Personal
Personal reflections, comments about things I've been doing, etc.
A New Christmas Tradition
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 12/15/2007 - 14:34Tradition has always been important to me and with our move this year, some of our traditions are changing. Traditions around Christmas can be especially challenging. I hate shopping. I hate the consumerism that detracts from the season. I hate the consumerism that adds to the problems our world faces. Instead of buying some other plastic object shipped in from China, are there things that we can do, locally, that is more meaningful.
Recently, our new neighbor gave us a clipping for Alpaca Hill Farm. They are about six miles up the road from us and are open from 10 to 5 every Saturdays in December before Christmas. (They are also open by appointment). We figured we would drive up, see the alpacas and head on to our next adventures. With my two oldest daughters being accomplished ‘fiber artists’, (that is a great phrase to describe all the wonderful things they do talking fleeces from various animals and turning it into special clothing), I hoped we might have something that the whole family could enjoy.
Indeed, we all had a great time. Alpacas are gentle animals and we all enjoyed petting them, as well as looking at various rovings, yarn, garments and other gifts. The biggest problem was everyone wanted things from the store ‘Right Now!’ and weren’t interested in the delayed gratification of Christmas. I finally got everyone out of the store so I could get the appropriate gifts.
Soft warm rovings, yarn and garments, grown locally are good not only in that there is much less carbon pumped into the atmosphere for their creation and transportation, but also, hopefully everyone will enjoy wearing such products and it will be easier for me to leave the heat down in the house.
It looks like visiting Alpaca Hill Farm is the sort of Christmas tradition I hope to make a regular part of the holiday season.
Random Links
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 12/13/2007 - 20:13Fiona has been home from school today due to the snow. Kim has been in bed all day due to a bug going around, so it has been a low-key sort of day for me. I finally got around to working on upgrading some sites to Drupal 5.5 today, and, for the first time in about half a year, the number of unread emails in my inbox has dropped to zero. I still have nearly 400 emails flagged for follow up, but that’s another story.
So, to follow up on a few of them, let me link a few different sites worth noting. Somewhere, I stumbled across yet another social network for Second Life users, SLBuddy. So far, it is not compelling.
Ben Smilowitz let me know about the new Disaster Accountability Blog. I’m a big fan of the Disaster Accountability Project, and I’m glad to see they now have a blog.
The GoodNews Network recently pointed to an article in the British Daily Mail about a Bottom-ranked school that shot to top after introducing Harry Potter-themed curriculum. The GoodNews Network often has links to interesting stories and deserves a shoot out of its own. The article about the school is especially interesting for people concerned about why kids don’t read, (They don’t? Harry Potter sales would seem to indicate otherwise), and culturally relevant curricula. The article deserves a post of its own.
There were some other links I wanted to highlight, but they are lost in the shuffle right now. So, back to all the other stuff.
OpenID and other stuff
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 12/05/2007 - 12:45As I visit various blogs as part of Wordless Wednesday, I find some of them are highlighting that the draft version of blogger now supports OpenID. That is very cool. I’m a big supporter of OpenID. People with OpenIDs can login and comment on my blog using OpenID. A lot of people have OpenID already without even knowing it.
If you use AOL, your OpenID is http://openid.aol.com/screenname If you use Vox, your OpenID is http://username.vox.com If you use Livejournal, your OpenID is http://username.livejournal.com If you use hosted WordPress, your OpenID is http://username.wordpress.com If you use Yahoo! you can use http://idproxy.net to have it authenticate with your Yahoo! id. You can also set up your own OpenIDs at http://myopenid.com and http://claimid.com
One of the things that is great about http://claimid.com is that if you have many OpenID enabled accounts, like I do, you can link them all together with ClaimID. So, if you have an account that supports OpenID, sign in and say hello. If is also worth noting that you can set up your own blog to support OpenID by adding a few lines to your blog template, so I regularly use Orient Lodge as my OpenID.
In other technology related stuff, as I listened to the NPR Presidential Debate streaming yesterday online, I got the blow-by-blow recapping of the debate by Andy Carvin on Twitter. I even pointed people having problems with the stream to Andy’s Twitters. It was also through Twitter that I learned of Marc Orchant’s Massive Coronary. Our prayers go out to Marc and I keep my eye on Twitter for updates. On a happier note, it is great to participate, even peripherally, in the celebration on Hanukkah via people’s post on Twitter and their blogs. In many ways, it feels like we only have enough oil to keep for another day, but just as the oil lasted for eight days, I hold on to my faith that the Lord will provide and all of us will make it through our various trials. Happy Hanukkah everyone.
Sen Clinton: Fiona is running for President
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 12/04/2007 - 12:15I hope, forty years from now, an opponent of Fiona’s in a Presidential primary, will look back at this blog post and prepare a press release stating, “AHA! I told you Fiona had been planning to run for President for years!”. Yes, if you ask her, she wants to be President. She would sure do a better job than our current President, and she knows that.
I give a lot of credit to people like Howard Dean, John Edwards, and Barack Obama for returning the role of President to its proper place in the American dream. The Presidency should be an honorable office sought by people hoping to make our country better for everyone.
When Fiona isn’t dreaming of being a President or Congresswoman, she is dreaming of being a paleontologist, a marine biologist or a fashion designer. The dreams of childhood, we need people like John Edwards or Barack Obama to help make the American Dream and the dreams of childhood a little more realistic.
So, when Fiona’s opponent, forty years hence, comes and read this blog post, I hope they read all of it. I hope follow the link to Hillary Clinton’s press release proclaiming that Sen. Obama is rewriting history, by claiming he hadn't been planning a White House run. I hope they read the disgust people have at Sen. Clinton’s word parsing and her inability to distinguish between hopes, aspirations and the hard word of planning and organizing a Presidential campaign. Somehow, Sen. Clinton’s speech sounds a little bit too much like Brutus accusing Caesar of being ambitious. Yes, Obama is ambitious. Ambition can be a great thing, and so perhaps I must play Mark Anthony.
Yes, Sen. Clinton, and whomever channels this sort of attack forty years hence, Fiona is planning on running for President, with all the childlike joy and passion a six year old has. It is a beautiful thing and shame on anyone who would speak ill of such dreams.
My support is with John Edwards, I believe he is the best candidate this time around, but I also have great respect for Barack Obama, and this latest attack by Hillary Clinton only improves my opinion of Barack Obama and lowers my opinion of Hillary Clinton.
(Cross posted at DailyKos)
Teen Task Forces
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 12/03/2007 - 21:23It’s been over three decades since I attended one of those high school parties where I was more concerned about what people were thinking of me and whether or not I would finally find a high school sweetheart than I was about how I would get home safely. It has been over three decades since I listened to announcements on the schools public address system about the death of a classmate in a drunken driving accident. My memories of such events are cloudy, but they still linger with me. Still, issues of teen driving remain with us today, and the solutions seem not to have changed substantially.
Last week, The Hartford Courant had an article about Gov. Rell appointing a task force on teen driving.
The governor, following the accident-related deaths of seven teens over the past four months, today announced formation of a task force that will look for more effective ways to convince teens to drive safer.
Named to co-chair the task force are: Robert M. Ward, commissioner of the state Department of Motor Vehicles, and Dr. J. Robert Galvin, commissioner of the state Department of Public Health.
The comments in forums and mailing lists were not particularly favorable. As I think back to my high school years, I can just imagine how much credibility such a task force would have had with my peers and how dubious I would have been of any of their suggestions. Why don’t they listen to the kids?
I have no beef with Mr. Ward or Dr. Galvin, yet somehow, it seems like they might as well have appointed Paula Schwartz, the infamous superintendent of the Region 10 schools who seems so threatened by teenagers expressing real feelings.
No, if you want to find solutions to problems with teen driving, maybe you should listen to teens. Maybe you need a person like Avery Doninger on the task force, inelegantly pointing out how out of touch too many of us adults are. Perhaps you need more teens pouring out their hearts online about how sad they are, and groups like the ‘RIP myles gosselin we miss you’ group of Facebook.
Perhaps if we adults spent a little more time listening to teenagers, they wouldn’t need to spend as much time doing stupid things like drinking and driving or driving to fast. I guess it seemed that way to me thirty years ago, and it still seems that way to me today.
Postscript: While it seems that some things never change, things do get better. When I was in high school it was only the hardcore nerds that ever touched a computer, which for me consisted of using a Teletype to connect to a computer at a community college a couple towns away. When I was in high school, some of us nerds hung out in the photography clubs dark room trying to make our artistic photographs. Now, with a few clicks of on the cellphone anyone can store their photographs online. I even ended up meeting my high school sweetheart. For me, it only took twenty five years.
