2020 Hindsight

A Lake George Diary

In which a California native takes digital camera and powerbook with her on her three-week visit to upstate New York to be with her 99-year-old grandfather during a cold, gorgeous January.

All the entries in the Lake George Diary:

Lake George Day 1 Thursday, 13 January, 02000
Arrival at the Lake

I've just set up a work space and have worked out a net connection using my grandfather's ISP, and am just getting used to 28.8 baud connection speeds after high-speed DSL.

Lake George Day 2 Friday, 14 January, 02000
On Freezing Water

I picture a molecular gym class of sorts. The molecules clump together in tighter and tighter gossiping knots, until the coach molecule, with an atomic shrill whistle, blows it and shouts "double-arms' distance, everyone!!"

Lake George Day 3 Saturday, 15 January, 02000

Being around my grandpa is always an education in scientific matters. My education was pretty much liberal arts.

Lake George day 4 Sunday, 16 January, 02000
Pictures from Saturday

Today it got up to a balmy 34 degrees. Grandpa says, "Oh, we're having a heat wave."

Lake George Day 5 Monday, 17 January, 02000
Pictures of Sunset; On Technical Writing

Yesterday I heard much about the early history of GE (General Electric), both in stories from Grandpa, and in rooting around one of the buildings here and finding some notebooks containing my grandmother's work correspondence.

Lake George Day 6 Tuesday, 18 January, 02000
The Refrigerator Story

My grandpa has had a soft spot in his heart for that refrigerator, since, while working for Stevenson, he was an eyewitness to the refrigerator's beginning.

Risking Hypothermia was Rewarding
Photos from Monday's sunset, with brief commentary about lessons learned.

Lake George Day 7 Wednesday, 19 January, 02000
Pictures and Stories

And maybe, just maybe, I understand a little bit more about gas turbines and my grandfather's contribution to generating the electricity that gives me all these ones and zeroes that I consume so voraciously.

Lake George Day 8 Thursday, 20 January, 02000
Walkin' In A Winter Wonderland

The only sounds I heard were my footfalls and the muffled burble of iced-over creeks.

Lake George Day 9 Friday, 21 January, 02000

Snow and Eclipse

Later, I checked out the satellite map at The Weather Channel's Web site, and noticed that of all the cloud cover on the east coast, there was one tiny hole in the clouds right over Lake George.

Lake George Day 10 Saturday, 22 January, 02000

Sunny!

Housekeeping: Checking out some of the other manila sites, there's been some talk about how to get more discussion going in the discuss areas of our sites. I saw that there are some things I could do to entice you to join, and to make it easy for you to Introduce Yourself!
Also: Another excerpt from Grandmother's GE Work Correspondence.

Lake George Day 11 Sunday, 23 January, 02000

Mugging for the Camera

After Grandpa checked his email and the weather web site, I showed him how to get to this site. "That's the yard!" he exclaimed, as he looked at yesterday's entry. "We're lookin' at this over the web?" "Yes." "Hm!"

Lake George Day 12 Monday, 24 January, 02000

In Which A California Native Acclimates To Winter

Inside their gloves, my fingers discovered the territory that lies somewhere between cold and pain and throb and numb.

Lake George Day 13 Tuesday, 25 January, 02000

Snow, Stories, and Cookies

Grandpa read me this sentence from the article: "A recent survey found that 86 of the top 100 e-commerce sites plant 'cookies' --identifying markers-- on users' computer drives, sometimes without their knowledge." Then a lively discussion ensued!

Photos of Ice on Lake George

Photos of the Lake George Waterfront.

The boundary bewteen frozen and liquid has some fascinating forms.

Lake George Day 14 Wednesday, 26 January, 02000

Snow and More Snow!

When it comes to what to upload from what I've shot, I'm pretty ruthless in deciding what goes up. I've shot 300 images so far, and have uploaded perhaps 2-3 dozen. They have to be good to go to the trouble of retouching and the mega-trouble of uploading.

Lake George Day 15 Thursday, 27 January, 02000

We gotta houseful!

I put my arm in the cuff, she pressed the button, and the reading ended up being zero. "Susan, you're dead!" she blurt out.

Lake George Day 16 Friday, 28 January, 02000

Ice and Atmosphere

Each day the ice on Lake George advances further over its surface. Looked at one way, my nearly-daily picture-taking forays are a process of documenting the gradual freezing-over of Lake George.

Lake George Day 17 Saturday, 29 January, 02000

Glitter and Percolator

I was looking at the sun glinting off of snow outside the dining room window. Snow sparkles with tiny flashes of glittering light.
Also another of Grandma's correspondence about a TV show appearance.

Lake George Day 18 Sunday, 30 January, 02000

Leaving the Lake

After I make this entry, I'll be packing up my computer and other things. My brother is driving me to my cousin's house in New Hampshire.

(Post) Lake George Day 19 Monday, 31 January, 02000

Snow Day!

The snow was coming down fast n furious first thing, so the radio announced that it was a snow day--no school. The cousinlings shot outta bed with enthusiasm that never gets expressed on a school day.

(Post) Lake George Day 20 Tuesday, 1 February, 02000

New Hampshire Primary

It's New Hampshire Primary Day! My cousin voted already, but will take me by the local voting booths so this California tourist can drink it all in.

(post) Lake George Day 21 Wednesday, 2 February, 02000

Groundhog Day

Ice Skating!! What a treat that was! My feet did fit inside the skates; the stretching did help. After a bit of uncertainty, my sense of ice-skate balance returned. Jubilation!!

Home Again Friday, 4 February, 02000

Home again, home again, jiggity jig (the plane truth)

You smile at your seatmates with grateful embarassment as you tread on their toes, you manage your way back on that skinny aisle, and, if you're lucky, there's no wait to go into that teeny tiny little room where you can be at one with nature, at 30,000 feet, courtesy of the FAA.

A Lake George Diary, day 5; On Technical Writing

Cold, cold, cold. At 10:30 eastern, this is what the thermometer said:

Now it is slightly warmer-- zero degrees farenheit.

Here is last night's sunset:

Yesterday I heard much about the early history of GE (General Electric), both in stories from Grandpa (who worked there from 1923 until the 60's; after retiring, he consulted on projects for the company or the company's partners), and in rooting around one of the buildings here and finding some notebooks containing my grandmother's work correspondence. She was an engineer at GE, too. They are notebooks containing carbon copies of all the letters she wrote. She was a general consultant to the entire company on matters of Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow, in addition to her activities with the ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) and the AIEE (American Institute for Electrical Engineering; which later became the IEEE). Her correspondence reflects her company-wide doings and her involvement with the technical societies. She wrote papers and attended various professional gatherings, sometimes presenting, and bringing back reports from there to share with her colleagues. She also reviewed others' others' papers for publication and made comments and suggestions on those.

Seeing as how I've ended up doing some writing myself, in writing how-to books for computer software, I've thoroughly enjoyed both her writer's voice in my perusal of her correspondence, and, in particular, her specific comments on how to improve the quality of the technical writing in the ASME publications:

August 13, 1953

Dear Mr ________:

Your remarks in the July issue of Mechanical Engineering on imporving ASME publications were most interesting.

Two possibilities occur to me for improving reader-appeal. One is to introduce humor a little more often, not just jokes, but humorous writing about technical matters. I am thinking of the paper on "Alice and the Sluggers", by Sanford Moss and L.A. Hawkins, which I cut out and saved. I also saved the comments in a later issue. The paper was not offered to the Society, but was published "by permission of the American Journal of Physics". Another amusing squib was the yarn about the mechanical engineer, who retired at the age of fifty with $50,000, which he had secured by hard work, ingenuity, perserverance, etc., and the death of an uncle who left him $49,999.50. These two are all I remember in the last ten years. One way of encouraging the writing of humorous articles might be to invite the former editors of engineering college humor magazines to put their good wit to work in the preparation of technical papers.

The other possibility is to use as "fillers" quotations from early writings of our great engineers. Harper's does it for the humanities, and I think one of the physics journals does it in the field of physics. The sense of continuity that one gets from a direct quotation with a date has been satisfying to me. The type of literature search required would have to be done by a person, or a group with a strong feeling for history.

Filling up page after page of Mechanincal Engineering with Technical Digest material is a poor substitute for the Transactions, which the Society is too stingy (but not too poor) to make available to the general readership. In general, the younger you are, the more interested you are in Transaction-type papers, and the less able to afford the extra $6.00 for a subscription.

So let's hitch our wagon to a star, but not by popularizing at the expense of soundness.

Very truly yours,

Later. . .Dan Gillmor's weblog is covering his trip to New Hampshire, where he's covering the NH primary. I was in New Hampshire last week, staying at my cousin's house. The day I arrived, one of their household had seen McCain speak that day at lunch. Their mail contained a notice that John McCain would hold a town meeting in their small town last Friday. As a Californian, I'm amazed at all the attention that such a small population gets from candidates. What?! It's possible to see a political candidate speak --in person, no less-- two times in one week? We've too many people to even get close to a candidate. So, Dan is covering how technology is or is not part of the campaign.

I show my grandpa the web site with the picture of the thermometer when it read -4 (our high for the today was 0; it's dropping again), and he comments on how amazing it is that I can take a picture with that camera of mine and then go and broadcast it to the world--it shows the state of affairs for technology today.

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