Hi, I'm Kara Shallenberg, a.k.a Kayray. I knit and make free audiobooks for LibriVox. Find me on Mastodon, if you like: https://zirk.us/@Kayray.
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/
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/
Last week I felt remarkably good most days. I wonder if I’m *finally* on the right dose of synthroid?
The weekend of the 11th I scanned my dad’s old copy of The Swiss Family Robinson for Project Gutenberg (zip file of scanned images here, if you want them). Betsy had helped me submit the info to Gutenberg for copyright clearance, and their experts declared it to be public domain, which means that they can convert my scans to plaintext for their collection and I can record it for LibriVox! They have a translation by a French woman, which I don’t care for at all (too flowery), and a recently-edited version that’s not actually copyright-free. So this one will be the best, heheh :)
I started my recordings on Monday the 13th, and am already more than halfway through the book! You can follow my progress here: http://librivox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=20254. Click the link at the top of the first post to be emailed when it’s all done and ready to download. Gosh, I just love this book. It’s possibly my favorite librivox project ever.
So besides all the recording I did last week, I was productive in other ways, too, um, of course I can’t remember what I did but trust me, I did a lot of stuff. Not much knitting, though — it’s been too hot.
Friday I got a migraine and then I didn’t feel very well the whole weekend and Monday, which was disappointing. I didn’t even have the ambition to record anything. But I dusted off Wind Waker and picked up my last savegame (2nd time through) in the middle and that amused me, though I still felt bad not being more productive.
Today I felt a lot better again, and even went shopping! We’ve been wishing for just a few more plates, spoons, and forks so I went up to Macy’s and got some more Fiestaware, which was on sale. We bought our first Fiestaware back in December 2007, use it every day, and there’s not a chip or a scratch on any of it. And it’s bright and cheerful — our dishes are red, yellow, orange, turquoise, and a very light green. I got four more 9″ plates (two green, two yellow), two of the deep cereal bowls (green), four little red saucers (on clearance, and perfect for a single bagel), and two sets of red-handled flatware, which were on also on clearance!
And then I went to the bookstore and picked out a few books for baby Ginny and 1-yr-old Jaylah, came back, packaged everything up with (with the little quilt for Ginny), and went out to ship both packages. Well, that doesn’t sound like much, I guess, but I swear it took half the day.
Then I recorded chapter 11 of the Swiss Family, and chapter 10 of a really interesting book called “Observations of an Orderly”, published in 1917, about life in an English war hospital. Great stuff. Here: http://librivox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19910
Remind me to tell you about my love affair with the little propane grill another time.
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/
Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America”, died today. Dad used to watch the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite every night when I was little; Walter’s voice was as familiar to me as if he were one of my own family.
That was what The News looked like when I was nine.
Goodbye, Walter.
I feel so sad.
And that’s the way it is.
The Story of Mankind, by Hendrik van Loon, read by Kara and Michelle.
02 Our Earliest Ancestors – 05:06
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.
01 The Setting of the Stage – 9:08
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/
By popular demand: instructions for cold-brewed coffee, which is always smooth and non-acidic and yummy!
You need a jar with a lid. I use an old spaghetti-sauce jar.
Put a scoop of high-quality ground coffee into your jar, and add, oh, a cup or two of cold water. I don’t measure, I just fill the jar about a third full. Put the lid on and give it a good vigorous shake. Leave it on the counter or the window sill until tomorrow.
Next morning, give it another shake and pour the coffee through a filter of some kind. I use an Aeropress but you could put some cheesecloth or a napkin in a sieve, or use one of those single-cup filter thingies, or whatever.
Your coffee will be rather strong, so you can thin it to your taste. I add about an equal amount of cold water, and if it’s a cold day I microwave it till it’s nice and hot. In summer I leave it cold or even add a few ice cubes. Then it needs a big spoon of sugar, and a good glug of heavy cream. Yummmm!
Now don’t forget to start tomorrow’s coffee in your jar!
