joe’s blog

Now that the last post is more than 18 months old, I thought I’d up date the site. People have asked, I (belatedly) respond. What follows are three photos of the family and the latest flower installment in front of Casa De La Del El Haus Ferrare (Maryland branch).

The first photo is of Alexandra and Sue at an event of some kind — what kind exactly is, of course, immaterial. You can see Alexandra’s smile, which is under construction these days. Sue is smirking in the background.

The second one is of Alexandra and I on my 50th birthday last month. We took the photo with a small number of candles on the cake because, once we got all 50 on, it was like trying to take pictures of the sun and see detail. I’m sporting the goatee in this shot, which is something Alexandra talked me into growing and Sue said I should keep, as it deemphasizes the rest of my actual face.

The last is the front of the house. The previous owners were really into sculpting the whole flower bed thing, but we’re taking a somewhat simpler line. Pretty flowers. Sue did all the work, of course, and took the picture.

This being Memorial Day, we’re hanging out at home, eating sausages on the deck with visiting friend Tom Blake. I’ll try to capture a pic before he shoves off tomorrow.

We took a much-delayed trip to Berlin over the Columbus Day. Alexandra was off on Friday as well as Monday, so Sue and I took Friday off too and we made a four-day trip of it. We took the train both ways, however, so it was really two days on the train and two days in Berlin.

It worked out fine, considering. I had gotten some extra money for a trip I took, and we put it into getting a better hotel. The only problem was the hotel put its extra money into looking all modern and stark, and not into being a comfy and family-friendly. They could have spared a few more bucks for mattresses, too, at those prices. On the plus side, it was clean, quiet and conveniently located, so all was not lost.

On Saturday we went to the zoo (of course), which is right downtown, and the huge KaDeWe department store (the biggest on the continent, they claim). We walked around downtown, saw fountains, landmarks, monuments and assorted whatnot. Sunday we took the bus tour, which was nice. We saw all the major sites around the inner part of the city and got to bop around by the Brandenburger Tor for a while.

That was kind of freaky, actually. I was stationed in Berlin from 1986 to 1989, and covered Reagan’s visit as a temporary add-on to the White House Press corps (yes, I’m ashamed now). I took photos of Reagan as he gave his famous “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” speech. East German guards were watching from atop the Brandenburger Tor in what appeared, through my zoom lens, to be a machine gun nest. Sunday last I was having a mocha at a Starbucks just a hundred yards or so on the other side and watching mimes work the crowd for euro. That was the biggest difference to me. Sure, Potsdamer Platz was something to see, but it looked like no place I remember in Berlin, so it didn’t seem odd or shocking. There were other things, like the new, huge train station, all the additional government buildings and whatnot, but that stuff was new and in places I wasn’t as familiar with. The Tor, however, was something else. Pretty amazing, and satisfying, in its own way. I’m not saying I earned my Cold War medal and all that Berlin service stuff just so I could have a mocha where the commies used to have target practice on their own citizens. But If you’d seen the old East Berlin the benefits of capitalism were easy to spot.

After our bus tour we took a break, then went to the Allied Museum, formerly known as the community library. I served right in the headquarters of the old U.S. Command Berlin, and the museum is in the library and the old theater. The actual headquarters is in use by somebody who still needs locked gates, and the entire PX complex — the nicest, if not the biggest, of its day in Europe — had been levelled. Too bad, that. The housing area was apparently given over to people who needed that kind of low-standard housing. Lots of kids, spray paint and so forth. Not a lot like the rest of that part of town, which was quiet and well-to-do.

A funny thing about our trip was where we ate. The first night we ate passable, if expensive, sushi in the train station. The next night we went into Kreuzburg — not a great part of town, as our taxi driver reminded us — to eat Korean. The last night we ate at an Agrentinian steak house. When I lived in Berlin they used to say that you could eat at a different restaurant every meal for your whole three-year tour and never have to repeat. So going there was a nice break from Garmisch, which is big on Bavarian food (of course) and Italian. There are other places — notably Indian, Thai, Serbian and Chinese — but the Bavarian and Italian predominate.
The two photos are just tidbits. The first is Sue and Alexandra by one of the hundreds of bears that all over the city (the bear is Berlin’s symbol). The second is Alexandra with one of the aforementioned mimes (actors?). She stands there to have photos taken with her. She let Alexandra wear her little mask, then, curtsied. Alexandra did her own little curtsy back and was so cute doing it the mime actually let out a little oh! of surprise. That’s my girl.

The only letdown is that we bought a new camera for the trip. It’s a Samsung compact job we got to complement our bigger digital SLR. It was fairly cheap, and I thought it would do for these kinds of tourist-y photos, but it takes really poor photos. They’re worse, even, than our 5-year-old 2 megapixel camera. Noticeable jaggies and blockiness. I think this one is going back.

Yesterday was Alexandra’s first day of school. Kindergarten started a couple of days after the rest of the school, because the teacher does home visits. Anyway, it was a big deal around Haus Ferrare, as you might imagine. We got the girl up, she watched a little TV and then it was time to get ready. She chose her own clothes (the night before) of course, and had her new backpack and lunch box. We stopped to take this photo on the pedestrian zone, which is right outside our house.

She’s really taking to this well (based on a single three-hour day, mind you). She decided she wanted to take the bus (insisted, really), had fun at the Kindergarten visits, seems to like the teacher and so on. The Kindergarten has 17 kids, which will soon be 18 when another family arrives in October. Alexandra knows about half the kids, as she went to pre-school with them. So it’s not that big a move up for her, not like it was for me. Back then we went right from playing in the the dirt outside the cave to the first day of Kindergarten, so it was all quite a shock. She was in hourly day care, then pre-school, and now the big K. So for her, it’s just “big kids’ school.”

Besides, she got new clothes, a new desk and chair (which she’d been after us about), the backpack, lunch box, school supplies… So it was not unlike Christmas for her.

I’m going to put up a separate page in a bit with several more photos.

Finally got around to getting that pic of snow in August here in Garmisch. Click for a bigger, and uncropped version. Actually, the bigger version is from 29 August, and the smaller one on the main page is from 30 August. Neither was the first snow of the month, as we had a couple of light snow showers on the mountain earlier in the month. July was really hot (for Garmisch), and I don’t remember if we got snow in July or not.

Saying “we” got snow is a bit misleading, of course. We get rain, and up the mountain it snows. It’s kind of like a magic trick, actually: it gets cloudy, it rains, the clouds lift and — poof! — the mountain has snow on it.

This is taken as a good sign by the skiers and snowboarders. I know a couple who ski or snow at least one day every month of the year. Not as hard as it sounds, as there’s a glacier not that far away. Well, there is for now. These things seem to be melting. Maybe they can switch to surfing. Anyway, here’s the pic.

Forgot to put the pic on the USB stick, so nothing to update with. I tried using the upload file option in WordPess, but no go. Tonight, I guess.

We got a good snow overnight. Going to post a photo when I get home (I can get on the blog during lunch, but I can’t upload at any time). Anyway, we’ve actually had snow on the mountain at least twice so far this month, but both times were just a smattering. Last night’s was a good snow.

It was raining on the way in to work and as I got close to work I swore the rain was about to turn into snow. Gotta love Garmisch.

Just got done setting up Linux on the machine of a friend. Her husband got the laptop free (!) for signing up for some service, probably DSL. Anyway, it’s not a killer laptop. It’s got a 1.2 Ghz Via C3 processor, which means it probably runs about as fast as a 600 Mhz Pentium. But it’s got a nice enough 14″ screen and is otherwise OK for laptop kind of computer work he wants to do — surfing, e-mail, writing (we need a new snappy one-liner on the order of readin’ writin’ and ‘ritmatic to capture the surfing, e-mailing and word processing trio a lot of people use their computers for). Hey: my laptop runs at 600 Mhz most of the time, thanks to frequency scaling to save battery life.
It came with Knoppix (and a “designed for Windows XP” label) on it . They seemed to have done a terrible job installing the system. Knoppix is a live CD, which means you don’t have to install it to your hard drive to use it. You can run Linux from the CD. But it’s huge and has all kinds of things the average user doesn’t need. The husband is retired, and it’s his first computer, so I don’t think he needs any high speed stuff. Parts of it also seemed to think it was still running off a CD (disk is not writeable errors), and they set aside 3.5 GB for the swap partition (the usual is about twice your physical RAM, which would be about 512 MB in this case).
Well, after trying to bring the thing up to date (it came with version 3.8 and 5.0 is the current version), I just downloaded Kanotix Lite and installed that. Worked like a charm. Spent a few minutes setting up his KDE preferences, simplifying his panel and so on, and the machine is a good 15 or 20 percent faster (don’t ask me how I know; it’s just snappier to use).

That makes four people I’ve set up with Linux now. That’s out of a pretty small group of people, as the Garmisch American community is pretty small. Now that I think about it, though, neither of them is American. She’s British and he’s Austrian. Anyway, small world to be evangelizing Linux.

I’m going to revisit the other machine I recently installed Linux on. I put Zenwalk on it, and have since discovered STX Linux, and it is perfect for that machine. It’s a 300 Mhz laptop with 128 MB of RAM — and an off-brand machine at that. Zenwalk runs a lot better than Windows 2000 on it (yeah, Windows 2000), but still, STX looks to be perfect. Or maybe I’ll give Kanotix Lite a try. It has IceWM in addition to KDE, and IceWM is about the right speed.
I just realized I have yet to install the same version of Linux twice. The four I’ve installed were Mepis, PCLinuxOS, Zenwalk and now Kanotix Lite. Funny, that, espeically because I’m a die-hard Slackware user. I’ve got one other person asking to try Linux out, and I’m going to install a music-specific version for him, because he’s into mixing his own tunes. It’s a wonderful world, this Linux.