Bound to be fun — Book group has been together nearly 20 years

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

There are readers and then there are readers.

The former pack a book for a plane ride. They skim through the paper in the morning. They end the day with a chapter or two before turning out the light.

For the latter, anytime their eyes and hands aren’t immediately occupied doing something else, they’re glued to a page. If they’re not reading, they’re thinking about what they’ve been reading, or planning what to read next. For those, the only thing worse than having nothing to read is having no one to share what they’re reading with.

That’s where book groups come in.

“You just get jived, you know, when you love to read,” said Rosie Reeder, who recently taught a class for Soldotna Community Schools on how to form a book group. “How you read a book and think, ‘Man, I’d love to talk to somebody about it.’

“I have friends who say, ‘How can you be so excited about a book?’ Hey, my name is Reeder. It’s kind of spelled out that I do these things.”

Reeder and the seven-woman book group she’s part of, literally called THE Book Group — “I feel a little like ‘Who’s On First?’ when I say it,” Reeder said — have been meeting “for about 18 years, or some ridiculous thing. I put it in my appointment book. I just hate to miss it.”

The group, Marge Hays, Sammy Crawford, Lois Pillifant, Susan Jelsma, Sherril Miller, Reeder and Peggy Toppenberg, meets every Wednesday morning for about an hour and has become so entrenched in members’ lives they’ve even managed the seemingly impossible — maintaining regular meetings in the summer, albeit on a reduced schedule of once a month.

And these aren’t even the best of friends, desperate for a reason to get together and chat. They’ve know each other for differing numbers of years and interact in various professional, community, philanthropic and social realms, but other than their book group, they probably wouldn’t all get together as regularly as they do, if at all. And that’s good, Reeder said.

“I’ve found that best friends are not necessarily the best way to do it because you tend to talk about some pretty heavy stuff and you’re too busy visiting,” she said.
Just discussing the books leaves plenty to talk about. In part, that’s due to the members’ personalities.

“We’re all kind of type A personalities. We try to give turns, but we’re not very good at it, to be perfectly honest,” Reeder said. “We try to honor each other and try and take turns.”

“The other thing is they have to be skilled at interruptions, obviously, because we all talk at the same time,” Pillifant said.

On April 1, the group was discussing “Exile,” by Richard North Patterson, a thriller set amid the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The group rarely reads novels, preferring nonfiction, especially biographies and the like.

“Our basic thing is we like to learn from what we read,” Reeder said.

The novel is set in real context, which fit the bill as informative. As usual, not everyone was in agreement over specific elements of the book, much less whether they enjoyed it overall.

But that’s half the fun of the discussion.

“I can’t believe that she even went in the first place. Oh lady, what were you thinking?” Hays said, reiterating her take on one of the book’s main characters.
“Oh, here you go again,” Reeder said.

“Some of the books we read, I would not read, and I wouldn’t have read a chapter of this unless you told me too,” Pillifant said.

“But that’s good for us. One thing I like about a book club is it sure expands what you read,” Hays said.

THE Book Group started with Hays and Reeder. The two got talking about their mutual love of books before a college class one day, and said they’d both always wanted to be in a book group.

“Marge said, ‘Well, you know we could start one.’ And I said, ‘Oh, that would be cool.’ Next week I came back she said, ‘Did you get some people?’ I said, ‘Oh, I thought you were kidding,’” Reeder said.

The group’s membership and numbers have fluctuated over the years, but they finally hit on a makeup that works for them: Seven women, amiable but not superclose friends, who love to read to learn and are willing to speak up about it.

“In book group it’s so cool relating something and somebody else will say, ‘I don’t remember it being that funny,’ or that whatever, and you realize it’s the way you read it, so that’s a whole new perspective,” Reeder said.

They occasionally get inquiries from people looking to join a group, but they don’t want more than seven. Yet filling their last opening took some time to find someone who fit well into the group, could meet at the scheduled time and was interested in mostly nonfiction books.

“It took forever for us to find someone and to make the decision, and they turned us down,” Hays said. “We were so sure everyone wanted to join our group. We had to have a moment of silence.”

With this group, the silence probably didn’t last long.

Writing rules for reading

Rosie Reeder, who has participated in a book group for about 18 years, has fielded questions over the years from kindred bibliophiles looking to join or start a book group.

It’s a great activity, but just like some books take effort to get into them, forming a cohesive, consistent group can take patience and persistence, she said.
Here are her tips for forming a book group:

Decide how many and what types of people you want. For numbers, three aren’t enough, because it’s hard to have a good discussion if someone doesn’t show, and 10 are too many because it’s hard for everyone to get a chance to talk. As for types of people, Reeder advises against close friends, because it’s too easy to talk about everything but the book. On the other hand, having people who are extremely dissimilar can cause more friction in discussions than some members may want to endure.

Decide logistics. Where will you meet? How often? What time? For how long? How long will you take to read a book? Are kids allowed? Will there be food, coffee, wine? If so, who’s bringing or preparing it?

Some things to keep in mind: Restaurants can be fun, but also expensive, and wait staff may not want a large, possibly loud group taking up a table for hours on end. But if it’s at a home, you don’t want hosting responsibilities to become disruptive or burdensome.

“If it’s at your house, well I have a family and a life and you’re going to come here every week for four hours on the weekend? I don’t think so,” Reeder said.

“We meet at my house, and I don’t have anything except coffee or tea water. If gets to be a drudge, you’re not going to do it for 18 years,” she said.
Decide what type of books you’ll read.

“The type of books you read, I think, has lot to do with it,” Reeder said. “If you want to meet five or six times and be done, it doesn’t matter. But you really need to have some commonalities, like we read almost all nonfiction and we read a book in about a month. You really need to pick something that holds your interest. We have a hard time with a romance book or a novel, because what are you going to talk about? ‘Did you think he did it?’ ‘Yeah, he did it.’ Then you’re done.”

Decide how you’ll get books. Buying even one book a month can get expensive, but local libraries don’t usually have enough copies for everyone in a book group to read the same thing at the same time.

“That’s huge. You could really spend a lot of money if you end up buying them, and you don’t want to steal them, so you have to figure something out,” Reeder said.

Reeder recommends combining a variety of approaches — including libraries, checking with River City Books about a discount for book groups, shopping at used book stores, shopping online, trading off books with other book groups, borrowing from friends and taking advantage of the Anchorage Public Library’s Book Club Bags, where the library will lend out and ship batches of about 10 books for six weeks at a time.

Sweet dreams: Author wants to share family tales with other kids

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

Ken Covey, of Soldotna, may find it a little odd to tell his stories to a group of wide-awake kids, since his tales came about as bedtime stories told to his six children, then 15 grandchildren, over the past 40 years.

He’s scheduled to do a book talk and reading of his book, “The Adventures of a Little Boy Named Kenny,” at 1 p.m. April 18 at the Triumvirate Theatre Bookstore in the Peninsula Center Mall in Soldotna. His grandson, Josh Lofquist, a senior at Nikiski High School, will be there to talk about illustrating the book, as well.

Covey wrote the book before Christmas this winter and had it self-published at the urging of his family.

“It’s a compilation of stories that I’ve been telling my kids and grandkids ever since they were small, starting out with the older kids in the 40s now,” Covey said. “As they grew older they wanted them to be recorded so they weren’t lost, so they encouraged me to write them down. And my wife, too, she’s one of the instigators.”

The stories are of young Kenny and the adventures — or misadventures — he gets into growing up in the mountains of Colorado, whether it’s accidentally stowing away on a train in an effort to find out where the tracks by his house go, or building a homemade “hootenanny” go-cart that has no end of go, but is a little short on stop.

The tales are drawn from Covey’s own childhood experiences and they’ve changed somewhat over the years depending on who he’s telling them to and what he wants to get across with the stories.

Each tale can be read in 10 or 15 minutes, and contains a lesson along with the adventure.

“I hope there’s a little wisdom in there, and a little bit of teaching. I guess a moral might be the way to say it. Every story has a moral of what he should or shouldn’t have done, or could or couldn’t have done or whatever. When I was telling the stories to my kids they were designed not only just to entertain them, but also to instruct them about how actions have consequences and how you should think through things before doing them and not just jump into things before thinking,” Covey said.

Covey hasn’t published anything before, but he’s done writing in college while getting his bachelor’s degree in education, and he’s written stories and poems “for my own amusement,” he said.

“My degree is in education and I was a pastor of a church for several years, so I’m a communicator, I guess you might say. Or try to be, anyway,” Covey said.
One of the biggest challenges was switching communication modes — changing oral stories to written ones.

“I’m not sure that they came out the same way they were told. Translating them to the page was difficult. You can’t use hand gestures and facial expressions and voice inflection and all that sort of thing to tell a story in a book, so the language had to be more colorful, I guess,” Covey said. “Actually, it was easy to write the stories, it was hard to get them to sound right on paper — a lot of changing of words and using a word wrench to get the right phrases in there, and the punctuation all had to be in there, which you don’t think about when you’re telling a story.”

Covey also had to break “one of his sacred convictions that adults cannot hear a Kenny story,” he wrote in the forward to the book. “This is one of the things that has endeared the stories to the kids, because they exist in a secret place where adults cannot enter and where one little boy is the center and hero of his world.”
It was a sacrifice he was willing to make in this and his future planned Kenny books, in order to share the stories with more kids.

“Of course, I like kids. We have six of our own and all our grandkids. Kids are special and need all the help they can get,” he said.

The book talk and reading will be part of the formation of a book group for kids, probably at a fourth-grade reading level and up, said Rosie Reeder, coordinator of the Triumvirate Bookstore. The first meeting will be at the bookstore, then may move to the Soldotna library. Reeder expects the group will meet once every three or four weeks and read a book a month.

The book group is open to anyone, and Reeder is seeking sponsors to help defray the costs of purchasing books for the kids to read.

For more information, contact Reeder at 262-2908.

For more information on Covey’s book, visit www.outskirtspress.com/adventuresofkenny. It is available for purchase at River City Books, Triumvirate Bookstore and online at www.amazon.com, www.barnsandnoble.com and www.borders.com.

Wild catch — Fisherman in the middle of bear-shark tug-of-war

By Clark Fair
Redoubt Reporter

Commercial fisherman Bill Holt thought the shark was bad enough — and then the bear came along.

Holt later admitted he was somewhat amused by what transpired next, but mostly he was just irritated because he was losing precious fishing time.

In a world of 12-hour openings and limited resources, Holt didn’t appreciate wasting minutes when he could be netting salmon and making money.

“That’s the one thing about commercial fishing,” he said. “You can never rest on your laurels. As soon as something goes wrong, you’ve gotta be thinking about the next place to go because you have such a small window of opportunity to make it.”

Holt’s notions about taking advantage of limited time have been honed by years of experience. He has been drift fishing Cook Inlet for about 30 years. For nearly 20 of those years he fished the east side until the runs petered out, and then motored across to the west side to extend his season.

Typically, in mid- to late August, he would enter Chinitna Bay, just south of Mount Iliamna, to take advantage of the runs of silver salmon entering the streams there to spawn. At the head of the bay, he might jockey for position with other boats trying to corral schools of salmon headed for Clear Creek, but he preferred the more sedate opportunities along the bay’s northern shore, particularly in tiny Clam Cove, when the weather and the tides were right.

Holt, a local school board member who is the chief caretaker of the Tsalteshi Trails behind Skyview High School, entered Clam Cove one morning in August 1995 and set about preparing to fish the outgoing tide, as he had done many times before.

As water leaves the cove and enters the bay during an ebb tide, it is swept west to east toward the mouth of the bay and open inlet. So Holt fished the cove’s east-side beach, cognizant of the need to keep his fishing vessel inside the cove and not drift into the main tidal current, where it could be pulled eastward and trail his nets into the rocks on the point of the cove.

On this particular morning, Holt backed up his boat — a 34-foot fiberglass vessel named the Loujon — as close as he could to the sandy beach and dropped his 40-inch bright orange buoy right at the water’s edge. Fishing regulations state that a buoy, which marks the far end of a fisherman’s net, must be in the water at all times. Holt likes to tie his buoy close to the end of his net and place it just offshore to prevent salmon from skirting his mesh on that side.

He said he is careful not to place the buoy actually on the shore because he is “paranoid” about breaking the law and bringing down the wrath of fish cops. As the tide ebbs, he keeps enough tension on the boat end of the net to prevent the buoy from going dry.

“We always heard these stories about (former Fish and Game wardens) Dan France and Al Thompson, that they would be over there and they would hide in hollow tree trunks,” he said. “Whether that was true or not, I don’t know, but we always lived in fear of that.”

After dropping the buoy, he and his crew — his 12-year-old son, Galen, and a college graduate named Maggie, who was set to enter Harvard Medical School later that fall and had never fished commercially before — began feeding out the net in a series of small S-turns that Holt likes to call “lollygags.” The lollygags give him handling flexibility with a net three shackles (900 feet) long, and the turns in the net sometimes confound the fish and cause them to become more easily trapped.

“We were catching some fish,” Holt said. “And as the tide started leaving, I had to start pulling harder offshore. So pretty soon, essentially, I sort of had a straight net.

“And so we’re fishing, fishing, fishing — and all of a sudden the (first shackle of) net just goes completely underwater and starts thrashing around.”

The net began to bow outward slightly south toward open water.

“When I first saw it happen, my first thought was we’d just seen killer whales that morning going up the bay. But then I realized, no way; I would’ve seen them. The boat was in only 6 or 7 feet of water.

“And then we saw that it was a shark. You could see its ugly old shark nose and all that stuff. It went back down and started thrashing around.”

The salmon shark, which Holt estimated at 8 to 10 feet long and 250 to 300 pounds, became so entangled in the mesh that it could not escape. Holt’s crew was “pretty excited,” he said, but he was becoming concerned.

“I’m thinking, ‘Oh, man, here we go. It’s gonna wreck the net. It’s obviously gonna wreck the net.’ And I knew that to pull back and get the shark out would cause the buoy to pull too far offshore and then I’d have too much current.”

Then, as if the situation wasn’t bad enough, out of the mix of alders and spruce at the margin formed by the beach and the woods, came a large black bear that ambled down the incline to the water’s edge, apparently drawn by the jerking motions of the buoy.

“It just sat there like you’re sitting on a stool or a chair, sat there watching the buoy. Ten feet away from this buoy, just sitting there watching it.”

The bear didn’t sit still very long. Intrigued or irritated by the movement, it returned to all fours, walked determinedly down to the buoy, grabbed it with both paws, and bit it.

“Then it takes the buoy and starts backing up the beach with it. He pulled it up the beach a little ways to where it was actually on the sand. So he’s actually helping me fish,” Holt said. “And then he dropped the buoy, walked away and sat there, watching.

“And the shark’s still going at it, and pretty soon it starts pulling back off the beach again. Pretty soon the buoy’s back out in the water, so the bear comes down and grabs the buoy again and pulls it back up on the beach. And I think this happened three times.

“It was like a shark and a bear playing tug-of-war with each other, and I’m in there, too, trying to mediate the whole thing. Eventually, the bear quit pulling up, and the shark kept screwing around, and in order to keep things straight I ended up catching some current.”

As the bear disappeared back into the woods, Holt was forced to motor out into the current and around the point to steer clear of the rocks. As he drifted eastward, he used a hydraulic gillnet drum to winch in the net until the shark was free of the water. Once he had slashed at the net enough to liberate the shark, he was able to bring in the rest of the net and pick the fish he had caught. He was delighted to see that, despite his double predator seesaw struggles, he had 100 to 150 silvers in his hold.

The morning wasn’t off to such a bad start, after all.

But, as a true fisherman knows, time spent contemplating one’s fortunes or misfortunes is time lost, so Holt prepared to fish again. “By the time I got the net back in, I’d forgotten all about the incident and I was already trying to think about someplace else to go fish. And I was upset because this thing had taken some time out of my fishing day.

“We only needed two shackles of gear there, anyway,” he added. “What I did was cut all the floppy net out and restart the set. When you’re fishing, you don’t ever give up.”

Sliding into spring — Avalanche hazard in Turnagain Pass

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

Snowmachiners, backcountry skiers and climbers beware: the January hurricane crust could come back to bury you.

That’s the message from Carl Skustad, with the Chugach National Forest Avalanche Information Center. The center issued an advisory of extreme avalanche danger in the Turnagain Pass area on Friday.

“The current hazard is out there due to the large amounts of new snow. We’ve actually gotten about one-third of our total snow in the last three weeks, and that is sitting on top of a weak layer that was formed mid-January,” Skustad said Friday.

Conditions formed what Skustad calls a hurricane crust. Winds gusting up to 120 mph on ridge tops and rain up to 3,000 feet in January created an icy layer on top of the snowpack. Subsequent snowfalls, which have gotten heavier as temperatures warm, are sitting on top of that slick surface.

“Now we’ve reached this point where there’s this much stress on top of a weak layer and it’s exceeding the strength of this weak layer. That’s why any additional load could tip the balance, or any skier or snowmobile or climber,” Skustad said.

In these conditions, a slide could be triggered by as little as the warming rays of the sun. On steep slopes, any snowmachining, skiing, climbing or snowshoeing could trigger an avalanche, and risky activities like high marking pose a distinct threat.

“No, that’s definitely not a good idea right now,” Skustad said.

Most avalanches happen on slopes with a 38-degree or higher angle.

“But that’s just another indication of how tender our snowpack is now, that we’re seeing avalanches as low as 25 degrees,” Skustad said.

“I do not have a good feeling for the rest of the season,” he said. “We’re in April, so, really, we’re looking at a month. Once the snowpack has a chance to go through the whole avalanche cycle, which it does every spring, and it gets to what is called isothermal — when the snowpack is all the same temperature. Past that we’re golden, but until that point this weak layer will live under there.”

The hazard was issued for the Turnagain Arm area, but Skustad cautions that the same conditions probably exist throughout the highway backcountry corridor.

“It’s confirmed all the way through Summit Lake, and I expect all the way into the Lost Lake area. There’s nothing to think that it’s not at Lost Lake. I think it’s safe to assume this hazard does exist all the way down to there,” he said.

The death of 35-year-old Yancy Flair, of Anchorage, who was buried in a slide in Johnson Pass while snowmachining March 28, and a slide that closed the Seward Highway between Girdwood and Portage on March 27 has punctuated the avalanche danger in the Turnagain Arm region recently. It took searchers until Saturday to recover Flair’s body.

Skustad said conditions are hazardous, but not extremely unusual.

“It’s something that we can expect every few years. It’s the persistent weak layer that happens midwinter that determines how significant our spring instability is going to be. We had a couple really large events midwinter that have now come back to haunt us in the snowpack,” he said.

That doesn’t mean the mountains should be off-limits, just approached with caution and the proper gear — including avalanche beacons.

“I always tell people they should go out and recreate out of doors somehow. You need to keep the slope angle low and have experience, or travel with someone who has experience with avalanche awareness,” Skustad said.

Science of the Seasons: Stone cold crazy in love

It snowed again this week and spring seems to have been put off again. After a long winter, many of us are ready to see a color change from pure white snow (perhaps with a little gray volcanic ash as an accent) to the shades of green that spring offers.

Various trees are showing bulging catkins that are preparing to pop open, and swelling leaf buds will soon give rise to the next generation of leaves. A postponement of what we think of as spring may occur, but changes are ongoing in the streams, whether we know it or not.

If we could see underneath the ice cover of streams and rivers today, there are subtle changes happening. A fair number of aquatic insects have been feeding and growing during the winter months, and some will emerge as adults within a couple weeks. One of the early emerging insects from the Kenai River is a group of small stoneflies (Plecopterans), commonly called winter flies or winter stoneflies. They get these names because they can often be seen crawling on the snow and ice in the late winter or early spring.

Two weeks from now there will be thousands of tiny black, Capnidae stoneflies emerging from gravel substrate areas. If you happen to walk along the river, perhaps near Slikok Creek, every large rock along the stream edge will be crawling with slender, half-inch long stonefly adults. A close examination will reveal that these little insects have transparent wings folded flat on their backs, indicating they are in fact adults and no longer nymphs.

They aren’t very strong fliers so they prefer to crawl. You’ll find them crawling all over you if you sit down for any length of time or even stand still for a few seconds. They do not feed as adults and will see you as a tall, drumming platform and a possible place to find a mate. One might argue that they are “looking for love in all the wrong places,” but there will be lots of them using you as their personal dating service.

In some years the Kenai River ice cover has been melted away by now. This year it seems that the ice cover could remain intact during their chosen emergence period; but that will not deter their massive emergence. Most of these insects use light duration as their “zeitgeber” or timing cue, and they don’t really care if there is still ice cover or not.

Hidden from our view are air-filled spaces beneath the ice because of lowering river levels. There are lots of exposed rocks or even ice surfaces for the insects to use as an emergence platform. Winter stoneflies can emerge underneath the ice cover, find a mate, lay eggs and die, all hidden from the gaze of curious entomologists or insect predators.

For shortlived aquatic insects, and these stoneflies might only survive for two weeks, synchronous emergence of the entire population is important. By having most members of the population becoming an aerial insect at the same time, there is a high likelihood of everyone finding a mate. Since they are emerging early in the spring, very few avian predators are around to disrupt their party.

Along the Kenai River, various shore birds, like lesser yellowlegs, will work the shoreline, feeding on as many stoneflies as they can, but they cannot eat them all. These winter stoneflies will emerge by the tens of thousands so the predators that do appear will soon become satiated. The surviving flies will be able to complete their reproductive duties.

Because of a diverse number of microhabitats in the Kenai River, there are a fair number of different species of stoneflies. This species diversity probably comes from the variety of possible food sources available for stoneflies. Many, like the winter stoneflies we’ll be seeing in a few weeks, are leaf shredders. They feed on leaves, mostly those from riparian trees that are infested with nutrient-rich bacteria and fungi. The nymphs (immature stoneflies) chop the leaves into fine fragments and pass them through their gut. Because their guts are relatively inefficient — they can only extract about 5 percent of the nutrients they take in — they process a lot of leaves. Now you know why we don’t find many leaves in the river after the ice melts.

Another guild of stoneflies are active predators on smaller aquatic insects. These predators target the most abundant stream insects, the midge larvae and young mayflies. Some stoneflies combine the two lifestyles by starting their nymphal careers as a detritivore but slowly change into omnivores and eventually become predators.

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects about many stoneflies is their novel approach to finding a mate. The males will crawl into a nearby shrub or tree and begin to “drum” on the limb with their abdomen. A receptive female, upon sensing the drumming, will answer with her own abdomen tapping and crawl toward the male virtuoso. Eventually the male will find the responding female and they mate. Each stonefly species uses a unique drumming cadence so inappropriate species are not attracted. Eggs are then laid on the stream surface or along the shoreline on submerged structures like a rock or tree limb. Soon stonefly nymphs hatch out and start the yearly cycle again.

David Wartinbee, Ph.D, J.D., is a biology professor at Kenai Peninsula College’s Kenai River Campus. He is writing a series of columns on the ecology of the Kenai River watershed.

Plugged In: Speeding up PCs doesn’t have to empty out wallets

This week, I’d like to discuss the last few cost-effective computer upgrades. Some of these upgrades, such as CPU and system board replacements, are more likely to require the services of an experienced local technician to actually implement them.

CD/DVD drives. Modern CD and DVD drives are inexpensive and faster than earlier drives. I’ve bought good-quality Sony CD/DVD drives for as little as $20 to $40. This is an easy and worthwhile upgrade. Remove both side panels and unplug the power and ribbon cables, noting the correct orientation for later reassembly. Unscrew the four screws attaching the drive to the case, slide out the old drive through the front panel and slide in the new drive from the front panel. Reattach screws, power plug and data cable.

Upgrading CPU processors and system boards. I usually don’t recommend that an inexperienced home user upgrade either the CPU processor or the system board even though they can be a worthwhile upgrade. Unless you have prior experience replacing a CPU, there is a very good chance that you will permanently damage this expensive but fragile component. A professional technician can usually do the upgrade in a fairly short time.

The most cost-effective CPU upgrade would be one in which you substitute a significantly faster version of the same processor type. Usually, the most economical and beneficial approach involves replacing an entry-level CPU with a later, faster version of the same product line, installing additional cooling as needed. I believe the best cost-performance ratio is usually found in CPUs that are one speed grade lower than the current top-end model. Because system board and memory hardware may differ among product lines, you probably should consult an experienced local technician to evaluate whether it’s worth upgrading your system, determining the most appropriate replacement CPU, and have that technician do the upgrade.

Upgrading system boards is even more difficult. You’ll need to make many different sorts of connections and set numerous options during system board installation. Unless you already have significant experience installing new system boards, this is definitely a job for an experienced technician.

My current preference for cost-effective CPUs is the 2.8 Ghz AMD quad-core Phenom II line. Although most operating systems do not efficiently use all four CPUs on any processing chip, this new processor line does have significant overall performance improvements compared to earlier models. You’ll most likely need to upgrade the system board and memory. The Phenom II requires DDR2 1066 memory and a system board with an AM2+ socket. I like the Gigabyte boards built around the AMD 790 series chipsets.

Power supplies. The fast new hardware that we’ve discussed over the past several weeks does require a lot of power and cooling, and you may need to upgrade your power supply. At this time, I am using 600-watt power supplies to ensure that there’s ample power, especially if you have installed more than one hard disk. The brand is not important but be sure it has enough of the right kinds of power plugs — at least two, preferably four, SATA hard disk power plugs, at least one six-pin PCI-E video card plug, plus the usual 20-pin and four-pin system board main power plugs. You’ll want a floppy disk power connector and some spare, traditional four-pin Molex power plugs for your CD/DVD, fans and front panel power lights. The power supply should have one or two large, quiet fans. I prefer 120-millimeter fans to move a lot of air quietly.

Replacing the power supply is not difficult if you take care to avoid disturbing other cables, connections and settings inside your computer. Open up both side panels of the computer case. Disconnect the main AC power card from the wall outlet. Then disconnect all internal connections to system boards, disk drives of all sorts, fans and video cards. Remove the four rear screws that attach the power supply to the case, carefully sliding it out to avoid hitting and damaging other components. Slide in the new power supply, attach the screws and reconnect the various power plugs.

Ideally, rather than leaving a tangled mess of power wires inside the computer case where they can get caught in fans or tug on other connections, take some heavy wire ties, loop the extra connectors and overly long cables into one or more neat bundles and wire tie them together.

Video card upgrades. Upgrading to a really fast video card is worthwhile only if you are a serious gamer, a designer using AutoCAD or using the latest version of Adobe PhotoShop CS4 and other higher-end Abode products. Most business users will not see any obvious benefit.

Having said that, upgrading a video card can be easy if your intended upgrade card contains the same brand video chipsets as the video card you’re replacing. Although there are many video card brands, almost all include basic video chipsets made by either ATI or nVidia.

Both of these vendors use what’s often termed “unified drivers,” which means the recent ATI or nVidia device driver software will work with nearly all brands of recent video cards using a wide range of low-end to high-end ATI or nVidia chipsets. That’s a positive development because mismatched video driver software will usually result in a complete system crash at boot-up.

For this reason, a home upgrader is well-advised to purchase an upgrade card that incorporates the basic video chips from the same vendor as their existing display hardware and to first ensure they have already installed the latest stable device driver software from either ATI or nVidia, as appropriate. Under the best circumstances, physically swapping the video cards will be all that’s required.

To determine whether your computer currently uses either ATI or nVidia video chipsets, check the printed materials that came with your computer. If that is not clear, go to “Start,” “Settings,” “Control Panel,” “System,” “Hardware” tab, “Device Manager” button, “Display Adapters” and then click on the “Display Adapters” + box. Windows will list the video chipset manufacturer and series. Double click on the chipset listing and you will bring up the “Properties” box. Click on the “Driver” table and Windows will list complete information about which video card device driver software is currently installed. If it’s within a year or so, there should be no problem.

You can manually check for a standard update by clicking on “Start,” “Windows Update” and select the “custom” button. After Windows Update checks your computer for currently installed software, click on the “Hardware, optional” button to see whether newer video software is available and certified by Microsoft. If so, choose and install it.

If you decide to upgrade with a video card using a different vendor’s chipsets, then you simply need to temporarily set your display to VGA 640 x 480 or 800 x 600 before starting your upgrade. To do this, right click on a blank area of your Windows desktop, choose “Properties,” then the “Settings” tab and adjust the “screen resolution” slider to these lower resolutions.

Because I use several high-end Adobe products in my legal practice, I looked carefully for an advanced video chipset that supported all of the various Adobe Master Suite CS4 products, not just PhotoShop. Weirdly, some of the Adobe products packaged together as Abode Master Collection CS4 are certified with some video chipsets and other Adobe products are certified with an entirely different group of video chipsets.

The only economical video chipset that I found to be broadly compatible was the ATI Radeon 3870 set of products. Because I have been using lower-end Radeon video cards for some time, installing a 3870-based video card was easy, at least for Windows XP systems. I found the single ATI 3870 GPU cards made by Sapphire were fast, well made and affordable, costing between $85 and $100.

Summary Upgrade Specifications. Here’s a modern computer system that I would consider a very good balance of performance and cost-effectiveness:
1. Mid-tower case with 600-watt power supply, brand unimportant.
2. AMD Phenom II 2.8 gigahertz CPU processor.
3. Gigabyte Socket AM2+ system board, model depending upon your particular peripheral device needs. I prefer the newer AMD 790 series of chipsets.
4. Four gigabytes DDR2 1066 DRAM memory.
5. Video card based upon ATI single-processor 3870 GPU chipset. Sapphire brand has been reliable and inexpensive.
6. Sony or comparable 16x DVD and CD burner.
7. Standard 3.5-inch, 1.44 MB floppy disk for operating system installation.
8. Western Digital Black Caviar 640GB WD6401AALS hard disk. If you are interested in maximum performance, then use a 10,000-rpm Western Digital. 300GB VeliceRaptor hard disk as your C: boot drive and program storage drive and the 640 GB WD6401AALS drive as your D: drive where your data would be stored.
9. Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse. Surprisingly, the less expensive models seem more reliable.
10. Digital monitor to taste. At the moment, the 23- and 24-inch 1080p flat screen monitors from Acer, ASUS, HP and Samsung seem like the best deals.

Video Card Setup: WARNING: If any technical setup information below seems at all confusing to you, then I would urge you to stop at this time and either abandon any video upgrade or get the job done by a competent local technician.

A few days before you update your video device driver software, and again when you later upgrade your video hardware go to Windows “Start,” “Settings,” “Control Panel,” “System,” “System Restore” and be absolutely sure that “System Restore” has been operating and tracking all drives. Use your system regularly for a few days to ensure that you have at least one good system restore point..

When you are ready to install the new video card, shut down your computer, ground yourself to avoid static discharge, and unplug the power cord. Open the side panel that allows access to the system board. Find the first PCI-E card slot. If your computer is too old to include a PCI-E slot, then it is too old to be worth upgrading even if you could still find the older hardware.

The physical side of the upgrade process can be straightforward unless other computer components physically get in the way. Many modern computers, particularly less expensive systems, often include a lower-end video display on the system board rather than as a separate video card. In that case, you will not have a separate display card to first remove but instead you’ll just plug the new video card directly into the first PCI-E slot, secure it to the case with the appropriate screw, and, if required, plug in a 6-pin auxiliary power cable.

However, when you next reboot, you will first need to go into the BIOS setup and configure your hardware to set the new video card as the default boot-up display. If you don’t have a free 6-pin power plug, then you will need to get a simple adapter from older 4-pin Molex power plugs to a 6-pin PCI-E video card power plug.

Again, don’t try this at home if you are at all uncertain about what to do. Instead, have a local technician do the work for you. Making a mistake in the BIOS setup can make your system unusable until a technician restores the BIOS to factory defaults.

Physically installing a powerful new video card can be sublimely easy or really tricky, depending upon whether your system has a modern power supply with a free 6-pin power plug for the PCI-E video card and depending upon whether your existing computer has system board components, hard disks, cables or other hardware that physically get in the way.

Even if your system does not have a free six-pin PCI-E power connector, a computer technician often can provide a simple adapter that converts traditional four pin Molex power connectors to 6-pin PCI-E, so this is not a serious problem. Likewise, if you have cables or hard disks that physically interfere, these can be moved if you know what you’re doing. However, both of these factors should be taken into account before you decide whether to install a faster video card. Upgrading simply may not be worth the trouble.

I upgraded three Windows XP and Windows XP x64 computers with these Sapphire video cards and found that the upgrades to Windows XP systems were easy and worthwhile. Upgrading the Windows XP x64 system was troublesome because ATI’s newest 2009 x64 drivers were not stable, forcing me rebuild the system and revert to ATI’s older but stable July 2008 x64 software. I would expect the same stability problems with the 64-bit version of Windows Vista, which is based upon the XP x64 software.

If you experience any crashing after upgrading device driver hardware, then boot up in Windows Safe Mode by passing the F8 key several times during your next boot-up. Windows Safe Mode will start and then ask you whether you wish to boot normally. Answer No and then choose a system restore point that you know will work reliably. Your system will revert to the earlier software and settings, thus giving you a stable system and another chance to cause yourself grief.

After you have physically installed any new video card, then run the installation disk that comes with your new hardware and again go to “properties”, “settings” to configure your new display to your taste.

Local attorney Joe Kashi received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from MIT and his law degree from Georgetown University. He has published many articles about computer technology, law practice and digital photography in national media since 1990. Many of his technology and photography articles can be accessed through his Web site, www.kashilaw.com.

Big shots — Eruption photographers find their work appearing far and wide

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

Just like any good news photographer, David Wartinbee didn’t waste time celebrating the good luck that put him in the right place at the right time with a camera in his hand as a spectacular mushroom cloud bloomed over Mount Redoubt on Saturday afternoon. He lifted his camera to his eye and started shooting, and didn’t stop until the eruption subsided.

Then he went straight to his computer and filed his images. Later that evening they started showing up in media venues across the state, and soon, the nation and world.

All in a day’s work for an intrepid roving news photographer.

Except Wartinbee isn’t a news photographer. He doesn’t work for a media company or wire service; doesn’t have a press pass or journalism credentials. He’s a biology professor at Kenai Peninsula College’s Kenai River Campus with a recreational interest in photography whose front porch in Soldotna faces out across Cook Inlet, and who happened to be pulling into his driveway just when the mountain started to go off.

But through the power of digital cameras and the Internet, and a world that’s becoming insatiable for instantaneous imagery, Wartinbee and other central peninsula residents were deputized as newshounds that day, by virtue of having cameras, having something spectacular to point them at, and being willing to share.

Shots seen ’round the world

Until Saturday, Mount Redoubt hasn’t been terribly cooperative with photographers in this round of activity. Other than some visible steam plumes, most of the volcano’s many eruptions since March 22 happened at night or were shrouded behind clouds and haze. Redoubt hadn’t produced anything nearly as visually exciting as the iconic image that came from its last eruptive cycle in 1989-1990, when a massive, red-tinged mushroom cloud spread over the mountain April 21, 1990.

Saturday was different. Clouds lifted, the air was clear and the mountain was visible from the Kenai Peninsula around 2:30 p.m.

“Kathy (Wartinbee’s wife) and I came home from whatever we were doing — I think we did something exciting like go to the dump. When we came back and were driving down the road to our driveway, I could see that the mountain was visible, and we hadn’t seen it for days,” Wartinbee said.

He got out his camera to take a few shots, and showed Kathy the spot where he’d taken a photo of Redoubt venting at sunset on March 15.

“I started taking pictures from the deck and as I did I could see something was going on. I said, ‘Hey, there’s a bubble there, and it’s growing.’ And it was growing very fast and we just sat there and watched this thing blossom. We were absolutely dumbfounded by how fast it happened, how fast it went from a little bubble to bang, this thing is there. It wasn’t 15 minutes from the time it started to the time there was this huge, anvil-shaped cloud that was moving toward us,” he said.

Wartinbee’s first shots were dark as the ash cloud was low on the horizon. As it gained altitude it caught the sunlight. By the end of the event Wartinbee had to zoom out to get the spreading ash cloud in the frame.

He went to his computer and downloaded the images, then sent some to the Alaska Volcano Observatory, which posts volcano images on its Web site, www.avo.alaska.edu. The photos are free to download and use, and media sources can print or air them, but must include the photographer’s name. Wartinbee also sent a few to news sources in the state, thinking they might want some eruption shots.

KTUU TV aired one of his photos in its late newscast Saturday, and the Anchorage Daily News ran the same shot in its Sunday edition. From there it was picked up by The Associated Press, a content-sharing membership organization for media outlets worldwide. And that’s where it went — worldwide.

Wartinbee did an Internet search for the photo Sunday, and found it on Web sites for National Public Radio and several newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and papers in a Syracuse, N.Y., Buffalo, N.Y., Taiwan, South America and Finland. It’s also on the U.S. Army Alaska’s Web site and numerous blog sites — all with his name attached to it.

“I just thought, ‘I wonder how far this thing has gone? If they (the Daily News and KTUU) picked it up, I wonder if anybody else did?’ And it’s amazing how far it’s gone. It’s like, ‘Wow, how many people are interested in this little news item?’” Wartinbee said. “My 15 minutes of fame.”

Jaden Larson, of Nikiski, is enjoying her 15 minutes of fame, as well — one for every year she’s been alive.

The Nikiski Middle School eighth-grader was driving home from a movie in Kenai on Saturday with her sister when they noticed an oddly dark cloud creeping overhead as they were passing The Salvation Army thrift store on the Kenai Spur Highway.

“We just kind of thought it was an odd-looking cloud so I got some pictures because I didn’t know what it was,” she said.

Jaden and her sister continued driving north, but stopped around South Miller Loop to take more photos as the dark ash cloud spread overhead. When they got home, Jaden’s mother called the Alaska Volcano Observatory about the ash fall, and the woman they spoke to encouraged them to e-mail photos that AVO could post on its Web site. Jaden sent about 26 pictures, and eight or nine were posted on the Web site, she said. The photos spread from there.

“We saw one actually on National Geographic, their Web site. It was also on the Anchorage Daily News. We’ve been looking around. It’s pretty cool,” Jaden said. “It’s exciting. My mom was calling all our family to go look. Everyone at school was like, ‘Did you see your pictures online?’”

Jaden said she enjoys photography, and is starting to turn it into a moneymaking endeavor doing portraiture, especially maternity and newborns. She posts her work on her site, www.smilineyesphotography.weebly.com.

“I’ve always liked to take pictures and my parents bought me an expensive camera so I’ve been doing more of it,” she said.

Jaden said she likes portraiture, and hadn’t considered going into news photography in the future, which is still a long way off, considering she’s in middle school. But if she ever does, she’s already got a widely circulated breaking news shot to her name.

For Wartinbee, Saturday fulfilled a dream he’s long had — to see a volcanic eruption in person.

“I’ve seen pictures from years ago, and a friend from up here in Alaska sent me ash in ’89, and I’ve always wanted to see one,” he said.

Now he’s not only got the memories and photos to prompt them, he’s also got some notoriety to go with the experience.

“One of the blogs (that posted his photo) said, ‘Beautiful picture by David Wartinbee.’ Well, that’s cool. Thank you very much.”