research project. Will a
ATA 100 be compatible with my system? Looks like I am
going to have to hit the internet. I
am looking at the Maxtor
DiamondMax Proxima series (98196H8), which is a 80.0gb
(81.9 to be precise) EIDE Ultra DMA/100 5400 RPM drive.
The The best price I have
seen on this drive is around $250, which means that you can
now buy storage for way under a penny per megabyte. I
remember how excited I was when I bought my first 1 gig drive
and it only costs me $0.50 per meg. At that rate this 81
gig drive would cost me somewhere in $41,000 range.
Ouch. OF course I was running Novell back in those days
as well. Another ouch.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Friday, December
29, 2000
|
The more we hear about that wacko in Boston
who went in and shot up his office the day after Christmas,
the worse it gets. It now turns out that he was also
into bomb making and of course it's the internet's
fault. From one news report: "may have also
taken part in complex scientific discussions over the Internet
about how to make explosives."
I guess I spoke just a little too
quick about how I inserted the Acer ScanWit 2720S into my SCSI
chain.
I went to use my flatbed scanner
yesterday afternoon and was immediately confronted with a
problem. In short, the twain driver could not see the
scanner as long as the new film scanner was in the
chain.
At first I thought maybe there was a
conflict with two twain drivers loaded (albeit they were
different and for different devices), so the first step was to
reload the driver for the flatbed. I even searched for
an updated driver. No luck there. A side benefit
was that I had now corrupted my version of Photo Shop and now
need to reload that software as well.
I then thought maybe my SCSI chain was
too long, so I reverted back to my original setup (removing
the film scanner from the chain) and I was back in
business. However, the SCSI bios at boot saw all three
devices.
I then tried connecting the two scanners
to the chain. I was going to connect the printer to
another machine, but this didn't help matters any
either. I guess it was a termination issue with the film
scanner, although I was hoping it included automatic
termination since no terminator was shipped with the device.
The film scanner came with a propriety
SCSI card, actually it's an ARARD AEC-6710D, but that
information is not found on the card or in the documentation
from Acer. A search on the net didn't come up with much
other than a lot of Linux users looking for drivers. The
card may be a OEM part from a Artop Electronics, probably in Taiwan.
I think it may use the AdvanSys chip set. But I'm getting
the cart before the horse here.
So I decided I would connect the film
scanner to the Windows 2000 machine which already had an
AdvanSys SCSI card installed. Problem: The connector was
a SCSI mini-50 and the cable for the film scanner uses a 25
pin connector.
I pulled the machine apart and swapped
SCSI cards and rebooted and was confronted with a head
scratcher. Win 2K would hang every time about 50 percent
of the way through the boot process. I went 'round and
'round with the process, including a coupe of boots in safe,
putting the AdvanSYS card back into the system, but with no
luck.
In troubleshooting the AdvanSys card,
which now wasn't working either, I discovered an uninstall
option in the device manager.
I'm making a long evening short here,
but what I discovered was that I had to uninstall the old SCSI
card before replacing it with a new one. That is,
uninstall it with the Win 2K software.
I was used to other operating systems
where you could just go in and replace the card, load the new
driver and be on your way. Seems to me that with a true
Plug and Play system, the operating system would have noticed
that a hardware change had been made and then take the
necessary steps. If Microsoft is planning for Win2K to
be the mainstream replacement for Windows then I would suggest
they rethink how complicated the new version might be for the
every day novice.
Anyway, I digress. Once I
uninstalled the AdvanSYS card with the software and replaced
it with the card from Acer and rebooted Windows 2K, it found
the card and began installing the driver automatically.
It also installed the scanner. I was concerned about
trying to find a Win 2K driver for this card since one was not
obviously in the package, but thankfully one was included in
Windows.
It was a long evening, but in the end, I
did achieve the original objective. All of my SCSI stuff
is now functioning. Well, I haven't checked the printer.
The machine named Wilma on my
network is a Pentium II 300 on a Seattle of SE440BX
motherboard. It's actually an old Micron Millennia XI system
board that was manufactured by Intel as an OEM part for
Micron.
While I was at tearing this machine
apart (this is same machine I was changing SCSI cards in as
well) last night I thought I would upgrade the system
bios. The bios I was running was the
4S4EB0X1.05A.0006.P03. I found the upgrade at Micron
which brought me up to the ....0007.P04 update.
The first thing I noticed was a
different boot flash screen and then Win 2K reported trouble
with the parallel and serial ports. Simple fix
here. I just went into the bios and changed their state
from [AUTO] to [ENABLED].
I wanted to update the bios in preparation
for installing the mega IDE drive I am contemplating and
wanted to give this future installation every chance of
performing to its maximum ability.
We usually spend the New Year's
holiday with my mother up in Virginia and plan to head up
there later this afternoon. However, in watching the weather
map, we may cut our trip a little short this year and not
actually stay through the new year. The last thing I
need to do after taking a couple of weeks off is to get snow
or ice bound there. And the kids need to get back to get
ready to head back to school.
Therefore my next update will more than
likely be sometime in the new year or the actual new Millennium,
so from all of us at Wakeolda, Happy New Year. I hope
it's a prosperous one for you and your family.
My
conservative political persuasions are no secret, so it's appropriate
that I pass along this Dear Abby letter that appeared in my
mailbox over the holidays.
| Dear Ann
Landers,
I am a sailor in the New
Zealand Navy. My parents live in the suburb of Seatoun
and one of my sisters, who lives 20 Palmerston North,
is married to an Australian. My Father and Mother have
recently been arrested for growing and selling
marijuana and are currently dependent on my two
sisters, who are prostitutes in Auckland.
I have two brothers, one
who is currently serving a no-parole life sentence in
Mt. Eden Prison, Auckland, for the rape & being
held in the Wellington remand center on charges of
incest with his three children.
I have recently become
engaged to marry a former Thai prostitute who lives in
Christchurch and indeed is still a part time
"working girl" in a brothel, however, her
time there is limited as she has recently been
infected with HIV. We intend to marry as soon as
possible and are currently looking into the
possibility of opening our own brothel with my fiancée
utilizing her knowledge of the industry working as the
manager.
I am hoping my two sisters
would be interested in joining our team. Although I
would prefer them not to prostitute themselves, at
least it would get them off the streets and hopefully
the heroin.
My problem is this: I love
my fiancée and look forward to bringing her into the
family and of course I want to be totally honest with
her. Should I tell her that my brother-in-law works in
the Clinton Administration?
I don't want to lose her.
|
|
|
|
|
|
