Meador Manor

Unexpected Obsolescence

Posted on March 30, 2013 by Granger Meador

March 30, 2013

From the Google Graveyard

Planned obsolescence has been a driver of our consumer culture since the Great Depression. I tend to resist it with respect to durable goods: my car is 12 years old and has over 200,000 miles on it, and my home repairs include appliance repairs, rather than replacements, whenever practical. However, the fast pace of technological development forces me to upgrade computers and related devices more frequently. I tend to buy high-powered desktop systems and use them for about five years, but I’ve been replacing my iPhone every two years and have frequently replaced my Kindle book readers and iPads.

The internet churns at an even faster pace. Companies and services come and go, with a long list of services I once relied upon which are now essentially defunct. I don’t particularly mourn dead online services like CompuServe or WebShots, but they certainly were useful to me in their day. But it is disruptive when the plug is pulled on a service you still rely upon. In a couple of weeks CableOne, my internet service provider, is pulling the plug on its webpages service, which forced me to relocate/recreate some websites with new providers. But what really has irked me is Google.

Google has a history of creating extremely useful free services, luring me into relying upon them, and then killing them off. This has happened with Google Notebook, will happen shortly with Google Reader, and will happen later this year with iGoogle. Slate has a nice Google Graveyard where you can put a flower on the graves of services you loved in their day.

My iGoogle homepage

I use iGoogle as my homepage, having set it up with a number of RSS feeds which show me the latest articles from a variety of favorite websites. That includes a list of articles pushed to me via Google Reader. I like to scan article headlines from certain sites and always read certain webcomics via Google Reader. Now I have to shift over to an alternate service for my RSS feeds and I might as well switch my homepage to a new service as well. What a pain! These services are not obsolete for me, even if many people now rely upon Twitter instead of RSS, dip into the random posts by their Facebook friends, or use FlipBoard and the like on tablets to see news articles.

I want to retain my one-screen listing of article headlines from my favorite sites which I can quickly scan each time I activate my desktop browser. So I’ve been looking at possible Google Reader replacements and the same for iGoogle, reading through one set of suggested alternatives after another, and there is an exhaustive listing if I get desperate.

Thus far I’m playing with igHome as an iGoogle replacement and it looks like Feedly is a good replacement for Google Reader, but no one has written a Feedly gadget for igHome yet, so I’ll keep using iGoogle and Google Reader/Feedly for now.

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Snow Break, Day 3: Kemper & Nerman

Posted on March 24, 2013 by Granger Meador

March 23, 2013

Crying Giant (click image for slideshow)

My last day of Snow Break 2013 in Kansas City was spent at modern art museums. I struggle with much modern art, especially the less representational modes, but recently I got a real kick out of the modern art pieces at Crystal Bridges in Arkansas. So I braved return visits to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art.

I dislike the spider motif at the Kemper, based on the sculpture by Louise Bourgeois. Given my frustration with much of modern art, I’d prefer they play off their Crying Giant sculpture by Tom Otterness. For example, a close friend of mine loves Capri by Brendan Cass, while I struggle to appreciate his bold abstracted style of landscape painting. But we both enjoy the huge portrait Count Basie by Frederick James Brown.

Source Figure

I liked looking directly up at Dale Chihuly’s Campiello del Remer, Ireland glass chandelier, but the highlight of the collection for me was Source Figure by Robert Graham. The original sculpture of an African American woman is at the source of a fountain at the Bunker Hill Steps in Los Angeles. The three crabs at the base are mysterious and lend themselves to ribald commentary. But the woman’s figure is sensual, and the museum has cleverly placed the sculpture in an exterior alcove with windows highlighting views of her profile and setting her against Architect’s Handkerchief by Claes Oldenburg and Cossje van Bruggen.

I then drove miles westward to the Nerman Museum on the campus of Johnson County Community College, where security guards kept a careful watch as I progressed through each gallery. The museum cafe featured some nifty cylindrical light fixtures which caught my eye, but Do-Ho Suh‘s Some/One was the real eye-catcher with its large hollow robe composed of gibberish-covered dog tags.

Some/One by Do-Ho Suh

Bones were prominent in the permanent painted collection since they were major features of Brad Kahlhamer‘s Eagle Fest USA, with its prominent skulls, and Allison Schulnik‘s Skipping Skeletons, which had them skipping through prominent 3D flowers of thick paint.

I’m impolitic and crass enough to interpret Tomory Dodge’s Wasteland as a commentary on much of modern art, but I did appreciate Stephan Balkenhol’s rough-hewn wooden Man Lying on Platform. My favorite painting was the abstract Miasma (2) by Marc Handelman, which is a dark version of his sunburst painting Miasma. The much better (2) version is more powerful at a distance than close-up.

It was a snowy drive back to Bartlesville, a fitting conclusion to this Snow Break.

Snowy Drive Home

Click here for a slideshow from this day

< Snow Break, Day 2

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Snow Break, Day 2: World War I Museum & Rock ‘n’ Roll

Posted on March 24, 2013 by Granger Meador

March 22, 2013

Big Gun at World War I Museum (click image for slideshow)

On the second full day of Snow Break 2013 in Kansas City I had an early lunch at The Classic Cup Sidewalk Cafe at the Plaza; the Steak Frites was superb. Then I returned to Liberty Memorial, which I’d visited the night before for the view of its lit flame, to again tour the National World War I Museum.

I crossed the glass bridge over the poppy field, bearing in mind the famous poem by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae. I captured some of the large graphics in the museum about the chain reaction of treaties and countermeasures which would lead to global war, along with the dreadful graph of dead and wounded by nation, underlined by the deployments by the respective countries.

I shot down the barrel of one of the big guns and gazed at rationing posters and the movie poster for To Hell With The Kaiser. Downstairs, on the way to the reference library, were numerous quotations from soldiers about the war machine which ground them to bits. New to me on this visit was a walk around to the high north wall of the promenade to see The Great Frieze by Edmond Romulus Amateis, which depicts the sufferings of war and the blessings of peace with images of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and mourners as well as farm workers bringing in the harvest.

Granger the Guitarist

I had lunch nearby at Crown Center’s d’Bronx and walked The Link over to Union Station to enjoy the great Science of Rock ‘n’ Roll exhibit, where I saw an old record cutter and could play the guitar, keyboard, and drums a la Guitar Hero or Garage Band and mix tunes and sing karaoke (very poorly!).

Click here for a slideshow from this day

Snow Break 2013, Day 3 >

< Snow Break 2013, Day 1

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Snow Break, Day 1: The Arabia and Liberty Memorial

Posted on March 23, 2013 by Granger Meador

March 21, 2013

Treasures from the Steamboat Arabia (click image for slideshow)

I spent the last half of Spring Break 2013 in Kansas City, but since it was bitterly cold throughout my stay and it snowed, I am calling it a Snow Break!

I again stayed at the Best Western Seville Plaza hotel at Country Club Plaza, and on my first full day in the city I drove a few miles downtown to revisit the Treasures of the Steamboat Arabia museum. I first visited this splendid attraction years ago and recalled that the Hawley family and some of their friends had excavated the 1850s steamboat from under farmland off the Missouri River.

The boat was full of cargo and passengers a few miles from Kansas City when it hit a snag and sank. All of the passengers and crew escaped, but the boat and its cargo sank into the river bottom. The Arabia was buried for over 130 years in conditions which helped preserve its tons of cargo as the river changed course over time. The Hawleys researched its location, found it using an advanced metal detector, and excavated the wreck, recovering tons of nearly pristine cargo.

The Arabia

I pulled up before the impressive facade, posed beside the exterior bronze, and then joined a tour, seeing a satellite image and photos of the excavation site. An artist’s conception of the steamboat helped me visualize it since the wreck was nearly unrecognizable after the river swept away the upper decks. I recalled from my previous visit the large stern on display, with its tiller fashioned from a tree trunk by the crew after the original one had broken, and the large rudder. Back when I had visited the museum, they were still spraying down the wood daily with preservative, but that process is now complete.

I saw the beautiful buttons and trade beads and powder flasks recovered from the wreck, as well as some of the passengers’ personal belongings. There were oodles of pristine kitchenware, dry goods, clothing, and hardware. Even bottled foods were found intact. But some broken glassware was displayed to acknowledge that the violent sinking had damaged a considerable portion of the cargo. The snag which sank the boat was also on display.

I was glad to have renewed my acquaintance with the Arabia and its story, following it up with lunch at Rozelle Court at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. I’ve already blogged about that beautiful attraction on multiple occasions, so I will skip onward to my evening visit to Liberty Memorial.

Liberty Memorial

I first visited this World War I memorial in 2010, but I had not photographed it at night when the “flame” atop the high tower is lit. The flame is actually steam lit by orange lights, and was de-activated by budget cuts in recent years. Happily fundraising has led to efficiency upgrades and it is back in operation.

The memorial’s huge lit tower and large adjacent sphinxes were impressive at night, as was the high view of Union Station from the memorial platform. I would return to this location the next day to revisit the impressive World War I museum located under the base of the tower. That day would bring the eponymous snow of this “spring” break.

Click here for a slideshow from this day

Snow Break 2013, Day 2 >

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Dealing with “Retirement” Courtesy of CableOne

Posted on March 13, 2013 by Granger Meador

March 13, 2013; THIS POST WAS FULLY UPDATED AND REVISED ON MARCH 28, 2013; UPDATED AGAIN 3/30/2013

Thanks for nothing!

I had a most unwelcome email message from my internet service provider in mid-March. CableOne wrote to tell me that they were “retiring” the free personal web space service they have provided to me and other customers for many years. That meant that on April 10, 2013 my existing bartlesvillehistory.org and inquiryphysics.org websites would go dark. (Those links now redirect to the pages I created at awardspace.com and weebly.com to replace the defunct CableOne service.)

Same price, less service. Thanks for less than nothing, CableOne!

I shifted much of my personal web content from their service years ago when I began blogging regularly. I am already the creator of many websites outside of this blog, but most of them are school-related and hosted on the district’s web server. I cannot transfer my Bartlesville History or Inquiry Physics websites to that server, however, since the history site has no relationship to the district and the curriculum site is a personal and commercial page used to promote and sell my physics curriculum.

I tried recreating my Bartlesville History pages on wordpress.com, but it was too onerous a task with the limited formatting options and cumbersome navigation on this blogging service. So, acting upon a suggestion from former student Michael Graham, I switched them over to the free awardspace.com service. It was cumbersome and confusing, but I managed to create a new “bartlesvillehistory” subdomain on their “mywebcommunity.org” domain where I uploaded all of my existing pages and content. Then I switched over the forwarding mask at GoDaddy for my bartlesvillehistory.org domain.

I tried doing the same for my curriculum sales page, but after a day or so the subdomain I created on awardspace’s “onlinewebshop.net” domain stopped working, generating 403 Forbidden errors. I filed a trouble ticket and awardspace revealed that you cannot use “PayPal” on their webpages. That took them out of the running.

My curriculum sales site

I didn’t want to use Google Sites for the curriculum sales page because I simply don’t trust Google anymore after they announced killing off two of my favorite services, iGoogle and Google Reader. So I opted to create my new Inquiry Physics curriculum sales pages on weebly.com at inquiryphysics.weebly.com. Those pages seem to be working okay thus far and were easy to create. I’ve now changed my forwarding mask for the inquiryphysics.org domain.

I’m tempted to eventually switch the entire high school physics website to weebly.com for easier maintenance, but I’ll have to explore its calendar service options. I gave up on using Google Calendar for my classes’ assignments calendars since that service doesn’t offer good live links support; that is why a couple of years back I switched to localendar.com for my class calendars. But I don’t know if localendar.com will prove compatible with weebly.com and having my class pages on the school district’s web server ensures they remain accessible to students through the heavily filtered school district internet service.

My local history site

3/30/2013 UPDATE:

Today I upgraded BARTLESVILLEHISTORY.ORG site by incorporating newly scanned larger images into the front page, making them expandable. I also reworked the front page and the links on all subpages so that I could change the forwarding mask. Now, when someone visits the site through the usual masking weblink, the subpages display without revealing the underlying web host. That should allow links visitors decide to bookmark to still work even after the site has to be ported to a new service. I’m trying to do my part to fight link rot. I can’t complain too much: it had been five years since I’d had to update some of the history pages, which is LONG time for the internet.