I haven’t been writing much since 2006, with nothing to say for several months. When I tried to enter some posts and clean up some presentation issues, MT presented some odd behaviour. In fact I was unable to write or edit entries in Opera (which has become my browser of choice) which was probably related to the way Opera handled Java scripts. That seems to have gone away with an Opera upgrade and a reinstall of Java.
MT had been upgraded in the last year, including the release of version 5 in January 2010. I began the upgrades a couple of weeks ago. This was a more demanding upgrade. I installed MT 5.01 by a clean install. At that point I got lost on the upgrade path until I remembered – basically learned again – some of the server side file structure. Once I figured out which folder was my Web Root, I got the uploaded files in the right directories and CHMOD-ed and got the mt-configure.cgi file reading right.
MT tried to supersede many plug-ins and to revise the handling of templates – basically allowing for the incorporation of some pieces of the old templates in new widgets or template modules. I refreshed MT templates, lost some of the features in the sidebars on my old templates I have to go back and edit some templates to get some content back on line but it’s on track again. On the positive side, this brings a lot of old files up to date and gives me a lot of new options. Assuming that I start to write again.
Author: Tony Dalmyn
Rosa
My mother died last Friday. She was 82 years old. She has had Alzeimer for several years and has been in a care home since June 2008. She had asthma for many years. She had been having increasing difficulty breathing and with that came a diagnosis of late stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. I visited Winnipeg in October last year and at the end of January this year. Her death was sudden, apparently due to a cardiac episode. The last few years were confusion, distress and illness, the end of her life was inevitable, painless and not too soon.
My sisters and brothers in Winnipeg have coped with the issues of my mother’s terminal illness and my father’s decline and psychological collapse with much hard work and many tears. Dad is in the care home. In the last couple of months before mother died, he was failing in self care and unable to change the course of mother’s illness. He was getting disconnected with reality, although his love and affection never wavered. He seems to have become more lucid, but much sadder after the funeral today.
He has mentioned some old stories that I had never heard before, and would not have understood when I had less lines on my face. His mother had visited from Holland in the early or mid 1960’s. My father had not gone back to Holland when his father had died, and he had tried never to look back on his decision to move to Canada. His mother had told him, he remembered, that his mother had reservations about Rosa. She was older than him and “bossy” which was probably a way of saying what we might call needy, as she was always emotionally expressive, and defensive of her self-regard. He said that his mother had tried to say that she was surprised at how well Rosa was doing as a wife and mother, but he had found the remark hurtful.
My brother in law Joe accepted the task of delivering a eulogy at the funeral. He spoke well, emphasizing on the positive elements of her last few years. She became a happier person, more “in the moment” more content to take and give a smile and thumbs up and to wish anyone well with “keep up the good fight”. He found the right picture and captured her strength as a mother.
Appliances
Since my move to Victoria, I have tried out and adopted some appliances and discarded others.
I started with a new set of Paderno stainless steel pots – purchased cheaply in 2006 when Canadian Tire dropped the Royale sets. I have added another sauce pan and the steamer and double boiler (not Royale but who cares). Capital Iron carries Paderno in Victoria. I expect the saucepans and the dutch oven to last for a while. The coated frying pans are standing up well although I think the coating in those pans will break down long before the pans wear out.
I bought a larger enameled cast iron dutch oven at Capital Iron which has become one of my favorite pots.
I started with some decent knives – some with the Superstore house brand and some of the midrange Wusthof Tridents.. I bought a couple new knives last year – I went to Mac for a 6 and a half inch Santoku and a 10 inch chef’s knife. The steel is superb – it stays sharp enough for ripe tomatoes with a few strokes of a diamond dressing hone.
Paddling and Cycling
This year I broke off with dragon-boating. It was initially a conflict with the manager of the Club program over a protocol and has become a longer break. Some paddlers paddle dragon boats every summer from May to August. I have enjoyed the evening practices and the frantic transformation of couch potatoes into weekend warriors, but I have let it go.
I paddled Outrigger canoes (OC) through the winter, one or twice a week. In the spring, I paddled in some spring races and some longer races. It has helped me to stay active but I have not trained enough to consider myself a fit or strong paddler. I had hoped to paddle more this summer but many paddlers give up OC for dragon boat or to take canoe or kayak trips. There are a few diehards so we have been getting out about once a week. Dragon boat is winding up and there are going to be some races this fall, so I might get on a team and get into some tougher training.
I have been cycling more this year than last year. I haven’t done many evening rides, but I have been getting some long rides in on weekends. I have had some work done on one of my bikes. I had upgraded some components on the Giant in 2004 but made the serious mistake of putting on 175 mm cranks. This may have been contributing to strain on joints, pain and fatigue. It may play a part in the stiffness in my right hip. We will see.
Aging Parents
In December last year I agreed to travel to Winnipeg to accompany my dad to the hospital for his surgery for hernia. He had the operation in January. It disrupted his routine of visiting mother in the nursing home for a few days, but he was back at it. He realized that his needs to visit and be with her had been putting a strain on his family – specifically my sisters, who had been picking him or taking him home. He agreed to apply to be placed in a nursing home – on strict condition that it would be the same home as mother. He was surprised when his application was approved quickly. He had been underestimating his frailties.
He moved when a room became available. He is on the same floor in a different wing. He visits mother and tries to anticipate her needs and wants, and to provide care that the staff can’t provide. This tires him out, because his ideas of what she needs and deserves are not the same as everyone else’s, and he reacts to her smallest gestures. As her behavior is impulsive, this can be frustrating for him. He says he is happy. He is busy with his efforts to help mother. He turned 80 in June. I visited at the end of June.
2008 is over, Hallelujah
My story about my musical year starts with a short term obsession about a song.
The CBC broadcast a story about the popularity of Leonard Cohen’s song Hallelujah in Britain on the National (TV news) on the Friday night before Christmas. The CBC was interested because the writer was a Canadian. The story was that two different versions of the song were topping the British charts in the week before Christmas. For the last few years, some kind of Christmas themed piece has topped the charts. There is no Christmas list as such, and the charts continue to track the popularity of modern popular music in Britain, on sales.
The only connection between Hallelujah and Christmas is that the word Hallelujah is used in some Christian prayers and songs, including some Christmas songs and hymns. There is a Hallelujah Chorus in Handel’s Messiah, which has become a Christmas concert favorite for choral performances. The oratorio is more of an Easter piece, and the Hallelujah chorus alludes to passages in the Apocalypse (Revelations as English speaking Protestants call it) rather than to King David, King Solomon, or Samson and Delilah. I found one artist, Allison Crowe, who had recorded the song on a Christmas album.
I listened to clips of the Alexandra Burke version that topped the British charts. I listened to several versions, including Cohen’s, John Cale’s, Jeff Buckley’s, and Crowe’s. Wikipedia has a clip of a cover by John Cale. I found a cover – vaguely techo – by Bono on a Cohen tribute album. I thought Allison Crowe did well, but Jeff Buckley’s version was better, perhaps the best. That young man was a great performer. Jeff Buckley understood what Cohen was writing about when he said that the song was dedicated to the orgasm, which one of the few things that provokes serious (as opposed to profane and vulgar) religious exclamations, and the closest thing to mystical ecstasy that people can credibly claim to have had.
Cohen sings the song as a song of memory and regret, sung by lovers who have exhausted the physical potential of their relationship without finding a way to stay in love. When Cohen sings it, you can smell the Scotch and cigarettes, and visualize the books by Camus and Sartre on the bedside table. Cohen celebrates and preserves the memory of the sexual relationship within the context of rationalizing the fact that the emotional intensity of relationship has changed, and that the ecstasy was temporary.
I heard a Victoria group, the Gruff, sing their cover at Spinnaker’s Brewpub last spring, and then a few more times at other venues in Victoria and at the Mission Folk Festival in July. For some reason, their version is less worldly and more optimistic and anticipatory.
My year in music was pretty quiet. I listened to Cohen, and some performers who covered him. I bought some old classic Fairport Convention. The high point of my year was travelling to Vancouver to hear the Oysterband at St. James Hall – the Rogue Folk Club’s principal venue . They were touring to promote their newest album. Their concert was amazing, and the new album is pretty good.
I wasn’t happy about the Vancouver Island Festival in Comox-Courtenay this year. It was hot, and the camping is crowded, leaving the hardy party folk drinking and carousing amid the families and people trying to sleep. I recall a couple of good workshops about calypso and Indian music, but the festival was disappointing. Michael Wrycraft was one of the hosts on the main stage. He was trying to pay a tribute to the great musician Oliver Schroer, who had died a few days earlier. The crowd was indifferent, which struck me as very sad. Folk fans like to fancy themselves as true patrons of the arts, bonded with the artists by love of the genre, but they are just fussy consumers. They know what they like, and they like what they have been groomed to listen to. The best that I can say about them is that they have stretched their tastes beyond mass culture to be listening to folk at all. I will stay away from negativity.
The Mission Folk Festival was small, quiet and well programmed. I enjoyed the Gruff, and Moira Smiley and Voco, Rani Arbo and Daisy Mayhem, and Nathan Rogers. I have caught Rogers at different stages in his career. His stage manner is respectful but a little manic. He performs fine covers of his father’s songs – some imitative of the canonical performances, others innovative. He has experimented with a song with throat singing. He caught me with a good cover of Into White, a song by Cat Stevens. I could have done without the all the extra stage time lavished on a Tibetan singing nun.
Over the rest of the year, I began to listen to Billy Bragg more carefully. I also have appreciated Richard Shindell, Richard Thompson, Joan Osborne. I went to Sheryl Crow’s concert at the Memorial Arena in Victoria with some of my friends from my Dragon Boat team. I know most of the songs, the production overwhelmed the music, and I realized that I didn’t have a clue about the way women from 15 to 50 felt about her songs.
I have been tending to read with the TV on, tuned to news, or soccer, or a bad movie, and not listening to music. That has started to change. So ends the year.
End of Summer
The milestones of life …
Toshiba Satellite A200 without Vista
Over the last 6 weeks I spent more time than I want to think about trying to get a new Satellite (Model A200, or A200-03V, specifically PSAE3C-03V08C) to run an alternative OS to its pre-installed Windows Vista. The laptop was attractively priced, perhaps because it was pre-loaded with Vista, as much as the fact that it was being cleared out for newer models. I think these models were engineered for XP and thrown on to the market with Vista drivers when Microsoft terminated its OEM licencing for XP installations, forcing computer manufactures to pre-install Vista.
Given the resources of the system – processor and memory – it falls short of what it seems to take to run Vista, and running Vista has other drawbacks.I wasn’t sure about changing to XP although that is the route I took in the end. One problem, for me and many users is having to buy XP off the shelf. There is a cost factor, and even if I had owned a valid working copy of XP, I needed to get working drivers for the hardware in the Satellite to complement the install set and complete the installation. Another potential problem is losing the recovery functions that Toshiba builds in with its HDD Recovery Utility.
MT 4.1
Back in January, I ran the upgrade to Movable Type 4.1. The developers made a number of moves to make MT more attractive to personal users including changes to let personal users migrate from Word Press and to port Word Press Styles to MT. The management of pictures and content has become easier with the ability to upload and manage “assets” and then use the assets in the blog.
I haven’t used it much. I have been busy at work, and spent more my personal time reading and pursuing other things.
Ribbons are Nice
Jennie Bristow, reviewing Sarah Moore’s Ribbon Culture for Spiked, nails the self-obsessed culture of advertising one’s moral quality by fashion accessories. Her review is called Untying the ‘ribbon culture’. The moral virtue of wearing ribbons is to show awareness or solidarity with a group of victims. Being a victim has become a way of attracting attention, building political support, explaining the lack of joy in one’s life, and selling media product. Cry, cry, cry. Frank Furedi’s column about faked victim memoirs, History-as-Therapy, complements the ribbon piece.