Where’s George?

January 5, 2009

Imagine you’ve just left your house and are running a few minutes late from work. You stop at an intersection and notice, there lying on the road, several bills. Three one dollar bills to be exact, although you’re not quite certain. What do you do? If you’re me, you put the car in park, get out, pausing only briefly to consider whether this would make a good photo, until a breath of wind sends some of the money skittering further down the road. At this point you gather up the money and look around to be sure that there isn’t any more laying around, and as an afterthought, perhaps the former owner.

I spotted neither an owner or more bits of green paper, so I got back in my car and continued the commute to work. And I called my wife to tell her about my new found riches and suggested she go take a look, since it was so close to the house. Hey, maybe somebody pulled a caper and some of their folding money had come unstole! Of course she informed me of the much more likely possibility that some kid had dropped his/her lunch money while waiting for the school bus this morning. This caused me a momentary pang of guilt. Very brief. It’s not like, had I left it there, the wind would’ve blown it back to the original owner. And anyway, come lunchtime, the kid will learn a valuable lesson on the importance of securing your money.

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Ancestor Top 10 for 2008

January 2, 2009

A long time ago, back when I was really actively working on my genealogy, I would post a list each month of my most popular ancestors according to number of page views each had. I think I’ll do that again. This time for the year 2008. Here we go:

10. John Hiram Layne (1768 – ~1840): Born in Virginia and moved to Marion County Tennessee sometime before 1800. If your last name is Layne and you’re from the middle Tennessee area you’re probably related to this guy. He was my 4 x great grandfather.

9. David Pickett (1858 – 1910): Born, lived and died in Daus, Tennessee. Struck in the head and killed, by a rock which fell from a chimney he and two of his brothers were building. He was my great-great-grandfather.

8. Daniel Lafayette Layne (1871 – 1946): A well respected man born in Sequatchie County Tennessee. He not was not only a teacher for fourty-four terms in several one room school houses, but also a deputy sheriff, a member of the Sequatchie County Court, and a Justice of the Peace representing the Third District for forty years. He was my great-grandfather (my mother’s paternal grandfather).

7. Daniel Lee Layne (1907 – 1992): Better known as Leander Layne. He was born in Daus, Tennessee. Something of a trouble maker in his youth. He found religion sometime after the death of his brother Ulys in 1939. Like many in the 50s he moved the family to Detroit, Michigan to work in the automobile factories. Several years later he moved back to Tennessee. He served the community as pastor of church in Beersheba Springs until he passed away in 1992. He was my maternal grandfather.

6. Francis Adam Goodman (1827 – 1898): One of only two (as far as I know) ancestors that have found themselves worthy of a wikipedia entry. Francis immigrated from Germany in 1830 and eventually made his way to Salem, Allegan County, Michigan in 1855 after having lived some time in Baltimore, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. During the Civil War, he served as a private in the Ninth Michigan Infantry, Company D. After having served the local community as Supervisor of Salem Township, Commissioner and Justice of the Peace, he was elected as a Republican, representing the Second District, to two terms in the Michigan state Legislature in 1881 and 1883. He was my 3 x great grandfather.

5. Major James Tate (1778 – 1849): Born in Virginia, he along with several brother settled in, what would become, Warren County, Tennessee around 1806. James served in the War of 1812 at the rank of Captain and was later promoted to Major. He would be known as Major from that time on. Although I wonder if the title wasn’t given in recognition of his 18 children! He served as Justice of the Peace for Warren County and other public roles. The Major accumulated as much as 26,000 acres (that’s 40 square miles!) of land in and around the area now known as South Cumberland State Park. He was my 4 x great grandfather.

4. Colonel John Tate (1743 – 1828): John was born in VA and settled on Big Moccasin Creek on a spur of Clinch Mountain on the Holston River in November 1772. He is referred to in my documents variously as Lieutenant and Captain but his headstone reads Colonel. It is said he served under Colonel William Campbell in the Washington County Militia during the American Revolution and fought at the Battle of King’s Mountain. In 1787, John was appointed Captain in the upper Militia of the Moccasin Valley. In 1802, James Monroe, the Governor of Virginia, later President, appointed John Tate to become Lieutenant Colonel Commander of the 72nd Regiment, 3rd Division of the Virginia Militia. Later, as the senior Justice among 31 present for a special meeting in Lebanon in 1825, John Tate helped start Emory and Henry College. Colonel John Tate was my 6 x great uncle.

3. Robert Tate, Sr. (1725 – 1794): Robert Tate, Sr. is the oldest of the Tate line contained in my genealogy. There are over 1000 Tates in my database that can be traced back to Robert Tate, Sr. He was my 6 x great grandfather.

2. Henry Miller Layne (1846 – 1917): Apart from a brief time spent in Company “C” Tennessee Union 6th Mounted Infantry Unit during the Civil War, Henry spent his days as a farmer in Sequatchie County Tennessee. He was my great great grandfather.

1. Robert Tate, Jr. (1745 – 1806): Robert Tate was not quite so active in public service as his brother Colonel John Tate, so less is known of him. In 1781 he and his brother, John swore allegiance to the United States in Washington County, VA. On April 20, 1784 he received a land patent of 250 acres in Washington County, VA on both sides of Big Moccasin Creek on a spur of Clinch Mountain on the Holston River some three miles from Colonel John Tate. He was an Ensign of the Militia in 1786, while his brother, John was a Lieutenant. He was my 5 x great grandfather.

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Out With the Old

December 31, 2008

Well, I’ve finally made good on my threat to update my web site. It’s been on my to do list forever and now it’s finally done. Mostly. No need to go into all the details, but what I figured would take me two, maybe three hours, ended up taking something like eight hours. Hopefully, the site is a little easier on the eyes. No more google ads, flickr widgets, or woodsy background images. There’s a Twitter widget in the sidebar, but since Twitter is where I do a lot of my 140 character or less blogging, that seems appropriate. Hopefully these changes will make it easier to maintain and maybe I’ll even start posting regularly again.

I noticed while I was cleaning up I’ve only made eleven posts this year. Eleven! Compare that versus other years:

2002 26 posts*
2003 158 posts
2004 21 posts
2005 80 posts
2006 57 posts
2007 63 posts
2008 11 posts

*Starting in November 2002

There are several reasons I think. Shorter observations and such find their way to Twitter and Facebook. And World of Warcraft consumes a good deal of time and thought. But many times I started a post and then thought, oh, I don’t know if anyone would really be that interested to hear about that. But as I went through my posts I noticed that the stuff I’d written that maybe wouldn’t appeal to a wide audience was the stuff that I found most interesting. Crazy stuff my kids did and milestones in their lives. Or posts about friends and family. My own observations about current events and random stuff I wonder about. A good deal of it about boobs. No surprise there. The posts where I think I was trying to appeal to particular segment, like web developers or Apple fans, was less interesting to me and probably other people as well. Unless you know me, are you going to read some random guy’s thoughts on Apple, or are you going to read Daring Fireball? Although… I do have comments enabled. So I got that going for me.

Anyway, in the future, I guess I should worry less about trying to write on topics that I think will appeal to a particular segment, and more on making a record of my observations of the world around me for my future enjoyment.

One last thing, If your reading this, or even if someone is reading it to you, please leave me a comment and let me know if everything seems to be working right or not. And feel free to add any other comments you may have about the new look. I’d really appreciate it!

Happy New Year! – Casey

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Act II

December 30, 2008

Why hello there old blog! It’s been a while. You’re looking… not so great really. I thought that I was going to do something about that? One of those things I’ve not gotten around to I guess. My list of things I’ve not quite gotten around to seems to be growing. And lately I’ve been thinking about that more and more.

It’s that time of year where millions of people reflect on their past and resolve to make changes in the year to come. And perhaps it’s for that reason, or because I’ve recently turned forty, or for no particular reason at all, that I’ve been thinking about some changes in the year to come. Not the usual sort of resolutions that you hear about, losing weight, exercising, quitting smoking, and so forth. Although those are things I should probably look into. Rather, I’d like, very much, to be able to balance all the various interests I have along with my obligations as a employee, father, son, brother, husband.

For example, whatever the thing is that has my attention at the moment, be it woodworking, genealogy, golf, or my current obsession (again) World of Warcraft, whatever it is, can dominate my thoughts during my free time and often during times when I really should be focusing on something completely unrelated, like work, or my family, or why the room is filing with smoke.

In the case of WoW, I could, like a friend of mine, quit the game completely, but something else would likely fill the void, and it might be an expensive something (see above: golf). What’s more, I enjoy not only the game, but more importantly the company of some good friends that play along side me. So, I want to stay active in game, but I want to make time for other things as well. What I need is a bit of self discipline.

Of course I don’t expect I’ll wake up tomorrow and suddenly discover a that somewhere within me is a heretofore undiscovered reserve of self discipline. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a thing I could do to every day not only to try and become more disciplined, but also something that I would enjoy. A thing that would help me to learn something new and, hopefully, at the end look back and be proud of my accomplishment. I think that would be worth a stab anyway.

Sometime back in October I bought a new camera in anticipation of a family vacation to Disney World. I’ve since taken a few photos and, in many cases, found myself not entirely happy with the results, wishing I knew a little more about creating good photos. Not great, mind you… well okay, an occasional great picture would be nice. But I’d be satisfied, for now, with good. I’ve thought about maybe some classes, read a book or two, but it seems experience really counts for so much more than you can learn from a class or a book. At some point I wondered: what if I attempted to take at least one photo every single day for a year? This, I discovered, was not an original idea. But whatever. Could I do that? Is there anything at all (apart from involuntary biological functions) that I have the discipline to do for 365 consecutive days?

The more I thought about the idea, the more I thought this could have far more profound benefits besides simply making me a better photographer. First, that whole discipline thing I went on about earlier. Assuming I could do this, something that seems pretty simple on the surface, perhaps it would pave the way for less appealing tasks. While I could start the new year off resolved to do something like walk at least a mile every single day, it’s the sort of thing I could (and have) very easily talk myself out of. Especially on those days when it’s cold, or rainy, or windy, or sunny…

A photo a day would also be a nice supplement to my notoriously porous memory. It could take me off my well worn path between work and home to see and experience new things. I can even imagine situations where might be help me overcome my acute introversion. And of course, help me learn to allocate time for those things that are important, if only for a few minutes a day.

Some of you who know me well, most likely, groaned at some point while you were reading this and I can’t say as I blame you. I mean, when I asked my wife what she thought the prospects were of me completing this little project, she immediately said It wouldn’t happen and I told her she was probably right. But, I’m going to try. And hopefully, at the end of it, I’ll have learned something more than just how to take a better picture.

Note: I’ll be posting my photos on flickr in a set called Project 365.

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Fun With Dreamhost

November 19, 2008

Some of you may know that I have a large chunk of my website devoted to a little genealogy hobby that I pick at from time to time. And you may also have noticed that it has been down for the last few days. It’s back up now, but getting back up was not at all fun.

Several weeks back, while I was on vacation at Disney World in fact, I got an email from my web hosting service, Dreamhost, letting me know that a certain script was making unreasonable demands on one of Dreamhost’s database servers and it had been disabled for me. They asked me to take a look at it, optimize it, etc. No big deal. My genealogy software was a version behind so I updated it and made some other changes in hopes that would clear up the problem and notified Dreamhost. They responded a couple days later with some additional suggestions and I made a mental note to poke at it a bit more when the opportunity presented itself, but otherwise considered the problem solved. It was an inconvenience, but a reasonable action for Dreamhost and they were fairly prompt in responding to email.

On Sunday I received another email from Dreamhost. The same software hammering the same database. Instead of letting me know that the other changes did not solve the problem, and taking the offending script offline again, they decided to take the database itself offline and deny access to it. The email did mention that a backup of the database (containing many years of work) could be provided, but 3 days later no one at Dreamhost has responded to any of my emails. I could understand their decision in this case as well if they were in any way responsive to my attempts to try and contact them. But to destroy my work (as far as they know) and turn their back on me I don’t understand. At all. In fact the email seemed to suggest that I find another hosting company. A suggestion I may have to take them up on.

It’s funny because “reliable” is not the first thing that jumps into most people’s minds when describing Dreamhost. Combine that with the fiasco of exposing thousands of FTP passwords and the $7.5 million billing error (oops) and you would think they would be willing to go the extra mile with those customers that have stayed with them in spite of their foul ups. I’ve stuck with them because it’s cheap and my site is in no way mission critical and most importantly, I’m lazy. If my site were critical of even moderately important, Dreamhost certainly wouldn’t be hosting it.

Since Dreamhost has yet to respond to my emails I’ve had to take matters into my own hands. The main culprit was likely spiders such as Googlebot and Slurp, so my robots fie has been changed. You would think that after the 30 gozillionth time indexing a file that has not changed that Google would understand IT ISN’T GOING TO. I mean look how often I’ve posted to my blog lately. Anyway, I’ve also changed my htaccess file blocking large chunks of IP addresses that didn’t look right (if you can’t see this just let me know, ha!). And finally I’ve created a new genealogy database from a backup. Hopefully this will not provoke the wrath of Dreamhost and get my hosting shut down completely. But if this site disappears you’ll know what happened.

Update: Not half an hour after posting this I got a response from Dreamhost. The changes I made “sound like an acceptable solution” and the genealogy database has been re-enabled. Good deal. If only I’d gotten this response two days ago!

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