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”

©2010 Roger’s Ramblings. All Rights Reserved.

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

©2010 Roger’s Ramblings. All Rights Reserved.

• 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!!

©2010 Roger’s Ramblings. All Rights Reserved.

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

©2010 Roger’s Ramblings. All Rights Reserved.

Before and After showing progess of Restoration

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

©2010 Roger’s Ramblings. All Rights Reserved.

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.

 

©2010 Roger’s Ramblings. All Rights Reserved.

Before and After of Olde Photo

©2010 Roger’s Ramblings. All Rights Reserved.

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.

 

©2010 Roger’s Ramblings. All Rights Reserved.

Mount Washington Summit

with the towel pharoah headgear

During the Winter and Spring Roger taught after school Lego Engineering at 2 different schools, and later in the year got to see the Lego Team from Byron Center go to the Regional Finals and then the State Finals of First Lego League.

Lisa, Minor and Mary Lee ready to dine on the porch. RIP Minor.

The last piece of the Green Mountain Railway line still on the mountainside. The rows of spikes set into the rock mark the route of the tracks.

At the summit of Mount Washington.

On June 11 Roger had surgery on his right knee to repair a tear in the medial meniscus. The surgery went very well and he came home on crutches after the surgery and was walking on it again the next day. That knee is much better now.

Zoe and Friends at Zoe's 9½ birthday party at Gun Lake.

At the end of June we “camped” at Gun Lake, about 20 minutes south of Caledonia for Zoe’s 9½ birthday for a couple of days with Kurt and Ann, Zoe and a bunch of her friends. It was unnecessarily hot, so the proximity of the lake was a good thing.

Looking along the two lines of Luminaria

Roger, Ann Christensen and Lisa Christensen. Ann is married to Lisa's cousin, and is a breast cancer survivor.

We took part in both of those. The 24 hour “Relay for Life” turned out to be about 21 hours – we had great weather Friday afternoon and evening which was particularly good for the luminaria ceremonies – a bag with a candle in it for each person being remembered or honoured by participants, but cold rainy weather on the Saturday morning drained the enthusiasm and the organisers decided to let us stop early, so we could get our sites packed up and tidied away.

the shiny propellor cones kept us amused...

what you get when there are no balloons above the baskets...

In July Roger’s brother Alistair arrived for one of his very quick visits on his way to a computer conference somewhere in the USA. We paid the obligatory visit to the giant horse at Meijer Gardens in the morning as well as a quick tour through downtown Grand Rapids. In the afternoon we headed off to Jackson – about 1½ hours away – to see a hot air balloon festival. Alas the weather gods weren’t smiling on us – it was too windy for them to attempt to launch the balloons, so we had to make do with some flying demonstrations by a small number of World War II planes, as well as watching the balloon pilots shoot flames into the air from their burners without the balloons. But we did have fun taking our pictures in the super shiny propellor cones on the old planes.

Kyle and Zoe - Banner Carriers for WMGS

Kyle doing his thing while Kathy and Zoe look on.

As the end of Summer approached we again attended a series of free (to members) concerts at the Meijer Gardens. For 5 weeks the weather co-operated beautifully, and one of the concerts had a very memorable ending when a meteorite was seen streaking across the sky above the amphitheater stage.

September saw us heading to Wisconsin with Lisa’s Mum (well she came with us after Roger went to Ann Arbor and picked her up) to attend a Christensen family get together in honour of cousin Sue’s marriage to Bill. They had been married sometime earlier, but this was a chance for most of the Christensens to get together to meet Bill. So we drove the 6 hours to Wisconsin on a Friday, and back home again on Sunday.

almost as far as the eye can see - strawberry fields, machines and farm workers.

Western Michigan Genealogical Society celebrated its 55th anniversary the first weekend in November with an Awards Banquet and a Seminar. Roger was the lead organiser for this, and we hosted “The Genealogy Guys” – 2 speakers from Florida who presented a programme at the Awards Banquet, and then each made 4 presentations during Saturday to a little over 100 people. Roger received “The President’s Award” for having “displayed outstanding leadership and involvement in the organisation”. That is the first time this award has been given.

Around home the big outside project for the year was raising the front porch up. It was levelled up on 7 jacks and then 8 new posts set 3-4 feet into the ground in concrete to hold it up – the poor construction job done originally had allowed the front edge of the porch to sink – in places up to 4 inches (10 cm) – pulling the porch roof down with it. That took Roger quite a few weeks towards the end of Summer, and even though it needs finishing off next year it certainly looks a lot better than it did!! Lisa had several periods of being laid off from her job for a week or more at a time. Several rooms got new curtains and shades, all hand made, a fresh coat of paint and the dining room also got its wood floor refinished.

Lots of other photos and blog posts are available from the Home Page

©2010 Roger’s Ramblings. All Rights Reserved.

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.

©2010 Roger’s Ramblings. All Rights Reserved.