letter

A letter to the editor I found at The Denver Post:

Sit quietly

If you sit quietly in one spot where you call home, memories will arrive. I am at a small kitchen table looking up at our skylight. The kitchen has been a favorite gathering place in our home during parties long past. Time sits still if you listen; the friends, the laughter, the bad jokes, pass by in your mind.

We are in a time when listening is all we have. You are able at any age to do so. What you will find, as I have, is that after all of the “vicissitudes of life,” there are people we remember, people we are bound to by birth, people who make an impression, people we love deeply, and people who love us. It is, after all, people that make our existence whole.

The realization that COVID-19 may take me at 71 threatens to crowd out my hope, interrupt my idea that more gatherings will come, and more lovely faces will grace our kitchen.

I hope that those who survive learn from this universal experience that our connections matter. We are together on this wondrous journey. We live together, die alone, yes, but most of the time, we are here with others. To survivors, make this re-discovered truth a reality. That means we share or we perish; no more winner-take-all society. Everyone matters; the baker, clerk, barista, mechanic, truck driver, nurse and teacher. Each deserves the dignity of a decent life, including those we must care for because they cannot care for themselves.

Bill J. Fyfe, Denver

a look at opensuse

openSUSE is, of course, one of the best Linux distros out there. M.Hanny Sabbagh discusses some of its excellent features in the article "Reasons to Give openSUSE a Try" -- https://fosspost.org/education/reasons-to-try-opensuse

pandemic

Good article that looks at the situation going forward. Paints a grim picture, but realistic, given what is known. I'm saving this link; maybe one day I'll be able to look back on it and see how accurate the author was, if I'm still around!

"How the Pandemic Will End: The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialized world. This is how it’s going to play out." -- https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how-will-coronavirus-end/608719/

anarchy review

A DistroWatch review of Anarchy Linux: https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20200323#anarchy

As noted earlier, I've used Anarchy to install an Arch system, which I'm quite pleased with. The author of the DW review wrote that after using Anarchy, he "...had a well configured Arch Linux-based system that I was able to set up in under 30 minutes by just selecting options and entering options in the Anarchy installer." He goes on to say that "Anarchy Linux is not perfect, but it does do a good job of making Arch super easy to install." I completely agree.

in times like these

In times of difficulty and uncertainty, back to the music. That's how I cope. Here's a link to the Illuminations album by McCoy Tyner, at YouTube.

Personnel

McCoy Tyner – piano
Terence Blanchard – trumpet
Gary Bartz – alto saxophone
Christian McBride – bass
Lewis Nash – drums

I don't have Illuminations on CD or on cassette, but I was playing one of my old minidiscs and found the complete album saved. So I checked the computer and it's saved to the hard drive, too. I'm thinking I must have borrowed the CD from the library and copied it. This album won the Grammy Award for 'Best Instrumental Jazz Album, Individual or Group' in 2005.

stephens

After several months of reading just a little bit at a time, I finally finished the remarkable work by John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán, which was originally published in 1841. Stephens journeyed to Central America, exploring and documenting ancient Mayan ruins. The copy I have is split into two books, Volume I and Volume II; the book can also be found online at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Incidents_of_Travel_in_Central_America,_Chiapas_and_Yucatan.

Stephens, of course, is considered to have been a pivotal figure in the rediscovery of Maya civilization. Besides the detailed descriptions of the Mayan ruins, his work provides the reader with a fascinating snapshot of life and conditions in that part of the world at about the middle of the 19th century.

After his first trip (1939-40), Stephens returned to the region in 1841 and wrote about that visit in Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, originally published in 1843 (I have yet to read this book).