This is a temporary page for quick updates. Visit my actual home page to get to the rest of the site.
Here's my Wordpress blog. There's a link there to my Wikipedia user page, too.
Sometime in November, 1968, when I was a patient in Manhattan State Hospital (wrongly suspected of being suicidal), I entered the men's room, and there I saw a patient who was clearly a bully holding another patient in an armlock, facing a wall. The patient being held seemed to me to have a low IQ; I don't know the proper term for that. When he did speak, he was soft-spoken, but he rarely spoke at all. He was obviously in distress; there was a wild look in his eyes. When he saw me approach, he said something. Whatever it was, it was enough to make the bully release him, saying, "That's better. All I wanted was to teach you to speak up when you need help."
It was a heck of a way to teach somebody something, but I think that bully was right about the message. When somebody's in trouble and needs help, the worse thing he can do is to bite his tongue. Unfortunately, it's also the natural thing, I suspect.
That's what I do, at least, especially when feeling depressed, lonely, overwhelmed, tormented, and so on. I close my eyes, pull up the covers, and make myself feel as rotten as possible. I can't explain it. But I know it's not the way to be.
I just discovered that Bountyquest disappeared a long time ago. The evidence is available via the Wayback Machine.
Someday, I'd like to send a message to TPTB at AOL, but meanwhile, as an example of what can go wrong, I'd just like to mention that I received a message from them. This time, it came in the form of a unique e-mail in a window identifying it as "Official" e-mail from AOL. That's a step in the right direction.
On the other hand, there was no way to reply to it. A missed opportunity to take the important step they must take sooner or later!
It was just this last Sunday that Ted Turner appeared on "60 Minutes," apparently still in possession of a vast amount of AOL stock, though he was (ceremoniously or not) dumped from office at AOL Time Warner.
I'm glad he's moving to Florida (for tax purposes), but I can't help feeling sorry for his losses of wealth, power, and influence. I hope it wasn't he who was responsible for all AOL's problems, which, after all, aren't that broad. As far as I can tell, they all boil down to one thing: treating their customers poorly by preventing them from communicating with the management.
The occasion for this message was a phone call I'd just completed. Apparently, my brother-in-law called AOL and cancelled my account on January 28th, without telling me.
He'd already paid the bills through February 16th, and I was expecting to check my INBOX periodically until then. But when I tried to log in, I got a message indicating not that my account had been closed, but simply that there was a password/username problem.
In my phone call to AOL Account Reactivation at (888) 265-4042 (Note my insistence on using the parentheses, which I consider a good idea, no matter what anybody else may say!) I clearly identified myself and explained (as always) that somebody else was paying for the account.
In response, AOL sent me an e-mail with my brother-in-law's name in the greeting!
(Again!)
Will they ever learn? Am I the only person to use AOL while somebody else pays for it? Will they go bankrupt before they make an attempt to find out what's wrong?
Who knows?
What's obvious to me, at least, is that they have problems that must be straightened out sooner or later.
And what I'd like to make obvious to them is that I, for one, have no trouble seeing what the matter is.
It's the same problem afflicting all of business in America today, and its opposite is what made us successful: communications between businesses and their clients. Once they were great, and now they stink. It's that simple.
I didn't do it on purpose, but I'm locked out of AOL, and I'll probably never use it again. I'm sorry if it causes any problems, but now that I'm signed up with ICQ, MS .NET Password, Yahoo!, MSN, Lycos, Hotmail, WhoWhere, BellSouth, Access4Less, Alachua Freenet, the Internet Theater DataBase (as "choirboy"), Trillian, Alibre, and more other services than I can recall, it shouldn't be too hard to find me, particularly if you know my name, and that I'm living in Miami nowadays.
On the other hand, I discovered that there are a heck of a lot of Marshall Prices in (Norte) America, which leaves me with a warm feeling. If you can't find me, at least you'll find somebody.
Sometime in the near future, I hope, I'll learn how to use my new website at www.marshallprice.com, at which point I'll invite all my namesakes to join in the fray!
-----
Meanwhile, another tidbit.
Mother was once strongly tempted to accept a maharaja's proposal of marriage. Until last night, I didn't know his name, only that he was the maharaja of Sarila, and that when I went to the government mapmaking headquarters in New Delhi, in 1972, they'd never heard of Sarila. It was terribly disappointing.
The maharaja's son's name is Narendra Singh. When I went to Europe in 1973, he was the Indian ambassador to Spain, and I met briefly with him outside his office in Madrid.
I know I'd met him before, but I still don't quite remember when and where, or what we talked about. I only know I'd always liked both his father and him.
Suddenly, though I'd often fantasized about how marvelous any place named "Sarila" must be, and whether I ought to encourage Mom to reconsider, I realized I didn't have much to say to Narendra other than, "Isn't it interesting that your father liked my mother enough to consider adding her to his wives"!
(I think there were about four at the time, and it was clear that Mom would never be treated like a prisoner in a seraglio.)
Now I discover that Narendra Singh was later ambassador to Switzerland (which I find much more impressive somehow), and stepped down from the chairmanship of Nestle of India a few years ago to become chairman (or CEO) emeritus.
He wrote several very interesting letters to the editor of the Times of India, clearing up some long-held misconceptions about Jinnah's role and motives in the partitioning of India in 1946, which are still archived, though gone from the paper's website. He was also apparently on the board of a girl's school, but don't follow that link! You'll get a zillion browser windows opening faster than you can cope with them. Take a lesson instead: never use the string "girl" in a website!
Also removed, but accessible through Google's cache are some genealogical files for Narendra, his father, and his family.
I wish I could write him, that he's well, and that someday I might visit him in Sarila (which I still can't locate) and sip a blissful cup of tea with him in his (no doubt) splendid white palace!
Now that Seflin's freenet is gone, I'm looking for another way to get telnet access to the Alachua FreeNet. I've been using AOL for quite a while, but never liked it.
Well, recently I stumbled across Access4Less, which looks perfect. It costs $8 to sign up and $6 per month thereafter for unlimited Internet access. I avoid any ISP's which would require me to run their software, and having no credit card, I'm sure I've avoided a lot of pitfalls that way, too.
I called up Access4Less and started to sign up, but the person at the other end explained that I could use my bank (ATM: "Automatic Teller Machine") card. Apparently, they consider it a "debit card." I thought a debit card was something I had to apply for -- something connected with Visa or MasterCard.
So they didn't charge me for the phone call, and instead I went back online and went through the registration process, using my ATM card's number for the "credit card number."
Then I went looking for a way to pay, since I hadn't run my card through a scanner, signed anything, or used my PIN ("Personal Identification Number").
Under customer support, I found an invoice, with "I-Billing" and an address for them in Atlanta. So I printed it, made out a check and, unsure to whom it should be made payable, sent an e-mail to support@access4less.net.
They didn't answer right away, which didn't surprise me, considering it was in the wee hours of the morning, but the next day, I received a bill (also apparently intended to be printed out) from I-Billing in my e-mail, along with an account registration confirmation from Access4Less.
But I still couldn't get in, so I wrote another e-mail to support@access4less.net, made out the check to "Access4Less (or I-Billing)" and mailed it, and have tried numerous times to get into the system since then. The access numbers work, but I get an error saying my username or password is invalid.
That's how things stand. Maybe, once they get their hands on my check, or after it's cleared, I'll have my nice, new non-AOL ISP. I can hardly wait!
I'm known in the rags community for my advocacy of fine modern millinery.
(Millinery refers strictly to women's hats; here I model an understated
Picassoesque cocktail toque in drag.)
A unique custom creation of David Anderson.
Photo: David Anderson
I haven't always been self-employed. Here I am (on the right) circa 1993 with co-worker David Anderson (who took the photo with a delayed-exposure camera) at the end of a long day's work at Wethington Quality Piano Rebuilding, which went out of business when the owner, Pat Wethington, moved on to greener pastures in Colorado, leaving behind many beautifully restored pianos here in Miami. As you can see, David and I took our work very seriously. He and Pat were incredibly productive in the shop, while I concentrated on regular in-home piano tuning and maintenance. We're all perfectionists, which is one reason I burned out-- temporarily, I hope.
Pat and David both love their work, Pat being avid, energetic, and strongly motivated, while David seems calm and unhurried. But he's very productive. He can restring a piano at least twice as fast as most technicians, and his work is consistently gorgeous.
I, on the other hand, constantly felt as if I were under tremendous pressure, though I wasn't, and never felt satisfied with my work. It's a total mystery to me what's wrong. I loved everything about piano tech when I was in school.
Now Pat's in charge of all the pianos on Carnival Cruise Lines, and often calls in David to help out, though David's here in Florida, and Pat's in Colorado. Pat could tune a piano quickly in a crowded room, entertaining the people around him as he worked. When I tuned, I usually got complaints about the noise, and sometimes the complaints went not to me, but to somebody higher up.
Of course, he's healthy and gregarious, and looks like a million bucks, while I'm pretty much the opposite. At least I have false teeth now; then I needed some. And decent clean clothes. And grooming. Etc.
My arriving hot and sweaty from a long bike trip didn't help matters, nor did the mood I was often in, having been given a run-around by the people who were supposed to let me board the ship early. For some reason, my name was frequently left off the list, and I had to sit on a crate on the dock, in the heat, air-borne dirt, and noise, from seven a.m. till ten or eleven, when the customs agents and other officials "cleared" the ship.
Then I'd have about a half-hour, if I was lucky, to tune eight or ten pianos, an impossible task.
They'd changed the rules on me mid-stream. Originally, I had from seven to three-thirty to get the work done (which was wonderful), but suddenly, they decided I couldn't work when passengers were around. With two thousand passengers leaving and two thousand more arriving, there was hardly any time in between.
And instead of having pianos which just needed a bit of touching up, I wound up with pianos overdue for thorough tunings.
Something had to give, and it wasn't going to be them. :)
I have a public key now! :)
Never mind. I still don't "get" the whole public-key encryption/keyring management (PGP-RSA?) thing, so I'm not using it.
Very good news! I now have a broadband Internet connection, thanks to my new neighbor, who let me link to his home computer. (I live in his garage.)
Also, I've found two sites linking to mine, one interested in piano technology, and one in religion (my scholasticism definition). So now I have a reason to consider maintaining what I've got here!
I've reworked Young's article on piano string acoustics using PEDIT (the "Programmers' Editor"). A newer version is here, and the latest is here. I'm still working on the tables, and when I find the original article (oops), I expect to include the images.
I have HTML editors from Lotus, Microsoft, and the WWW Consortium, but found it easier simply to edit it manually, while running Internet Explorer and lynx as separate tasks to check on the results. Tex, LaTex, MathML, etc. look much too complicated. I've got enough homework already.
I also reworked my original index.htm, because it wouldn't validate. The <CENTER> attribute wasn't allowed under the DOCTYPEs I tried. Valid or not, I liked it better before.
I'm having a great deal of trouble connecting to the Alachua Freenet via telnet. I'm using AOL, under which I run Lynx for Windows, which "spawns" a Windows telnet program. It often doesn't seem to work right.
The main thing which has happened since 2000, when I last updated my website is that my mother has died. She passed away quite peacefully at 10:47 pm on Sunday, June 9, 2002.
We were holding hands, and her breathing, which had grown shallow and labored, simply stopped. There was no rattling sound or extra breath or two, and she'd apparently been in a state of semi-consciousness for days.
I was blessed with the opportunity to sing and pray over her, and wish her every blessing I could think of. I felt inspired.
I'm sure the Lord loves her dearly and forgives all her mistakes, and that her desires are in perfect accord with His will.
So any grief I feel can only be attributed to self-pity, which I consider a perfectly appropriate emotion.
On the other hand, I'm glad to realize with certainty that I've loved somebody with all my heart, a very comforting thought.
Mom (on the right) on June 12, 1989, with Marion Ellis, the lady who introduced Jacqueline Kennedy to Mr. Onassis, half a block from Tiffany's. She and Jackie were shopping together when she spotted Aristotle, who had lent her the use of several airplanes for transporting students to and from the school in Switzerland where she was headmistress.
I took this picture (which spent many years in my wallet) at the home of Neith Nevelson, a well-known painter here in Coconut Grove, the daughter of famous sculptress Louise Nevelson. Neith's back was broken a few years ago in a terrible accident and never properly treated. Consequently, it has a sharp bend in the lumbar region, and her health and mobility are adversely affected. I suspect that like me, she is often depressed, but she seldom shows it.
My parents were married on Halloween.
Drop me a line at afn49304@afn.org. I've got plenty of free time these days.
