Archive - 2005

January 10th

Cheryl and Linda

One of the first funerals Kim and I went to together after her mother died was Linda Bergwall’s. Many years earlier, Linda and I had gone to the same church together. It was a close knit group of kids in their twenties. We would all go to the beach together on weekends. The retreats were special events.

Linda was a talented sweater designer and a very special woman. She had a long battle with breast cancer, and it was hard for Kim and I to go to her funeral, especially so after Kim’s mother had died of cancer.

Perhaps that is part of the reason why Greg Hammond’s blog about his life with his wife Cheryl while she was fighting her cancer, and how he is dealing with life now especially touches me.

Running for State Chair, updated 1/10 5:45 PM

Back on December 22nd, I wrote a blog entry about rumors that George Jepsen might not be running for re-election for State Chair. I mentioned that my wife suggested that I run for State Chair. Within a few days, the rumors were confirmed and an exciting race for State Chair has emerged.

People online picked up on this, such as Jerome Armstrong at MyDD wrote about it on his blog, and sent me a note encouraging me to consider running. It was picked up on Democratic Underground, and I’ve been getting messages from around the country about this.

Is the blogosphere good?

Yesterday, friends came over to dinner and I introduced their daughter to MOOs. To quote the Wikipedia definition, “MOO is short for MUD object oriented and is a type of MUD text-based virtual reality system”. I am a big fan of MOOs, and it was the geek term that I used most often to glaze over the faces of my interlocutors before I started talking about blogs.

A lot has been written about MOOs. My Tiny Life, by Julian Dibbell, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, by Janet H. Murray, and Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet,
by Sherry Turkle each provide an interesting glimpse into MOOs. A friend of mine, Prof. David Jacobson teaches a college course on Social Relations in Cyberspace that goes into MOOs, as do many other professors, and has had many articles published in scholarly journals about the topic.

Tripping

My apologies for not writing something more profound on a political, technical or some other topic. I’m still catching up from last week, and hope to have something profoundly important to say later in the day. Until then…

This morning, I was checking Michele Agnew’s blog and playing the comment game. Today, we are all supposed to go over and add a comment to petite anglaise’s blog. She had a story about tripping on the stairs at her office place. I added my one great tripping story as a comment, and I thought I would add it here as well.

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January 9th

Tsunami Relief

For the past week or so, I've been meaning to write my thoughts about Tsunami relief, but I haven't gotten to it. This morning, I read a post in Michele's blog about tsunami relief that I encourage everyone to go check out. A donor has offered to donate a dollar to Oxfam for each comment posted.

Normally, I don't like these sort of things. It sounds a little bit too much like, 'If you send this email to that person Microsoft will give you $100', or the story of the boy that received 100,000 get well cards, and his family continues to receive them five years after the boy died.