Today is Father's Day, and tomorrow is my Dad's birthday. We lost my Dad to cancer in 1997, and I miss him terribly. You can read all about my Dad on his memorial page; if you haven't ever done that, do it for me now. I love you, Dad.

I spent a good part of the day at the Chicago Highland Games today--been going for years but today was the best day weather-wise ever. Bright and sunny with a cool breeze that made wearing a wool kilt and jacket comfortable. The Illinois St. Andrew's Society outdid themselves this year with 30, yep I said 30 pipe bands! There must have been darn near 300 pipers in the massed band! AND there were FOUR Grade Two bands, which is just one step below world-champion calibre. I was hoping they'd have the results of the Pipe Band competition up by now but no such luck. Not even on rec.music.makers.bagpipe (which claims to be shutting down anyway).

Anyway, here's the secret of the Chicago Highland Games for all of you who really just want to hear the massed bands anyway--the massed bands play at 5:30pm and admission is free after 4:00pm! If you'd come at 4:00pm this year you could have heard the last two Grade Two bands compete as well as the massed bands. So tuck that away for next year...

This directory of Civil War Naval online historical resources is a good starting point for research into the subject. “...Organized by topic, there are links to pages on all major and many minor battles and operations (excerpts from the weighty but indispensable Official Records feature heavily here), officer biographies, and genealogical information, including links to Web pages on ordering the military records of family members. The ships are not neglected; links to appropriate pages from The Dictionary of American Fighting Ships - itself a superb resource - are listed, and to make the experience of the war more personal, one can read about the lives of the sailors themselves at sea.”
[from Netsurfer Education]

The University of Virgina has made all 36 volumes of The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources available online. This annotated collection of letters, orders and all other manuscripts from 1732 to 1799 are fascinating reading and certainly make today's email correspondants and bloggers look like absolute pikers by comparison. They can be compared against the original manuscripts, most in Washington's own hand, at The George Washington Papers from the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress. Being typeset, this new online collection is much easier to read; George was a great president and a great man, but his handwriting leaves someting to be desired. What an enourmous treasure trove of information! Now anyone, anywhere can do original-source research on the pivotal figure of the American revolution and our first President. I always knew this Internet thing would be good for something someday.

Yes, you read that right: a PC for four dollars and eighty cents. The computer is a genuine IBM PC: an IBM PC350 with a 100MHz Pentium Processor, 32MB RAM and a 1.7GB Hard Drive. MicroCenter has it “for store pickup only” (duh! it would cost more to ship it than you're paying for it!). I'm not sure if it has any empty slots, but you can pick up 16MB EDO memory for $4.99 each. Of course, that's 19 cents more than you paid for the computer itself. This could be a Linux-driven router or firewall, or an NT-driven print server. But the real point, is that I just keep chuckling at the price. A $4.80 computer. Who'd have ever thunk it?

An amazing database of folk music: the Digital Tradition Database, maintained at www.mudcat.org. Not only do they have this database of over 9,000 songs, they actively encourage downloading and mirroring of the database. Perhaps the best mirror, because it actually includes both GIF and Postscript scores and multiple computer formats for many of the tunes, is Erich Rickheit's “Yet Another Digital Tradition Page” at sniff.numachi.com/~rickheit/dtrad/. Us musical types can get lost for hours in this stuff!

After trying and failing, and even investigating and learning that it was not working for others as well, I had pretty much given up on trying to get Fedora Core 1 (aka Red Hat 10) to run under Virtual PC 2004. I really needed it to run in Virtual PC so I could get screen shots for my course notes for the Linux course I am teaching. Using a gut feeling, I decided to try a text-based installation and everything worked! It took a long time (over an hour) but once it was done, Fedora ran just fine.

Here they are: the first batch of graduation photos from my son's high school graduation. Andrew Kenneth Trygstad graduated from Naperville North High School on June 3, 2004. It was a beautiful, sunny evening that darkened into night during the ceremony. The day before graduation, Andrew had an audition and was accepted into the School of Music at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois. So I guess it was a pretty good week for him, huh? We are quite the proud parents but he is a pretty talented kid. Click on any photo for a closer look, or click on 'Continue reading "Andrew Graduates!"' for links to hi-res versions suitable for printing.

Ronald Reagan. I know, you think of him as the 40th president of the United States. But for me, for eight years, he was my boss. I know, he was four echelons up the Chain of Command, but he was in it; Commander-In-Chief is not just a courtesy term. I happened to have been in a war, you see, and the decisions that your boss makes are really critical during wartime. The war? It was called “the Cold War”, but trust me, while there were no shots fired between us and the Soviet Union, it was a war nevertheless. I was there; I saw many, many Soviet naval units close-up and personal. But what did my boss do for me? In the words of Lady Margaret Thatcher, “...he won the Cold War - not only without firing a shot, but also by inviting enemies out of their fortress and turning them into friends.” Words cannot even begin to express my gratitude to the man who ended the “big war” of my naval career. Mr. President—sir, we'll miss you. You probably saved my butt.

Yes, I know the blog has been blank for many days now; between the end of my semester, my son's graduation and college stuff, my chemotherapy, and preparing for my summer school class, I just got overwhelmed and the one thing to give was the blog. I hate it but I'll try not to let it happen again.