Our Trip to Alaska



In June, we took a trip to Alaska. Marsha's mother, Anne is turning 90 this December and decided to take her children and their families on a cruise on the Inner Passage in South East Alaska, stopping at Juneau, Skagway, Hubbard Glacier and Ketchikan. We traveled on the Royal Caribbean Radiance of the Seas. Click on the snapshot of the page to the right to read about and see pictures of our trip.

Stern's Pond, Harold Parker State Forest



Last week, on a beautiful day, I put my kayak in my car and drove up to Andover, to Harold Parker State Forest. When I worked at CMGI, I passed by signs for this forest all the time, but never went to explore. Now that I have some more time, I took the opportunity and explored the pond -- with my digital camera and GPS. Here is a web page that records the results.

Project Vote Smart

Opensecrets.org--Money in politics data
lt;br />Here are two excellent web sites for understanding who you are voting for and how they get money so that they can run. This is a great example of how the Internet serves the democratic process.

Live365

I have followed music on the Internet since the first MP3s were published. I remember way back in 1997 (?) writing a gushing message (as I am want to do) to Guy Bradley, my good friend at CMGI@Ventures about how MP3s were going to change the way we thought about music. This was inresponse to my first encounter with MP3.COM. more...

Malcolm

Our dog, Malcolm, died in April. This is a web that is a memorial to him: all that he meant to us, his background, his pedigree, and lots of pictures that I took while he was with us. In addition, many people sent us messages about Malcolm and these are recorded here.



Currently, I have not figured out how to make this work on multiple browsers, and so this web site will only work if you are using Internet Explorer versions 5.5 and higher on a Windows PC. I am working on fixing this. In the meantime, if your browser is detected as being different than the required browser, you will see a snapshot of the website with the only interactivity being going from page to page.

Presence Page


I've heard a lot of people talk about "Presence" on the Internet. The idea is that there is some set of services that you can use to keep track of how to reach you. So, I thought, how about combining my interest in internet video along with presence and new things, by setting up a page where people could go to see exactly where I am and provide some links so that you can communicate with me at those locations. Thus the genesis of my presence page.


Webcams have been around for some time -- largely the province of the voyeuristic crowd. Too bad: I think pictures and sounds are a much better form of communication for most interactions -- Thus the success of the telephone and television. So, why shouldn't we use these two media to their fullest potential for personal communication now that they are quite affordable. For example, the upper two webcams on my presence page are Intel cameras that cost about $70/camera. These cameras are attached to PCs running a program called WebCam32. The bottom two cameras are Panasonic Network cameras which attach directly to the ethernet in my home. Each camera is a standard-alone internet host complete with a web server. The lower two cameras are steerable. Click on the still image snapshot to explore.

TrackerCam

Update: I've taken this off line in favor of a more flexible set of cameras discussed in the entry above.



I've set up a fun device in my basement -- a trackercam. This is a little platform that is able to rotate a platform around a vertical axis as well as tilt the platform around a horizontal axis. Mounted on top of the platform is (in my case) a small ball shaped webcam. On my PC there is a web server running which allows you to both view as well as control the where the camera is looking. The software is able to do a lot of things, including serve as a steerable webcam, a survailance camera that can track objects that move, as well as a video conferencing camera. It's a pretty neat device and fun to watch it work. The image to the left shows the motion of the platform with the camera. To give it a try, click on the following link:



http://forsdick.dyndns.org:8090/



The best way to use it is to click on the "Live Pictures" button.

Year in Review


We have switched over to an interactive web for our annual year in review letter. It is a much better way to use both words and pictures to tell our story.



In addition, we used AmazingMail.com to send out our Christmas and Chanukah cards. I had purchased cards at Amazing Mail in the summer when they were having specials so that these cards cost only $0.25 a piece -- my full color photograph, text message and small picture on the back plus postage -- all for a quarter!

Truth in Advertising


The temptation to show images of products so that they look good in advertisements rather than be accurate is strong. So, in Sunday newspaper sales brochures, you frequently see disclaimers like "simulated picture" (I'm not even sure advertisers go to this trouble these days since everybody assumes such pictures are doctored to look good).



Well, I was struck by this image in a sony ad which shows the camcorder as it actually works when you turn the viewing display around so that you can take a picture of yourself -- the Sony logo is indeed upsidedown when you do this. Sony earns a star in my book for having enough confidence in their brand and product quality to show their name in a somewhat unflattering configuration...

How to Find Stuff on the Web

I frequently get asked "How do you find things on the Internet?" Here is a message from a friend who recently expressed her frustration in trying to help her kid with homework

"When it comes to the internet and searching I feel fairly inept.  I can be sitting down with Becca trying to help her find some piece of information for a homework assignment and it will take 45 minutes when it seems like it should take 5, at most.  Is there a site you can point me to that will help me better know how to locate information on the web in a fashion that doesn't leave me severely frustrrated?"

Here is my response: more...

In an attempt to help Lexington residents communicate with each other in an immediate, grass roots, civil, respectful, fun way, I've started up The Lexington List, a Yahoo!Groups email discussion list and web site. So far, with one message and one letter to the editor, 40 people have signed up for the list. But, it is hard to get the discussion going. I'm a little fearful of sending too many messages to get the list going. I think it will take some time before people feel comfortable expressing their opinions or even asking questions. We'll see...

For quite some time, I have wanted to see if I could host my own website. Well, now I've done it. You are viewing this web site from a server hosted in my basement over my cable modem connection. Why, you ask, would someone want to host their own website? Several reasons including 1) more control, 2) less expensive, 3) to learn what it means for someone to have a home server / digital hub and 4) because it was fun to do. Now that I have done the heavy lifting of getting all of the settings on the router and firewall, all the servers configured, etc., I hope to be able to do even more interesting things -- such as have my entire collection of digital photographs as well as digital music online, control my TiVo over the web, monitor my house with web cams, use my Internet connection as my telephone connection. more...

Yesterday, Will and I started out on a multi-segment kayak paddle down the Charles River -- from Route 128 to the Science Museum. Our route starts just outside Route 128 from the MDC Martin Memorial Golf Club at mile 62.1 and will go to the Science Museum at mile 77.5. We plan to take the Charles in managable doses with the great support of Marsha who dropped us off and picked us up yesterday. Since we now have added a tandem kayak to our fleet, it is now possible for the three of us to all go, using two cars. But for now, this is a guy thing. more...

At the end of June, I called my sister Jane and she told me about a wonderful weekend she had just come back from, which included a variety of boating including kayaking. She went on to tell me how she had just gone out and bought a small kayak. She was talking about exactly what I wanted to do. It must be in the genes. So, being the impulsive sort, I went right out and bought the same kayak, a Perception Sparky. We bought this boat just before the 4th of July. We've had a lot of fun with this little yellow kayak. Now, that we've gotten the bug, we decided to buy another one -- a tandem kayak so that either 2, 3 or even 4 of us could go out at once. So, a couple of days ago, we bought an Old Town Twin Otter tandem kayak. This is a big roomy boat -- very stable. We plan to take it out for it's maiden voyage this afternoon.

Check out the diary of our trip to Florence. From March 21 through April 4, 2002 we travelled to Italy to soak in Italian art, architecture, music, scenery -- Italy in general, and Florence in particular. As we went, we all took lots of pictures and Marsha and Jane (my sister) kept journals. Although I was planning on posting the pictures and our commentary as we went, I ran into trouble accessing the Internet due my faulty packing (didn't bring the right cards to plug into my laptop, sigh...). But, now that we are back, I will be posting a new page for each day, including pictures and comments about what we did.

0z0

Here is a blog that I use to collect random things I find on the web. There is no particular category to describe the articles. The name 0z0 is a shortened version of 0ZereZ0, both of which are palindromes. The name came about because 0 appears first in any sorted list, but for some reason, I couldn't use just 0, so I augmented it with 0Zero -- which was tantilizing close to a palendrome, so I added an eZ and changed the "o" to s "0" and came up with 0ZereZ0. Being a computer programmer and having had to create names for lots of variables for 35 years, my mind is kind of strange when coming up with names.

Art

I have discovered as I get older that I am intensly visual -- I think in terms of pictures and consequently, I really enjoy the visual arts: painting, sculpture, design, colors, ... I collect art items that I find on the web into an Art Blog. Most of these are culled from the Metropolitan Museum of Art Daily Artwork Archive.

Resume: Harry C Forsdick

Although I'm not currently looking for a job, here is my resume anyway. Having worked for several companies related to the Internet, I am now a consultant working on projects that I enjoy. Please inquire if interested: harry@forsdick.com.

HCF Memorabilia

Like most people, I have a box of little things that I just can't bring myself to throw away. Actually, I have many such boxes...

My Favorite "All About" and "How To" Pages

Some people are experts on the most obscure things. Fortunately for the rest of us, there is an urge to share that knowledge. Sure you can get whole books on these topics, but sometimes a simple web will do. If you have suggestions, please send them along.

Directions to our house in Lexington

We have lived in Lexington MA since 1978. Our house is a simple Cape with several nice additions we've put on over the years.

Directions to our house in Cummington

In 1981, along with three other families, we started out on an 18 year project to build a summer house in the Birkshires. The project continues...

Baker-Forsdick Timeline

On our 20th Wedding Anniversary (June 5, 1997), Marsha and I started making a list of things we had done or had happened to us in the past 20 years. This has proven to be an interesting exercise in trying to sort out when things happened in relationship to each other. To put this all in context, I have shown our events in relationship to the events going on in the nation and the world.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Seminar Series

In 1998, my friend Richard Homonoff and I started to meet on Saturday mornings to have breakfast at the Quebrada Coffee House. We have continued this tradition ever since then, changing locations, expanding the group, and generally having a good time. This has turned into a little seminar series, where we talk about the world's and our own issues, both great and small.

HWF: A Pictoral History

When my father, Harry W. Forsdick, died in December 1997, I decided that in his honor I would acquire "www.forsdick.com". He would love to know that his name has been preserved on the business side of the Internet. Since then, I have also acquired "www.forsdick.tv" for my kids. Seems appropriate...

Welcome to the new version of our web site. With the old version, I found it difficult and time consuming to change things and add new material. So, I decided to change the way this all works so that there is some introductory material (at the top) followed by a series of articles that I can add to and update using the Blogger system. Hopefully this will allow me to add material in little chunks and this will make it easier to make the site more dynamic and (again, hopefully) interesting.