One thing I like about this is what a great French accent this kid has. Wanna brush up on your vocabulary? I think I even heard a passe simple verb tense go by. Play it phrase by phrase, and when you've got it down, you'll be ready for the Big Trip!

While we're in French, karlkunkel wanted me to comment on the fact...not confirmed by me, by the way, that Micky D is going to open up a shop in the Louvre. MacDonald is an American icon...it stands for everything the French think of us, including the fact that we eat badly. Including, but not limited to, mind you. JF loves to say that the French LOVE to eat at MacDonald's just to come away talking about how badly they've just eaten. It's a sort of reverse snobbism. In the Louvre, they'll have even more opportunity to cluck and do their Gallic shrugs. And can you imagine the numbers of American tourists who will flock there? It's a marriage made in heaven.

Click on the photo of this wonderful cat to access all the photos from our birthday celebration spa in Hot Springs, North Carolina. The cat lives in this fabulous bead shop in Asheville, one stop on our way home. Other photos include extensive pix from the Duckett House Inn, where we stayed, and some from the hot tub where we relaxed and got massages. Ahhhhhh.....

1. Visit our new website: www.faihouse.org. I must say, says she, dusting her fingernails, I am pretty proud of it. And having to rebuild it from total scratch wasn't a bad exercise. Some things I got righter the second time.

2. Spa! one of you asked how that went. Well, it was just lovely. I do have some photos that WILL get uploaded sooner rather than later, but for the past week, I've been trying to restore the backed up files to my wiped-clean computer. The B&B we found was reasonably priced and more like a European B&B-- shared bathroom (though we were the only ones in the building besides the owner, so we didn't have to end up sharing anything.) Nice quilts. Very antique-look. Wood. Nice lamps. The breakfast was scrumptious. And then we headed over to the Hot Springs themselves. This is something I love to do, and have done maybe five or six times. Only before we stayed in the campground. We read aloud from Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. We talked about our vision of our future. It was wonderful. The masseuse was not brilliant, but was perfectly adaquate. I give her a B+. It was a great getaway.

3. Computer woes: Here's the rule I broke and so read it and learn: Back up your computer files. And THEN test your backup. I worked with Judy on Sunday. That girl has enough on her computer to copy in about three minutes. She doesn't need a complicated backup system. Me, on the other hand, I've got something like 130 GIGA bytes. Sheesh. Takes hours. I need to get it done overnight. I had done the backup because that computer was acting sort of wonky and I didn't trust it not to crash on me. Which it did. But what I hadn't done was TEST the backup system. It turns out I just couldn't get the computer to recognize my backup files AS backup files. So it won't go in and restore them for me.

4. Tell No One. If you can't stand to read subtitles, you should get a reading course and get better. This is not a movie I thought I'd go for. I thought it would be too violent. It was violent at times, but so wonderfully shot, so well-crafted, such a nuanced and compelling story, that the violence didn't bother me. Rent that sucker!

5. Movie-making. Whew! All the movies are finished, though a couple of students needed some outside help to GET finished. I'll put the evaluation of the course up on the Worlds Touch Blog when I get it done. I learned a lot, including that not all students are going to love me. What a concept! Not loved by all? How can that be? But I do know that I'm a very intimidating teacher to some people...one reason why, if I ever tell you I'm going back to teaching high school, please shoot me on the spot.

Movie-Making Gala Premiere

Posted using ShareThis

Where my mother's ashes are buried, along with some from my father.

I did a couple of things right to get through the computer disasters of the past couple of days. The best decision I made was to call the young man who had helped me set up the web site for FaithAction in the first place, Dave. I had started out thinking I could think my way out of the problem, but after talking to him, I realized that I had not adaquately understood the underlying structure of the way WordPress works. I knew the information for your site is store in a MySQL database. Somehow, I imagined that the database lived in the files up there in the control panel when I log into the place I keep my site, my host is the way we geeks talk about it, my garage, is how I've come to think of it.

So when I uninstalled WordPress and saw all those files still there, I thought I hadn't actually ERASED anything. Ha. I had in fact erased everything. All that was left was the shell, the icing without the cake, the glory without any of the guts.

Dave and I did a bunch of exploring around...and of course he had to see all the clumsy things I'd done to try to rectify the situation in my ignorance. What on earth do people do who are hesitant to appear stupid and inept and ignorant in front of others? How do they get their messes cleaned up? Do they just not MAKE messes? Of course, Dave assured me that everything I'd done, he too had done once. Whither thou goest, I too have gone kinda thing. Which of course assuages the embarrassment of being a techie who didn't quite realize that if I uninstall WordPress, about two weeks of work is going to slide right down the tubes into oblivion.

And while it did take me two weeks to GET there, it won't take me two weeks to get BACK there. I spent about five hours last night after our board retreat reconstructing the site. It's still bare bones, but it's at www.faihouse.org. I have a couple of tweaks I'll do to it today before we leave for Hot Springs, but basically, this is the site. I rebuilt all the pages and put all the words on there and I'll get the pictures up next week. And there will be some changes anyway, since at our board retreat, we revised our vision and mission. Not a total tidal wave of change, but some good solid changes.

Now, as regards my laptop, which also crashed Friday. I have found my backup files and while Windows won't just "restore from backup" easily (because it thinks this is a new machine, is all I can gather from it), I can certainly just move the files manually from the backup. I need to check out and see why we aren't all just using Windows' generic backup on a regular basis. And the whole thing is a wakeup call about getting backups into the system as a regular and ongoing thing.

That'll fix the files, the photos, the documents, the videos. After that, there is the patient and steady evaluation of what programs need to be reinstalled here. I've got to get ahold of my virus protection people, since this machine thinks I didn't have any and so wants me to pay for a new deal. And there's iTunes and my podcast subscriptions. Essential. I've got my Office to install as well. After that, it's sort of waiting to see what comes up. My guess is that I've swept out a bunch of stuff that I wasn't using and didn't need.

So besides the most important technology lesson (BACK IT UP! BACK IT UP! BACK IT UP! -- JF says the NASA rule is three backups and that is what he does, methodically and consistently-- and amazingly for the rest of his space looks like haphazard chaos), what am I taking away from this disaster? One is that panic and drama just would not have served anywhere in this process and boy am I glad that my boss didn't fall into even the first particle of that because I might have if he did. The other is that, with all things computer, patience is really the most important virtue. When intelligence fails (as mine did...I KNEW there was a database back there. I should have known I couldn't uninstall the program without eliminating the database. Duh, really!) then patience saves. The other of course is to get help from people that know more than you do, and that carries with it the willingness to turn up flat stupid.

Okay, I'm off to install iTunes.

My disconnect with my technical world is complete. The web site that I've spent the last two weeks building has gone south, from my own lack of presence of mind this afternoon. I may be able to recreate it before Monday... I have to, my boss is announcing the new site already on the newsletter. I suppose I could go in there and take the mention of it out...hmmm....last resort.

But THEN! I got home and my laptop has gone into recovery mode. That is...everything EVERYTHING everything has been wiped off and it has been returned to the condition it was in when it arrived from the factory.

I don't have to reinstall the drivers, there IS that. And I did do a backup of the video, photo, and documents just day before yesterday. But all the software I had installed on the machine is gone. All the comfortable little things...my desktop photo, all that. Gone.

And tomorrow, I have an all-day board meeting and after that...web site recovery. It boggles the mind.

JF and I have reservations for Sunday night at a bed and breakfast in Asheville. And an appointment for a hot tub and massage on Monday morning. I'm boggled at the moment. Do forgive me.

I loved this woman's face. I searched for Immigration on Flickr in the creative commons licenses and this one came up. Loved the whole atmosphere, etc.

Yesterday's post(s) got away from me, I think. Well, I like that. I'm also thinking how it's funny to have a public blog but be reluctant to advertise it on Facebook, where so many people from my Real Life are keeping track of me. I like this little club. Think about it. Sweden, Chile, Spain, Texas, Oregon and a goodly number from right here in High Point. How did we all get here?

Anyway, what I was trying to get at, but got distracted, was that I get these ideas, these thoughts that are winking and blinking at me, saying "Blog post, blog post," and then my day surges in, and off they go.

Today's thought, well, really last night's, is that Neal Stephenson is even better than I remembered, and I remembered a fantastic writer. lizardek , have you read anything by him? I started with Cryptonomicon, super oversimplified when I say it's the history of cryptography. He is just a master character artist, a brilliant turner of phrases, and just a whopping good read. The only problem with Quicksilver, the book I started last night, is that it's so heavy, it's hard to read from a prone position.

I like to read myself to sleep at night. Indeed, I'm not sure I could actually get to sleep without a book in my hands. So having a weight roughly equivalent to a BRICK is tough.

So..yoga done, just a little blog post done. Dishes done from last night. I may be the only person I know who doesn't MIND getting up to dishes. In fact, I'd much rather do dishes while my coffee brews in the morning than tackle them at night, when what I really want to do is get up from the table and just wander into my bedroom, pick up my book and settle in.

Okay, day. Surge in. I'm ready for ya.

I found the notes from the radio program I was listening to this morning. Here's the link to the podcast: http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/ta/

Here's the blurb:

America's social state is withering at the expense of its expanding prison system and the UK is heading in the same direction, with potentially disastrous consequences. That's the argument of Laurie Taylor's guest, Loic Wacquant, Professor of Sociology at the University of California.

From 1980 to 1990, spending by the US government on operating its prisons and correctional establishments doubled while at the same time spending on public housing more than halved. According to Wacquant, this process is continuing; he says that 'the construction of prisons has effectively become the country's main housing programme'. Are America's penal policies too harsh, and if prisons and correctional facilities are becoming increasingly important, what are the social consequences?

He talks to Laurie about why he believes America is too ready to accept a state of poverty for huge sections of its population and at the same time see the social state obliterated. Is America punishing its poor and is the UK at risk of following the same path, overly dependent on prisons while eroding its social state?

Actually, the fact that blew ME away was that America's prison population has QUADRUPLED in the last twenty-five years. That's 400 per cent. And over the same time period, the amount of actual crime first stabilized and then declined.

I've known that violent crime in the USA has been declining for some time and that the PERCEPTION of violent crime has increased sharply. Americans are more and more afraid and more and more seeing bad guys around every corner...guys who are young and black, primarily, it seems. And we're sending them off to prison at an astonishing rate.

Listen to the podcast. It's really quite remarkable. And what is most remarkable is that while sociology is being presented, it is not neatly pidgeon-holable as leftist or rightwing conservative. Well, the points of view expressed on this show might be characterized as more left-leaning to our sensibilities. But this prison discussion lays out the facts of our penchant for incarceration really very matter-of-factly.

And throws me into a wild blue funk. What sort of world do I live in here? Obviously, not in any danger of going to prison, and so not really touched by the truth. I think that is what strikes me the most. I'm not touched by reality. I'm safe, warm, well-fed and I just got a new Neal Stephenson book out of the library. While my country, that supposedly believes in liberty and justice for all, has turned into a police state. One that starts wars of imperial ambition. One that doesn't believe in due process, or speedy trials, or the rule of law for everybody. Wow.