Archive - 2013
August 20th
The Discarded Lottery Ticket
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 08/20/2013 - 19:57"You're under attack, xm drained 1%, resonator destroyed. Good work"
The graphical representation of a resonator on my smartphone screen turned white and then disappeared. I tapped on the 'fire' button and a circle rippled across the stylized map of the aging New England city I was in.
My glasses made a strange beeping sound and I paused to look up at the ethereal image of a twenty-five inch television floating eight feet above my head to the right. I am a Google Glass explorer and I was receiving notifications of the latest news from CNN and the New York Times. There were stories about the fighting in Syria and Egypt and the radiation leak in the crippled nuclear reactor in Fukyshima Japan.
I returned my attention to Ingress, the augmented reality game on my smartphone. I had a little bit of time I could walk around the city green before heading off to my first meeting of the day.
"The world around you is not what it seems."
In Ingress, resonators are connected to portals. You can only see them in the game. Portals are often at statues or monuments. The game has gotten me out walking more and visiting places I wouldn't normally go.
I walked passed a decrepit lingerie display, a thrift shop full of old shoes and dresses, and a store front with artifacts from a bygone era of reporting. There were For Lease signs on old banks and the Symphony Orchestra had taken up residence in a different closed lingerie store.
One of the few open businesses was a donut store with it's easily recognizable national branding. An obese woman wobbled out eating her daily dose of diabetes. She wasn't running anywhere.
"… to wound the autumnal city" the opening line of a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel comes to mind. It is eight in the morning, and I would expect to see business people heading off to work, but all that I see are the discarded people, down on their luck; the veteran who never did get the PTSD treatment he needed, the immigrant whose hopes of a better world in America never materialized, and the cop trying to keep things from getting too ugly.
There is a decayed movie posted proclaiming "The Empire Strikes Back" and a residential care building next to a large crumbling edifice with a Latin phase about God and Heaven.
I take one more lap around the city green, "Field established, excellent work," sounds from the synthesized voice in Ingress. It is almost time for me to head to my meeting. I take a few notes with Google Glass and bring up the directions.
Between the wearable computing, the augmented reality game, the news of fighting and nuclear radiation leaks, it is hard to distinguish between the autumnal New England city and Dhalgren's Bellona. The closest thing I could find to hope was the discarded lottery ticket on the ground.
August 19th
The Affordable Care Act and the Next Generation of e-Patients
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 08/19/2013 - 20:00Wikipedia describes e-Patients, or Internet-savvy patients as being "empowered, engaged, equipped, enabled" and I run into e-patients from time to time in my work as a social media manager for a Federally Qualified Health Center. Yet all too often, many of our patients are not empowered, and I've often pondered ways to help empower more of our patients.
As the health insurance marketplaces come online in October, many uninsured patients will have the opportunity to buy competitively priced quality health insurance plans. They will do this via the Internet, but will they become empowered, engaged, equipped and enabled? This is one of the many questions out there about the Affordable Care Act.
There are lots of important aspects about the Affordable Care Act that are set up to help empower patients. There are Patient Centered Medical Homes and the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute. Will these help do the trick?
I suspect not. I suspect much more will be needed. While there is a lot of talk about getting young men who think they don't need health insurance, the young invincibles, to sign up, there are a lot of efforts by those opposed to President Obama to thwart these signup efforts. Beyond that, there is a lot of work being done to bring in the working poor, people who too often are not empowered in their daily lives.
When I think of e-patients, I tend to think of affluent, well educated white patients who are already empowered in other aspects of their lives who have then faced a medical emergency, often a chronic or terminal disease. Because of this have taken a much more active role in dealing with their health issues.
Will the newly insured take more active roles in their health? Will they learn about their conditions online and communicate with their medical providers via patient-portals? Or, willing they stick their insurance card in their purses and only take them out for emergencies?
I believe that as a nation, we will all be better off if the newly ensured are encouraged to become the next generation of e-patients. I am optimistic when I hear about enrollment efforts that go beyond simply getting someone to sign up for health insurance.
So, can we get the current generation of e-patients to take an active role in helping uninsured people get health insurance, and then become empowered in managing their own health? What can we do to help make this happen?
August 11th
When You Wish Upon the Perseid Meteor Shower
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 08/11/2013 - 14:34I woke up early this morning, at about 2:30, as I find myself doing more frequently these days. I knew that the Perseid Meteor Shower would be peaking soon so I headed out to see if there were any shooting stars.
The frogs were croaking down in the pond. Based on variables like pitch, volume, direction and timing, I guess there were probably about half a dozen adding their commentary on the night. In the distance there were sounds of a skirmish. It sounded like a large cat of some sort had just captured it's dinner. I knew our dog was inside, but I wasn't sure where our cat was. He's an old cat who has survived many scrapes, and although he's getting old, I didn't think he was the likely appetizer.
I walked down the stairs from the deck to get as wide a view of the sky as I could. The Milky Way was faintly visible, and I noted the smaller stars gathered around the familiar "W" of Cassiopeia. I intended to look them up in a star chart later to get a sense of what magnitude of stars could be seen. Looking at some online star charts and trying to remember what I saw in the middle of the night, I'm guessing that I could see things as dim as between magnitude four and five, maybe even a little fainter.
I saw what appeared to be many quick brief dim streaks, I'm guessing they must have been magnitude 5, and were fairly random in direction. I think most likely, it was just my eyes adapting. Whatever it was, it wasn't anything notable. I saw the blinking of a plane cross the sky, and various stars that at first glance appeared to be satellites moving slowly across the sky, but as I looked more closely appeared to be stationary.
As I settled in, waiting to see a shooting star, Jiminy Cricket singing, "When you wish upon a star" came to mind.
When you wish upon a star
Your dreams come true
My dreams were vague at that hour of the morning. Something about being more creative. I can't say they took clearer shape as I stared at the sky, hoping. But perhaps that is some of it; those long hours, actually, just minutes but they seem so long, as you wait for a shooting star, when you try to find things to think about while waiting.
As you think about your dreams, your secret desires, as you consider the pros and cons, what it would take to make the dreams come true, and the implications it would have, you are perhaps moving closer to making the dreams come true.
I saw a shooting star, whizzing by Cassiopeia. Just one, but it was enough to assure me that my dreams can come true. I thought of waking up Kim. I told her I would wake her up, if there were good shooting stars. But, it had taken a while to see the first one. If the next one came quickly, I would get her up. Otherwise, I would let her sleep.
In the distance, was another noise. It seemed like an owl, only bigger. As I waited for a second shooting star, I thought of Fiona's guitar playing yesterday. I found her a site with easy guitar chords to some of her current favorite popular songs.
It's got mountains
It's got river's
It's got sights to give you shivers
But it sure would be prettier with you
Perhaps that is another part of the magic of sitting up late at night watching shooting stars. It would have been prettier with Kim, but the shooting stars were still to few.
I stayed up to see a second shooting star, and then a third, and finally a fourth. It was spread out over close to an hour. Enough shooting stars to help some dreams come true, but now I'm tired.
Perhaps I'll wake up tonight or tomorrow night and see more, or perhaps it will just wait until the next meteor shower.
When you wish upon a star…
August 7th
Using #Glass as a Powerpoint Replacement
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 08/07/2013 - 06:06I've never been a big fan of Powerpoint dating back to my training as a speaker in the 90s. The audience should be focusing on you and what you are speaking about, not on reading your script and looking at pictures on a screen. If you must use PowerPoint, you should follow Guy Kawasaki's 10-20-30 rule for Powerpoint, no more than 10 slides, no more then 20 minutes, and font no smaller than 30 points.
Instead, if I am using visual aids in a presentation, I prefer to use tools related to the presentation. When I speak about social media, I like to use Buffer to send preloaded tweets out to Tweetchat using a hashtag. The key points still get displayed on the screen, the audience gets more of a chance to interact and it illustrates using the technology.
On Thursday morning, I will be doing a presentation introducing a group of librarians to Google Glass. So, the challenge I came up with for myself was, could I use Google Glass as a replacement to Powerpoint.
The first issue was to find a way to present what is on the screen through a projector. I've done presentations using the screencast capabilities of the Glass app on my smartphone. This works very well if you are presenting to a small group that can gather around the cellphone, but for a larger crowd, finding some way to connect my smartphone to a projector was called for.
My first attempt was to use the old TV Out approach. My current smartphone is a Samsung Galaxy G4. Some Samsung phones, like several other phones, have the ability to display to old fashioned televisions, and many projectors using a cable that plugs into the headphone jack. I have a cable like that I've used on other phones, but I couldn't get it to work on the G4. My guess is that there is a setting I need to enable, which I haven't been able to find. Any suggestions are appreciated.
The second idea was to use a MHL cable. MHL, or Mobile High-definition Link, is a micro-usb plug on one end and a HDMI plug on the other. You can use it to display what is on your phone screen on a high definition television. I don't watch much television, so we don't have HDTV and I don't have any MHL or HDMI cables. I must admit that I haven't looked, but it seems like most times I've done presentations, the projectors accept RCA input (the old fashioned TV connector), or VGA input (the standard for PC monitors), but HDMI inputs are far from ubiquitous, so finding a RCA or VGA approach would work better.
My next thought was to try and find some way to connect the cellphone to a laptop and connect the laptop to the projector. I've connected other android phones to my laptop using the USB cable and running Android Development Tools, ADT, on the laptop. The Samsung G4, like many smartphones, does not default to having debugging enabled. How To Enable Samsung Galaxy S4 USB Debugging provides good instructions on how to do this.
However, when I connected the smartphone to my laptop and started ADT, I got a message that the Samsung Galaxy S4 was offline. It took me a while to figure out what the problem was. With newer versions of Android, there is security added to the device. You need to permit the specific laptop to debug the phone. I was using Android Debug Bridge (adb) version 1.0.29. This version does not support this type of security. When I upgraded to version 1.0.31 and tried to enter debug, a message popped up on my smartphone asking if I wanted to allow the laptop to debug the phone. I said yes, and dab started working.
The Dalvik Debug Monitor Server (ddms) provides the ability to display the screen of the android device on the laptop. However, this only works for single images. To be able to see the screen as it changes, I downloaded Android Projector.
Getting Android Projector to work also required a few steps. First, I needed to make sure I had a current version of Java running on my laptop. Then,, I started adb and authorized my laptop to debug my phone. Next, I started ddms and connected to my phone. With ddms running, I then started Android Projector. The screen came up nicely. I rotated it to match the orientation of the Glass app screen cast, and then hooked my laptop up to a projector and I could display what I was seeing on Glass to the whole room.
The one caveat: it tends to lag by three to five seconds between when a card comes up on Glass and when it makes it to the projector. An aside: I could have put Glass into debug mode and connected the glass directly to the laptop. I tried this, but then you need to remain connected via a USB cable, which ties you down and loses some of the effect.
With this in place, I could now display how Glass works on the projector. The next step was to put a presentation up on Glass. I've been doing a little bit of Glass development and have created GlassDeck. It allows you to create a bundled deck of cards as a timeline item. It is written in PHP based on the quickstart Mirror API guide. It is still fairly primitive. I wrote it mostly as a programming exercise. You can save your GlassDecks and share them with others. If you log into GlassDeck, you can find my presentation at 106686438536671985498:Presentation. Even if you don't have Glass, you can see the HTML that I used to create the cards. If you do have glass, you can edit it and create your own presentations.
This is all fairly primitive still, but has potential. I look forward to refining my GlassDeck app, finding easier ways to display Glass on a projector, and perhaps even using a remote for Glass at some point. Remotte is creating one such remote that might be useful for doing presentations using Glass.
So, Thursday, I'll do a presentation using Google Glass. I'll let you know how it goes. Let me know your thoughts on ways to make doing presentations using Google Glass even easier.
August 6th
Falcon Ridge 2013 Part 2 - Unbroken
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 08/06/2013 - 07:12the hope of seven generations, maybe more
I believe 1994 was the first year that I went to the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, right about the time of Miranda was a year old. I believe it was also the year that Dar Williams first performed at Falcon Ridge. What was I thinking when I took my young daughters to this event? Sure, some of it was for the sheer joy of going such a wonderful folk festival, but what were my hopes for the girls? What were my hopes for them as I took them to piano lessons or drove them to summer camp? What were my parents hopes for me, when I was younger?
I took piano lessons when I was young. I sang in choirs, but none of that went all that far. My mother loved singing and had a great voice, before the essential tremors started.
I was standing by my window,
On one cold and cloudy day
"Will The Circle Be Unbroken" was the final song of the final workshop stage session of the final day of the Twenty Fifth Anniversary Falcon Ridge Folk Festival. Like Friday night, when Red Molly and Susan Werner performed "May I Suggest", I was tired and wet from a passing rainstorm.
I closed my eyes and thought of my mother. She would be saying how proud she was of Mairead, going all the way to Japan. Her voice would be shaking from the essential tremors, and their would be a tear in her eye as she thought of how much she loved her grandchildren. My mother went to Germany with my father after they were married. He served in the Air Force in Germany during the Korean war. My mother never did get much more of a chance to travel, other than our summertime vacations to campgrounds along the Atlantic Ocean somewhere between Mount Desert Island and Cape Hatteras.
Her shaking would go on wistfully to say how excited she was for Miranda; about her book, for her singing, and all the wonderful opportunities that awaited her. My daughters didn't know my mother when she tried to pursue the arts while struggling to raise a family in Western Massachusetts. After cleaning out the family house, I brought home various artifacts of her creative endeavors.
When I saw that hearse come rolling
For to carry my mother away
The audience stood to join in. I stood too, but could not sing; great performers on the stage, their children now performing on the Main Stage, an enthusiastic crowd; twenty five years of Falcon Ridge. Mairead was traveling in ways my mother only dreamed of. Miranda was singing in venues my mother couldn't even imagine. Memories of my mother during my childhood, all mingled together into a transcendent moment.
Earlier this summer, I ate a wonderful sweet juicy peach. I stood over the sink so the sweet flavors wouldn't make the floor sticky. I closed my eyes and was lost in the moment of eating the peach, nothing else existed but the sweetness of that peach. This moment at Falcon Ridge was like eating that peach.
When my daughter's were young, I used to sing "The Circle Game" to them as I put them to bed.
So the years spin by and now the boy is twenty
Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true
There'll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty
Before the last revolving year is through.
Have the dreams lost any grandeur coming true? Maybe for my daughters, I don't know, but not for me. This is the best part of my life. The circle remains unbroken.
this is the faith
That they invest in you
It's that you'll do one better than was done before
Inside you know
Inside you understand
Inside you know what's yours to finally set right
Mairead and Miranda have already done so much more than just one better than was done before. Fiona is still young, but even now, she has done so much more than just one better too.
The circle has remained unbroken and this is the best part of our lives.
