A few years ago, Elvera Voth, a musician that grew up a few miles from here was back in the area. Her specialty is vocal music, and one evening, she led a hymn sing at our church.
During the event, she talked about how much music can touch the heart. Elvera remembered many years ago that a woman in the church was leaving for a service trip to India. She would be gone for 7 years straight. None of her family or friends would be able to see her during that entire time.
The day she was to depart, friends, family, and church members went with her to the Santa Fe station in Newton, KS. While waiting for her train, at some point, the group started singing. Elvera remembered that they sang
So nimm denn meine H nde (
Take thou my hand, O Father) and
Ich bete an die Macht der Liebe (
O Power of Love).
Elvera remembered they sang in the station, and the high, wood ceilings made it sound like the music filled the whole building. I can't think of a better goodbye than that.
Elvera remembered so many details about the event, but two things she didn't remember were who was leaving and what year this happened. So I remembered this story for awhile, but didn't really follow up on it.
Then last December, our neighbor Hildred called. Hildred and her sister live on their old family farm about a mile from us. They're some of the older members of our church, and I believe both of them have lived on that farm their entire lives. Hildred heard that I am gathering photos for a book about the centennial of our church, and she offered to bring some of them over. Knowing that it was cold and dark outside, the roads were snowy, and that Hildred drives a car at least 40 years old (because "Daddy said this is a good car"), I offered to drive to their place. "Oh no," she said, "it's no trouble. I like to get out. Besides, I haven't seen your house since it's been remodeled!" So she came over.
Hildred had stacks of amazing old photos from the church and the community. And she had a stack of photos and letters from India, where her aunt
Augusta Schmidt was a nurse for 14 years. She was very proud of her aunt's service to the needy there. I started to put things together in my head and asked her if she remembered singing at the train station when Augusta left for India. "Oh sure," said Hildred, as if everyone knew about that.
So that's how it happened that the "historical moment" on Feb. 10 was about Augusta Schmidt. Each month during church, leading up to our centennial in October, we have a brief time where we highlight some interesting story from the church's past. I happened to mention this one at a historical committee meeting.
So, on that Sunday in February, someone got up and told everyone about Augusta's life. She was born in 1894 and graduated from college with a nursing degree in 1927. She heard about India at a conference, and quickly felt that God wanted her to serve there. She left for India in the fall of 1927, and would serve two 7-year terms there.
She wrote that India was a beautiful land, contrary to things she had heard. The city where she worked (I believe it was Bombay, but I'm not positive) had hallmarks of a wealthy city, such as educational institutions, hotels, etc. However, it saddened her greatly to learn that 80% of the people in the city were homeless and slept on the street. No doubt this played a role in her dedication to service there.
After we learned about Augusta, the choir sang So nimm denn meine H nde -- one of the songs that Augusta heard at the train station back in 1927. Imagine you were there, 81 years ago, seeing a friend off on a trip across continents, not to see her again for 7 years. Then the people there start singing a cappella...
So nimm denn meine H nde
und f hre mich
Bis an mein selig Ende
und ewiglich!
Ich kann allein nicht gehen,
nicht einen Schritt;
Wo du wirst gehn und stehen,
da nimm micht mit. | Take thou my hand, O Father,
and lead thou me,
until my journey endeth
eternally.
Alone I will not wander
one single day.
Be thou my true companion
and with me stay. |
You probably weren't there that day in 1927, or even the day in February when the choir sang the song. I wasn't either because I had the flu that day. But I borrowed the cassette recording of that day's service, recorded using the best we have right now -- the wrong type of microphone pointed the wrong way, onto a cassette tape that has certainly been reused way more times than anybody knows.
Click here to listen.
The choir sang the first verse in German, verse 2 in English, and the whole church joined in on verse 3. I'm told there weren't many dry eyes in the church after that. After all, how could you keep a straight face singing "Take, then, my hand, O Father, and lead thou me, until my journey endeth eternally" right after the narrator read about Augusta's retirement and death, saying, "there, I was surrounded by friends, but most of all, by the sovereign love of God who had been with me my entire life."
Postscript
Remember Elvera Voth, from whom I first learned this story? In 1961, she moved to Alaska. Elvera taught at several universities; founded the
Anchorage Opera; directed the Alaska Festival of Music, Anchorage Boys Choir, and Alaska Chamber Singers; and there is
Elvera Voth Hall at the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts.
But her best work, I think, happened after she retired and moved back to Kansas in 1995. In 1998, Elvera founded the
East Hill Singers, a choir composed mainly of minimum-security prison inmates, plus volunteers from the community. Elvera has inspired so many people, taught them that they have value, that they can succeed and make themselves better. One of the
said:
Can you imagine what a standing ovation feels like after being told all your life that you are worthless?
And another inmate
commented:
It made me feel like maybe I'm not just being punished. I mean, I am being punished for what I did. But being in this program made me think that I can also come out well, better a better person.
It all makes me think. What an amazing thing these two women with love in their hearts have done to make this planet a better place. Is it even possible to do that by using weapons that kill and power to frighten?
As Elvera puts it, "many of the men in prison will be back in the community soon. I'd rather have them as a neighbor with hope in their hearts than with hate in their eyes."
I've been critical of the almost abusive terms in the user agreements of most user-harvesting-based services (sometimes called Web 2.0) for a while now. There are quite a few services that I simply won't use because their owners want me, all my web "content" (whether explicitly posted to their site or not), my first born child, or similar. There are even more sites where I'm careful not to put much beyond the bare minimum and try to make sure that I keep backups of nearly all of it. Usually that means keeping a copy of the input, as getting my data back out of most sites is a pig. So far, when I've criticised aggressive user agreements, I've felt like a lone voice in the wilderness. It's been heartening to spot two user-harvesting services geting some abuse over the last week or two. First, the Swift online community platform for conferences has been attacked by both David Lee King and librarian.net for its over-zealous user agreement demands. Particularly "nice" is the feature where one rule of Swift club is that you don't talk about Swift club (see last paragraph of David Lee King's post). Swift's owners have responded. I'll watch and see whether it improves enough to get a follow-up post from either blog. Secondly, the Phorm advertising system has faced hard questions from both Open Rights Group and Sir Tim Berners-Lee over its mysterious user tracking. Phorm hasn't yet replied properly about their potential to harvest user-generated content (web histories and so on) without consent, as far as I can see. If you know anyone on Talk Talk, BT or Virgin, tell them to start planning the exit route. If you'd like to refer them to our agency for The Phone Coop that would be great. I suspect the owners of The Phone Coop would get quite vocal if it ever tried to track users like this and a comment on the ORG post suggests someone else has asked Are we seeing the start of a user-harvesting backlash?
finally, after waiting for some years, we now get the 
I must admit that I feel slightly uneasy about 
I was just editing a file with vim and was about to do the same few strokes repeatedly. I vaguely remembered something about recording macros, so I tried it: I pressed q-1 to start recording, did my steps (a yank, a movement, an insert, a paste, a movement), and finished the recording with q. Now I could repeat these steps with @-1.I then noticed that I forgot something at the end (moving the curser to the beginning of the line). I re-started recording (q-1), thought hey, maybe I can insert the old recording here and pressed @-1. Surprisingly, that worked. I added the missing movement and finshed the recording with q.When I then tried to recall these commands with @-1, the editor froze and I was wondering whether the network connection went down (I was working over SSH). But it wasn t, and it dawned me that vim did not insert my old commands when re-recording the macro, but just inserted the call to the macro itself. My text editor was caught in a infinite loop...Not too bad, I just killed vim, did not lose anything and everything was fine. But I think an editor, even vim, should somehow prevent such behaviour.
Dear lazyweb, this sunday afternoon, I opened BackupManager’s Bugzilla and started squashing bugs. There was 54 bugs opened that requested a review. 15 of them are now tagged “pending” (meaning they’re closed in SVN and will be shiped with the next release).
All of the patches submited - that made sense - were applied, thanks to all the reporters for their help, by the way.
So, fear a new release soon…
I've just finished reading "Don't You Have Time to Think", a collection of letters written to and from Richard P. Feynman. A birthday present from my wishlist.
Previously I've read the collection of letters to/from Tolkien. (Several times actually. Very nice collection!)
It suddenly struck me that over my lifetime I've probably written <200 letters to people.
When I was young I had a couple of 
Another week has been spent in a repetition course in the military. Readers
of my blog will know that this means playing poker (I lost about CHF 7 this
week — we just play for fun at CHF 5 for 50 chips) and watching movies.
Recently, chatting with some folks on the 
I've been extremely busy with labwork lately, trying to get a second paper ready for submission in the coming months. It's taken an obvious toll on my free software work, but that's life I guess. The upside is that the other night I realized why a year and half's worth of experiments kept turning up with negative results that seemed to contradict our other results. It turns out that this experiment was conceptually flawed, and even though I wasted a year and a half on this I did learn something even from those negative results that should go in to the final paper. I'm actually relieved, because even though I don't have all the data yet I can really see how the paper will end up, so I can start writing soon. Oftentimes knowing why something is wrong so you can fix it is even more important than being right.
keeps the release away.
That's why, following 