This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon

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May 2006
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David Ramseur Minter

Time for another ancestor. This time my father’s father… born 1912 in North Carolina, died in 1991 in Arizona. With quite a lot of interesting events in between.

David Ramseur Minter

On 27 Sep 1955 a “Mass Meeting” of the white elite of Holmes County, Mississippi met and accused Dr. Minter and his co-practicioner Dr. Gene Cox of “communist doings” at Providence due to the fact that they treated both blacks and whites at the same facility. They were told to get out of town. David and Sue stayed for about another year, but then the pressure on them and on Providence Farm became intolerable and the family moved to Tucson, Arizona to join son William (Bill).

On the wiki page I link to the three pages of a biographical article published in 1997. It is a fascinating history, especially the years in Mississippi. In fact, there is a whole book on the history of the “experiment” that my grandfather was a part of in the late 40’s and early 50’s. I’d definitely recommend the article (it is a very quick read) to everybody and the book for anybody that is interested in a bit deeper view.

Why am I Up?

This last evening I’ve had the opposite problem. I fell asleep at 3:30 UTC (early for me) but then work up at 8:30 UTC (middle of the night). Then I was up two hours. Then tried to get back to sleep another two hours. I only succeeded in lying in bed tossing and turning. Then just a few minutes ago I decided that even though I would really like a couple more hours of sleep and feel quite tired, that given my failure to fall back asleep and the fact the sun is now up, I should just go ahead and get up even though normally it would be another two (maybe three) hours until I would be stumbling out of bed. Ideally at this time of year given my work schedule, I’d sleep from about 6 UTC to 14 UTC each day. So I am getting up, although I resent it. Yawn!!!

But usually, I have the opposite problem. Hitting snooze for hours and not getting up when I should. People keep coming up with good ideas for alarm clocks to combat this sort of thing, but I haven’t seen any of them actually AVAILABLE TO BUY yet. And this one is no different. Just another design prototype. Come on, somebody please sell one of these?

Anyway, I love the idea.

Alarm clock that won’t give up
Stephen McGinty, Scotsman

The wall-mounted alarm clock can be switched off only when its user climbs out of bed, stands directly in front and repeats, by pressing coloured buttons, a sequence generated randomly each morning. If the user fails to repeat the sequence swiftly, the alarm will continue to blare until the task is completed correctly.

(via Digg)

Generation 1

With the last post I finished off Generation 1. So time to do a “where am I from” summary. “From” in the sense that people say their family is from England, or Germany, or whatever. I’ll do this after each generation I fully complete. At the moment I have enough in my spreadsheet that I know I can “complete” at least through Generation 4 (my 16 great-great-grandparents) in that I have all of their names. I don’t however have where all of them were born, so when we get there part of me might be from “Unknown”. We’ll see. Generation 5 and beyond I also am missing people entirely. (For instance, I only know 24 out of 32 names for Generation 5 at the moment… then on a percentage basis each succeeding generation has fewer.)

Anyway…

Based on the 2 people in Generation 1, Sam is from:

50%: District of Columbia, USA
50%: Ohio, USA

Of course, I should have made a post like this after finishing Generation 0. It would have looked like:

Based on the 1 person in Generation 0, Sam is from:

100%: Wisconsin, USA

Ruth Marilyn Brandon

Another ancestor, this time my mother. Born in Ohio, lived in a bunch of other places, soon to go back to Ohio. I’ve actually got a few biographical details on this listing, simply because there were a few paragraphs of such things in the announcement of the award she got last year. I didn’t add too much of my own though. Only used what I could find elsewhere. In any case:

Ruth Marilyn Brandon

Graphs of Websites

image

This is very cool. The above is a graph of the abulsme.com home page (right before I made this post) based on the internal structure of the html.

The tool to make these is here.

The full explanation is in the item linked below:

Websites as graphs
(Sala, Aharef)

HTML consists of so-called tags, like the A tag for links, IMG tag for images and so on. Since tags are nested in other tags, they are arranged in a hierarchical manner, and that hierarchy can be represented as a graph. I’ve written a little app that visualizes such a graph, and here are some screenshots of websites that I often look at.

(via Digg)

Oldest Unanswered Email

As of earlier today my oldest unanswered email turned one year old. Now, this is unanswered email in my inbox, and also includes things that never will be answered, but need to be looked at and perhaps something done with them before they are filed. At the moment my oldest unanswered email is a Google Alert for “Palm Bay” that I received May 28, 2005 01:40:30 GMT It was about a Central Florida Man who was sentenced in the death of a shaken toddler. For this particular email, all I need to do is file it away in the 2005-05 folder, but I haven’t done it yet, and it is now a year old.

Sigh!

Titus Buttry’s Cr@p Shack

In addition to his long defunct Tripod Site and his not updated all that much Phatback Blog, about a month ago my friend Al opened up an online store (using CafePress) selling t-shirts.

There are such gems as “If I wanted to mow the grass, I wouldn’t have had kids!” or “I smell like feet!“.

Enjoy:

Titus Buttry’s Cr@p Shack

William Maynard Minter

Time for another ancestor:

William Maynard Minter

This is my father of course. The bibliographic details aren’t completely filled up, I didn’t want to take that liberty, but it has links to a few of his books and the basic information. He was born in Washington, DC and after quite a few years in other places, lives there again.

When available, I’ve usually tried to use a picture from when the person was between 20 and 40 years old. I had a few of those of my father on my computer, but all were too low resolution to be usable. Sometime after we’re all moved and I have my stuff again (including old photo books) I’ll make a higher res copy of one of those and replace the pic I used. But the pic I used is a good one, just more recent.

And of course, as I get a few generations back, I’ll have to take what I can get in terms of pictures because much fewer exist. And of course, beyond a certain point, they don’t exist at all.

Samuel Antonio Minter

When I was thinking about if I should link to the Wiki or not, there was actually one item that pushed me in this direction. Namely, I have for YEARS been wanting to put a family tree type thing up on abulsme.com. Several years ago I’d actually made some templates for the pages and such, but it was kind of a pain, so I never got very far with it. The Wiki thing has really enabled that by just making it a much more frictionless process to quickly get what I want up. I’d actually started with a big Excel spreadsheet and I now have 180 ancestors on that spreadsheet. (And quite a few of the “deep nodes” on there I know I can go deeper, I just haven’t yet. For instance, the stuff I mentioned in New Deepest Relative isn’t reflected there yet.)

I quickly realized though that I wasn’t capturing a lot of interesting information in that format. So I started putting it on the Wiki and adding a lot more info. As of now, I have 28 ancestors up on the Wiki. I’ll probably post whenever I add a new ancestor. But first I’ll catch up on the ones I’ve already posted (don’t worry, not all at once.) You can of course click through on the Wiki itself and find the others, but I’ll post them here one at a time.

So of course, I must start at myself.

Samuel Antonio Minter

I was born in 1971 in Madison, Wisconsin. And I lived a bunch of places. For now I’ve left my Biography section blank. You may all feel free to add info there if you feel like it. :-)

Other than that, I think I’ll start posting the others I already have up based on a breadth first search maybe one a day (maybe more, maybe less, we’ll see). If I add new people I’ll post them immediately if I already have their direct decedent posted, otherwise they will wait a bit.

Also, despite what I said about nothing being of interest to anybody, once you get several generations down, there are lots of people looking for this kind of information. After all, once you get back six or seven (or more) generations, these folks often have many thousands of decendants. And some of those descendants will also be looking into this kind of stuff. On some of these deep relatives I have found HUNDREDS of pages on the web where people are trying to sort out what information is known about some of these people. Most duplicate each other, and for those people I’ll be duplicating too, but I’m trying to be nicely comprehensive when I can be and link to all my sources, so I might be of use to other people looking for some of these people.

AbulWiki

I set up a personal wiki for myself a little while ago. Over a month ago at any rate. At work I had been using one on a daily basis to document projects and also just to keep a personal to do list organized. So I decided I wanted one at home too.

From the begining there was nothing to stop random people from playing with it if they found out the URL from somewhere (and there were a number of ways to discover it). But I was going back and forth on if I should lock it down so that only “authorized people” could see it, or just open it up and link to it from here.

As you can see, I ended up deciding to go ahead and link to it.

Not that there is all that much on it that anybody other than me would care about. For the most part it is an online to do list to remind me to do things. And yup, there is indeed a sort of grocery list on it at the moment too. All that sort of thing. But I’m also using it as a scratchpad for notes on various projects I want to do. Most of which, again, will be of zero interest to anybody but me. But hey, if I link to it and let Googlebot and the like spider it, then who knows, something might end up someday bieng of interest to someone… unlikely, but hey, you never know.

It is an open Wiki, so if anybody reading this wants to, feel free to dive in and contribute anything you may want. Add information to any of my projects that you think might be useful, or just add things to my to do list or grocery list if you feel like it. Whatever. Of course, things that are actually constructive would be prefered to adding “Please Bathe, you stink” to the to do list or some such. But since it is open, I really don’t have all that much control over that.

At the moment I require registration, but anybody can register and start editing and such instantly. If that ends up being abused, I’ll probably have to shut that off or restrict it in various ways. But for the moment, I’ll give it a shot and leave it open. (Aside from registration.)

The links are on the left nav of the Abulsme.com Home Page now and will stay there indefinately unless I decide to pull it at some point.

Or of course, here it is in this post:

AbulWiki