Welcome. Bienvenidos.
Willkumm. Bienvenue.
Welkom. Bem-vindo. ...
How do you say Welcome in 800 different languages? For the answer click here. Our selection above was chosen to mirror just a tiny sampling of our ancestral roots (US-English, Spanish, Zurich-Swiss-German, French, Frisian-Dutch, and Portuguese).Got Bats? Get the HulaBats Collection here...
This site is a hybrid containing some personal things and links to the HulaBats Collection and Documentation...
If you are visiting this page via the link from the HulaBats Blog or you are interested in our software then click on HulaBats Docs in the nav menu on the left or select HulaBats Srcs for the HulaBats software download section.I feel I should tell you that since retiring I have not done much with HulaBats other than run it from time to time in newer Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 virtual machines on my macbook pro. I more-or-less abandoned the Windows platforms after I no longer was forced to use them at work. I still run Windows software such as FamilyTreeMaker 2014 from time-to-time, and I need to support my wife who uses Windows 7 at work and at home, so that keeps my feet wet...
If you read the HulaBats Docs page you may notice that it seems to lose timeliness in the early days of Windows Vista. I have not kept up with the latest UNIX over Windows trends. But the Hulabats software itself works on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, with the fixes for Windows Vista that I had already finished (like ls.cmd), for the most part.Besides the HulaBats software there may be a few personal things which may have drawn you to this site...
If you are visiting this page to peruse our Family History or Genealogy data then please click on either of those named links in the nav menu on the left or the top menu, respectively. If you are interested in the sailboat we have for sale select the Sailing Stuff link on the left.
The Irony of 'F' When you are a student in elementary school the letters 'A' and 'B' seem the most important because those are the grades that please your parents and may end up with some kind of a reward. Those grades make you feel good about yourself, too. On the other hand, the letter 'F' is shunned, and may indicate a sorry state of affairs. In one of life's little ironies by the time you reach 60 you may have realized that the letter 'F' is possibly the most powerful letter in the English alphabet... Here is a list I made one morning during the commute to prove my point: F15 F16 F17 F/A-18 fact factor factory factotum fail fail-over failure fame familial family famished fan fans fast faster fastlane fat fate Fatima (St.) fatso fatwa fear fearful feast feat feathers features feeble feeble-mindedness feed feed-store feet f*l*t*o fend-off Fender-amp Fender-guitar fender-bender Ferrari fester fetish fetus fez fib fibonacci series fiddle files finally finals find finder's fee finish finished finish-up fire fired fir tree fit fitness fizz flick flickers flint Flintstones foal fob foe foil folders foo foobar food fool foolish foot football foot fetish Ford form formality formalize formula formulae fork fortune foul foul-ball foul-smell foul-taste found foundry fracture fractured-flickers freak "freaking weird, dude." freakish freak occurrence freaks freaky Fred Flintstone free freebie freedom freight freighter freight train french fries Fresca frescoes fried friend friendly friendlies friends friday fright frightful frightened fubar f**k FUD fuel full fully found fumble fun funds funk funky funny fun-time furry-friend furs future futures fuzz fuzzy logic Now, tell me true, don't the 'F' words seem to be the most powerful to you, too? -- Cal Crowley, 30 Sep 2010
What's next?
Entropic Maelstrom Or Maelstromic Entropy?
We met with our new broker at Edward Jones the other evening.
Our previous broker quit to take a law enforcement position
with the state department of fish and wildlife. So, I suppose
poaching is up since the economy is down, huh? At any rate,
our new broker informed us that the stock market has been in the
red for the past 10 years! The first time that has happened
since they started keeping records about it back in the 1800's.
I suppose it proves that the economy is really, really down,
huh?
When the stock market goes to hell everybody moves their positions
to bonds, paper, and gold which is just exactly what has been
happening the past couple of years. Now the broker says everyone
is worried about a bond bubble -- which if the feds screw up and allow
run-a-way inflation will really mess us up. Nothin' will be worth
nuttin' so to speak.
I remember meeting the grandfather of a friend of mine once.
He lived next to the ferry dock on Shaw Island, Washington. His
words of wisdom for us two young men amounted to this: "I
came into this world stark naked and if I go out flat broke
I'll figure that I about broke even."
Now what's troubling about this "Aw, shucks" wild west attitude
is the seemingly fatalistic acceptance of mediocrity as the standard.
I seem to remember Jesus mentioning something about withered vines?
If your family tree becomes unproductive then it just withers and dies,
doesn't it? Do you suppose it's just the same for an individual's life?
Or, how about the life of a country? Or a church? Empires fall.
They always have. Rome supposedly fell in a day. Ok, I know that's
not entirely true, exactly, because it's still falling ... as we speak.
-- Cal Crowley, 19 Oct 2010
Obama says, "Osama is dead". Long live Obama.
Irony 101. Was it setup this way or not?
Apparently, the day the U.S. Government killed Osama bin Laden
was 1 May 2011, same day his death was confirmed. Hitler died
on 30 Apr 1945 but his death was confirmed on 1 May 1945,
some 66 years earlier than Osama did. That is too weird.
Additionally, May 1 aka May Day is the traditional, often left-leaning
day for labor or working person celebrations around the world. But,
May 1, 2011 was also the date Prince William and Kate Middleton
tied the knot in all the pomp and circumstance the royals could muster.
So, the question is this: who upstaged who?
-- Cal Crowley, 02 May 2011
I have long contended that the Republican party is destroying the USA...
"Paul Starr suggests in his analysis of the American health care system (i.e.,
The Social Transformation of American Medicine) that Richard Nixon was the
first mainstream political leader to take deliberate steps to change American
health care from its longstanding not-for-profit business principles into a
for-profit model that would be driven by the insurance industry. In 1973,
Congress passed the Health Maintenance Organization Act, which encouraged rapid
growth of HMOs, the first form of managed care."
[ Managed Care ]
Similar effects from similar causes have occurred to our higher academic systems, banking regulations, utility infrastructure regulations, unions, ..., in fact everything that was put in place to get the USA out of the Great Depression has been "de-regulated" or "union busted" and now we are back to the late 1800's in a "boom-or-bust" economy that has gone "bust" and you wonder why? Hah!
-- Cal Crowley, 24 Oct 2011
They knew about "offshoring and outsourcing" years ago, and yet they did nothing to stop it?
I worked at Boeing in Seattle in the 1990-1995 period, and I remember my big boss John telling me back then that soon in the future most software development jobs like I was doing would be off-shored to China and India. He knew. That means others in power knew. So, my questions are these: (1) if they could see it coming why didn't they stop it or at least ameliorate it? (2) couldn't they see that it would destroy our economy to lose so many high paid positions? (3) why haven't those responsible for allowing or encouraging or causing it to happen been rounded up and prosecuted for being "traitors to the people of the United States of America"? Huh?
-- Cal Crowley, 25 Oct 2011
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
-- Cal Crowley, 26 Oct 2011
We have lingered long enough on the shores of the Cosmic Ocean.
~~ Carl Sagan
All this nonsense is wasting precious time, in order for the human race to
survive beyond the habitable life cycle provided by this Sun, we must begin
preparing for the eventual move elsewhere. Either sending out many
small seed expeditions in all directions, or building a huge space armada
capable of carrying most of what we need to search for a younger solar
system elsewhere, or both. We must not waste any more precious limited
resources like oil on any other formulae other than meeting that objective.
We must begin now. We should have begun this process last century.
No other more advanced civilization is coming to help us in this endeavor.
We are doomed in the long run if we do not take care of ourselves.
Noah's Ark was lesson #1. What we need now are redundant Noah Space Arks!
-- Cal Crowley, 13 Jan 2014
A Collection Of My Own Personal Quotes
We're doomed. Nobody here can save us from ourselves.
Nobody out there will come to save us either.
~~ Cal Crowley
Newton's 2nd Law (the one he forgot to tell us):
Everything's bound to go down eventually.
It's the gravity of the situation, you see.
~~ Cal Crowley
Emacs is for people who don't know what to do with their left hands.
The rest of us, Vi users, for example, know how to multi-task.
~~ Cal Crowley
The eldest son of the middle son of the youngest son
is a nobody in just about anybody's pedigree.
~~ Cal Crowley
The only things dirtier than my laundry are
gravediggers and the world's money system.
~~ Cal Crowley
Well, just do the best you can, and leave the rest to the god of your choice
[e.g., The Great Spirit/The Spirit of Truth/The Holy Ghost/The Lord of Hosts/
El Shaddai/Adonai/HaShem/Elohim/Yahweh/Jehovah/Allah/Krishna/Govinda/Vishnu/
Wakan Tanka/Tunkashila/Taku SkanSkan/...] or whatever.
~~ Cal Crowley
If I'd have been a bit smarter, I might've had a better life.
Key word being "might".
~~ Cal Crowley
Since the defeat of California Proposition 37 and Washington Initiative 522
I have come to believe that Gandhi and the movie Serenity may point the way to
a solution: let us all just refuse to eat and drink - since they won't tell us
exactly what is in the food and drinks the corporations are selling. If we all
just passively lay down and die - then what power will they have over us?
Ah, serenity...
~~ Cal Crowley
-- Cal Crowley, 09 Oct 2014
An Open Letter to CEO of Apple (re: Carl Icahn hysterics)
How to fix lagging iPad sales? Six things might do it ... but, basically, you just need to give it some real laptop functionality ... (1) a lightening to female USB adapter - so we can plug in USB memory sticks (2) a lightening to female XSD adapter - so we can plug in (X)SD cards Oh wait, you already have both of those products, dumb me! It's just that they don't freaking work in a normal manner!! IOW they don't have unlimited access to an open file system [major] and there are no file managers and tools (re: Finder, Explorer; or command line tools like: cp, mv, ren, move, copy, ls, dir, cat, more, less, find,...) to let us access them directly. But, also, as importantly,... (3) kill off the separate sandbox data store requirement for every danged app! The redundancies, limitations and headaches this causes are a major butt pain. Create a two part file system instead ... major fs [D:] and minor fs [C:] [D:] major - for all apps combined so they can share data in a single file system. Basically, sandbox all the apps together inside of one mega major file system so there can be interprocess communications between apps across the file system. So, you only need one copy of each file you are working on instead of a bzillion copies, one in each separate app sandbox -- which makes revision control a freaking nightmare! [C:] minor - for the operating system core itself so it is sandboxed from the apps. Critical security stuff, certs, data sockets, pipes, drivers, kernel are here. You'd also need a "wormhole" comms channel for accessing the major file system to/from the minor file system in a secure way. When users plug-in their USB memory sticks and SD cards into the adapters their file manager apps should be able to copy files from their FAT32 file systems into and out of the major file system. All kinds of files: text files, documents, spreadsheets, photos, videos, icons, whatever. Not just photo images that are allowed now through the lightening to camera adapter -- what a dumb freaking limitation that is. (4) One more thing ... create a developer compiler suite so we users can compile and run code natively within the major file system on the iPad itself. Like a real laptop IOW. Hell, there are ARM compilers already out there for Linux ARM and other operating systems, so use them as your baseline if you need to. (5) Give us real UNIX command shells like a ksh, csh, sh, bash, zsh with perl, python, and ruby ports so we can program in other scripting languages rather than limiting us to just jscript and HTML as processed by the web browser. See Also: python's Cmd and Cmd2 packages. We should be able to code our own cmd shells and terminals, too, with ssh/scp/sftp backing! (6) Give us Java -- a java runtime engine (jre) and a javac compiler. Partner with Oracle (Sun Microsystems) java team to get this done ASAP. Java on ARM already exists -- so leverage it. Once I realized that my iPad Air would not allow me access to a real file system and that everything had to be duped in each separate app's data store I was very depresssed. I longed for a lightweight mbp laptop again. I hate that I have no real cmd shell and compiler and programming tools. I think purchasing the iPad Air was the worst decision I have made in years. And may I say in closing, stop thinking that the cloud or your iCloud is the be-all end-all answer to everything. Most of us don't trust our data to the cloud where the NSA and other agencies of world governments, terrorists and corporations have unfettered access to it. I ain't paying for external storage when I have my own computers. I ain't buying into the cloud con. I want to be able to freely copy and move my data between my devices via sneakernet on USB sticks and SD cards. iCloud, Dropbox, Amazon,... be damned. Once you have USB working correctly we should be able to access real external hard drives via USB as well -- don't ya think? That gets us past your 128 Gb internal flash store limitation, too, don't ya think? Although, SanDisk supposedly is about to come out with a 512 Gb (X)SD card so that should take care of most of our issues with that. Coupled with 64 Gb USB memory sticks, we are almost there partner!!! In the "jeez I am not as important to the news as Carl Icahn department" my above "Open Letter" is in response to this press feeding frenzy... Google: [ how can I send an open letter to Apple's CEO? ] About 14,100,000 results (1.05 seconds) Search Results Icahn promises 'interesting' open letter to Apple CEO Tim ... www.cnbc.com/id/102070654 CNBC Oct 9, 2014 - Carl Icahn will be sending an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook on Thursday, the activist investor said on Twitter. Carl Icahn to Send 'Interesting' Letter to Apple CEO - WSJ ... blogs.wsj.com/.../carl-icahn-to-send-interesting-lette... The Wall Street Journal Oct 8, 2014 - Billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn revealed on Twitter that he plans to send an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook on Thursday. CARL ICAHN: I'm About To Send An 'Interesting' Letter To ... www.businessinsider.com/carl-icahn-im-about-to-send-a... Business Insider Oct 8, 2014 - CARL ICAHN: I'm About To Send An 'Interesting' Letter To Apple's CEO. Joe Weisenthal and Linette Lopez. 1 minute ago; 10,179; 16. Icahn Plans to Send Open Letter to Apple CEO Cook Today ... www.bloomberg.com/.../icahn-plans-to-send-open-letter-... Bloomberg L.P. Oct 9, 2014 - Billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn said he plans to send an open letter to Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook today. Icahn To Send 'Interesting' Open Letter To Apple CEO Tim ... www.rttnews.com/.../icahn-to-send-interesting-open-letter-to-a... RTTNews Oct 8, 2014 - Billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn said Wednesday that he will send an open letter to technology giant Apple Inc.'s (AAPL) Chief Executive ... Carl Icahn says he's sending an 'interesting' letter to Apple ... www.cnet.com/.../carl-icahn-says-hes-sending-an-interesting-letter-... CNET Oct 8, 2014 - Carl Icahn says he's sending an 'interesting' letter to Apple on Thursday ... plans to send an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook on Thursday. Carl Icahn teases 'interesting' open letter to Apple CEO Tim ... appleinsider.com/.../carl-icahn-teases-interesting-open-letter-to-apple-ceo... Oct 8, 2014 - Investor and activist Carl Icahn, who previously had a public battle with Apple over its cash hoard, has revealed he will be sending another ... Carl Icahn signals he will send letter to Apple's Tim Cook ... www.bizjournals.com/.../carl-icahn-apple-... South Florida Business Journal Oct 8, 2014 - Carl Icahn, billionaire investor and chairman of Icahn Enterprises Holdings LP. Icahn said he'll send an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook ... Carl Icahn Teases Web With Plan To Reveal Open Letter To ... www.crn.com/.../carl-icahn-teases-web-with-plan-to-reveal-open-letter-to... Oct 8, 2014 - Carl Icahn, founder of Icahn Enterprises and billionaire activist investor, tweeted ... afternoon he will pen an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook the following day. "Tmrw we'll be sending an open letter to @tim_cook. Believe it ... Carl Icahn Said to Send Letter to Apple CEO Cook - MSN.com www.msn.com/en-gb/...to-send-letter-to-apple-ceo.../vp-BB8jGQE MSN Oct 9, 2014 - Carl Icahn Said to Send Letter to Apple CEO Cook. Oct. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Billionaire investor Carl Icahn may suggest in an open letter to Apple ... . . .
-- Cal Crowley, 21 Oct 2014
An Open Memo to the CEO of Apple
Apple Mac OS X Yosemite has a butt ugly Look & Feel (looks like an Android?). I just loaded it the other day over Mavericks -- boy what a mistake! All the icons, the top menu bar, and the bottom dock look plain, flat, 2Dish, and BORING. If Steve Jobs was alive this version would never have seen the light of day. It is ssssoooo inelegant! All this graphics capability on my mbp and they go away from the 3D effects of buttons and window borders and go to something that reminds me of Andy Warhol Campbell Soup Can paintings. Mac OS X used to be the Picasso of the industry -- but no more. The minimalist designers have won the day. I think they should all be fired!!
-- Cal Crowley, 22 Oct 2014
Panama Papers Scandals
A couple of thoughts about the recent so-called Panama Papers release ... (1) you can tell which news empires are involved or not by how much importance each has placed on the release of the Panama Papers. To some it is worthy of top glaring headlines and several points of view articles, but to others, they bury it deep in their usual nonsense with hardly a word. (2) countries and orgs with strong dictators and control of their press, such as Russia, China, and FIFA, are less than forthcoming and paranoically accusatory... that "others are out to get them". They hope to hide the truth and control the flow of information to their "citizens" through things like the Great Firewall of China. There is little hope that the people of those countries and institutions will be able to make any change as a result of the revelations. So, business as usual, just as corrupt as ever. One can only conclude that tax dodging and money laundering are to be expected. That corruption is the order of the day. That transparency and decency and morality and integrity are not desired values for leaders of any stripe. Do people get what they deserve? Why just look at Trump.
-- Cal Crowley, 06 Apr 2016
Parallels Upgrade Scam
Parallels Desktop® 12 for Mac has arrived!
oh, yeah, time to fork over another $50 ...
Parallels Desktop is software with an inherent builtin upgrade scam!
Every time Mac OS X is upgraded by Apple for "free"
the Parallels company charges you yet another $49.99
to install the latest "macOS...xxxxxx-ready" version of Parallels
and this really sucks over time ...
Parallels Desktop 9 for Mac macOSX Mavericks-ready $49.99 Parallels Desktop 10 for Mac macOSX Yosemite-ready $49.99 Parallels Desktop 11 for Mac macOSX El Capitan-ready $49.99 Parallels Desktop 12 for Mac macOS Sierra-ready $49.99by Sierra I have spent $200.00 keeping up with "free" Mac OS X upgrades!
-- Cal Crowley, 20 Aug 2016
