Skip to main content

Considering Place

By

Ivanhoe, California

I am from Ivanhoe, California, and believe growing up in a small, Hispanic, farming community has influenced most of my decisions. Before viewing my slide show, I think you should know about the place I call home.
Population (year 2000):4,474
Median resident age:24.9 years
California median age:33.3 years
Ivanhoe median household income in 2005:$29,700
California median household income in 2005:$53,629
Ivanhoe median house/condo in 2000:$76,900
Ivanhoe median house/condo in 2005:$159,100
California median house/condo in 2005:$477,700
The ethnic composition of Ivanhoe also shaped my views on social issues:
Races in Ivanhoe
Hispanic76.2%
Other race40.4%
White Non-Hispanic21.8%
Two or more races9.5%
American Indian2.0%
As you can tell, it is not what people imagine of California. My wife and I uploaded some of our photos of the area around Ivanhoe, which I have marked as a slideshow on Flickr. Somewhere in storage I have photos of Ivanhoe's Main Street, with Ivanhoe Hardware, Ivanhoe Drug, and a handful of small shops. The school in town is, of course, Ivanhoe Elementary, and the county library branch is under 1400 sq. feet.


This is home, but I also consider "home" to range from Sequoia to the Coast Range. On a clear day, you can see from Sequoia to the Pacific Coast Range, nearly 200 miles. Home will never be urban... but Los Angeles has some surprisingly wonderful national parks within an hour to two hours. (Los Padres is really great during the winter and spring months.) San Francisco used to be "closer" to farmland, but much of the wine country is sprouting homes.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

MarsEdit and Blogging

By
MarsEdit (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Mailing posts to blogs, a practice I adopted in 2005, allows a blogger like me to store copies of draft posts within email. If Blogger , WordPress, or the blogging platform of the moment crashes or for some other reason eats my posts, at least I have the original drafts of most entries. I find having such a nicely organized archive convenient — much easier than remembering to archive posts from Blogger or WordPress to my computer. With this post, I am testing MarsEdit from Red Sweater Software based on recent reviews, including an overview on 9to5Mac . Composing posts an email offers a fast way to prepare draft blogs, but the email does not always work well if you want to include basic formatting, images, and links to online resources. Submitting to Blogger via Apple Mail often produced complex HTML with unnecessary font and paragraph formatting styles. Problems with rich text led me to convert blog entries to plaintext in Apple Mail
2 comments
Read more

Learning to Program

By
Late last night I installed the update to Apple's OS X programming tool suite, Xcode 4. This summer, in my "free" time I intend to work my way through my old copy of Teach Yourself C and the several Objective-C books I own. While I do play with various languages and tools, from AppleScript to PHP, I've never managed to master Objective-C — which is something I want to do. As I've written several times, knowing simple coding techniques is a practical skill and one that helps learn problem solving strategies. Even my use of AppleScript and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) on a regular basis helps remind me to tackle problems in distinct steps, with clear objectives from step to step. There are many free programming tools that students should be encouraged to try. On OS X, the first two tools I suggest to non-technical students are Automator and AppleScript. These tools allow you to automate tasks on OS X, similar to the batch files of DOS or the macros of Wor
2 comments
Read more

Learning to Code: Comments Count

By
I like comments in computer programming source code. I've never been the programmer to claim, "My code doesn't need comments." Maybe it is because I've always worked on so many projects that I need comments  to remind me what I was thinking when I entered the source code into the text editor. Most programmers end up in a similar situation. They look at a function and wonder, "Why did I do it this way?" Tangent : I also like comments in my "human" writing projects. One of the sad consequences of moving to digital media is that we might lose all the little marginalia authors and editors leave on manuscript drafts. That thought, the desire to preserve my notes, is worthy of its own blog post — so watch for a post on writing software and notes. Here are my rules for comments: Source code files should begin with identifying comments and an update log. Functions, subroutines, and blocks of code should have at least one descriptive comment.
3 comments
Read more