One Trick Pony

Since putting part of my family tree online, I’ve been hoping to be found by more distant relatives who Google their way to my site. No luck so far, but June just hit the jackpot. I put all of Alex’s grandparents on the tree, so June’s late dad is there, ready to be found.

So this evening’s mail brought this note from Marie Payne:

May I ask if your GRANDFATHER’s name was AUGUST MAXMILLAN WEDESWEILER, born 1873 and died 4 September 1948 in L.A.? His parents may have been PHILLIP GEORG JAKOB WEDESWEILER, born 23 July 1850 and married to HENRIETTE PHILLIPINE BECKER.

I would be very interested to hear from you. I have quite a bit on the family in Germany and Australia. Best wishes. Marie

Very cool, if the “His parents may have been” part pans out. Looks like June will have one line tracked back before 1800.

Today I learned a lot about setting up a database of books. We need that for the JCS warehouse of textbooks as well as Dori’s library at the learning center. Although Ted has a brigade of teenagers ready to start inventorying several thousand textbooks next week, I knew that typing in all those titles and publishers would be a crushing chore. So I jumped to Google looking for ISBN and lookup.

First thing I learned is that a few people are using ISBN lookup as a way to learn how to use SOAP to develop web services. http://www.lazarev.com/SOAP/isbn.asp, for example, will give you back the title and author when you type the ISBN into a form.

I also learned about the structure of ISBNs. The last digit (the 9 in 0-14-008948-9, for instance) is a check to make sure the rest of it is valid. One FAQ page by a German said that ISBN is on the way out, to be superceded by EAN in which the E stands for European. You can turn an ISBN into an EAN by putting 978 in front of it and changing the check digit.

I struck gold a short time later when I found Readerware, a simple data base for books. What makes it unique is that you can type in an ISBN and the software will go to Amazon, Borders, the Library of Congress and elsewhere and find what it can to fill in all the fields. It even looks for thumbnail pictures of the covers!

Even cooler, you can use a bar code reader with it. To test it out, I grabbed a bunch of books from the shelves in our den. I was amazed to see how many we have that predate the ISBN era (around 1968) but for those that had it, the software worked like a champ. We could scan in a dozen bar codes in a minute or so and then turn it loose looking for data. Two minutes later, the fields were full and we could create web page reports complete with cover images.

This is going to save a lot of man/woman-hours. And the software costs only $50! It’s written in Java and runs on OSX as well as Windows.

Finding this and figuring it out made this a productive day. I’ve redeemed myself for these last few lazy days.

Another slow post-roadtrip-recovery day spent surfing and snoozing. Alex stayed overnight at Michael’s so the every-three-hours question “Are you hungry?” was missing as an organizing force. J & I had a tasty lunch at riceJones.

With luck tomorrow I’ll actually accomplish something.

Drove up to the new book warehouse for Julian Charter School in Temecula with three Linksys wireless routers and a trunk full of PC wireless cards. Got the warehouse plugged in and dropped the rest off at the learning center. Should make it easier to do training there and when Alex is stuck killing time while J works he at least will be able to get things done and have less to gripe about.

I didn’t put a password on the access point, at least for now. I wonder how long it will be before the warehouse gets warchalked?

James Goldsborough got it exactly right on the op-ed page in this morning’s San Diego paper. Referring to Bush’s big Middle East speech, he says “George W. Bush labored for weeks on his Middle East plan and produced a mouse, a “wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie” that is an insult to America’s influence, power and intelligence.”

“Next comes a Middle East speech - billed as a “plan” - that has not one new idea in it. Dump democratically elected leader Yasser Arafat, says Bush, because Palestine needs democratically elected leaders. Say what? Stop terrorism, says Bush, and Israel will lead you to the promised land.”

Little by little, I hope people are beginning to see the need for a change in our own elected leadership.

Aunt June’s funeral was at 11 in San Marino and though we had good intentions of leaving San Diego at 9, it didn’t happen that way. June says she’s always punctual when it’s just her going places but all the overhead of getting me, her Mom, and a groggy adolescent out the door led us to miss the service.

We did get there in time for the gathering at Aunt June’s house. A nice celebration of a long life. She was loved by lots of people over the years.

It’s nice not to have to rush to the airport for a change. I decided to cruise up the Naugatuck Valley to Torrington, go on to back roads and head for Hartford. Passed through Unionville, which looks like a nice little town, and Farmington again.

I’d never seen Mark Twain’s house before, and I’m glad I took the time to stop. He had it built to impress his publishers and to create the glamour that made him the first modern celebrity. Twain lived next door to Harriet Beecher Stowe, which seems pretty amazing.

I’ve been through living history spots and historical tours by the boatload and I’ve decided that the single most important ingredient for their success is the guide. The man who led this tour clearly felt a connection with Twain. He even came close to choking up a bit when describing how the Twain’s life unravelled slowly as he lost his wife and two daughters at an early age. That made the house come alive for me.

The museum has been working on restoring the house and recapturing the original furniture since 1929 and they’ve done a great job. Definitely worth the stop. Next time I’ll check out the Stowe house and the Museum of Connecticut History nearby.

Spent the morning finally pushing the Design Patterns stuff to the next level and revising the old flowchart of WebQuest design. The new flowchart is simpler. I hope it makes things easier for people.

Drove to Farmington to do a 2-hour workshop and a keynote for the Connecticut Association of Independent Schools (CAIS) Summer Technology Conference held at Miss Porter’s School for girls. Great group of private school teachers. They raised good questions and seemed to really get it.

Now I can relax. A day of aimless touring tomorrow and then home for a few weeks.

I spent the morning driving around Waterbury, comparing my fading memories with the inevitable changes. Went past my grandmother’s house (now abandoned), my Boy Scout camp, and walked through downtown. They’ve torn down most of East Main Street and are putting up a new branch of UConn and a performing arts magnet school. It’s fun carrying around knowledge of the buildings of my youth and the buildings that I’ve learned from postcard collecting were there a century ago and comparing it with the present. It’s like walking through three eras at once.

The apartment building I grew up in was levelled twenty years ago to make way for an overpass over I-84. The last time I was here, the spot was a neglected tangle of weeds and trash between the overpass and the new Brass Mills Center Mall. According to today’s paper, the new mayor asked St. Mary’s Hospital to take some responsibility for it, and now it’s been cleaned up and turned into Waterbury Manufacturers Park.

There’s a plaque on a millstone that used to be at the foot of the flagpole across the street from my bedroom window. With typical adolescent obliviousness, I don’t think I ever read it. Now the millstone is back in this new park. I didn’t know that this little patch of dirt went back all the way to 1680. Maybe someday they’ll add another plaque that says “The Father of WebQuests grew up in a delapidated building near this spot”.

Or not.

As I stood in line to board my plane early this morning, a familiar face crossed directly in front of me on his way to Starbucks: Sam Waterston of Law and Order. Being used to being stared at, he studiously avoided eye contact. He had that same world-weary look he has in the series, yet here it was overlaid with a tan and a hint of relaxation. You can’t look like a New Yorker in San Diego for long.