Personal
Personal reflections, comments about things I've been doing, etc.
Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit, May Day
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 05/01/2011 - 09:53Well, another month has come and gone. Last month ended up with me spending a bit of time fixing up various computer issues. Fiona’s grandparents got her an MP3 player, so I’ve been working on getting it setup and connected and have been fixing various old computers along the way.
At work, the Community Health Center blog is coming along nicely. Coworkers are walking today in the March for Babies. Please consider helping out there.
While your out making this world a better place, you might want to check out CT Bob. Bob is a freelance videographer that I met through politics many years ago. Times are tough and he’s trying to raise some funds to go to an important film making event, and it would be great if some of you could chip in on the Donate button on his blog.
Looking forward, this evening, Fiona will host a special episode of her radio show with former Governor, Dr. Howard Dean. I’ve blogged about this already. It should be a great show and I hope you’ll listen in. Later in the month, Miranda will graduate from college and I’ll head down for that.
So, that is what May is looking like for me. What about for you?
Random Stuff
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 04/23/2011 - 18:34Kim’s brother was visiting for the holiday weekend, so we had dinner with the extended family last night. Fiona stayed over at Papa and Nanna’s house. This morning, we took Wesley over to Veteran’s Memorial Park in Bethany to romp with Kim’s brother’s dog. They had a great time. It turns out that we showed up at the same time as the ribbon cutting for the new pavilion there. I stopped and chatted with the folks there a little bit and ate a few cookies.
Today, the first episode of Dr. Who aired in the U.K. It will air here in the states this evening. Unfortunately, our cable company doesn’t carry BBC America, so I started looking for ways to stream it online. The best I could find was BBC’s iPlayer, which only works in the U.K. So, I spent a bit of time tweaking one of the computers so it would appear to be from the U.K. so Kim could watch it.
Beyond that, mostly I rested and cleaned. A rainy day in Woodbridge and Bethany.
Taxes, Computers and Cellphones
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 04/17/2011 - 18:13Well, our taxes our done, and our finances are a little stronger than we expected. That is a relief. However, money is still very tight so I hesitate spending money on any new computer equipment, but it might be that it is getting to be about that time.
You see, my primary computer died again this morning. It does it fairly regularly these days, and each time I managed to eventually resuscitate it. It is an old computer, I am guessing about fifteen years. It still runs Windows NT on it. In a previous life, it had been a corporate server, and I bought it second hand when it was decommissioned. It has four hard disks in in. They were big hard disks by the standards of the time. I think each one may be around 300 megabytes, and when I bought the computer, the people wondered what I would need 1.2 gigabytes for.
Well, since then, one of the hard drives failed. I’ve had memory problems and replaced memory. I think it is the power supply that is going now, and I suspect another hard drive or two are about to fail.
One option would be to power up a couple of the ten year old Windows 2000 boxes. There are three of them that I got when a company I was working for shutdown. I think they’re in reasonable shape and I could probably get by with them for a bit. Perhaps I could mount the disk from the old server into one of these boxes, and copy off the files. I don’t think they have as much disk space, however, and it might be good to get a large external drive for them.
Then, there are three old laptops kicking around. One is about seven years old and runs Ubuntu Linux pretty well, most of the time. It is what I use for a laptop when I need to. However, it crashes fairly frequently. I think the hard disk is dying. There is a heavy ten year old Windows 2000 laptop. It came with the three desktops and is pretty good. I could probably fix that up to be more reliable. If I recall properly, it has a lot of memory in it, but is just heavy. There is a third laptop. This is a nice, newer, sleeker computer. It had been running Windows Vista on it, but it crashed. Besides what appeared to be a hard disk crash, the video has stopped working. I’m not sure what it would take to revive that box.
Then, there is the computer I am using right now. It is only about five years old. I installed Linux on it, and generally, it runs pretty well. However, it is set up as a server, with just about every package imaginable installed on it. It only has half a gig of memory, and has been running pretty slowly, unless I shut down a bunch of different services.
At the same time, I have my trusty Nokia N900 cellphone. It is now a year and a half old and runs pretty nicely. It actually runs as a fairly nice Linux server, besides working as a cellphone. It has also slowed down a bit as I put more stuff on it, and I haven’t really been doing as much programming on it since I started my new job.
I’m also now carrying an HTC Thunderbolt cellphone for work. I’ve really been liking it and am wondering when the time will come that I move off of desktops and laptops over to just a smartphone or a tablet. I’m not quite there, but I’m getting awfully close.
With that, my wife is overdue for a new cellphone. So far, she has not made the leap to a smartphone, but it may be getting time for that.
So, I’ll try to work out something for my desktop and laptop computing needs, as well as my wife’s cellphone needs.
Marley and Monique
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 04/14/2011 - 19:35Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week for many Christians. It is a time of remembering the triumphant entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem, followed by his betrayal and even his closest friends turning their backs on him, before he was crucified and rose again. It provides a framework for my thoughts about two messages I recently received.
R.I.P., Marley Francis Jones........You will be missed.
With all our love,
The Red House Gang (your second family)
I only met Marley a couple times, at my Uncle’s funeral and at my Aunt’s funeral. He was a dedicated Franciscan and was always incredibly kind.
The message went on to say,
Marley was always there to help us through our sad times as well as the happy ones. He will be greatly missed by all of his friends
Always there to help... I guess it is something we all look for. We all have difficult times. We all have joyous times, and through all of it, we all need people to be there to help us.
The second email was from a person that has had difficulty finding someone to be with her and her family during a difficult time. It was from Alexa McClain, the grandmother of Monique McClain. Monique had been so badly bullied in a Middletown, CT school, that her family pulled her out and has been battling with the school district to get them to properly enforce their zero tolerance of bullying policy and to provide a safe learning environment.
Unfortunately, those whose job it is to make sure that children are provided a safe learning environment seem to be making the problem worse.
Fortunately, the North End Action Team eventually found a Wesleyan student to tutor Monique, but even with that, the school district’s stonewalling continues to threaten Monique’s education.
I just wish Marley was around for Monique. Perhaps, he, together with St. Francis, and others will pray for Monique. Perhaps her struggles with being bullied and having almost no one around to stand up for her will be transformed in to a joyful new life where she is valued the way Marley was valued. May she will be valued the way St. Francis and Jesus valued all those that people in power have overlooked or turned their backs on.
Road Trip, Day 2
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 04/10/2011 - 08:17The drive south was uneventful. I did not tap Fiona on the knee and shout “Red winged Blackbird”. We were riding in a Prius and could talk at normal voices, and not on Pirsig’s motorcycle. We were going to see Fiona’s sister. My ex wife would be there and while it very different from Pirsig going back to his earlier life, this was not Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
It would be an eight hour drive. We had various books on tapes to listen to. Fiona had her video game to play. Yet, instead, we spent time talking. We crossed the Hudson River and talked about New York City, about my family and their travels.
We stopped at Dietrich’s meats to pick up some local soda. We passed by Harrisburg and looked down the river towards three mile island. We headed down Interstate 81 where there were many signs for gun shows. In Virginia, the Blue Ridge Mountains were shrouded in fog and we eventually checked in at our hotel.
I could write more about this, but the day is beckoning.
