www.nickhodge.com

Nor­mandy, France.

As a great fan of Dr Melyn Bragg, BBC4 is pub­lish­ing the pod­casts of his his­tory debat­ing show In Our Time.

This week, he dis­cusses Ada Lovelace; the prophet of the com­puter age we now live in.

Excel­lent video from the Google engEDU series.

A talk given by Alex Wright; excel­lent his­tory of Inform­a­tion The­ory: The Web That Wasn’t, espe­cially hyperlinking.

Spend an hour and listen. Good his­tory. I am prob­ably going to Amazon his book, Glut

You know you are get­ting older when you read stor­ies about his­tory, and have played a very minor part in them.

• Apple sales staff were in Hawaii in 1996 when Gasee came to visit Gil Amelio (it was the Asia-Pacific Sales Con­fer­ence). We didn’t see him as he “flew in under the radar” of the media and employees.
• I remem­ber Ellen Han­cock ask­ing the internal crowd about OS altern­at­ives. I spoke pos­it­ively about Unix, and Sol­aris. Re-reading the his­tory… I didn’t help out much!
• See­ing a pho­to­graph of Rhaps­ody run­ning on a Power Mac from the NeXT cam­pus in March 1997.
• WebOb­jects. What the RoR crowd now think of as the pin­nacle of MVC (model-view-controller) on the web just echoes NeXT’s Open­Step UI devel­op­ment from the late 1980s.
• The 1997 Mac­World con­fer­ence in San Fran­cisco (which I atten­ded, includ­ing the now-famous key­note) with Woz and Steve Jobs as guest speaker was a major love-in

Why blog your fam­ily his­tory? Because it helps oth­ers out, and you find out more. Oth­ers doing searches for com­mon ancest­ors will stumble on your site, and send emails.

The above photo is of one Mary Milne. She mar­ried a Melville Hodge in 1853 whilst on her way to South Aus­tralia. Her first son was my great– great– grandfather.

In other words, she is my great– great– great– grand­mother. A small part of her is in my genes. This photo was taken in March 1904, 103 years ago.

And speak­ing of genes, if you look at her eyes and mouth: they are not aligned. It’s not “an error” in pos­ing. It’s prob­ably Bell’s Palsy.

Thanks to Darryl, also a decend­ent of Mary Milne for send­ing the photo and a detailed history.

Up at 6:00am to get ready for a long day. Osaka JR train to Osaka-shin. Catch the Shinkansen to Hiroshima via Shin-Kobe and other sta­tions that mix together. The Hodge’s almost broke the whole sys­tem by insert­ing our Suica cards into the wrong machines. Friendly JR staff kindly help us for gaijin out.

Just like the blur of the Shinkansen passing in the oppos­ite dir­ec­tion, with many many tun­nels. And also like yes­ter­day, all land us used. Fukuyama has a large cath­olic cathed­ral clearly vis­ible in the centre of the town.

Avril and Liam had fun feed­ing me unknown Japan­ese foods. They tasted awful. Do not want.

Off at Hiroshima, and a short walk to the Street Cars. Choice: Y600 for a day ticket or Y150 for each trip. A pic­ture of the rail­way sta­tion from August 1945 clearly demol­ished, over 1.2kms away from the hypo­centre brings you back to the real­ity why Hiroshima is now a city name every­one recognises.

The street car takes you on a short 20 minute ride into history.

The Atomic Dome is a silent, yet stark reminder of our his­tory. Our shared his­tory. Not a pleas­ant his­tory at all.

The build­ing, right next to the Aioi Bridge, is one of the only build­ings to sur­vive. The hypo­centre (the ground nearest the blast, the blast being only 580m from the ground). The ori­ginal iron girders are now inside in the Peace Museum. There is a slight twist against the force of the blast. Touch­ing items such as roof­ing tiles that have bubbled; bricks that have fused together: brings home the blast.

The city of Hiroshima has left the Atomic dome as a reminder to us all of the effects of the bomb. The whole area of the Peace Park was once a bust­ling part of the city centre. Now gone. Vari­ous peace organ­isa­tions pop­u­late the edges of the park, along with statues. These organ­isa­tions present the Japan­ese per­spect­ive on Amer­ican mil­it­ar­ism — and vastly dif­fer­ent to the sit­ting on the fence of the Peace Museum.

The museum shows how Hiroshima was the home of the 5^th Divi­sion (note: this divi­sion served in Java and Timor dur­ing WW2) and alter the HQ of the Second Gen­eral Army. The task­ing doc­u­ments from US Mil­it­ary com­mand do not men­tion the mil­it­ary nature of the target.

No mat­ter how man jus­ti­fies his hor­rific actions to other men: reli­gion, ideo­logy, per­ceived dif­fer­ences; the hor­rors of war are clearly on show at Hiroshima. It is neither shrine nor temple. It is a liv­ing reminder of what humans can do to oth­ers. No mat­ter the couch­ing in stra­tegic, polit­ical or tac­tical terms: war is most unwanted.

There are many clocks in the Peace Museum at stuck on 8:15am. The time that the bomb blast hit. Hiroshima remains staunchly anti-nuclear weapons to this day. And with clear justification.

The Peace Museum, with its pur­pose­ful high­light­ing of the effects on chil­dren: show­ing the inno­cents in the war; height­ens the par­ent in all of us.  Whilst the tech­no­logy of the bomb is shown with a men­acing scale rep­lica of the bomb sit­ting over a part of the dis­play — all seem to dis­reg­ard it. The after-effects are rightly shown.

Another mov­ing place to visit is the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Hall. It has a down­ward spiralling walk­way into a room. This room has a 360degree pic­ture of Hiroshima, post bomb. How­ever, this picture’s dark/light is made from the names of 140,000 (vari­ous places in Hiroshima report 350,000) vic­tims. It is a power­ful display.

On our long return to the Shinkansen sta­tion, we pass through many malls and shops. Strangely, a Yel­low Sub­mar­ine store selling B29 mod­els sits dir­ectly under­neath the hypocentre.

We point at menus, get more strange food; and return to Osaka via Shinkansen and JR. Hotel at 9.15pm.

Hiroshima is no mod­ern shrine. It’s name is the shrine.

Any fur­ther inform­a­tion on this pic­ture we have in our pos­ses­sion would be great.

From what I can tell, it was taken on the 14^th April 1941 (cod­ing 14441).

It is also the first pic­ture I’ve seen of Churchill with his wife; the fel­low in the bowler hat is a mayor or sim­ilar. You can see that Churchill has a gas mask over his shoulder, and is rais­ing his hat with a cane (badly framed photo misses this)

In a week of sur­real­ity, I learnt I am a MINI-me to a Nick Hodge in the UK and atten­ded Ying Tong.

An email from my mother-in-law, who emig­rated to Aus­tralia in the mid 1950s, con­nec­ted more dots. And some fam­ily skel­et­ons in the closet fell out.

Before jump­ing aboard the ship to Aus­tralia, she worked at the BBC — with The Goons! She typed their scripts and atten­ded record­ings. I am related to fam­ous, and only a few steps removed from The Goons. I am con­nec­ted to Brit­ish Com­edy roy­alty, even if only by marriage.

On the eve of Anzac Day, 2007, the National Archives of Aus­tralia have released a moun­tain of scanned doc­u­ments detail­ing the ser­vice records of World War I sol­diers, sail­ors, air­men and nurses.

As an exer­cise, I am tra­cing the his­tory of an Cor­poral Albert Ern­est Lock. I think he is the per­son who gave name to the town of Lock, South Aus­tralia. (Ser­vice num­ber 29888).

He died of wounds in late 1917, and was bur­ied in Bel­gium in 1917.

Fur­ther Notes from archives:

6^th April 1917 — Assigned 102 How­itzer Bat­tery, a part of 2^nd Field Artil­lery Bri­gade, 1^st Divi­sion Artil­lery, Aus­tralian 1^st Divison. He manned one of the 4 x 4.5 inch how­itzers in this Bat­tery. He was one of 71 other ranks; a part of one sec­tion, 116^th How­itzer Bat­tery, also con­sist­ing of Major Har­ris and 2^nd Lt C Groves.

16^th May 1916 — Pro­moted to Cor­poral from Gunner

20^th August 1917 — Pro­moted to Temp. Sgt from Corporal

22^th August 1917 — Wounded in Action, remained on duty (Bel­gium) The War Diary for the 1^st Divi­sion Artil­lery has no enemy action on this date.

9^th Octo­ber 1917 — Died of Wounds / Killed in Action; dur­ing the Battle of Poel­cap­pelle. (a part of Passchendaele). The 102 How­itzer Bat­tery was fir­ing on China Wood in a Search and Sweep at 11:27am. He was one of 9 ‘other ranks’ that died that week.

Bur­ied at Huts Cemetery, Dick­e­busch (Dikke­bus), Bel­gium. (Divi­sional Diary of that Month)

Father was Albert Lock, sta­tion­mas­ter at Bridge­wa­ter, South Australia.  Mother Mary Jessie Ann Lock. Sis­ter, Sis­ter Majorie Ellen Lock.

In will assigned Hun­dred of Roby County of Bac­claugh numbered 9, Pur­chase 6784 Register Book volume 573 Folio 9 to his father. Was he a clerk in the rail­ways on Eyre Peninsula?

I don’t under­stand a word of this, but the cent­ral ten­ants of Geek hard­ware and repro­duc­tion are universal:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8PQnKdYh-0

Accord­ing to Bruce Satch­well, hard­ware and radio geek from the Gold Coast, this is an example of a weird European hobby called Ama­teur Radio Dir­ec­tion Finding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_Radio_Direction_Finding

I won­der if this hobby star­ted like arch­ery in the 11^th through 13^th cen­tury in Eng­land? Eng­lish arch­ers were revered through Europe due to their prowess. This was developed in vil­lages from a young age. Maybe dur­ing the Cold War east­ern bloc coun­tries had their young radio geeks make RDF devices to stop the Cap­it­al­ist west air­borne intruders? I wonder.