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Snow Leopards Leaping

Aug 28th, 2009 by Tom

When I learned of the unexpected death of Keith Wilson nearly 9 months ago I was shocked.  Keith was not only the developer for  iFamily For Tiger–as it was known when I first became acquainted with and subsequently purchased the software–he was head cheerleader for the product and a passionate genealogist.  The quality of the product attracted me right away but it was Keith’s personal involvement and interaction with the users–through the iFamily forum and email–that was the most instrumental factor in my purchasing iFamily.  We carried on a lively email banter and swapped a few jibes and stories even though a hemisphere separated us.  If there was ever a problem or a question regarding either iFamily or genealogy, Keith was quick to respond, in fact his proaction was astounding, almost rivaling his programming skills.  So Keith’s death struck me as tragic for his family and friends and the project he certainly loved, iFamily.  His death also introduced a level of pessimism in me about the future of iFamily.

Perhaps it is unfair to assume that the best intentions cannot realistically be expected to translate into that which they intend.  Perhaps, but the development of iFamily has been stalled since Keith’s untimely passing and there are no tangible signs that development is ongoing, or, if it may ever be revived.  I had hoped that iFamily’s code base would be taken over by either another individual who was an avid genealogist or by a firm similarly committed to genealogy so that Keith’s efforts would continue to grow and flourish from the fertile foundation he had laid.  Unfortunately, in nearly nine months not one revision has been made to iFamily, not even the last revision Keith had scheduled for release around the end of October 2008.  I am not a software developer and I harbor no secret desire to become one although I had been a programmer for over 20 years (retired); however, there is an implicit professional mandate not to let a viable code base languish; it is not good for business and it certainly is not very considerate of customers who have purchased the product and spent long hours filling its database with genealogical data.  It would be kinder and wiser to announce the end of development for that software.  Situations arise when it becomes necessary to end product development; unfortunately, such casualties are not all uncommon in technology.

While I have hoped that I was mistaken and that my judgment was faulty, action or inaction seems to confirm my doubts.  On June 9 2009 I raised a query in the iFamily forum regarding Apple’s newest operating system, OS X 10.6, dubbed Snow Leopard, and compatibility issues, if any, with iFamily.  It was said that there were no expectations for any conflict or problems for iFamily running under Snow Leopard.  Sadly there are: iFamily does not run under SL.  Apparently, iFamily was never tested by the developer to confirm that it would or would not run under OS X 10.6.  The developers of Reunion 9 did test their software and issued a warning prior to the release of Snow Leopard so that the users would know in advance that upgrading the OS would cause Reunion to fail.  Meanwhile, they are working to release an upgrade to address the problems which they have identified.

My personal preference is to continue to use iFamily as my primary genealogy program and I am willing to be patient for the short term as long as there is a definite commitment made to the active development of iFamily and not long periods of inactivity and promises which go unmet.  One of the realities involving of computers is that operating systems will continue to improve and change.  Developers have an obligation to keep abreast of, and, in some cases, ahead of the sharp technology curve that these improvements promise if they want their products to remain viable.  I hope that coding issues with iFamily and Snow Leopard will be resolved in a reasonable time, on the other hand, I am beginning to take a closer look at Reunion 9 as it appears to have a solid user base and a track record for longevity–not a bad quality when one is involved with genealogy.

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Posted in Technology, genealogy | 2 Comments »

Vacuum Cleaners: A Meditation

Aug 25th, 2009 by Tom

After 20 years of reliable service I decided it was time to replace our old multi-tool Panasonic with something more powerful and easier to use.  In addition to conducting  research online to evaluate possible replacement options, I also spent considerable time testing various  models at the usual brick and mortar establishments.   Nothing  really seem to appeal to me; however, just as I was beginning to resign myself to endure using my aging vacuum until it no longer functioned at all, my wife pointed to an advertisement featuring a half off price sale at a local Oreck Store.  Oreck was not one of the models I had tested before so I decided to see what was being offered and demo a vacuum while I was there.  While the half-price deal was intriguing I didn’t really intend to plunk down the bucks for an Oreck, or a Rainbow, or any of those similarly priced vacuums.

At the Oreck store we tried out the full line of vacuums as well as inquiring about the half-priced model listed in the advertisement.  As I expected, the vacuum on sale didn’t measure up to the various models I tested but that was due more to my specific requirements than the performance of the vacuum itself.  In the end I opted for the Oreck XL Platinum Plus which comes with a 15 year warranty that includes yearly maintenance on the vacuum and its parts as well as a canister vacuum–I chose the mid-line canister model for its combination of features and portability.  The initial outlay for the Oreck  that I chose was substantially more than I had considered spending for a vacuum; however, the life expectancy of the appliance and service contract added sufficient value to the primary feature of the product (its excellent performance as a vacuum) that it offset the cost.  Besides, there was a thirty day trial period which included a money back guarantee.

I did hold onto the old Panasonic while I put the XL through its paces and for one scary day I was beginning to think I would have to revert to my aging dust creator again.  The week we bought the Oreck an emergency arose and we had to make a quick trip north to see family so I didn’t have the opportunity to test our new vacuum thoroughly until we returned.  Shortly after I commenced vacuuming in earnest, an ear-piercing squeal  developed.  The sound only occurred during the backstroke, when one was pulling the machine back toward oneself; however, the effect of the squeal was almost nauseating.  It is probably an understatement to suggest that there are occasions when I tend to be more reactive than on other occasions.  I can tell you that each time that Oreck squealed at me it sounded as if dollar bills were being shredded in a modified trade of cash for toxic assets deal.  So I called the Oreck Store immediately.  When I finished my description of the problem, I was told that a shipment of vacs had come into the shop that had not been properly lubricated at the factory.  Apparently other customers had reported similar experiences as the Oreck representative was familiar with the problem.  I was told to bring the vacuum by the shop and it would be fixed/adjusted while I waited.  The vac was adjusted in a matter of minutes and we were on our way.

I don’t often go for the warranty gambit offered with most products these days as they do not appear to add enough value to the product for the cost.  I’ve read that engineering has become so refined that manufacturers can produce products with specific failure rates built in which are accurate to within a week of the projected point of failure, which, can conceivably allow the fees from warranty contracts to be applied directly to the bottom line.  Costs for certain replacement parts exceed the purchase price of a new item, e.g. one can buy a newer model laser printer for less than or equal to the cost of the old printer’s toner cartridge.  So why bother with a vacuum from a company that includes service as an integral part of its business model?  For starters, there is something appealing about resisting the waste produced by the throw-away attitude which is so prevalent today.  Caring for whatever one used–without consideration of ownership or value–had been an implicit code of conduct in general society; it certainly was drummed into me as a kid.  Of course, the notion of caring may have had its roots in everyday living where a certain frugality was necessitated by the limitations of one’s resources.  Until the recent global economic collapse consumption and not conservation was the dominant mindset of the average individual.  We became short-sighted in our estimation of value, misled by a faulty system of cost analysis where the constant churning of production was an insatiable maw that cannibalized itself.  Complicit with the unending cycle of producing was the concomitant drive for entrepreneurs, large and small, to create need where before only want stood day-dreaming about the imaginary world it was constructing.  I’m not implying that all novelty is a matter of ulterior motivation or that creativity is merely a process of deception; however, while both statements contain the seeds of truth, it is the growth and the yield which are often the source of ambiguity.

Of course, I am extremely pleased with the Oreck; it has performed as advertised.  I may not feel the same way in 2019 or 2024, two-thirds of the way into the service contract and at its end, respectively, which, returns us once again to the topics of obsolescence and longevity.  If the present climate has taught us anything it is that businesses, even those considered too big to fail, can in fact fail; and that obligations, promises, and contracts are as transitory as the organizations that offered, issued, or underwrote them.  Oreck, as a company, may not survive the bargain it has struck with me as a customer.  Fifteen years can be an eternity these days, besides, in a year or two some better product may (will) come along that will offer more for the same cost or less, or be more green, as we are inclined to say to show off our global view and environmental awareness.  It is both confusing and perplexing; it is even seductive, this surplice of green cloth which at once protects us and our environment and blinds us from our own self-centered ratiocination.  Perhaps the solution depends upon not what we have but how we have it; not what we do but how we do it.

Theory

I am what is around me.

Women understand this.
One is not duchess
A hundred yards from a carriage.
These, then are portraits:
A black vestibule;
A high bed sheltered by curtains.

These are merely instances.

—Wallace Stevens

Posted in General, Observations, Philosophy, Poetry, Politics, Technology | No Comments »

Moving On

Aug 11th, 2009 by Tom

Several weeks have last since my last post.  My silence has its source in the reticence one inevitably experiences when a loved one dies, in my case, it was my mother; however, her passing was absent the pain and anguish I have heard recounted that others have suffered.  Whereas I have had an intellectual and philosophical understanding of the nature and meaning of death, that is not the phenomenal equivalent of the actual experience of the death of another human being.  A few years ago I acquired such knowledge first hand when the loss of a dear friend struck me to the core of my being and I found myself inconsolable until I was able to make some sense of his passing by remembering him in writing.  While the news of my friend’s death precipitated an immediate response in me the loss of my mother did not.  The mind is a master at misdirection and it allowed distance and absence to mask the finality of our condition, both mine and my mother’s.  The eight or nine hours of travel time which separated us made her only absent, unavailable for the moment, as if she had stepped out to go shopping or to have her hair done.  Although her voice could not have answered mine and proceeded to meander from one non-sequitur to another using her failing hearing and memory as both guide and crutch, tacitly I knew that if I did not call, I could extend the reality to which I had grown accustomed and, if such power was implicit in the choosing, I would enforce my own temporal hegemony over death.

The hurt of reality can become a constant agony if we are unable to accept the endless flow of life and not rejoice in its variety and celebrate its creative advance into the unknown.  My mother was alive to me in the reality with which I had wrapped myself; that world burst as the family entered the funeral parlor.  I had dreaded this moment; the penultimate things that we humans feel the need to say to each other were already said and understood by both of us–I had always loved her and she had always loved me; there was something so elemental in our relationship that more addenda was simply superfluous.  So I did not want to evaluate the beautician’s or the mortician’s skill; I did not want to view a hollow shell that bore no resemblance to the living whirl-a-gig that was my mother.  The first half-hour in the funeral home was torment for me; as I entered I was unable to breathe, my breath felt as if it had been sucked out of me, and I was overcome with emotion.  I hurt all over, every part of me wept and would not be consoled.  When I thought I would never recover, I did, in time to stand and speak about my mother, to color our memory of her with authenticity bereft of cliches that so often are uttered in eulogies and have no connection to the life being celebrated.

This has been a season of mileposts for me.  I became a grandfather on our nation’s birthday and subsequently, in a little over a month’s time, my mother died and I turned sixty-four–today, in fact.  We often are seduced by the notion of infinity–a delicious prospect on many levels and just as daunting and dismaying on others–but we fail to comprehend the freedom and limitations of finitude.  Probability ascribes to me a remaining longevity that can be reasonably calculated by the addition of all of my digits(fingers, toes and thumbs) with the caveat that scientific discoveries may require something more extensive than digital enumeration: this little piggy went to market…might embark on a journey slightly longer than we anticipated.  When I extend my hand, in truth, there are times I see the wrinkled, spotted hands of an old man, but more often I am reminded of persistence even in the midst of the ephemeral nature which is our life long habitat.  There are so many tasks left undone; many are daunting, but they are all the obligation of the living.  We’ve endured so much how can we not be intrepid as we shape the future?

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it

– Omar Khayyam

Posted in Family, Memorial, Observations, Philosophy | No Comments »

Naming of Parts

Jul 20th, 2009 by Tom

As a freshman in college, I was required to write an analysis of Henry Reed’s poem, Naming of Parts. Throughout different periods in my life I have been reminded of that poem. Certainly, the tumultuous years of the 1960’s and early 1970’s were periods when the distinct anti-war sentiment of this World War II era poem resonated with the events unfolding at that time and with my own personal life as I served as a conscientious objector in opposition to the war in Vietnam. However, this morning, Reed’s poem penetrated my consciousness in an altogether different light. Around midnight the vale of calm that had descended over me was torn away by the ring tone of my cell phone. As I catapulted from my bed and fumbled in the darkness for the phone, I exhaled in resignation to receive the words I had hoped I would never hear:   Tommy, mom passed away just before quarter of twelve, my sister sobbed. The air was heavy, burdensome even in its life-giving properties; pathos rather than oxygen enriched it so that breathing was living and drowning, a vortex of light and water, an embrace of loss and love, of bondage and freedom. She slipped away as I slept.

Morning brings renewal whether or not we approve; it brings a perspective that we may accept or reject but it always provides us with a moment of innocence, a moment in which all that ever was can be remade in an inexplicable alliance of possibilities. We cannot undo what has come to pass or unhook the world from its orbit; we cannot perform a cosmological legerdemain and revivify the matter which has spent itself or master the soul’s surcease with an esoteric alchemy. Life begets death and death begets life, a tarantella we must all dance and, none or few of us, depending on one’s perspective, ever master.

I found myself strangely like the daydreaming student in Reed’s poem, gazing out on an imaginary Eden, constructing a haven of memories as the world droned on about the parts of its machinery, ineluctably, mechanically, methodically, routinely–dentist appointments, dental insurance claims, car inspections. What war demands is fomented from genius which has not bridled passion to bear witness to love; and, instead, sees itself as the object of all affections. Breaking down a rifle is not a paradigm for a life, not even if my mother, was by some reckoning, a cocked, Sicilian pistol; however, the process by which we compartmentalize a life may very well differ only in the naming of the parts: she was born on… her parents were… married on.. she worked for… retired… is survived by her husband… her children… her grandchildren… her great grandchildren… family will receive at… in lieu of flowers…

In my reverie I construct a thousand scenes, all of which paint her differently, portray her with loving tenderness but do not censor the salty repartee with which she could deflate the puffiest ego–mine was not exempt and suffered an occasional bruise as I tumbled from an untenable and precarious perch. When we draw near as friends and family to pay our respects, to honor her life, to share our memories, try as we might, there will remain an emptiness within the fullness of our remembrances for as the poet reminds us of the fragility of balance: for this we have not got.

While I wrote this poem nearly a decade ago on mother’s day, it remains faithful to the life and spirit of my mother, the indecipherable bond between parent and child, the inextinguishable flame which is implicit and guides us in all of our journeys.

Millennial Mother’s Day

I dialed several times before you answered
and several more before I got the number
right.
Hello
the voice as distant as it was dulcet
labored from years stashed away
like pennies in those glass bottles
lurking in the corners and dark places
of your rooms with their thin necks
stretched like cranes swallowing fish.

Of course you were surprised,
sometimes, the voice eludes you,
runs behind your memory like
the child you recall used to play
hide and seek beneath the street
lamps poking holes in summer nights.

Hi Mom, happy mother’s day.
How are you? Our conversations
have the regularity of our age,
spaced as the years increase,
they have become brief but epic
paeans to codify our strange chronology.

I’m OK. My back hurts when I lift
anything; walking’s hard but I
ain’t getting no operation on my back
at my age. The time in between my calling
sheds all forms of mechanism. There is no longer
any duty left, no rancor at being forgotten,
at least in my own tightly spinning universe,
until the next time I tap out the number
of my home, by rote and heart. She answers
if she’s there
and if she has made the trip
to her Mecca by the sea, Atlantic City, balancing
bouncing bus rides and the kalaediscope
of neon lights, spinning wheels, and the incubi
who whisper hoarsely to her of precious maps
to unimaginable fortune; or weighing how much
flesh she has left to barter for this respite
which requites the sacrifice of youth made
much too soon; he answers. Lucid now
when medicated, strong & powerful in my
memory of him. I see him mostly this way;
weak only when I measure my own fragility
against the encroaching ages of my children.

But she is there this time and we pause,
a reflection of distance and resignation
rushes by like a pleasant memory
which distracts but does not color
itself with time or place or people.
Our voices evoke an unspoken trace
of parent, child; something lingers,
her heartbeat in her breath, the young
woman in photographs, the rasp of
tobacco and hot nights of shift work
in factories since she left high school,
a girl’s dreams of field hockey exchanged
too prematurely for the secrets of adults,
something palpable that cannot be bound
with words.

Posted in Memorial | No Comments »

Dry Spells

Jul 2nd, 2009 by Tom

Spring rains were abundant this year and the parched central Piedmont of North Carolina was officially removed from the state’s drought listing.  Unfortunately rainfall is much more effective when it follows reasonable patterns rather than sporadic and localized downpours.  We have been treated to one rather onerous deluge a few weeks ago that relieved the stress on water tables but otherwise was the source of flooding.  Meanwhile the arid landscape has become a checkerboard of red clay baked by the unrelenting sun and absence of rain.  Experience suggests that relief will come, we don’t know when, and, even then, it is only a matter of speculation.

As the specter of drought inches closer, it is difficult not to cast about and recognize similar periods of inactivity or diminished productivity in other areas.  For nearly the last year I have been disengaged from genealogy research which I had pursued with such single-minded zeal that I became the bane of relatives who tired of my litany of questions and who cringed at the thought that my next breath was merely a brief interlude in preparation for another extended family anecdote.  Although the intensity of my genealogical research had ebbed from its former state, I continued to follow the activity on the various forums I had joined and posted whenever I could contribute meaningfully in the on-going discussions.

One forum that I found quite enjoyable was associated with the genealogy software I purchased to maintain the data that I collected as a result of my research.  In fact, I bought the software for a variety of reasons: quality, price, and, perhaps more importantly, the developer of the software was a man with a vision, had extensive experience in genealogy, displayed a passion for the subject of his software, and had the vitality to enter into a vigorous discussion with any and all of his clients.

Sadly, Keith Wilson died in November of 2008.  The software that he created is a notable memorial to his talent and passion for genealogy; however, the vision that he embraced and expressed in the software he wrote is now languishing, inching nearer to a similar fate–nearly nine months have transpired since the most recent version was released.  While the loss of any individual is an incomparable tragedy, watching the monument carved from Keith’s fertile imagination slowly deteriorate from inattention is still painful.

Posted in Observations, Technology, genealogy | No Comments »

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