Fourth Golf Game of 2008

I played an early morning round of golf on the Sunday of my Boston visit. It was another very hot day, so I was glad to start my round at 6:40 a.m.

I had done a Google search of the Newton area on Saturday and found a few courses. I chose Newton Commonwealth because it was quite nearby and looked like an inexpensive public municipal course.

Newton Commonwealth started in the late 1890s as a 9-hole course. by the 1920s, it was an 18-hole course and had been redesigned by the golf architect Donald Ross. In the 1970s, as the Chestnut Hill Country Club, the course got into financial trouble and was bought by the City of Newton to keep the land from development.


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The course is a par-70 that straddles a valley with a small stream running across it. The 18 holes take you up-hill, across the stream, through several undulations and along the edges of a hill then back down again before repeating the same twice on the second nine holes. There are several short but very tricky par-3 holes that feature steep drops to small greens. The distance is easy; the risks, though, are great.

I played with a young man named Jason, his brother Brad, and their friend Brit. Jason is a New Yorker who met and married a local girl and settled in Newton to raise a family. Brad and Brit still live in New York City and were up for a visit. They were nice young men and fun to play with.

I started the round with my usual self-deprecation and an appeal to their sense of humor. And, of course, immediately sent a modest but straight drive up the center of the fairway, pitched onto the green and two-putted for par. That undercut my warnings about the state of my play. So when I then played hole number two poorly, it made me feel that much worse.

In the end, I carded a 104. I had a few pars and a few modest blow-ups. It was great fun to play a brand new (to me) course. The courses around here are mostly quite flat; any hills must be added. So it is great fun to play a hilly course. And I enjoy meeting new people.

Another Word Cloud

I wanted to try another of these wordle word-clouds. This one is a cloud of the tags I use in del.icio.us. A more practical and clickable version of this has long lived at the lowest left-hand spot on this blog, of course, but I think this gives an accurate picture of what my focus is when I browse the web and mark things for further use.

I search mostly for items of and about Delaware. Many of these I find in my work for state government; I track land-use issues among county and municipal governments. Many of these I mark for inclusion on various pages of my office's web site; we use items relating to land-use planning, about proposals reviewed under the PLUS Process, on the US Census, and about the use and sharing of geospatial data (GIS stuff). I've also used del.icio.us tags to supplement an aggregation of state GIS coordination RSS feeds that I help maintain for the National States Geographic Information Council (NSGIC).

I still want to take another crack at a family-tree wordle. The one I did the other night was just a selection from among the Mahaffies on my tree. I'm trying to figure out a way to extract all 1,700 of the people on my family tree and make a wordle from that last.

Very Many Mahaffies

There's a neat light java tool out there called Wordle which creates colorful word-clouds. They are not the sort of thing that you can use for navigation, but they are loads of fun. 

I have created a few, including this one based on a bunch of names from my family tree. Have a browse through the gallery and see if you aren't tempted to make one yourself.

A Hot Day in Boston

I took a long, hot walk through Boston on the Saturday of my stay in Massachusetts. I wanted to see a bit of the Freedom Trail and wander around Boston Common.

I was staying in a hotel that straddled the Mass Pike (I-90) in Newton. The nearest T (subway) station was about 2.5 miles away in Newton Center. The hotel staff recommended a $10 cab ride, but I had a whole day to kill, so I decided to hoof-it. I had a nice walk up through a very respectable residential area, past a private school or two, and into a nifty little downtown area.

The T is comfortable and fast and takes you right into the center or Boston. I got off at the municipal building (featuring a big "Beat LA"
banner in support of the Celtics) and walked along parts of the Freedom Trail. This winds through Boston, old and new, past many of the places where the United States of America was born. There are historic taverns, and statues, and several very old graveyards hosting American heroes and ancient enigmas.

I followed trail to Boston Common, a 50-acre park in the center of the city that dates from the 1630s. It is the oldest city park in the US and fronts the Massachusetts State House, which also proudly wore Celtics green. The Common was filled with picnickers and tourists, Tai Chi'ers and free-speech activists, and an old-format religious group singing and preaching to a crowd that included listeners and ignorers in about equal measure.

A part of Boston Common is the Public Garden, added in the 1800s and featuring a 4-acre pond with ducks and swans. The pond is bridged by what is said to be the world's smallest suspension bridge. On this day, it was host to an accordionist busker. At the far end is an equestrian statue of George Washington.

There was a watercolor painting workshop under way in the Garden. I kept wandering past painters hard at work and wise enough to stay in the shade.

The loveliest thing I saw was a pair of swans nesting next to the pond. I'd never seen swans nesting before. The nest was carefully fenced-off and folks watched from a respectful distance.

Leaving the Public Garden, I headed down Boylston Street to Copley Square where an older building was admiring its reflection in a newer neighbor. And there was a fountain in which families were cooling themselves and a group on a self-advertised field trip provided the music.

I caught the T back out to Newton Center and strolled back down the hill to my hotel, a float in the hotel's tiny pool, a light supper and so to bed.

"I Wished to Live Deliberately..."

On the Friday of my Boston sojourn, I went to Walden Pond to visit the site of the cabin that Henry David Thoreau built in 1845 as part of his experiment in simple living. He wrote about the two years he lived in that cabin in Walden, Or Life in the Woods, published in 1854.

I had not set out to visit this shrine to the transcendental movement; it was too rainy to be a tourist in Boston so I was wandering purposely aimlessly and found myself on the road to Concord. All of the sudden, I saw a pond on one side of the road and a parking lot entrance sign on the other. The word "walden" jumped out at me and I turned right.

I had found the Walden Pond State Reservation, maintained by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It surrounds the pond and includes a small swimming beach, beautiful views, and many trails leading to the site of Thoreau's cabin. It was here that Thoreau settled in to try a simple life.

I walked through the woods to the site of the hut. Thoreau abandoned the place after two years. It was salvaged into other uses; the boards went into other construction projects and the roof became a cover for a pigsty. The site was lost for years but was rediscovered in the 1940s.

Starting in the 1870s, friends and followers of Thoreau started to visit the site they thought had been where Thoreau lived and wrote (they were off by a bit) and began a tradition of leaving behind a stone in memory and tribute. There is now a sizable pile of stones.

Across the pond there is a steep bluff known as Emerson's Cliff. I found a small stone there to place on the pile by the hut.

Concord has a great deal else to see. The Minuteman National Historic Park is there. It includes the Old North Bridge where the American Revolutionary War started.

I'd like to head back there some time and spend more than an afternoon.

At Fenway Park

I got a chance to see the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park last night. I'm killing time in the Boston area while Colleen plays bass at Berklee and I figured I might as well try to get a ticket to what turned out to be the 418th consecutive sell out of Fenway.

I'm an Orioles fan, but I do like the Red Sox. Besides, baseball is baseball, and we're talking about Fenway Park, one of the classic old ball parks.

I had pretty good seats (not as good as that picture would suggest; that was taken on my way to the men's room). I was in the grandstand on the first-base side and close to home plate. I was fairly far back, though, just a row in front of standing room.

I sometimes enjoy going solo to events like this. I've done several large rock concerts as a solo and now this ball game. There's a certain freedom to being an unknown.

The Red Sox lost this game, 8 to 0. They had had an emotionally active game the night before in completing a sweep of the Tampa Bay Rays, a good team. There were fights and outbursts and drama. The game I saw was against the Mariners, not one of the better teams, and the Red Sox looked a little flat and made a few errors.

In Boston

I'm typing this in a smelly smoking room in a Sheraton Inn in Newton, Massachusetts. I'm in the Boston area through the week-end. I brought Colleen up for a three-day "Bass-Lines" program at the Berklee School of Music. She's staying in the Berklee dorm and I have a cheap (and stinky) room just outside of Boston.

We drove up today. Colleen is almost done with the first 6 months of her graduated driver's license; she can drive with a parent along in the car and I used this trip as an opportunity to give her some (guided) experience driving on various kinds of highways. She has now driven Delaware's SR1, parts of the Garden State Parkway, several different interstates, and the Merritt Parkway. She did well.

We got into Boston in the late afternoon and got her checked-in at Berklee with no trouble. We then met some summer friends at Quincy Market for a nice dinner. After that, I dropped Colleen off at her dorm and headed out to this hotel.

I got terribly lost heading back out here. It was dark and Boston is tricky. I got here, though, after a few false leads. This hotel sits astride Interstate 90 -- the Massachusetts Turnpike -- Looking out my window I see three lanes of headlights and three of tail-lights.

I used Hotwire to book this place; it didn't have to be special, just a place to sleep for a few nights. My plan is to play tourist but be nearby if Colleen needs me. I didn't count on a smoking room, though. I hope they can move me tomorrow.

Seen Around Dover...

I took a brief walk around Dover this noon for my lunch hour. It was a pleasant day for a walk, with a carry-out Caesar salad from 33 West as my reward.

On Elm Terrace, I came upon a rose bush that has climbed up a neighboring tree. A group of pale pink blossoms were glowing in a shaft of sunlight at about second-story level.

I've mentioned before that Dover is a city of flowers. Delaware's Capitol City fills with tulips each spring. The city does a great job of maintaining flower beds and planters downtown. The residents do their bit too.

Later, over on Governor's Avenue, I spotted three young men running along in front of a Chrysler dealership. They appeared to be about high-school age. There were two out front; one carrying a soccer ball and one carrying a pair off cleats. The third fellow was carrying what looked like the goal and net. He was having a bit of trouble keeping up.

You never do know what you are going to see next.

We Have Eggs

The bird who has taken up residence in one of our hanging plants this spring was off the nest when I finished mowing the lawn this morning. I took the opportunity for a peek and found a pair of eggs in the nest.

I must say that I was a bit worried about where the nesting bird might be. I worry that it will abandon the nest, which is quite close to our front door and so sees lots of human traffic. But the bird was back and perched on the eggs just now, so I will not worry.

With luck, we'll soon get a view of very young birds. I wonder what sort of birds these are?

UPDATE: Thanks go out to Rich, our Honest Hypocrite, for pointing out that the bird nesting on our front porch is a Mourning Dove.

What's (Not) Wrong With This Picture?

The News Journal had a story this morning on the possible effect of high gas prices on travel to Delaware's designated 20-something drinking and beach town Dewey Beach. The story ran in the 55-Hours week-end preview section. It was teased on the front page with the picture at left.

I find it troubling.

In Fueling the summer bar wars, Ryan Cormier writes about the possibility that upstate party folks will forgo the drive to Dewey, at four bucks a gallon, and do their drinking in upstate bars. Good news for the upstate bar owners, but bad news for the down-state bar owners.

But, as a down-state driver -- and as the father of a newly minted downstate driver -- I have to say that I'm thrilled to think that the young woman pictured here will not be driving around here.

Well Done, Dover Post?

Several of the newspapers that make up the Dover Post family of publications -- the Sussex Countian, the Milford Beacon, the Smyrna Clayton Sun Times and the Middletown Transcript -- have launched new news sites that are, at least after a quick tour, very nice. Ironically, the Dover Post site itself does not appear to have been updated yet (at least not as I write).

Update (5/29/08): The Dover Post site has made the change!

According to an editorial in today's Sussex Countian, the on-line make-overs came with the help of new parent company Gatehouse Media. It appears the writing was on the on-line wall:

... while we will certainly be printing the same paper we have since 1886 every Wednesday, there is little doubt that news-gathering and news distribution is moving in a digital direction.

These are very local weekly newspapers, and they have for a long time provided a close-focus look at their communities. But things are moving faster than the printing press can produce a tabloid-sized newspaper:

There are advantages and disadvantages to a weekly paper. On one hand, we get nearly a full week to work and develop stories that happen between Wednesday and Sunday. But then again, everything that happens between those days is, well-developed or not, old news by the time it gets to the paper.

I hope this means that these papers will continue their in-depth reporting, but will update on an interim basis. They have included lots of RSS feeds, so we can read along with them. And, when we do, we should take notice of their advertisers. That's how this business works, after all.

We Have Guests, Again

A bird has taken over one of the two hanging flower baskets we have outside our front door this spring. It's the second time we've played host to basket-nesting birds.

We first noticed that the flowers in one basket were looking a bit more stressed than those in the other. On closer inspection, we found the beginnings of a nest and we started to see a bird coming and going.

For the last few days, this bird has been sitting there steadily; I assume there are eggs under there.

I think we'll happily sacrifice the flowers for a few new birds.

Among the Many Things I Did Not Know: Why 88888 is So Interesting

Back in November, I posted about rolling 88,888 miles on my Prius. I thought it was just a way-station on my journey of obsessive nerdiness, but that post has had something of a life of its own.

The folks over at Delaware Liberal used it to start a "Guess Mike's Mileage" contest. That was cute. But I've also noticed a steady stream of hits on that post generated by Google Searches for "88888." The most recent, today, was by a web-surfer in Chahārmahāl o Bakhtiyārī, in Iran.

I've noticed that a number of the 88888 searchers are in that part of the world, so I finally got curious enough to follow-up and found two interesting facts about 88888 that may explain why that number is bringing readers.

First, the number 88,888 is a mathematical curiosity:

888888 is the only five-digit repunit such that the product of itself and all truncations of itself plus and minus one results in twin primes.

What? Don't ask me, I just work here. In any case, I've seen 88,888 referred to in several places as a lucky number. These two things are likely related.

More recently, 88888 is apparently the account number used by Nick Leeson for the speculative trades that led to the collapse of the UK investment bank Barings in the 1990s.

I just thought it was neat that my car's odometer had 8's straight across.

A Moment of Zen?

I went for a walk along the St. Jones River for lunch on Thursday. There were turtles and boys fishing and several Great Blue Herons. This one here was fishing at the foot of the Silver Lake dam. He was (rightly) annoyed with me for interrupting his angling. But watching him was so peaceful.

Do yourself a favor and turn down your volume before playing this (Assuming the video is showing up for you...). Not much happens, the Heron is just hanging out. But the water running over the dam behind me was load.

News Journal Update

The folks at the News Journal got back to me and explained that some of their feeds were "generating headlines from the incorrect categories" and that they have fixed it. We'll see. There are, of course, of problems with the News Journal site, but I'm glad they responded.

News Journal On-Line Makeover Disaster #4

The News Journal, Delaware's top daily newspaper, recently made-over its on-line offerings and I am not very happy with the result. It's still better than the other Delaware daily, which offers essentially no on-line content, but I find the new News Journal site hard to use and off-putting.

There's too much stuff on the News Journal web page, so it takes far too long to load. Some sections aren't well dated; it's hard to see what's actually new. And the site goes too far down the road to trying to be a social site, making things simply more confusing.

But none of those problems, as annoying as they are, is News Journal On-Line Makeover Disaster #4. No, today I want to talk to you about RSS feeds and how poorly they are implemented on the News Journal site.

RSS feeds can be a great way to organize and consume data; they are particularly useful for news and news-related content. Since I can't dependably find news content on the News Journal site, I have subscribed to three of their feeds: News, Politics, and Opinion.

The News feed seems pretty straightforward; it repeats the headlines from the main "News" section each morning. That's good. The Opinion feed doesn't appear to have been updated since May 16. That's bad. The Politics feed seems to be a special case. It updates every few hours and offers a broad spectrum of news headlines. Sometimes, there is even political news.

Here are the latest headlines from the News Journal Politics feed, as found in my reader:

• Sussex may trim money for open space, seniors (Seems political: Pass)
• Sallies-St. Andrew's lacrosse game moved to Tower Hill (Sports [unless someone political has a kid in the game]: Fail)
• Cape Henlopen fishing pier to reopen (Recreation: Fail)
• Pennsylvania midday lottery numbers (Numerology?: Fail)
• Pa. woman charged with throwing son, 4, on railroad tracks (Crime [unless she is elected somewhere?]: Fail)
• Merck agrees to $58 million settlement over Vioxx ad claims (Business: Fail)
• A day fit for the dogs — and birds (Cute photo of little white doggy behind someone's rain-speckled car window: Fail miserably)
• The Old 97's to do Dewey (Entertainment [unless Bill Lee is involved?]: Fail)
• Reaction to news of Sen. Kennedy's brain tumor (Major political news: Pass)
• Statement from Sen. Kennedy's doctors (Medical, but politics-related: Pass)

So, out of 10 "political" headlines, 3 are actually about politics. The rest seem to be "latest updates." Further, the politics feed has a tendency to repeat itself, and to repeat headlines found in the other feeds, particularly in the morning.

Am I being picky? Yes. But the News Journal is a business. It sells ads based on readers/viewers and I am one of those readers. My attention to the site -- my clicking through from my RSS reader -- is crucial to the business model of the News Journal site. If they make that progressively harder, they will lose readers and they will not be able to sell ads as well.

So, as a fairly polite fellow, I left a comment on the new site's readers' forum , in the section titled "Redesign Feedback." That was two weeks ago. I have had no response. I did send an e-mail to the on-line editor and got a polite, but not very helpful reply suggesting that I might be getting repeats in the RSS feeds if I've subscribed to both the "sports" feed and the "Phillies" feed. That might be an issue if they had an "Orioles" feed, but they don't.

So I decided to complain to you, and potentially, to everyone who searches the web for information on "News Journal RSS Feeds."

Congratulations, Lady Ravens

The Sussex Tech Women's Lacrosse Team posted a 6 and 6 record for the season that just ended. Considering that this was the first season that this school has had a Women's Lacrosse Team, that's not at all bad. And, as a team parent, I am proud.

At the start of the season, their inexperience showed. They had a core of girls who had played field hockey and knew both hustle and field strategy but lacked ball-handling skills. They were augmented by a group of girls, including Colleen (my eldest), who had been part of a lacrosse club last year and had some stick and ball-handling skills, but lacked game experience. They featured lots of sprinting towards the goal and plenty of shots, but little passing and strategy. Good teams beat them easily.

By the end of the season, though, the team had come together and found a nice balance. They still had a breakaway threat, but as often as not these girls made skillful passes, set-up plays, and manufactured goals with a touch of finesse. In their second-to-last game, they fought Caesar Rodney, one of the best teams in the league, down to the wire in a see-saw game that they lost only by one, last-minute goal.

So, congratulations, Lady Ravens. I'm looking forward to next year.

What is the Heart and Soul of Sussex County?

There's a new web site up to try to answer this question. The University of Delaware's Coastal Community Enhancement Initiative created the site to gather a wide range of descriptions and thoughts about what makes Sussex County, Delaware, special.

We believe that when a community takes the time to get to know itself, its Heart & Soul elements - it will gain a sense of identity and purpose that will empower its citizens to make strong enduring decisions and take right action to protect and strengthen who they are.

Only by going to, listening to, and learning from everyone - the influential and the forgotten, old timers and newcomers, young and old, rich and poor, business owners and workers, professionals and tradesmen, the noisy and the quiet, the caregivers and the gatekeepers - can shared purpose and identity live in and guide a community.

I thought I would try to help out and, after consulting with one of the Initiative members, I created a new flickr group to try to collect photographic input into this question. If you are a photographer, and have or would like to join flickr (it's free), please join Sussex County (DE) Heart & Soul and add some shots of what you think is special about this place.

I think this will be worth some of our time if only as an experiment in a crowd-sourced gazette of what a particular place means.

"Delawarisms" Get Some National Attention

One of the blogs of the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) has a piece today on some of the linguistic tics unique to Delaware's political scene. The blog, The Thicket, selects a few bits from a post this week by proto-blogger Celia Cohen on her Delaware Grapevine.

In Leg Hall Lingo, Celia offered a brief glossary to help watchers of Delaware's political antics keep up with the local dialect. Many were words and phrases familiar to legislature-watchers everywhere, but a few were new to the NCSL writer, including "Thurman's Office," "Body Parts People," and the "Big Head" committees.

The legislature is a community unto itself and, like any community, it has its own customs, its own norms and its own language. Ours is not the only one with its own words, The Thicket offers a neat little lexicon: Sine Die and Other Vulgarities.

RIP: Mayor Al Stango

I've lost another Mayor, I'm afraid. Al Stango, who led Lewes for (I think) 24 years, passed away over the week-end at age 93. We lost Mayor George Smith, who followed Al in office, in 2005.

Al Stango was Mayor when I first moved to Lewes in 1987. He ran a tight town. Al was in charge and he was not shy about it. But he was effective.

When I first came here I was a reporter and news reader at a local radio station. I quickly learned that a fill-up at the Mayor's gas station on the way to work was a great way to get a fresh morning's story. Al would come out and pump your gas and if you had a tape recorder, or a curious ear, he was perfectly willing to tell you just what was new in the city of Lewes.

Al Stango was a big part of why I fell in love with Lewes. He was a character and I am thankful I got to know him.