Open Letter to Steve Martin and Edie Brickell

Mr. Martin and Ms. Brickell,

For the past several weeks I have had the pleasure of attempting to decipher Daddy Murphy for Elkhart Civic Theatre's production of Bright Star. Our production process has been fraught with unexpected difficulties, yet also a delight due in no small part to the way your script draws people into a story that matters.

Thank you for writing a musical with complicated characters who entrench and resist and regret and change and adapt, sometimes all at once. Thank you for writing a sweeping tale of pain and redemption (ahem) that never veers so far toward either that it becomes easy to watch or perform—a story that remains ambiguous and challenging throughout. Thank you for a story that prompts performers to leave the stage sometimes weeping openly at the sheer beauty and kindness and smallness and ridiculousness of humanity.

Thank you.

Brent Graber

PS: We opened our two weekend run on November 12, 2021. Tickets are still available for our performances on November 13, 14, 19, 20, and 21. You know, in case you want to remind yourselves how good you are.

Google Apps and PHP

Because I find Google Apps Admin SDK Directory API PHP Quickstart to be a bit ... spare, and because I spent far too much time searching to find proper examples, here's one more place for poor saps like myself to maybe find some of what they need.

First, the PHP Quickstart, linked above. That should at least get a person connected.

Second, this lovely bit from Michael Seiler. The details (as of November 2016) are no longer quite the same (e.g., the line numbers he refers to in the code are no longer correct), but on the whole this worked.

Third, this thing that a suitably-energized person can probably figure out. (I was able to see, at least somewhat, what Michael Seiler was referring to by using this. That was not the case from looking at the code I'd downloaded from the Quickstart.)

Yes

http://www.computerwizardindy.com/my-fix-for-windows-update-error-80070011/

(Edit: Nov 30, 2016 -- seems like that site no longer exists. May need to rely on Wayback or search engine cache.)

Two posts in a day!

A year of nothing, and now two posts in a day.

How to write to an NTFS drive on Mac OS X 10.8.4 (specifically, how to replace a troublesome ntdll.dll file on Windows 7 running in Bootcamp):

1. Boot into the Mac OS.
2. Start a terminal session.
3. diskutil info /Volumes/BOOTCAMP | grep UUID
4. Copy the UUID
5. Use your favorite text editor (why would it be anything other than vi?) and sudo /etc/fstab
6. Type: UUID=<UUID you copied> none ntfs,rw,auto nobrowse all on one line. The nobrowse is critical for this to work.
7. Save the file
8. Open the disk utility, find the BOOTCAMP volume and unmount it.
9. Remount the BOOTCAMP volume.
10. In the terminal window type open /Volumes/BOOTCAMP to open the windows partition in the Finder.
11. Modify as needed. (This, at least, worked just fine for me to replace a balky ntdll.dll file that was crashing whenever I'd be organizing files in Windows Explorer.)