The positive reaction to yesterday’s post from the memoirs of my great-great-grandmother encouraged me to start thinking about how to proceed.
Initially I just had a vague idea of going through the manuscript and dribbling out a bit at a time in a series of posts. But I quickly realized that’s more complicated than it sounds at first glance.
First task would be to decide how to carve out just enough for a single post. And how long should each single post be?
Not too long, I think. Maybe 1,000 words, max. That’s going to be an editing job, even if I only plan out a few posts at a time.
The manuscript is about 250 pages. Say that translates into two pages per post. Something over 100 posts. Perhaps one every several days. It could take a year to do. Too long? Will readers get hooked or bored? I don’t know.
Then there’s a simple decision. Do I double check my sister’s text against the original scans of the handwritten manuscript to see whether the typos or odd words are in the original? The editing job gets more complex if the answer is yes.
So I went ahead and looked at the first chapter. Well, actually, the first chapter was all about Ellen’s description of her family, based mostly on family lore. And those recollections are annotated by my sister, who found much of the information to be wrong, and more unsupported. So I skipped ahead to the first narrative chapter, looking to see if there are natural breaks that would assist in breaking it up.
As started reading, I could almost hear woman’s voice, perhaps with a slight southern accent, reading aloud and telling the story. My thought—A perfect serialized podcast! Oh, good idea, Ian. Even more work, editing for someone to read out loud in order to make the podcast.
Now I’m hopelessly mired in the potential complexities of it all.
I think I have to go back to the beginning. Think Little, as poet Wendell Berry once wrote. That’s the way to start. The rest can, perhaps, follow.
But then I start thinking that this is a project that could stretch out for quite a while. Does it need its own subdomain, where followers can bypass the rest of iLind.net? How hard is something like that to set up?
More complications, since we’re in Seattle for much of the next week. I shouldn’t start thinking of this kind of stuff while on vacation!
Well, after being knocked offline for about 18 hours, my hosting service got this blog, and others, back online somewhere around 3:30 p.m.
Here’s the message sent out to explain the outage.
Earlier today, an automatic update to the DirectAdmin service unexpectedly disrupted the Apache/LiteSpeed web service on some of our shared servers.
Our team immediately took action upon discovering the issue, and we worked diligently to resolve it as quickly as possible. We understand the inconvenience this may have caused, and we sincerely apologize for any disruption to your services and workflow.
Rest assured that the issue has been addressed, and all services have been fully restored to their normal functionality. We have implemented measures to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future and are conducting a thorough review of our update procedures to prevent such issues from happening again.
We greatly appreciate your patience and understanding during this time. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team, who will be more than happy to assist you.
I’ve been with this hosting service for many years, and this is the longest disruption I’ve experienced.
And thanks to all those who contacted me “just in case” it had gone down without my knowledge.
I finally got around to changing the photo in the header of this blog to reflect the season, when the sun when viewed from Waialae Beach Park appears to rise over Molokai and, eventually, Maui.
Sometime around January 22, the sunrise will begin to slowly move back to the left of the photo, over Koko Head, then Koko Crater, and on until in mid-year it is rising over parts of the Koolau Mountains, off to the left of this photo.
When I choose photos for my annual Kahala at Dawn calendars, I try to catch the movement of the sun over the course of the year. I don’t succeeed 100%, as some photos are so good that I make a place for them, even if it’s not consistent with the position of the sun during that month. And I try to do the same by changing the header here over the course of the year.
In any case, I just wanted to explain the switch.
Here’s what I haven’t figured out. The chosen header photo is incorporated into the overall “theme” used for the blog, and appears the same way on all past entries until it is changed again.
I would like to find a way to display different headers depending on the time of year of a particular post, but just don’t know how to do that.
Maybe some more knowledgeable about the ways of the digital world can school me on this.
• A week ago, I posted Part 2 of something I entitled, “It could have been a simple traffic ticket.” At that time, I wrote that a motion filed by Miske’s attorneys seeking to suppress evidence drawn from his cell phone during an arrest on December 4, 2015, was “pending.”
The judge’s order denying the motion was filed that same day, and I haven’t gotten around to updating that entry. But for now, here’s what Judge Watson had to say.
In an order filed on November 15, Judge Derrick Watson denied the motion to suppress, concluding the search and arrest of Miske were not unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.
Miske’s attorneys produced “not one shred of evidence” that there was any “ruse or otherwise nefarious conduct with regard to the search and arrest of Miske on December 4, 2015,” Watson wrote. Without evidence, allegations in the motion amounted to mere speculation, according to the order.
Finally, Watson rejected the argument that the federal search warrant was constitutionally flawed because it didn’t comply with state law.
“Miske does not cite to any case supporting the notion that such an alleged failure or violation of State law alone refers an otherwise valid search unreasonable,” the order concluded.
• Back when Amazon first offered their Prime membership with unlimited file storage, I jumped on the service. When we moved from Kaaawa into town a little over eight years ago, I scanned a whole lot of old financial records, tax returns, bank and investment statements, etc. Then I uploaded a copy to Amazon Drive, and shredded the originals. I also uploaded thousands of photos, which ended up being moved over to Amazon Photos.
Fast forward to earlier this year, when Amazon announced it was discontinuing Amazon Drive at the end of December. Ouch!
There have been mixed messages from Amazon about whether non-photo files would continue to be accessible through Amazon Photos, or whether we need to rescue them by downloading to safe storage before the end of the year.
I’m paranoid enough that I’m preparing to do the download. The Amazon Photo app just made that easier by providing an easy way to download all non-photo or video files at once.
I’ll be trying it in the next day or two, but if anyone else has already made the move, please share your experience.
• The Honolulu Police Department is slowly moving to provide more public data. I’ve been checking the daily Honolulu Police Department arrest logs for a while. You get a quick view of what’s happening around the island crime-wise from the arrest logs.
I’ll report on other parts of their new data system as I try them out.
• Jan Kagehiro, Communications & Community Relations Director for the State Judiciary, let me know that the eCourt Kokua online data system allows searching for upcoming court hearings either by case, or by court.
In August we added a new tab in eCourt Kokua called “Upcoming Court Hearings Search.”
Upcoming Court Hearings Search: You can see at-a-glance a two-week view of upcoming hearings by searching by case identification (ID) number or by court/location. If you use search by case ID number, you can see all upcoming hearings associated with that specific case number. If you search by court/location, you can see all upcoming hearings in all cases for that specific courtroom. The information on the site is updated in real time as hearing dates are entered into the system.
So when you get into eCourt Kokua and go to view documents, you have choices for searching, by name, vehicle (license plate), case search (starting with case #), and the new selection, “upcoming court hearings search.”
This is certainly a step in the right direction, but right now it isn’t too user friendly. I won’t say more right now, since I’ve just started taking a look at how this works and how it can be used by reporters or others interested in the courts.
• We answered a knock on our door late Tuesday afternoon, and it was a salesman from Spectrum. He said he was going door to door, checking in with those who are not current customers. He was very nice and friendly, and took it well when I told him we’re quite happy with Hawaiian Telcom as our internet provider.
But it’s the first time this has happened to us, so it will be interesting to see if it represents an increase in competition between the two big cable companies in this market.
• No turkey for us this year. When we used to shop at Foodland more often, they made it difficult not to do a turkey. They are usually free with one of their coupons, which come after spending a certain amount. Now that we don’t get to Foodland often, no coupon, so it’s easier to be honest and say even a mid-size bird is too much for two people to eat. So we’re downsizing. We bought a chicken. Don’t laugh. We’ll see how it works out.
And we were amazed to see what people are paying to buy prepared Thanksgiving meals at restaurants around town. They’ve been sold out for some time, but prices for a meal for 4 went up over $300. Ouch! We’ll stick with the chicken at home.
And I’ll probably take tomorrow off in honor of the occasion, unless the morning dogs are so cute that I’ve got to post some of their pictures.
Anyway, gobble gobble. I didn’t include the whole scene with Steve Martin confronting the rental car agent, but you might want to search it out.
