A second picture from my trip. This of my mother in front of the church in Covington, Ohio that my grandfather Ralph Aaron Brandon was the pastor of when he died in 1941 a few months before my mother was born.
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The first of a series of pictures from my trip to see my mom. Right after I arrived early in the morning after taking the redeye, we went straight to Versailles, OH where several of my ancestors were buried. There may be more than these three, there were certainly many other Brandons, many of which I could identify from documents I have as various sorts of distant cousins. But on this trip anyway we only found these three who were direct ancestors. The stones above are for:
I actually haven’t gotten too much farther on the Brandon line of my research, but what I have done so far indicates that David Clement’s father Robert G Brandon should also be in that same cemetery, but we did not find him. I suspect there are more as well though, as the Brandon’s lived in that area for a couple more generations back. Well, I’m sure I’ll go back again someday to find more of them. We did though find many many other Brandon cousins, especially in the older portion of the cemetery. As I said, that part of the family was based there for many generations. Anyway, that was the first thing I did once I got to Ohio. Tramp around a small town grave yard for an hour or so with my mother looking for ancestors and cousins.
In any case, I *really* liked this movie. It is a sweet family movie. There is nothing deep here. There is nothing controversial or thought provoking. You don’t come out feeling like it has changed your life or anything. But it is just solidly cute and sweet. And OK, many people do not like that kind of movie at all, and would feel like it was torture, but I like those kinds of movies. I’m not sure I really have much more than that to say. Click the movie poster to go to Wikipedia if you want more on the plot and stuff. As for me, the summary is just that I came out going “Awwww….” kind of like when you see a cute kitten or puppy or whatnot. And that was enough. Oh, and I liked the song at the end by Roger Walters. I’ll have to get a copy of that.
I am in Denver now, waiting for my flight to Seattle. It has been delayed an hour so far. But the story of the trip home so far is the flight from Dayton to Denver. A little ways through the seat belt lights came on. The Captain came on the intercom and said that we were going to hit about 10 minutes of turbulence and to make sure we were belted and secure. The flight attendant repeated this about two minutes later. I could see the flight attendant, but not who she was looking at when she said, over the loudspeaker: “I don’t care if you need to use the bathroom ma’am, you need to sit down and get belted in RIGHT NOW. You can hold it for ten minutes. Trust me, you do NOT want to be in the bathroom unsecured and be thrown around. Sit down NOW.” I guess she did. I am guessing she was glad she did. A few minutes later the turbulence started. It did not last 10 minutes. It lasted more like 3 minutes. But it was the worst turbulence I have ever felt on by far. The airplane lurched violently side to side and up and down. It pitched and yawed suddenly and violently every few seconds. There were a handful of negative G moments. I don’t think I heard any actual screams, but each time it lurched there was a massive collective gasp coming from all over the plane.The whole airframe shook and rattled and felt like it was going to fall apart at any moment. Of course it didn’t. Three minutes later we were out of it and everything was smooth again. The pilot came on and explained that we had just passed through the front that has been causing all the tornados and bad weather on the ground. They had spent extra time trying to figure out if they could go under it or over it or around it, but they couldn’t. They did take us about 15 minutes out of our way to find the shortest possible corridor through the turbulent area. Thus getting us 3 minutes of the violent tossing and turning rather than 10 to 15. I thank our pilot very much for that. 3 minutes was quite enough. The picture is the view out the window (with my cellphone, I didn’t remember until later that I had my real camera with me too) right after we passed out of the turbulent area. You can clearly see the weather front. Soon after it was over, the people beside me and behind me, who turned out to be Air Force pilots, started talking about the turbulence. “Is that the worst turbulence you have ever felt?” “I think there might have been one time in a transport that might have been, but this was close.” “Well, this was the worst I’ve felt.” “One time I was in something that FELT worse, but I was in a little trainer plane… ” “You would not want to be in anything CLOSE to this in a small plane.” “Yeah, this was very bad.” “Definately the worst I have ever felt on a commercial flight.” Etc. Anyway, that validated at least a little bit that it really was pretty bad, and not just the uninitiated amoungst us being overly sensitive. The pilot apologized for the rough ride another couple of times before we landed. :-) Anyway, I’ve certainly read about much worse. Nobody was thrown from their seats, nobody hit the ceiling, there were no injuries. So all is good. (Although if they hadn’t followed the pilot’s instructions to buckle up there probably would have been at least some minor injuries.) But it was definately an adventure… for 3 minutes. Now all I have to deal with is the fact that in the time I have been writing this post my flight home has changed gates and been delayed another 20 minutes or so. So I need to finish up and move to the new gate… even though I’ve still got over two hours until the flight is now scheduled to leave. Bleh! Just arrived at my mom’s house in Ohio an hour or so ago. I arrived in Ohio several hours earlier, but we spent the morning visiting places various ancestors lived or were buried and such as part of my Genealogy Research. There are a whole raft of ancestors from the Brandon side that lived in Darke County, Ohio for a bunch of generations. But now I am at my mom’s house. I helped my mom walk Sara briefly today. She is six now. I hadn’t seen her since she was 2 or some such. Wow. I think she remembered me though. She made SURE that I was going to walk with her and not go right back into the house. But I took the red eye from Seattle, so I got almost no sleep. So I am going to sleep now. I’ll be here for the next few days. I’ll be seeing Chad while I’m here too since he and my mom live like 5 miles apart or some such now. I brought a camera, but not a cord or memory card reader, so I may or may not be able to post any pics before I go home. Or maybe I’ll get a cheap memory card reader. They are very cheap these days. Anyway, we shall see. For now though… nap time. Was was that old saw about the Internet considering censorship as damage and routing around it? Someone at a forum somewhere posted the 16 digit hex key which can be used (along with appropriate other knowledge) to break the DRM protections on HD-DVDs. People of course started linking to this. The industry association responsible for the DRM started sending out cease and desist notices not to where the “bad” information actually was (although they may also have done that) but to all sorts of sites that linked to it. This included Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing. And that started to get some attention, and so people started mirroring the information all over the place, and other people set of lists of links to the places that are mirroring it, etc. One (or more) of those lists of mirrors got a lot of Diggs at Digg. Then, presumably afraid of take down notices, Digg moderators started removing the posts that linked to or contained that information. Oops. As of now (4:52 UTC on the 2nd) absolutely every story on the main page of Digg links to or contains in its descriptions or comments (or all of the above) the critical hex key. And more are being created by the minute. And of course many many people are putting the key on their websites, in their email signatures, in their forum posting signatures… others are selling T-shirts and mugs and such with the key on it… etc, etc, etc. The number of people who would have known or cared about this silly little piece of information was miniscule before the cease and desist notices started going out. Now, while the number of people who will actually DO ANYTHING with this little key is still small, the information itself has spread so widely and is now in so many places (and spreading by the minute) that it will be one of those memes that lives on the internet long past when it is actually useful for anything at all. If there is some piece of information that people want, once it is out there is no longer any way to put things like this back in the bottle. And even with a piece of information that was only of interest to a very small set of people… once you start trying to quash it and hide it away… boom… you just made it interesting, and only succeeded in making sure more people see it and are aware of it than ever could have been possible otherwise. Oh well. Too bad for the HD-DVD people. Oh, and Digg must be hurting a bit right now too. Their site has been just completely trashed by this. Recommendation… just ignore it and it will die down in a day or two… if the mods start going on a delete fest again now, it will just get worse. Slashdot has a story about this now too: Digg.com Attempts To Suppress HD-DVD Revolt
Ha.
Yesterday I noticed that the Sitemeter counter on this site went over 100,000. Woo! Of course, I never did finish adding the counter to all the old pages on the site, and of course this site existed for many years before I added the counter… I added the counter about the same time I converted the front page into a blog. But hey, it is a number. I shall take this opportunity to list what right now Sitemeter thinks are the top 10 search queries people find my site with: #1) Nice Cleavage Well, OK, a couple are amusing, but most are just normal. Other interesting ones from further down the list: * Chocula OK, that’s enough for today. |
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