Tangled Up in Blue

"Tangled up in Blue" is trending on Twitter today.

 My parents grew up on Bob Dylan, who is turning 78.

I went to a Dylan concert at Pfeiffer University in Misenheimer, North Carolina in 1976, when I was 2 years old. It was loud. I cried and my mom had to take me to get ice cream.

 Decades later, I stumbled upon, and fell in love with this brilliant song.

 

Songs are poetry. (They rhyme sometimes), and of course Dylan was a master of words. One of my favorite Bob Dylan stanzas is this one from "Tangled Up In Blue:"

(the lines are actually not in the original handwritten song shown here, but are in most lyrical interpretations of the version on the original album. He wrote & performed several versions).

Here's the story of that song, and here's more about Dylan's complex rhymes.

CQ: 72 Days Before Quarantine: Newseum Visit!

Dec. 31, 2019: 72 Days Before the U.S. Coronavirus Quarantine NOTE: Was this severe flu I had the Coronavirus? USA Today said on March 23, it's plausible, but more research is needed. On April 11, the L.A. times suggested that COVID-19 was likely in California in December, under the guise of "an unusual flu season." We will probably never know. I penned this blog 6 days before the New York Times published their first article about Coronavirus on January 6, 2020 (shown above) and their timeline puts the start of the story in China on Dec. 31, when the government admitted people were coming down from a "mystery disease."  I really felt that what I had was unusual. The cough lasted for about 6 weeks after I caught whatever it was. I went to the doctor, but they couldn't tell me what it was. It wasn't the Flu, and it wasn't Pneumonia, because I had vaccines for both in the Fall.

Blog: We went to Washington, D.C. for New Year's Eve. Well, not really, but it was the last day we could tour the Newseum, the news museum there.

Suffice to say: It was awesome, I have a million pictures and videos to go through, but I'm sick.

Truthfully, I barely made it; I have some sort of flu, the worst I've had in years, but I insisted on going. With another day or two in bed I hope I feel better, but the cough is tremendous. A lot of my coworkers and friends are also sick. AccuWeather says it may be the "other flu" -- Influenza B --- that is causing the season to be so bad.

The worst part is: It killed my Christmas Break. I had all these high hopes of getting a lot of work done around the house, but as soon as I got back from Christmas at my wife's parents-in-law, I got sick. But anyway, Merry New Year, it's a new decade, and the Newseum was awesome. More later, I promise.

In any case, we got home late, in the dark, and drove over Seven Mountains during a snow squall. After I took this picture, it got much worse and snow covered the ground. My wife was terrified to drive.

But, we got home. And now... it's almost 2020.  UPDATE: IT IS 2020.

*NOTE: This is part of my series "Coronavirus Quarantine" about my family's (and the world's) experience with COVID-19 during the stay-at-home orders and self isolation of Spring 2020. You can read all the blogs in reverse sequence by clicking here. Blogs before April 2020 were written after the fact, but the thoughts and photos are from the publish date indicated. For reference, a graph of cases and news interest in the U.S., and newspaper headlines from each blog publish date are included in each entry.

Installing Emacs on CPanel with GoDaddy.com Web Hosting

NOTE: This was updated 7/1/2020 with some changes, because I had to install emacs *again* when GoDaddy attempted to solve a wordpress problem and nuked my entire home & bin directories. 

August 14, 2018: Once upon a time last year, I installed "emacs" -- an old UNIX command-line editor that I got used to in college -- onto my GoDaddy.com CPanel web hosting server. Today, I had to do it again on a new server, but I couldn't remember exactly what I did last time because I assumed I'd never have to do it again. Well, I am, and I'm documenting it here because these steps don't seem to be documented well online.




It's a little-known fact that, despite CPanel's "Installatron" feature not having much useful to install, you CAN still install programs on your CPanel server without "root" (sudo) access! This tutorial assumes that you have enabled SSH access on your GoDaddy CPanel account and are using a tool like "Putty" to SSH (modern, secure version of "telnet") into your server (first time just say "yes" to the "key") and you can now see a command-line prompt.

Of course, if you're not on the current CPanel system that I am (check by typing "uname -a" in the command line, which, for me generates "2.6.32-896.16.1.lve1.4.54.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux"), you may have to Google your way out of it. But here's what I did.

First, you need to download the source code by typing:

lynx http://gnu.mirrors.hoobly.com/emacs/emacs-26.3.tar.gz

(More recent versions can be obtained by browsing here).  The Lynx web browser interface will ask you if you want to download the file, which you do by clicking "d" on your keyboard. When it's done, you'll have to use your arrow key to highlight the download button to save the file. Then, type:

gunzip emacs-26.3.tar.gz

(This could take a while). Follow it up with:

          tar -xvf emacs-26.3.tar.gz

This will explode all the installation files into a directory called "emacs-26.3". "cd" into that directory, then type this:

./configure --with-x-toolkit=no --with-gif=no --with-gnutls=no

This will result in a long list of checks as the installer readies for your machine's environment. If it ends with some talk about "mail," then it successfully installed. If it doesn't, it should give you some advice for additional "=no" statements to add to the line above.

This was the part that really confused me -- running the configure executable failed multiple times until I added those commands. If you're just looking for command-line emacs, you won't need them anyway.

   Next, type "make" on the command line and you should see a long list of installation files scroll by as it installs the software, looking something like this:



And, finally, type "src/emacs" and you should see the emacs interface! Woohoo! It's a freaking miracle.(Ctrl-X then Ctrl-C to get out).

You can also set an "alias" when you login to point to the exact directory where that executable "emacs" file is. To do this (assuming you're using "bash"):

           echo 'alias emacs="/home/youraccountnamehere/bin/emacs-26.3/src/emacs"' >> ~/.profile; source ~/.profile

If you want to learn emacs, click here, but be warned it's also a pain in the ass, but I got used to it in college when I didn't have any choice besides command-line editing.  "Pico" is another popular UNIX editor that is much easier to use. 

Northern Exposure

I wanted to take a few moments to jot down some thoughts about Kamp Kenawachee -- a college experience in the wilderness of Alaska. The days are beautiful and classes are held outside in green grass or on wooden bleachers, under tall pine trees and a sky that's a dark blue that I have never seen. The nights are crisp and clear. Multi-colored shooting stars streak across the sky under a thick, bright canopy of galaxies that I didn't even realize existed. Most kids don't know what to expect when they reach the camp -- it's better to be thrown into an immersive experience that's free of technology and grounds them back to earth. Everyone's a stranger at first, leveling the social playing field and allowing students to form relationships naturally in an easy-going environment. Camp counselors are everywhere to help kids along and serve as their advocates, gurus or muses. Nature is everywhere -- the first night I slept in my cabin in the cool Alaskan air with one of the camp cats curled up against me. Later, a badger climbed in through the window and joined our warmth. During the day, butterflies and birds abound and deer walk among the cabins as students progress through their classes. Technology is absent -- only a community landline is available once a day, encouraging students to find their story within, rather than face the pressures of society. They drink water from a stream that meanders through campus. Meals are created from the earth and served in long, open dining halls where the breeze blows through the friendships that blossom at wooden picnic tables.

Dream Thrum

June 26, 2018 Went antiquing with Kristi and other people. Found old 8-track or similar cassette player that, when you turned it on, shifted you into another dimension. It was kind of like augmented reality, as in you'd still be in the same room, but things would change. For example we discovered if you began playing the tape near a children's green chair, it would come to life. We videoed this event on Kristi's cell phone and were eager to show it to others. In our kitchen at home, we found that when we pressed play, again only certain things would change. There was a dog and a cat who weren't there in real life, for example. The cat had thrown up in the corner of the kitchen and it looked so real that Kristi tried to clean it up but I said, "No, press pause" and it slowly faded away. We also noticed some seams between the dimensions in the corners of the room for some reason. One seam started dripping liquid that formed into an Aibo-like robot on the floor. Once leaked from the other dimension, apparently, it stayed in ours, so we were showing people how it would do tricks, bring us drinks from the fridge, etc.

The Origin of LOLcats

There is a history for everything.

KnowYourMeme says that the term "LOLcats" wasn't coined until 2007* when someone pasted a caption saying "I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?" (with the classic Impact font) onto a photo of a British shorthair named Frank, on the 4chan chat website.

TheStar explains: 

Some time in 2005,* an anonymous poster put text over a picture of a very relaxed cat, indicating he was waiting for "Caturday." Soon, 4chan.org was flooded with pictures of cats in various states of idyll proclaiming their love for "Caturday." 

Because it was more cute than funny, it would have been a short-lived fad had not another anonymous poster uploaded a picture of a hungry-looking, plus-sized grey cat with the text, "I can has cheezburger?" It was followed by a picture of the same cat snarling at a heap of clementines, with the words "Do not want!"

And thus LOLcats and memes were born.

*It's not clear if 2005 was the correct date, or how much later the "Cheezburger" photo was posted, but a graph by Google Trends of some early LOLcat search terms shows that the term "LOLcat" itself wasn't used until 2007.

The photo itself was from much earlier -- Frank's disembodied cat head had also been used in 2003, on the website of a Russian pet food company, advertising "Happy Cat."

It's not clear who took the original photo, but KnowYourMeme.com says that Frank was born in 1994 and died in 2007.