Roger’s Ramblings

Funding the Genealogy Collections at the Library of Michigan

Today’s Lansing State Journal has an article on the possible future of the Library of Michigan. So things still aren’t looking good and it seems that all of least year’s efforts – Hands Around the Library and MLA Rally at the Library not to mention all the letters, lobbying by individuals that went on have ended up with about a zero net effect on all of this – yes Governor Granholm did acknowledge the “pressure” when she amended her Executive Order, but what’s being talked about now seems to be worse than was imagined last Summer.

So given the grimness and probable inevitability of all of this, at least I’m somewhat cheered by this part of that article:

Robertson said the library still has yet to identify an agency or university willing to take on its federal depository and genealogy collections. Under one scenario, she said, the genealogical holdings could stay in the library if an interested group agreed to lease space there and staff the area.

So Ms. Nancy Robertson:

1. How much $$$$$ would it take to make this happen for a year?
2. When does it have to happen by before it’s too late and stuff starts leaving the building?
3. When better times come back would the State take it back over?
4. Would there be some kind of commitment from Ms Robertson about an ongoing nature to this until 3 happens – i.e. don’t change your mind after only a month or 2.
5. Would credit for the $$$$$ saved by NOT moving it all out be applied to the amount required in answer to question 1? After all whatever happens to change the status quo of the collection isn’t going to be done for nothing, so someone has to be paying for that.
6. How much $$$$$ would it take to make this happen for a year?

I’m thinking $1,000,000 ought to be more than enough – probably far more than enough.

That’s 20 lots of $50,000 or 50 lots of $20,000 or 100 lots of $10,000. Either way there have to be that many foundations/groups/people/trusts/organisations/societies/etc in the State of Michigan, and maybe some outside the state of Michigan who could come up with this without too much trouble.

It could be channelled through the Libraray of Michigan Foundation, who have an impressive “Board of Donors” on the 2nd floor in the Library. While it might seem harsh to ask them for more, many of them are businesses who surely realise the sense in not letting their current investments be thrown away.

7,000 people signed a petition about this last year – if they each put in $3 that would be one lot of $20,000 covered already.

Societies in the state of Michigan could come up with some of these chunks, either from their coffers or by fund raising within their communities.

But clearly the time to act is now, so Michigan Genealogical Council – a plan is needed that can be channelled down to the member societies, and through the member societies to their members for the grass roots effort, while in parallel seeking help from the Library of Michigan Foundation and their generous donors of the past for a large part of what would be needed to make this happen.

Anything is better than boxing this up and sending it in bits and pieces to whoever might want to (presumably after paying something for it??) take it, or heavens forbid out of the state to Fort Wayne. (Which I kind of think of as being similar to the Library of Congress deciding they can’t handle all that they’ve got that isn’t directly related to US History, and sending that to Mexico or Canada).

Down the road, when times are better the State Government need to snap out of it and realise just what a value this great building and its current contents provide for today and the future for what in the overall scheme of the state budget is truly a bargain!!

Yesterday I wore my “Protect Michigan’s Libraries” tee-shirt to the Library of Michigan. During the afternoon the people who make up the Board of the Michigan Center for Innovation and Reinvention Board (MCIR) were on a walk through and one of them noticed my shirt and said to me

“Nice Shirt”.

I replied “Thanks. It means what it says. Please leave everything here the way it is now”.

“We’re getting that” says he.

Whatever that all means, but perhaps they’re cognisant of the dissatisfaction expressed last Summer, and are under pressure to not follow through on some half-baked scheme that would make that great building be anything other than what it was designed and built to be. And it’s hard to imagine that anything they come up with for changes to that building and its function will cost less than the amount that hopefully Ms Nancy Robertson might provide in answer to Question 1 above.

Remember what it says at the top – “Roger’s Ramblings”

Swim Meet 12 February 2010

12 February 2010 was the West Michigan Swim League “A” Meet for 11 and over, held at Byron Center High School on the Friday evening. Kyle was in a relay and 2 individual races. He came second in both his races, beating his personal best both times.

The YouTube videos are below.

Kyle 50 Yards Butterfly. Kyle in Lane 5 (4th from the bottom) finishes a close second in a personal best time of 29.04 seconds

Kyle 100 Yards Freestyle. Kyle in Lane 5 gets a slow start, but fights hard to catch up and finishes second, taking nearly 5 seconds off his time, AND the first time under 1 minute for this event. Pay Up Dad!!!!!

And here’s half of the cheering gallery – my arm wasn’t long enough to hold the camera far enough away to include me, and Bev and George who were seated to my right.

Part of Kyle's Fan Club - Lisa, Kurt and Ann

Copying a Time Machine Volume

I decided recently to upgrade the storage in my Mac Pro. Currently it had 3 hard drives in it

• 320 GB – the one that came with the computer. This is little changed from when I got the computer as I immediately added a 500 GB and 750 GB to the machine as soon as I got it
• 750 GB – this is my startup volume, and has all the applications and documents on it. 90 GB free. It contained 1,803,033 files using 608.5 GB (653,331,116,032 Bytes).
• 1000 GB – this is my Time Machine volume, and has Time Machine backups going back 16 months to October 2008. 135 GB free. It contained 16,765,985 files using 787.6 GB (845,667,311,616 Bytes).

So for the upgrade – the plan was to add a 2 TB drive into the last empty drive bay in the Mac Pro to become the Time Machine volume, then clone the 750 GB drive to the 1000 GB drive, then use the 750 GB drive as a network backup volume perhaps.

So the first step was to attempt to move the Time Machine volume. This article http://www.macworld.com/article/146085/2010/02/migratebackups.html indicated it should be a fairly straight forward task. So I followed the instructions and set out. It took about 2 hours to copy all the data from the 750 GB drive to the new 2 TB drive, then I waited another 2 hours for the “Verifying” phase to complete, and just as it appeared success was at hand, a dreaded error message.

Well that wasn’t very helpful. Thinking that it was finished verifying I just accepted that thinking all would be good, but attempting to check the disk with Disk Utility gives

Even less impressed now. So I decided to run a Disk Repair on the 750 GB Time Machine volume – that took over 6 hours and found a few errors which it said were fixed. Then I tried the MacWorld procedure again, with at the end of another 4 plus hours the same frustrating result – an error message and a failure to be able to verify the drive.

Googling the error message led to a number of other sites with people complaining of similar problems. I tried the several suggested solutions, including initially making a partition on the new drive that was only a little larger than on the old drive, doing the Copy, and then enlarging the partition. This time the copy was successful, but enlarging the Partition wasn’t.

By now 3 days have passed me by.

So I tried Carbon Copy Cloner by Bombich Software, but when that was unable to manage the task I found that copying Time Machine volumes isn’t supported by Carbon Copy Cloner.

So I then tried SuperDuper! by Shirt Pocket Software. This set out to do the copying, but seemed agonisingly slow. After some 8 hours it had copied less than 6,000,000 of the files, so having read more sites that indicated that the MacWorld process, or very similar variations thereof really would work, I aborted the SuperDuper process and started another process using Disk Utility, but alas this too failed.

So it was going to have to be SuperDuper!. I set that running yesterday, and it finally completed today after an elapsed time of 17 hours 22 minutes.

According to Activity Monitor, at times the copy speed was above 100 MB/sec – presumably when copying large files, but for much of the time the copy speed was around 3-4 MB/sec as it copied the tens of thousands of symlinks that make a Time Machine volume work.

I don’t know what happened to the apparently missing 1,741,753 files (16,765,985 – 15,024,232), but once the copy was finished, Disk Utility reported that the drive had 16,269,744 files on it – a difference of a mere 496,241!!

When it was all done, and a “Repair Disk” from Disk Utility showed that all was normal, I opened the Time Machine preferences, selected the new 2 TB disk as the Time Machine Disk, and nervously waited for it to complete the first backup. This took a bit over 2 hours for Time Machine to scan the volume, Spotlight to get it indexed for Time Machine, and then the first backup done in several days to run, but HAPPILY when it was finished it recognised that the oldest backup was October 22, 2008, and reported that the next backup would be in about 45 minutes time. That backup ran successfully and completed in only a few minutes – it seems we’re back to normal, with a whole TerryByte of free space on the Time Machine volume now!!

So the next challenge is cloning the 750 GB drive to the 1 TB drive. Tomorrow is another day!!

Swim Meet 23 Jan 2010

23 January 2010 was another Age Group Swim Meet for Kyle and Zoe. This time it was at Rockford, Michigan. Kyle and Zoe both swam. The YouTube videos are below.

Zoe 50 Yards Backstroke. Zoe, 3rd from bottom in Lane 4 (the gap in the video is Uncle Roger pressing the wrong button on the camera at the wrong time). Zoe wins her Heat in 47.09 seconds.

Kyle 50 Yards Butterfly. Kyle is in Lane 4, diving in over the orange cap of the swimmer from the previous race. Kyle wins this heat in 30.94 seconds – not quite up to his 30.18 from 2 weeks ago – a better turn would have helped.

Zoe 50 Yards Breaststroke. Zoe is in Lane 2 at the bottom of the picture. She won this heat, but less time looking across the pool would have given her a bit faster time . 1:01.82 – hey it’s still waaaaaay better than I could even think of doing!!!!

Kyle 50 Yards Backstroke. Kyle is at the bottom in Lane 2 – a great start and then an easy swim sees Kyle winning this Heat in a good time of 35.11 seconds- more than 5 seconds ahead of anyone else.

Great Job Kids!!!!!!!!! See you next weekend

Yet Another Olde Photo

This one is perhaps the most difficult one so far. It starts out as a tiny 2 ½ x 3 ¼ print, so there’s not a lot to work with getting started…

Before and After showing progess of Restoration

Still quite a bit of work to do yet on this one.

Swim Meet 9 Jan

Saturday 9 January was the Quad Swim Meet for Byron Center, Zeeland, Rockford and a team called “Heat”, although I don’t remember what school they were. This is part of the West Michigan Swim League.

Zoe wasn’t swimming today – she was a Church Camp, but Kyle competed in a Relay and 2 Individual events.

50 Yards Butterfly…

Kyle finished a close second in this one.

100 Yards Freestyle

Kyle won this race very easily, but his time was second overall – the winner of the first race was 7 seconds faster.

A couple of other shots here, including an “action” diving shot.

 

Another Olde Photo

This one took a LOT of work. Not helped by a very inopportune Photoshop crash

Before and After of Olde Photo

Farming in Michigan

Well it was just a three weeks ago that our “neighbours” arrived with the giant green combine harvester on tracks and harvested the corn from the field out behind our property.

Today they’re back with a giant tractor cultivating the mud, dirt, water, ice and snow.

A closer view of the tractor and its running gear. The tracks are about 2 feet wide on the ground.

Pictures below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Christmas Newsletter 2009

2009 is all but done…

Mount Washington Summit

Fixing Olde Photographs

Here are a couple of before and after shots of some olde photos I’ve fixed up for a friend.

Young Pat Smith

Young Pat Smith's Sister

After scanning the photos it was lots of time with the tools available in Photoshop to Clone, Heal and Patch the damage. The second photo had been torn nearly through and then “fixed” with sellotape at some stage in the long ago past – what a mess!!! It kind of reminded me of watching the curators work on the Dead Sea Scrolls some years ago when we saw them at the Field Museum in Chicago – gently scraping away the decades olde tape that had been put on them.