Health

I had another appointment with the allergist today. In a nutshell, I’m allergic to shrimp and dust and should avoid them. If I have a strong reaction, antihistamines should be fine. Kim’s Lyme disease has been acting up and she’s back on antibiotics. Miranda sprained her ankle playing ultimate Frisbee at camp. Fortunately, it was the day after the first dance. I spoke with her last night and her arms are sore from the crutches, but she is in good spirits. My mother will have knee surgery in about a week. One of my friends has a bad infection which she had a year ago, and it has returned. Another is going in for a hysterectomy in a week. A third friend lost her mother to cancer this week.

With many of these cases, there have been issues one way or another with insurance and how things get paid for. All of this provides a good setting for me to go see Sicko. The Working Family Party in Connecticut has a great idea. Ask your State Legislators to go see Sicko with you. It would be good to get more of the Legislators to see the movie. At the same time, it would be good for more people simply to learn who their State Legislators are. I remember when Kim ran for State Rep and I heard a statistic that 85% of Americans don’t know who their State Rep is. Do you? Have you ever gone to a movie your State Rep?

Technology and the move

Most people get in touch with me via an email address that comes as part of my Internet service from my cable company. I’ve had this email address for many years. I’m on many mailing lists and in many address books with this email address. I’ve also used it for signing up for many social networks. We expect to move during the month of August, probably to an area served by a different cable company, so my email address of many years is about to go away. So, I’m starting to change as many subscriptions ahead of time as possible, and get as many people using a new email address.

I’ve had email addresses at Google and Yahoo! for years and I check them from time to time. You can use those addresses by simply changing the name of my ISP to yahoo.com or gmail.com in email address. The college I went to provides email addresses for alumni and I check that address from time to time. For that, you can use my first initial, my last name and the year I would have graduated at alumni.wooster.edu

However, I am encouraging most people to contact me at an email address I’ve set up to go with this blog. Simply use the domain name of the blog, and add my firstname, a dot, and my last name as the beginning of the address.

Unfortunately, this morning, my domain was down because of a hosting problem. It has since been resolved, but it gave me a scare.

Technology and social networks

As part of the email address transition, I updated my profile at Plaxo. I was pleased to see that they now include OpenID. I’ll see what I can do with that a little later.

I’ve also added my new email address as a contributor to my ”blogger” blog. At some point, I’ll update that blog to use the new templates.

I’ve also started kicking around new, at least to me, social networks. One is Blogcave. You’ll see my recent readers widget on the right near the bottom. So far, I haven’t seen anything that Blogcave does that MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog and BumpZee doesn’t already do. I figure sometime soon we will see a shake out in this space similar to what we saw with click exchanges.

I’ve also added OthersOnline. Again, it is similar to MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, BumpZee as well as BlogCave and Criteo. It works primarily on tagging, so is a little closer to having something unique. I’ll search some of the links they come up with.

Lijit is an interesting site that I’ve stumbled across. It does web searches based on what you’ve found interesting in social networks. Think Rapleaf for searches. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get their widget to work properly. I’ll kick that around more later.

Travels

On top of trying to figure out my next job and moving, I’ve got a bunch of traveling coming up. This Thursday, we’ll be going up to Falcon Ridge for the weekend. It is a folk festival we’ve gone to for years. The following Thursday is whenYearlyKos starts. Like Falcon Ridge, it will go from Thursday through Sunday. I’ll probably attend it in Second Life.

However, starting on that Sunday, is the National Conference of State Legislatures annual conference. It is up in Boston and I’ve applied for press credentials. It goes through Thursday. However, Wednesday I am planning to speak in Connecticut about blogging. Once that is all done, it is back home to deal with packing and moving. I’m hoping we’ll have some friends and relatives around to help with that.

Getting rid of stuff

As we prepare to move, we are going to be getting rid of a lot of stuff through many different venues. Some stuff we will give to charities. Other stuff we will try to sell online, perhaps through sites like eBay and Craigslist, as well as some specialized lists. Some stuff we’ll give away through Freecycle, and in the end we may have an estate sale, and/or just get some junk removal company to come take things. So, if you’re interested things from the house, let us know.

Other Stuff

My latest graph of MyBlogLog surfing is up on Flickr. Stop by if you’re interested.

I’ve also recently added a bunch of sermons that I’ve received via email to the Stamford Independent site that got set up a long time ago, but never really gained traction. There’s some good stuff there if you like reading sermons.

So, that’s it right now at the Hynes household. Lots of stuff.