Family found: a true story
Posted on April 30, 2005
Filed Under Life | 1 Comment
I’ve been meaning to blog this all week, but it’s been hard to find the right words…
My father died of colorectal cancer on February 10, 1999. A few days later, I put together a [memorial section on my website.](http://www.momathome.com/misc/memorial/index.html) My father loved the Internet, and it was cathartic for me to compose the site. It’s what I [wrote for his funeral](http://www.momathome.com/misc/memorial/eulogy.html), [his old website exactly as he last left it](http://www.momathome.com/misc/memorial/shellyw/welcome.htm) and his [obituary](http://www.momathome.com/misc/memorial/obituary.html) that ran in the local newspaper. I don’t care how many different websites I design for myself, these pages will carry from site to site and I’ll never change a comma.
My father had a brother who was much older than him. When my father was a child, his older brother was already an adult and living his own life. My father thought his brother walked on water. While my father lived with his parents who were very traditional and my father was a “good boy” my uncle travelled and was a free thinker. Through the rough times of my father’s life, he often said it was his brother that helped hold him together.
My uncle died of multiple sclerosis in 1972. I was only 6 years old at the time, and my memories of my uncle are sketchy at best. I have one clear memory of him…at a Passover seder when he was already sick, standing up from the table. He was tall. Very tall. In my memory he was so tall that he had to duck down or his head would hit the ceiling. My mother says I probably remember him hunched over from the disease. But even now, over 30 years later I can “see” him standing up from the table and cocking his head to the side so he wouldn’t bump the ceiling. Like a giant in a doll’s house. After my uncle died, I remember hearing whispers about things about him, but nothing specific.
A few days ago, I received an email. I’ve taken out some private details:
I hope you don’t find this request/project offensive?
I recently visited your father’s memorial site
My original name was Weiler. My mother married a {uncle’s name} in 1945 in {place}. His home address is given as {address} and that his father’s name was Aaron. He was a corporal in the US Army at the time of the marriage and also the marriage certificate states that he was a medical student aged 25. Other information I have regarding my father is that he was of Austrian Jewish extraction…
Are we related? I know many people have the surname Weiler
I had a hunch. I called my mother to confirm. I read her the email over the phone. I finished the first sentence and my mother said, “Oh my God, you found your uncle’s lost child!” The address in the email was my father’s address as a child and all the dates and names matched. It seems that while my uncle was in the Army in Europe he met this man’s mother, they had a child and married (in that order). I have no idea what happened, but for whatever reason my uncle returned to the United States the same year. This man’s mother remarried 10 years later and he took his stepfather’s name. Any family members reading this correct me if I’m wrong, but our family knew from my uncle’s divorce papers that there was a child, but with the name changes there was no way of easily tracking him down.
So I replied, letting this man know that yes, he found his family. I am his first cousin. I forwarded his email to his brother and sister who have now been in contact with him. He lives in the UK, so a face-to-face meeting will have to wait for a while. He had been looking for his father’s family since his mother died in 1993. He had his birth certificate, but it wasn’t until recently that he thought to try and find his parent’s marriage certificate and it was that piece of paper that had his father’s address and his grandfather’s name. With that information, he Googled and found my father’s obituary on my website.
We just had a wonderful phone conversation, and he’ll be talking to his uncle (my father’s only surviving brother) and his brother and sister in the next few days as well. Thank goodness Vonage is only 0.03 cents a minute to UK as we were on the phone for nearly 2 hours. We talked about family, art & politics and through the entire conversation I felt my father’s presence in the room. My father’s side of the family is small and now I know there’s one more out there. He’s only 4 years younger than my father would have been today, and I think they would have been great friends. I even made sure that he had a recent colonoscopy, since now he knows that he’s at higher risk.
So when my mother said, “Oh my God, you found your uncle’s lost child” my answer to her was, “No, Daddy did.”
Tiger lawsuit? Nah.
Posted on April 29, 2005
Filed Under Macintosh | 1 Comment
It seems that TigerDirect.com is [going after Apple](http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/04/28/tiger/index.php) for trademark infringement.
>Systemax Inc. subsidiary TigerDirect.com has filed suit against Apple in the United States District Court for the District of Florida, alleging Apple has infringed on its trademark with its recent marketing campaign to promote Mac OS X v10.4. The software has been known by its code-name, “Tiger,” since it was first announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in 2004.
As first reported by Bloomberg on Thursday, TigerDirect.com has requested an injunction against Apple. A preliminary injunction hearing has been scheduled for next week, but Mac OS X v10.4 will go on sale on April 29, 2005 regardless.
Of course it will. As I posted on a Mac board that deserves repeating here, my six year-old daughter will often throw a tantrum asking for something that she doesn’t really want. What she wants is the attention. If she got what she said she wanted, she wouldn’t know what to do with it.
If TigerDirect really wanted to stop OS X Tiger they would have filed this thing months ago. The timing makes the motivation clear. And it’s effective, I didn’t know TigerDirect was still in business until this happened. I bought stuff there for my Dad’s PC in the early 90s. Weren’t they related to Egghead?
What’s wrong with Leave No Child Behind? I’ll tell you.
Posted on April 29, 2005
Filed Under Life | 1 Comment
So last night I was all set to settle in for a couple hours of pure escapist reality TV (Survivor followed by The Apprentice) and I get reality that I didn’t need.
I can go through and pontificate on everything I found wrong with what Bush said last night, but let me concentrate on the point that is nearest to my heart…Leave No Child Behind. I wanted to throw something at the screen when he was talking about it, because the man **just doesn’t get it.**
So here it is…the problem with LNCB isn’t the concept. It’s a very, very good thing to have the goal of literacy for all children we are educating in this country. A child from a so-called “bad” school whose family is struggling to make ends meet or is at a disadvantage because of their ethnic or racial background should not fall through the cracks. We should be identifying those children who need extra help and we should be giving it to them. Sounds peachy.
But the implementation and consequences of this law? Give me a break. Connecticut is planning on suing their way out of it, as the Teacher’s Union and other states are already taking action against it.
Why?
Let’s put it this way…you’re a website developer and you present your site to your client. The goal is to get certain action out of your site visitors and that’s where your success is measured. Which will get the job done?
1. You present the site and get little to no feedback on its success or failure until it’s way too late to do anything about it.
2. Your site traffic is tested every 15 minutes, each test using a different server, different pages and a different measure. All you get is a report of the results and a directive “fix it, or else.” Maybe the server was down during one of the tests, maybe you can’t compare the results of one server to another to draw a conclusion. You know you have a problem, but if you spend all your time running tests all over the server you don’t have the time or the information to try and fix it. You get no assessment of the data, no suggestions, no constructive feedback and certainly no funds to implement the changes necessary even if you could figure out what those changes are. The funds you do get come with a memo that says “Based on the test results we need you to take the money we gave you already for site enhancements and instead spend it to fix the problem. Don’t ask us how to do that, just do it. Or else you’re going to have to spend the money to send your visitors to other sites.”
3. Your site traffic is tested at consistent milestones. You know it’s not about how often you test, it’s about how you assess the data. Your traffic from one month to the next is compared based on similar traffic patterns. Adjustments are made for time of day or network-wide outtages. You can see the progress from the beginning because you’re testing the same page over time and you know what changes you need to make to new pages based on what you’re learning. You get the results in a format that clearly indicates the trends and assesses where the weaknesses are. You are trusted as the expert to come up with a plan to fix the problem, you know how much it should cost and you are given the money to make it happen. You can even give extra attention to the pages that are performing well to make them do even better.
\#1 was our education system before LNCB. #2 is LNCB now. #3 is what it should be.
We are testing these kids to within an inch of their lives, but we can’t assess the data if we’re comparing Johnny one year with one teacher to Melinda the next year with another teacher. We are forcing children to be tested based on their chronological age, regardless of a diagnosed disability that makes them cognitively younger. We are turning teachers into robots. We are turning kids off to learning. We are forcing school districts to spend millions of dollars throwing money at a problem with no clue whether or not they’re hitting the right target. Oh, there’s a problem…but if you spend the budget to fix what you think is a bad link and the problem is really that you misnamed the page, what good is it?
Ho hum about the new cat
Posted on April 27, 2005
Filed Under Macintosh | Leave a Comment
I can’t put my finger on it, but I’m not just that excited about [OS X Tiger](http://www.apple.com/macosx) compared to other techie-thinking bloggers. It has nothing to do with my PC, because I’m not all that interested in the Longhorn sneak peeks right now either. Except to say that I think Longhorn is looking pretty ugly. I know that we’re not supposed to be judging the interface yet, but still. I didn’t like OS X when it first came out. It had to grow on me.
No, I think my ho-hum attitude is simply that I’m “over” operating systems. I move back and forth so I’m not wedded to which dialog box is which. I don’t use .Mac, iCal, Safari or Mail so that wipes out a whole bunch of the 200 new features. Well, that’s not entirely true…in a pinch on my G5 I’ll fire up Mail to get at email via IMAP but it’s closed 90% of the time. I ordered Tiger from [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com) and it hasn’t shipped yet and I’m not concerned. Eric and I were on line at the Apple Store for Jaguar and Panther and I had no desire to do that this time. What still perks my attention is applications. I am reading everything I can get my hands on about [Adobe Creative Suite 2](http://www.adobe.com) and it’s that order that is making me refresh my browser wondering why it isn’t shipping yet from Amazon. This morning, I gave up and found that [PC Connection](http://www.pcconnection.com) is not only selling the CS 2 Upgrade for $10 less than Amazon, but they have it in stock and it should ship tonight. Good enough for me, I cancelled my Amazon order.
Honestly, I’m far more interested in Tiger for the kids’ iMac because of the parental control features and the dictionary Dashboard widget. Laini goes to dictionary.com often to look up words and having it on the desktop is a nice touch. But that would mean ordering Tiger on CD since their iMac doesn’t have a DVD drive.
At least I finally got around to catching my G5 up to 10.3.9. Seems to be fine. I always wait at about a week for OS upgrades, quit all applications, check permissions, check the latest backup, eject the external FW drive and then upgrade. So if I’ve got 15 applications open and projects I’m working on it’s not something I do lightly.
Maybe I’m just depressed that there are no nibbles on my [iBook](http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5770387641) and for the life of me I can’t figure out why not. There’s been a lot of folks looking at the listing, but no bids. It’s certainly competitive. There’s [this one](http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=80050&item=5770625682&rd=1) that’s a G3/700 with 256MB RAM and a 20GB drive that’s up to $480. I’m starting the bidding at $300 for 100 extra Mhz, maxxed RAM, bigger HD, better video *and* I’m including a case, a mouse and some time left on AppleCare. What is wrong with that?!? I’m hoping that there will be a surge in the last day.
Serenity
Posted on April 27, 2005
Filed Under Entertainment | Leave a Comment
I only watched an episode or two of “Firefly” when it was on. It was on a bad night and I always had something else going on. But the movie based on the TV series looks really good based on the just-released trailer.
[Check it out.](http://www.apple.com/trailers/universal/serenity/index.html)
Joss still rules.
