Mel West, engaging people to help people in Nicaragua

April 25th, 2022

For decades while they were alive, my parents recounted story after story of their friend, mentor and “mission broker” Rev. Mel West, his wife Barbara, and their collaborative efforts to help “the least of these”. See Walking in John Wesley’s Footprints.

Mel is well known, and honored, for so much of his work engaging people to work together to help others. See Mel West’s honorary doctorate recognizes a lifetime of humanitarian service.
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Glimpses from the Vulcan, 1969-70

February 14th, 2022

Fugs

Not counting traveling through on a Greyhound Bus in 1966 on my way to/from San Antonio, my first memories of Austin are a visit in February 1969, seeing the Fugs and Shiva’s Head Band at the Vulcan Gas Company (VGC), being asked to sit in with the house band at the I.L. Club, and swimming in Hamilton Pool. Attracted to Austin and dis-satisfied with my situation in San Francisco, I came back that April for what I expected to be an extended visit. Except for a couple of stints in Ossining, NY 1975-77 and 1979-82, I’ve lived here ever since.

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[koko] MISP 2022

January 10th, 2022

“Things Have Changed” – Bob Dylan (1999)

“Everything, still remains the same”
“(Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay” – Otis Redding (1967)

tl;dr embarking on quantifying meaningful indicators of small computer system performance over the last three decades

In graduate school and subsequent professional work, analyzing performance of computer systems was often my primary effort, including much of the software I wrote, and my first three books. Years ago I pontificated about Meaningful Indicators of System Performance, surveying the (mostly) synthetic benchmarks in vogue in 1990. I was also active in the formation of the Business Applications Performance Corporation. Read the rest of this entry »

Why I continue to serve — I remember Nicaragua

December 13th, 2021

Thanks to my parents, Rev. Mel West, my supervising professor and others, the second great commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”, has been instilled in me as long as I can remember.

I was only vaguely aware of our neighbors in Nicaragua when my father, thanks to Mel’s suggestion, began donating to Rainbow Network in 1998. I began to become more aware in 2003 when Mel sent me a photo of homes under construction at Colonia La Paz, homes and land my father had funded.


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Making private 1960s and 70s recordings public

August 21st, 2021

https://technologists.com/60sN70s/

Over the years, as I have digitized much of my collection of private music recordings made by me and others, I’ve given out Web access through obscure directories. Now that the Storm track is commercially available, and inquiries have increased about others, it seemed time to make some of the MP3s more readily available, and they are now at 60sN70s.
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