Personal
Personal reflections, comments about things I've been doing, etc.
Bridging a digital divide
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 08/03/2007 - 14:26When I hear ‘Digital Divide’, I typically think impoverished inner city youth. I think of impoverished single moms struggling to get by. I do not typically think about the elderly. Yet this is a thought that has been building in my mind.
In the spring, my daughters volunteered at a local nursing home. Mostly, they spoke with the residents, played trivia, played a little bit of piano for them, the things that volunteers have been doing for years at nursing homes, just as I did when I was their age.
However, my perspective on this has changed, in part because of the developments of this past week. You see, on Tuesday, my mother had knee surgery. She is still recovering in the hospital, but will go to a nursing home for the next phase of her recovery in a few days.
At the end of June, Mairead, Miranda and I went up to visit my mother.
We talked about her using a computer to see pictures and videos of the family that I put online. She had an old laptop around and I fixed it up a little bit. However, she has essential tremors and being able to type or move a mouse is very difficult for her. The tremors also cause her to stutter, so speech recognition wouldn’t work well either.
After our visit, I posted pictures on Flickr. Later, my brother visited and showed her the pictures online. She greatly enjoyed them and hopes to find ways of seeing other family pictures online.
When Kim’s grandfather was in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s, they made a scrapbook of pictures from his life. As the disease wore on, he had more and more difficulties recognizing the pictures, but for a long time, they were a touchstone for him.
For a Wordless Wednesday recently, I scanned in a childhood photo which my mother and brother greatly appreciated.
Yes, we could print out photos and mail them, but too often we don’t get to that. For that matter, too often many of us do not manage to make it to the nursing homes to visit our parents. In my case, it will be difficult. It is a several hours drive, and it is even longer for my sister.
But, I do write about my life here. I post pictures on Flickr. If someone can help my mother access them, it will bridge a different digital divide, it will bridge a generational divide, and it will bring great happiness to many people.
So, if you live in Williamstown, MA and are willing to stop by at Sweetbrook Nursing home over the next few weeks, find my mother and show her recent pictures and read her some recent blog posts. If you have elderly relatives in Stamford, CT, let me know. I will visit them and help them access your content online. Most importantly, let’s reach out to one another to help elderly people that have difficulty accessing the internet find content put up by their families and friends.
Oh, and if someone does help my mother, here’s a pictures of Reilly I think she would like
Housekeeping
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 08/02/2007 - 11:55Yesterday, I rearranged the blocks on the right side of my site. I’ve added a block for ‘Cambodian Bloggers’. Beth Kanter is trying to raise money to attend the Cambodia Bloggers Summit. It will take place August 30-31. She has been invited to provide a keynote, train the trainers and help bring a stronger connection between Cambodia bloggers and those of us here in the United States and around the world.
I’ve known Beth for quite a while from the non-profit blogging circles and have great respect for the work she does. If a bunch of us all chip in, it would be great; money well spent.
I also moved the Lijit Widget from my general group of social network widgets up near the top. They provide a neat interface to Google so you can search on all your sites, both directly and within your social network. They provide nice little icons pointing to the different social networks your in, and a cloud for searches that have been done.
Lijit is still very early stage. There have been a few bugs setting it up, but their customer support has been great and I hope to see a lot of neat features coming in the future. Like RapLeaf, which does provides reputation related information, I believe their social network aggregation is one of the really important emerging trends, and I’ll be writing more about this soon.
In other website related stuff, quantcast has now gathered enough information to start giving me additional details about my audience. The graph shows the ups and downs of the week. They are currently saying that I get around 2000 unique monthly visits, or which around 1400 are from within the United States. Of that, around three quarters are people passing by, yet the regulars make up about half of the actual page views.
A lot of the traffic I’ve been getting has been Trackback Spam. I worry about the amount of strain the filtering of the spam places on the server, so I’ve ended up completely shutting down trackback on the site. The blog posts that have been getting the most traffic recently have been my posts about Falcon Ridge. I posted a comment about it in Livejournal and Facebook. I expected that Facebook would drive more traffic, but interestingly enough, much more of the traffic has come from Livejournal.
My post about The Motherhood got a fair amount of traffic, some from The Motherhood itself, others from Salon, where my wife wrote about it and on Been There, a blog by Emily and Cooper from The Motherhood. It terms of the interconnectivity, that sites like Lijit and Rapleaf are starting to explore, I found it interesting that Emily and Cooper were also both early contributors to Beth’s fundraising appeal to go to Cambodia.
Yet the post that has been getting the most traffic over the past few days has been my post about Zachary Cohn. I do hope that people reading the post stop and think a little bit about pool safety, the importance of product liability lawsuits, and getting more politically involved. Even more so, I hope that readers stop and read a few of my other blog posts. Yet the whole thing feels a little bit uncomfortable. It feels a little bit like people rubbernecking at a celebrity car crash. I sure hope that isn’t a major reason for the traffic.
Beyond the website housekeeping, the legal issues around the selling of our house continue to escalate. I do believe there is a place for litigation, but it should be avoided wherever possible. Kim, however, sees the actions as impacting Fiona’s education and is starting to talk about wanting not only fairness, but vengeance. I am hoping we will find a peaceful resolution soon enough. Until then, since we are looking at litigation, I’m going to remain mostly quite on this.
Some of Kim’s anger is perhaps fueled by the flareup of her lyme disease; yet another stressor. The final stressor I want to talk about is my mother’s surgery. On Tuesday, she had knee surgery. I spoke with her yesterday. She was groggy from the painkillers and from the lack of sleep. She wants to get home as soon as possible, but it does sound like the surgery went well and she is mostly getting the care she needs.
Any of you with a religious bent, are encouraged to lift up prayers for my mother, for Kim and, I guess, for all of us right about now.
A Little Rabbit Mercy Now
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 08/01/2007 - 09:07Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit, or perhaps I should say Kaninchen, Lapin, Coniglio. It is an old superstition that if the first thing you say is Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit at the beginning of the month, you will have good luck all month. Add to this, that August 1st is Swiss National Day, I thought it might be a good day to say Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit in German, French and Italian.
Yesterday, we got thrown yet another curve as we try to downsize out of our current house. I won’t go into the details here. I’ll only say that the lawyers are handling it, and that there is even more uncertainty about where we’ll be living.
I’m not a big fan of trusting in luck. Recently, luck hasn’t seemed to be on my side. Also, too many people I know seem to be looking at luck as an ATM to bring a little prosperity into their lives.
My wandering around the Internet the other day brought this home. I like to start off with people who have visited my site via MyBlogLog. Then, I see who visited their sites, and go off on an Internet Walkabout. You often see interesting things.
Recently, I was visiting Mard’s Rants from the Great State of Maine. Having been born in Maine myself, I particularly like Mard’s site. As I wandered the links, I found my way to Beyond Zen’s discussion about non-attachment. This lead me to a site about which credit card sites have the best reward programs, and from there to sites about the Law of Attraction. The path lead on to sites to buy jewelry and perfume. This lead to sites written by ‘luxury travel companions’. At this point, I figured I’d traveled far enough on that path and started over again visiting some mommy blogger who had recently visited the site.
It lead me back the important questions. What are we looking for? Wealth? Power? Sex? Or something more important and more satisfying? On the Object Relations website, Object Relations is defined as ” a modern adaptation of psychoanalytic theory that places less emphasis on the drives of aggression and sexuality as motivational forces and more emphasis on human relationships as the primary motivational force in life.”
Perhaps that is why I like the community of mommy bloggers much more than so many of the political blogging and SEO blogging, or even the Law of Attraction blogs. They get to importance of human relationships. That is also why I like Falcon Ridge so much. Falcon Ridge isn’t about music carefully packaged by RIAA compliant corporations, music focused on wealth, power and sex. Falcon Ridge brings the music of human relationships.
Mary Gauthier has a great song about this. In “Mercy Now”, she sings about her father fading away with Alzheimer’s.
My father could use a little mercy now
The fruits of his labor
Fall and rot slowly on the ground
His work is almost over
It won't be long and he won't be around
I love my father, and he could use some mercy now
She expands on this through out the song, ending up with:
Every living thing could use a little mercy now
Only the hand of grace can end the race
Towards another mushroom cloud
People in power, well
They'll do anything to keep their crown
I love life, and life itself could use some mercy nowYeah, we all could use a little mercy now
I know we don't deserve it
But we need it anyhow
We hang in the balance
Dangle 'tween hell and hallowed ground
Every single one of us could use some mercy now
.
I guess that captures some of the luck I hope to capture by saying Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit, by trying to think positively and attracting good things, by trying to be in a place where I can experience some of God’s abundance. All I’m looking for is a way to feed and shelter my family while I try to bring a little more kindness into this world that could use a little mercy now.
Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 07/31/2007 - 22:31
Zachary Cohn
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 07/31/2007 - 09:27“I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.” How often have you heard that phrase? How often has it come close to home? I try not to have any enemies, they just aren’t a useful thing to have. But over the years, there have been people that I’ve clashed with in stressful work situations, and they are perhaps the closest I’ve got towards enemies.
One person I had frequent clashes with was Brian Cohn. We both worked at S.A.C. Capital years ago. I haven’t spoken with him since I left over six years ago. A lot has gone on since then. I was going through my divorce while I was at S.A.C. I’ve remarried, and Fiona was born. Brian and his wife Karen had a boy named Zachary. Zachary was about half a year older than Fiona.
While we were listening to music at Falcon Ridge, a horrible pool accident happened at the Cohn’s house and Zachary drowned. The Stamford Advocate is reporting that the investigation includes drainage apparatus.
When I read about the pool drain, my thoughts went to John Edwards’ famous 1997 case against Sta-Rite. Sta-Rite has made pool products since the 1960 and according to an article in the Washington Monthly a dozen children had already suffered similar injuries from Sta-Rite drains before the trial.
Last month, there was another pool drain accident where the drainage system sucked out most of a six year olds small intestine. TwinCities.COM is reporting that the parents are contemplating legal action “against Sta-Rite Industries, which manufactured the pool's drainage system.”
I don’t know if the drainage system at the Cohn’s was made by Sta-Rite, but it does seem as if issues with pool drainage systems still haven’t been adequately addressed.
Brian is now President of S.A.C. Reports say that S.A.C. currently has $14 billion under management. S.A.C., like other hedge funds, has been making the news in political circles as Brian and others have made major contributions to Chris Dodd’s Presidential campaign. Brian, along with others at S.A.C. also contributed significantly to Dan Malloy’s Gubernatorial campaign.
Riches, political influence, all of that becomes pretty meaningless when faced with a horrible accident like the loss of Zachary. Brian and I aren’t likely to cross paths any time soon. If we do, I don’t know if any of the old conflicts will cloud our interactions. But I do know, that my heart goes out to him, Karen, and their whole family during their time of horrible grief. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.
