Altivo

Gary had another rehearsal day. Thursday he works with the Kishwaukee Ramblers, a trio he has played with for a number of years. I occasionally fill in with them when needed, but am not a regular, so Thursday is my day to do laundry and other solitary tasks. Today I wanted to take my car somewhere, as I haven't driven it for a couple of weeks. (And it's good for vehicles to be run regularly, so I try not to go longer than that.)

So I dutifully cleared the leaves off the windshield and checked the tires. The low pressure warning light came on last time I drove, and when I got home I checked and found that the pressure in all four tires was indeed 3 or 4 PSI lower than it should be. They weren't likely to all be leaking so I put it down to the sudden temperature drop we've had, from 60s and 70s wham, right into the 30s. Pumped them back up to within a pound or so of the recommended level, but I didn't want to go all the way up in case it suddenly were to warm up again. (It didn't.) Anyway, the warning light did not come on, and the tires don't look flabby, so I guess 31 is almost as good as 33 PSI. I'll push them up farther tomorrow.

Took my laptop, tablet, and phone with me and drove into town to the public library, where the wi-fi is about ten times faster than what we get at home. They actually encourage users to "borrow" their bandwidth by parking in front of the building these days, since it saves having to mask up to go into the library itself for that purpose. Ran all the updates and patches to Android and Linux in far less time than it would have taken at home, then packed things up and drove back. Total round trip about ten miles. Time saved maybe as much as three hours.

And the gas mileage on the 2016 Fusion I bought used in September when my Escape finally bit the dust (or turned into into rust, as it were) still shows on the trip meter as 28.3 mpg, which is pretty darned good for a car with 98K miles on it I'd say. It's only an interim solution until the Maverick pick-up I ordered finally comes in (April, it sounds like, if I'm lucky) but I'm finding there's a lot to like about this car.

It's been a strange day. I didn't get a lot done, other than the usual chores. Yesterday's blog post got a lot of replies that needed more commentary, for one thing. Then I came in from feeding horses and sheep and found several messages in my Earthlink mail that had been somehow lost in the spam trap. It's a wonder they weren't deleted. Those went back a couple of months and needed replies at least out of politeness, though some of them made requests that had already expired by now. One was an invitation from Alex at Bad Dog Books urging me to set up an "authors central" page at Amazon.

Seems like overkill, since I have only one story that appears in one book on Amazon, but I was curious enough to go through the motions. Of course, it's a marketing tactic, and Amazon asks for a photo and a biographical statement, which ought to be no problem. Except... they ask that the photo show only a portrait of you, without friends, mates, or pets. I couldn't find one. I finally sent them one of myself with a dog. Heck, lots of authors appear on the backs of their books in a photo with their dog. Big name authors, like Dean Koontz and Nora Roberts, in fact. So we'll see what happens with that. Apparently there's still an activation process that involves them contacting Bad Dog Books to make sure I'm not an imposter. Heh. Who'd want to impersonate me?

Speaking of Amazon, most of you probably remember the fuss in July when they decided that they had improperly distributed some materials to Kindle owners for which they did not have the correct distribution rights. So they went and deleted those books from the Kindle devices of those who had bought them. Without asking first, without any advance warning... Well, the outcry was enough to force their CEO, Jeff Brazos, to issue an apology and offer to return the deleted items or credit the accounts of any user who was affected. Presumably Amazon has reached a settlement with the actual rights holder for George Orwell's novel 1984, which was one of the major items involved.

I find this particularly ironic given the facts of the case. I also find it frightening in light of the story I cited yesterday, about a prep school near Boston that is eliminating its paper library entirely in favor of online resources and a few Kindles and Sony readers. Given that the Kindle allows Amazon to delete users' content without warning or consent, the potential danger of using it for school library resources should be obvious. You are giving Amazon censorship rights over your students and faculty. Worse, we all know that computer security is tenuous at best. Suppose Amazon's control system is hacked or duplicated? Imagine an anti-evolutionist deleting all the copies of Darwin's works from all the Kindles in the world. Imagine a religious fanatic, of whatever stripe, deleting books with which he or she disagrees, in whatever subject area. This seems like a very, very bad precedent, Amazon.

I don't own a Kindle. I do own an Ebookwise reader, and I like it very much. It is smaller and lighter than the Kindle, closer to the size and weight of a mass market paperback. The screen is backlit, unlike the Kindle. It offers a huge selection of materials at lower prices than the average Kindle items I've seen listed. And it lets me load my own materials, or books from Project Gutenberg, at will. As far as I can tell, Ebookwise has no ability to censor or delete files from my device. Since it uses a removable SMC memory module, I have a backup copy of everything that's in it anyway. I can transfer files between the Ebookwise and my PC, or make a duplicate of the SMC in the Ebookwise and store it somewhere as a backup.

Neither of these devices is suitable as a substitute for printed library books, though. Both of them lock most of their titles to a single device, and do not allow them to be shared among multiple readers. A library cannot maintain a list of Kindle books, for example, and load them at will to the reading devices of individual users, nor can they transfer books from one Kindle to another (at least, not the last time I heard the details.)

I don't deny that a digital revolution is going to come and shake the foundations of publishing as we know it. I do, however, deny that the revolution is already here. The Kindle is not the revolution, or even a harbinger of revolution.

Just got back from the library where we went to hear a lecture by local historian Craig Pfannkuche about what was going on in Harvard, Illinois in the year 1909. As it happens, May 7, 1909 was the day on which the original library building was dedicated. That building still stands but is now serving as a parish hall for the Roman Catholic church in town, after having served for 92 years as Harvard's public library. Craig's lecture was scheduled as a centennial commemoration of that event.

Not only is Craig one of the local experts on history, he is also a specialist in the history of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, which I did not know. Harvard was built where it is because a couple of wealthy men back in the pre-Civil War era had inside information about the route that the C&NW would take to reach Janesville, and even in 1909 the railroad was still a really big player in town. Two steam locomotives were assigned to the Harvard yard full time, 24 hours a day, just to handle the traffic from the Hunt, Helms & Ferris farm equipment factory. Borden and Bowman dairies both had plants in town, and daily milk trains went in both directions from Harvard.

Craig squeezed a lot of interesting gossip and information into just an hour. He read from articles in the two (count them, TWO) newspapers published in Harvard a hundred years ago. He showed us slides of old postcard photos, maps, and documents. He really brought the 1909 era back to life for us, with lots of laughs and a little nostalgia (though, of course, not even the oldest people present in the room could remember 1909.) Some things that surprised most of us, I think: in 1909, Harvard still had no sewers, and every home had an outhouse; none of the streets in town, not even the one where the electric interurban tracks ran, were paved in any way; there was direct rail passenger service from Harvard to Madison, Wisconsin, Kenosha, Wisconsin, Chicago and intermediate points. There were plans to link the Harvard to Lake Geneva interurban line down to Marengo, which had an electric line south through Sycamore and to Dekalb, but the actual line was never built. Harvard got sewers not long after 1909, but most of the roads remained unpaved until the administration of Illinois governor Lennington "Hard Roads" Small in the 1920s. (In keeping with Illinois tradition, "Hard Roads" Small was indicted for graft and corruption while serving in the office of governor.)

Most amusing though was the account, based on newspaper reports, of the great blizzard of February, 1909. The snow and ice had completely closed many of the railroad cuts, stopping train service in and out of Harvard. After the regular crews worked a 24 hour shift trying to clear the lines, the C&NW decided to hire transient labor from Chicago and a trainload of workers was sent in. The newspaper writer described these laborers as "hobos" but went on to say that some of them appeared to be educated men who had lost their jobs and were willing to work at shoveling snow for the railroad. The pay rate? Would you believe fifteen cents a DAY?

As for the library, though benefactor Delos F. Diggins of Cadillac, Michigan (who lived in Harvard as a boy) had left $40,000 for the construction of a library building, none of his money was earmarked to buy books. The library board and the new librarian, Miss Wilson, spent the first year begging and pleading with the citizens and local businessmen for the donation of books, or cash to purchase books. Evidently this was fairly successful, as the library had about 1700 books by the end of the year and received a donation of another 300 titles in January of 1910. A handful of the original books are still in the collection, though much worn and brittled. They have been moved to a special room with the rare and old editions. Today's library has holdings of more than 60,000 volumes in a new building that was dedicated just eight years ago, built in part by pennies collected by local children and, believe it or not, by money that had continued to be held in trust ever since Diggins' original bequest a hundred years ago.