The Story of Mankind, by Hendrik van Loon, read by Kara and Michelle.
You can buy a lovely thick reprint of the original book, with dozens of lively illustrations, from http://mainlesson.com.
Impatient? Get the entire free audio book here: http://librivox.org/the-story-of-mankind-by-hendrik-van-loon/
The Story of Mankind, by Hendrik van Loon, read by Kara and Michelle.
You can buy a lovely thick reprint of the original book, with dozens of lively illustrations, from http://mainlesson.com.
Impatient? Get the entire free audio book here: http://librivox.org/the-story-of-mankind-by-hendrik-van-loon/
I slept really well last night, hooray! And I woke up slowly, which is always best. I seem to either sleep long enough and wake up slowly, or I wake up much too early and all-at-once. Funny.
I also had a crazy dream: it was my fifteenth birthday and no one was paying any attention to me because of the nuclear war. However, the kindly gay Asian man who was living with us gave me a hug and said we could bake a cake in his convection oven. And there was a wolverine in the attic and a possum in the basement. I don’t know how the possum got into my dream (maybe he hitched a ride with the wolverine), but everything else can be traced back to something I thought about the day before, but y’know, scrambled by the egg-beater of my sleeping mind.
Chloe and I scanned 100 more slides from 1960 yesterday. Grandpa took this photo in San Francisco, October of 1960:
Dig the 20′ long station wagon!
We noticed the island in the distance and thought it might be Alcatraz. Checked google maps and a map of the cable car system, and discovered that this is the corner of Hyde and Chestnut. Here’s a screenshot from google maps:
Notice the apartment building on the left with its columns of gray stone in different shades of gray. Notice the red post-box thing on the corner, and the cable-car tracks of course. It’s the same corner!
The Story of Mankind, by Hendrik van Loon, read by Kara and Michelle.
You can buy a lovely thick reprint of the original book, with dozens of lively illustrations, from http://mainlesson.com.
Impatient? Get the entire free audio book here: http://librivox.org/the-story-of-mankind-by-hendrik-van-loon/
The Story of Mankind, by Hendrik van Loon, read by Kara and Michelle.
You can buy a lovely thick reprint of the original book, with dozens of lively illustrations, from http://mainlesson.com.
Impatient? Get the entire free audio book here: http://librivox.org/the-story-of-mankind-by-hendrik-van-loon/
(No spoilers here, haven’t seen the first ep of season 3 yet.)
We’ve been looking forward to season three of Mad Men for so long! It seems like a thousand years since the last new episode aired. A couple of weeks ago Dan and I decided to watch seasons one and two all over again. That was about the 5th time through season one for me, and maybe the 3rd time through season two. That show just gets better every time you watch it. So we had a lot of weekend Mad Men marathons and stayed up too late a few times, and now we’ve just got the last two episodes of season two remaining. Ooo those Jet Set people are so creepy.
So tonight when Dan gets home we’ll finish up season two and then there’s the first ep of season three waiting for us!
And, since Henry knows how excited we are about it, he wanted to watch too — so I started watching season one all over again with him a few days ago. He loves it.
Have you been to http://madmenyourself.com/?
Here’s me:
and here’s Henry:
The Story of Mankind, by Hendrik van Loon, read by Kara and Michelle.
15 Greek Self-Government – 5:51
You can buy a lovely thick reprint of the original book, with dozens of lively illustrations, from http://mainlesson.com.
Impatient? Get the entire free audio book here: http://librivox.org/the-story-of-mankind-by-hendrik-van-loon/
The Story of Mankind, by Hendrik van Loon, read by Kara and Michelle.
You can buy a lovely thick reprint of the original book, with dozens of lively illustrations, from http://mainlesson.com.
Impatient? Get the entire free audio book here: http://librivox.org/the-story-of-mankind-by-hendrik-van-loon/
The Story of Mankind, by Hendrik van Loon, read by Kara and Michelle.
You can buy a lovely thick reprint of the original book, with dozens of lively illustrations, from http://mainlesson.com.
Impatient? Get the entire free audio book here: http://librivox.org/the-story-of-mankind-by-hendrik-van-loon/
On August 10th, 2005, our Hugh McGuire had his brilliant idea, and thus LibriVox was formed. Esther (a.k.a Starlite) put together a wonderful 4th anniversary podcast with contributions from many of our volunteers:
LibriVox Community Podcast #106 (49:40 minutes long.)
Bits of it made me come over all weepy with sentiment and gratitude to our lovely volunteers, and bits of it made me laugh out loud! (I’m talking to you, Ryan and Ruthie!) Elli and Neeru did a “ten things we all love about LibriVox” countdown that’s full of fun and contains selections from a certain story read in many different languages. (I was pleased to discover that I could understand a little bit of the Dutch reading! Dutch is a very close relative of English, closer even than German, but I guess I never really listened to any Dutch before. Well, LibriVox can fix that ;-)
And that reminds me — on the weekend I finished and cataloged my recording of Dad’s ancient copy of The Swiss Family Robinson: http://librivox.org/the-swiss-family-robinson-by-johann-r-wyss/ I love this book! Hope you like it too. I’ll add it to my podcast feed when the history book is finished.
The Story of Mankind, by Hendrik van Loon, read by Kara and Michelle.
You can buy a lovely thick reprint of the original book, with dozens of lively illustrations, from http://mainlesson.com.
Impatient? Get the entire free audio book here: http://librivox.org/the-story-of-mankind-by-hendrik-van-loon/
The Story of Mankind, by Hendrik van Loon, read by Kara and Michelle.
You can buy a lovely thick reprint of the original book, with dozens of lively illustrations, from http://mainlesson.com.
Impatient? Get the entire free audio book here: http://librivox.org/the-story-of-mankind-by-hendrik-van-loon/
The Story of Mankind, by Hendrik van Loon, read by Kara and Michelle.
You can buy a lovely thick reprint of the original book, with dozens of lively illustrations, from http://mainlesson.com.
Impatient? Get the entire free audio book here: http://librivox.org/the-story-of-mankind-by-hendrik-van-loon/
Henry’s very best friend in the whole world, Fargo, is moving to Arizona. He’s here with us for one last visit. On Friday they went with Henry’s dad to Cirque du Soleil (he had comps!), on Saturday we took them to the Wild Animal Park in the evening, which was lovely, and yesterday I took them to the science museum and the zoo! (At the zoo we saw a woman fall into the pond at the bird show, but that’s a story for another time.) Today I was pretty tired so I let them laze about with me and watch fun things. We showed Fargo the first six episodes of Firefly, and a great many episodes of Arrested Development, so now he’s a fan of both shows! We plan to squeeze in a bit more Firefly before he has to go home tomorrow. Got to get up to “Out of Gas” anyway.
They got a bit of exercise playing swordfight in the yard and walking to Henry’s Kung Fu school for his evening class. Oh, and Henry baked a cheesecake while Fargo helped. And I filled four mp3 cds full of LibriVox audiobooks for Fargo to listen to on his drive to AZ.
We hope we will still get to see Fargo sometimes even after he moves, because his dad still lives up in Orange County so Fargo will come out for visits and we’ll steal him away. He’s a wonderful boy, smart and funny and a great reader. I lent him my huge volume of American and British poetry to read while he’s here and he had his nose buried in it practically the whole time.
Fargo is grating lemon rinds while reading poetry:
Washing up after baking:
At the Animal Park (Henry is finishing up the Alex Rider series and had to bring his book with him):
Come visit us again soon, Fargo! We’ll miss you so much!
The Story of Mankind, by Hendrik van Loon, read by Kara and Michelle.
You can buy a lovely thick reprint of the original book, with dozens of lively illustrations, from http://mainlesson.com.
Impatient? Get the entire free audio book here: http://librivox.org/the-story-of-mankind-by-hendrik-van-loon/
The Story of Mankind, by Hendrik van Loon, read by Kara and Michelle.
You can buy a lovely thick reprint of the original book, with dozens of lively illustrations, from http://mainlesson.com.
Impatient? Get the entire free audio book here: http://librivox.org/the-story-of-mankind-by-hendrik-van-loon/
Friday, July 31, 2009, is the 10th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day!
A sysadmin unpacked the server for this website from its box, installed an operating system, patched it for security, made sure the power and air conditioning was working in the server room, monitored it for stability, set up the software, and kept backups in case anything went wrong. All to serve this webpage.
A sysadmin installed the routers, laid the cables, configured the networks, set up the firewalls, and watched and guided the traffic for each hop of the network that runs over copper, fiber optic glass, and even the air itself to bring the Internet to your computer. All to make sure the webpage found its way from the server to your computer.
A sysadmin makes sure your network connection is safe, secure, open, and working. A sysadmin makes sure your computer is working in a healthy way on a healthy network. A sysadmin takes backups to guard against disaster both human and otherwise, holds the gates against security threats and crackers, and keeps the printers going no matter how many copies of the tax code someone from Accounting prints out.
A sysadmin worries about spam, viruses, spyware, but also power outages, fires and floods.
When the email server goes down at 2 AM on a Sunday, your sysadmin is paged, wakes up, and goes to work.
A sysadmin is a professional, who plans, worries, hacks, fixes, pushes, advocates, protects and creates good computer networks, to get you your data, to help you do work — to bring the potential of computing ever closer to reality.
So if you can read this, thank your sysadmin — and know he or she is only one of dozens or possibly hundreds whose work brings you the email from your aunt on the West Coast, the instant message from your son at college, the free phone call from the friend in Australia, and this blog.
The Story of Mankind, by Hendrik van Loon, read by Kara and Michelle.
You can buy a lovely thick reprint of the original book, with dozens of lively illustrations, from http://mainlesson.com.
Impatient? Get the entire free audio book here: http://librivox.org/the-story-of-mankind-by-hendrik-van-loon/
On Saturday Henry had Combat Camp from 10-3 at his kung fu school (a couple hours of ground techniques and a couple of hours of weapons training). Dan and I watched some Warehouse 13 and the unaired Dollhouse pilot, and hung out together having a nice relaxing time, and then in the evening I dropped Henry off to meet his dad in La Jolla and Dan and I went on our date to night-time zoo, which was just fabulous! We rode the sky buckets over to the far side, walked slowly through the whole new elephant exhibit, and then caught the new bird show. Since I saw it with Henry and Fargo a couple weeks ago they’d added more lights and sound effects at the beginning, which was kind of annoying, but once they got on to actually showing birds and telling us about them and letting them do their bird stuff it was great. When’s the last time a HUGE owl flew silently right over your head, or you saw a toucan fly up to grab grapes out of the air, or you saw a maribou stork fly over a crowd of people with his toes dangling down in such a storky way? Gosh I love our zoo.
We got out of the zoo about 9:30 and then had a late dinner at the Studio Diner. There were at least two tables of Comic-Con folk near us. We could tell by their unmodulated nerdy voices and topics of conversation. And we saw a Jayne Cobb hat!
Yesterday I was a bit tired again but I baked two batches of blueberry muffins and a loaf of banana bread, and then I beat the Earth Temple in Wind Waker. What a game, what a mighty good game. No recording at all this weekend but maybe I’ll be able to finish the Swiss Family this week. There are only five chapters left.
The Story of Mankind, by Hendrik van Loon, read by Kara and Michelle.
You can buy a lovely thick reprint of the original book, with dozens of lively illustrations, from http://mainlesson.com.
Impatient? Get the entire free audio book here: http://librivox.org/the-story-of-mankind-by-hendrik-van-loon/
