Personal
Personal reflections, comments about things I've been doing, etc.
Happy Birthday Fiona
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 10/06/2008 - 08:31Today is Fiona's birthday. We've had various parties over the past couple days, with classmates, with the extended family. Tonight will be a quiet night.
I've promoted a post I wrote when she was first born to the front page and she will read part of it at school today as part of the "MAG Birthday Tradition".
More stuff soon...
A Busy Weekend
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 10/04/2008 - 17:41Monday is Fiona’s birthday. So, this afternoon, we had a birthday party for her. Pictures will be up on Flickr soon. Tomorrow there will be a family birthday party for her, and then Monday will be her real birthday.
Meanwhile, down in Virginia, Miranda is performing the role of Sister Mary Robert Anne in Mary Baldwin College production of Nunsense. Last night I went to a gathering of Twitter users from Connecticut and Rhode Island over on Chester. Tonight, I’m going a fundraiser for the Woodbridge Democratic Town Committee. (Yeah, there website needs a little work.)
One thing that I did get done yesterday was a minor tweak to the website. It now shows the seven topics I’ve written most about over the past month up as a menu line. With that, I haven’t gotten much other writing done today. Tomorrow will probably be fairly busy as well.
Tribute to Paul Newman
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 09/27/2008 - 17:46
Confronting the Blank Page
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 09/14/2008 - 19:23I’ve done a lot of writing today. Most of it has been for mailing lists, and nothing seems to fit for the blog. Other stuff that I’ve written will make a good blog post when I have some time to sit and think and pull it all together. Yet other than an automated post from ma.gnolia, I haven’t written anything for the blog today, and I feel compelled to do so.
Both yesterday and today, I wrote some long detailed personal emails that I was fairly pleased with. They required some serious thought and good wordcrafting. It felt good to write that way, and I’ve been thinking about my posts on the blog recently. Some of them have caused me to think as I put my words together, but a lot of them have been pretty light.
To a certain extent, that is okay. If I was having serious, weighty discussions all the time, I’d probably be even more boring. Yet I like to engage in serious discourse when I can.
I’ve also been speaking with the folks at sezWho, trying to get their post and comment rating system working more reliably on Drupal. They seem to have fixed most of the problems, although there are a few outstanding minor problems.
With that, I’m starting to get people to rate my blog posts. My welcome blog post has received six ratings, for an overall rating of 4.0. There really isn’t much of anything in the blog post, and perhaps people are using it to rate the blog overall. My most recent Wordless Wednesday post also received six ratings with an overall rating of 3.8. It was a picture of a German Chocolate cake that Fiona and I made for Kim for her birthday. As is common with Wordless Wednesday posts it received a fair amount of comments as well.
Yet my more serious post, the day before about discussions of the nature of authority on a mailing list that I’m on, received three ratings, for an overall score of 2.3. It received one comment, which didn’t really address the main theme of the post. Yet this post stimulated great discussions on two different mailing lists. I wish people who disagreed with what I wrote would leave comments about what they disagreed with, instead of simply giving it a poor rating. I also wish that sezWho would make it easy to see who has given which ratings, and what other posts they’ve rated. Without this, the ratings seem arbitrary and don’t really help to build either community or help further the discourse. I’ve suggested this to the folks at sezWho and we’ll see if this comes in a future release.
So, I sat down, I didn’t have a clear direction of where I wanted to go with today’s blog post, but, in order to stay with at least a post a day, I managed to crank out something. I hope it was interesting and/or informative. For me, the discipline of forcing myself to post every day, has been beneficial, and I think I’m improving as a writer because of it.
What do you think? What should the balance of light and serious posts be? How do we build community and discourse around our blogs? Do you have goals or other things that help you write regularly, or improve your writing?
Remembering 9/11
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 09/11/2008 - 10:17I’ve been up late, recently, between meetings and work, so I haven’t had a chance to sit down and write up my memories of September 11, 2001. For me, Kim was at the obstetrician’s office. She was having one of those final checkups a few weeks before her due date. Fiona was kicking around inside of Kim’s tummy, and Mairead and Miranda were off at school.
Kim called from the ob/gyn office. As she was setting up her next appointment, she glanced at the television in the waiting room, and saw that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Centers. She called me, and I turned on the TV and watched as a second place hit the towers, as I talked with Kim on the phone. What was going on? What did it mean?
I logged into a text based virtual world that I had been active with. I talked with friends there. Some were from Washington, DC and were talking about events there. We gathered, as family, my wife and I on the phone, my friends online, and all tried to make sense out of it.
Now, seven years later, many of us are telling our stories online. Cromely’s World has a blog post up, pointing to a post on Flyer Talk about one passenger’s experience. He also has a post about his experience flying a few years later as well as his mother’s experience in New York City on 9/11.
Yet the story that jumped out most at me to day was, Soap Sushi’s story. She was in the hospital after having a c-section a few days before when her first daughter was born. Her first daughter is about a month older than Fiona. She talked about seeing the images of the planes hitting the World Trade Centers being repeatedly shown on television. She talked about going into bankruptcy and the darkness that surrounded her.
It is a powerful blog post that I urge everyone to read.
