This is Great Aunt Dahlia!

And she had a splendid time at the Moraga Town 25^th Anniversary. dah8_5.htm
 
 

As the fluted radiator style tells, this is a Daimler, officially a Daimler Light Straight Eight. However, in fact the car is now more correctly referred to as a Ford. Surely this must be a Daimler-Chrysler? In fact the company who actually owns the Daimler Marque is Ford by its purchase of Jaguar Cars of Coventry England. Here is a link to a brief history of the early days of the Daimler Motor Company.

 
 

One of the more amusing bits of history that came over with this Light Straight Eight was her second Log Book. This can be viewed at Side 1 and Side 2 - These files are fairly large (192kb and 108kb) to preserve legibility so if you have a slow dialup connection I would pass them by.

 

And now these are a few of my favourite links…

 

If you have ever listened to the radio for information then you almost certainly know about the redoubtable Alistair Cooke’s Letter From America which has graced the evenings of so many Englishmen, Scotsmen and Welshmen for more years than I care to remember. A childhood memory is of the Friday evenings by the old Radiogram being quiet while my father and mother listened eagerly to this week’s pearls of wisdom. What is so incredible is that what he had to say is as relevant today as it was then. It is with such great sadness that we saw the passing of what has become a vertiable institution with the death of the presenter. However the archive of words of wisdom is so vast, it is a miracle that the BBC has preserved so much of it. We are truly fortunate that Cooke was not a television presenter for Letter from America, there would probably only be a year's worth preserved "in the can" given the way in which the BBC "reused" (pronounced "destroyed") so many early programs. In my fiteen years as an expatriot I have never ceased to listen intently to gather a clear and balanced view of some of the more unusual goings-on in my adopted country and bless the Inernet for making it still possible to listen to Cooke and his incisive mind at work.
 
 

Other sites of interest are the extraordinary How Stuff Works series. If you want a good C primer or just wondered how cellular telephones worked, this is the one for you. The depth of the discussions is truly extraordinary. Everything from the inner workings of a fridge to how the X-box graphics are generated is explained in great detail.

  
If you have ever wondered where those amazing pictures attached to emails to everyone from one of your buddies, well chances are they came from Funpic in Hungary.  This site has to be the largest repository of pictures and clips in the world. I will say that many of them are in extremely dubious taste but an awful lot of them are incredibly funny. Given the raw volume of data and the speed with which any random file is served up, this must be a very large organisation. How it and it's massive bandwith demands are financed is another of life's little mysteries.

Adventures in Oregon

One other site of interest is the  South Oregon Shakespeare Festival. In spite of its name, the festival is by no means entirely devoted to Shakespeare. In fact the majority of the output of this prestigious company consists of modern and period plays. The festival goes on in the delightful town of Ashland, about 20 miles over the California-Oregon border. We go up to Ashland twice a year to make sure of getting to see all the plays because some of them have limited seasons.

Surprisingly, for a relatively small town which really relies on theatre for the majority of its income, Ashland is one of the most "wired" towns in America. The local co-operative Ashland Fiber Network has done an outstanding job in making this town a place where computers really feel at home.

There has been a marvelous old hotel in the center of Ashland. Originally, when it was build in 1925, it was named the Lithia Hotel. It changed its name years ago to "The Mark Antony Hotel". During the '90's, things did not go well for The Mark. Here was an edifice which was for many years the tallest building in all of Oregon. The Mark was a nine storey hotel, right slap bang in the centre of a world class, yearly, permanent, drama festival and it lost money… Quite HOW the hotel managed to lose money to the point where its very fabric crumbled slowly away is one of life’s deeper mysteries.

We stayed at The Mark some 11 times and with each new sojourn, more things stopped working. It was the absolute embodiment of Fawlty Towers but without Basil Fawlty to liven the place up. The superhuman efforts the staff put into trying to make things work was the definition of diligence. These wonderful people would be up at the crack of dawn fixing things and working well into the wee small hours looking after the worser-for-wear clients of an incredibly loud pop music venue which ran in what had been the Hotel’s public bar.

The "music" venue was the usual Mark Antony Mistake (one of so very, very many). It didn’t really bring in that much money but it really annoyed the older faction of the Hotel guests. They managed to sell some alcohol but, when the musicians had been paid, there was little to show for the complaints from guests who wanted to get some sleep. Somehow Shakespeare and heavy metal make supremely uneasy bedfellows especially after midnight.

The Mark’s existence was entirely dependant on the single, antique elevator that ran the entire spinal chord of the building. As in any vertebrate, once the spinal chord ceases to function, so does the entire being. This was "an elevator with an attitude". Not necessarily evil. In fact, in deference to Heather’s impossibilities with stairs, the thing only made one test of her during our very early days in Oregon and satisfied itself with behaving magnanimously to us thereafter.

Talking to other inmates at The Mark, many were the stories of how the elevator had gone into a sulk and made difficult or impossible the lives of some of the upper floor guests. When it decided it needed a rest, it almost always did so on a weekend making service difficult to get. It has been said that part of the elevator’s problems stem from certain events a long time ago, to do with things supernatural. Whether there is any truth in this we have no idea.

Finally, in 1998, The Mark finally shut its doors for the foreseeable future..
And rose again at Christmas 2000 as:-

The Ashland Springs Hotel.

One important development is that there is a new elevator! This is welcome news indeed! The hotel was originally scheduled to open in April 2000 which was just a tiny bit optimistic. In all events it partially opened at Christmas 2000 and is now positively luxurious. The delay was not at all surprising to anyone who has stayed there and knew how profoundly the fabric of the structure had decayed over the years.

The new owners have done a magnificent job with what is a very difficult structure. The rooms were always on the small side and this problem has been accentuated by the radical improvements to the bathrooms and by the installation of central air conditioning. However the hotel has not lost all of its charm, there is enough of the original ambience left to satisfy the seasoned guest.

In actual fact the hotel was going to be called The Ashland Grand then this changed to The Ashland Springs. Our personal preference would be for it to be named The Mark Two or back to its original title of The Lithia Hotel whose Motif is still seen in the stained glass in the foyer. However the name is apt as Ashland does have springs and these are laced with a good quantity of lithium salts (mostly chloride) which have a calming effect on the imbiber. In the main square of the town, there are faucets which deliver the thoroughly foul tasting liquor on demand. Curiously for a thoroughly litigious country, there is not a health warning to be seen anywhere near these dispensers of calm.
 

Terry Pratchett.

OK I have to admit that I am a Terry Pratchett junky! If you have never read this prolific author and like light fantasy with a message, get a book from the library and settle down for a treat to the braincells.

 
 
 
  Distributed computing.

 

 
 

Here is a simple idea that has really taken off. Ever since it was realised that, over time, the phophors on the screens of cathode ray tubes were slowly degraded by the beam of electrons which light them up, the screen-saver has become a feature of all computer operating systems. Some of these programmes are extremely complex, calculating intriguing fractals and whirling 3D animation. How good it would be if the vast computer power these necessities represent could be harnessed.

The concept of Distributed Computing was borne. Many enormously complex problem can be broken down into manageable chunks, the calculations done in each chunk can then be wrapped inside a programme which displays a pleasing screen saver pattern and distibuted to any computer which is idle. Each idling computer then has a schedule which downloads a fresh set of raw data. Once the data has been processed to yield a result, the result can then be uploaded back to the central store and amalgamated with all the other results from all the other idling computers. The incredible power of this idea is that the outlying computers need not be particuarly powerful. As long as they can find a way to the Internet, they can be simple low grade print servers or data entry terminals. Just as long as they spend more than 10% or their time idle, they can deliver a wonderful service to the community by donating this otherwise wasted time. Now that the open software foundation is involved we can expect to see projects started by other non-profit and charitable organisations who would otherwise lack the financial means open to seats of learning and public companies.

SETI at home is one of the earliest examples of distributed computing and is probably the best known. SETI, The Search for Extra Terrestial Intelligence, had collected a vast database of readings from the radio telescope on Arecibo. Analysis of this data required some fairly mundane but time consuming computing. What better way than to break it down into tiny chunks and write a screen saver programme that just happens to do the analysis using the free computer power that "appears" while the user is making coffee, having lunch or has gone home. That is effectively what Seti at Home is.

There are other programmes out there which emulate the success of SETI at Home. Looking at how proteins fold in genetic structures is another example. Folding at Home does just this.

One word of warning. As one might expect, a lot of these computers run Windows. They are often not regularly patched and there have been a number of Viri which make their way into an organisation using the humble Distributed Computing programme. It is a shame that a computer which is effectively rendering a service to humanity becomes a target for a virus writer but that's in the nature of the beast. Vandalism does not care what it destroys as long as it is something the rest of society values.

A Prairie Home Companion is another favourite of ours. We have seen Garrison Keillor three times when he visited the Bay Area. It is truly an amazing experience to watch the News From Lake Woebegon monologue. A quiet settles over the auditorium as the opening line "It's been a quiet week... " Then we watch spellbound as a story unfolds. What is astounding is that an amazingly detailed narrative is told usually without any notes or script. It just flows. Truly a wonderful experience.
 

One of the fun things Moraga has going for it is an active choral society the Moraga Community Chorus. Led by our choir master and director Frank Ryken, we have great fun singing for the community especially at Christmastime. We are always looking for more members so take a look at the website www.moraga.cc where you can find ways to contact the choir and also some samples of the works we undertake. The Summer Concert often has modern Show Tunes as its theme. These are very popular with our audiences and also great fun to sing. One does not have to have any musical training to join the group, just a love of music, an ability to learn and an ability to hold a tune.  The main aim of the group is to have fun and entertain along the way. Come and see us some time. The website has the contact information.

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