Death and Parents

I'm getting seriously concerned for my mother. There seems to be a parental death virus sweeping through my life at the moment. First it was Walt's mother, then it was Charlotte's mother. Tonight I received a call from Gilbert's niece that HER mother had died this morning. I'm running out of friends/relatives who still have mothers and I'm eyening mine very protectively!

I don't mean to be flippant about the death of all of these loved ones, but they were all old, all in pain of one sort of another, and all ready to die, so it's a bittersweet thing. There is the pain of the loss for the survivors, but the comfort of the loss of pain for the one who has passed.

And if deaths come in 3s, maybe this is a good thing and my mother is safe until the next round starts.... I dunno.

---

I got lured back into the classroom tonight. I had said I would not do another blogging class because the students' needs were beginning to go beyond my expertise. I know what I use very well, but I just have a simple little blog. When you start trying to figure out how to make a web page out of it, I don't have the answers and so I was finding that I answered more and more questions with "I don't know." That was when I made the decision not to teach the course again.

But I got a call from my friend Anne, from the Davis Community Network. Anne runs an Internet Users Group Meeeting, which is mostly seniors trying to grope their way onto and around the big scary internet. The group has been going for 2-3 years now, and I went to my first meeting maybe 6 months ago. I can't remember why I went, but it was on Anne's invitation, to maybe help out. Maybe it was a class on blogging. I really don't remember.

I enjoyed my time there and knew several in the class and fully intended to go back again, but somehow many things intervened. They only meet once a month and the meeting dates never seemed to mesh with my own schedule.

But Anne was doing an introduction to Flickr tonight and asked if I could come and help work in smaller groups with 2 or 3 people and help them learn how to upload pictures to Flickr.

This worked better than the blogging class because I actually knew (or could figure out) all of the questions.

I did learn one important thing myself, though. I've been eyeing notebook computers wondering if it would be worth it to get one for traveling. The main thing that has stopped me so far is that I didn't think I could load the program I needed for my journal onto it. And then I decided to sponsor another Compassion child insted, so that took it completely out of possibility.

However, someone in the class tonight had one and I got to play around with it a llittle. ABSOLUTELY NO WAY!!! The print on that screen was so tiny I could barely read it without a magnifying glass.

Nice to learn that I've just saved myself a few hundred dollars!

---

You won't believe what I'm doing awake at this hour of the morning. I've been watching an English Mastiff trying to birth some puppies. Check this site for puppy cam, though based on what she's doing right now--panting and licking herself, and the light in the room just went on so her owners can see her better--I suspect they will be born by then.

Oh! We have a puppy!!!! Will there be a second....?


D

The End of a Beautiful Career

I don't know if you can call teaching one 1-1/2 hour class every six months as a volunteer a career, but I think it ended last night anyway.

I taught my third blogging class and by the time it had finished, I decided I didn't want to do it again. For all sorts of reasons.

The class is held in a room in one of the city training offices that has about 10 computers. One computer is connected to a projector so the students can see on a screen what I'm typing on the computer.

All of the computers turned on except for the one that I needed to use. My partner fiddled around with it but she couldn't get it to work, so we called the expert, who only lives 5 minutes away, so came down to see if he could get it going.

In the meantime students were arriving. Four had pre-registered for the free class, Seven showed up (fortunately I had prepared hand-outs for 10). The youngest student was 14, the oldest was my age or older.

The first thing I always do when teaching this class is to go around the circle to find out why they think they are there. The first time I taught the class I had 3 people show up and all three really didn't have the first notion what a blog was and what they really needed were web sites for their businesses.

By now I guess more people are becoming aware of what blogging is and most of the people were there to do an actual blog, though one woman wasn't sure what was the difference between blogging, Twitter and Facebook.

The way I've done it the last two times was to have everyone log into Blogger, since that's the blogging platform that I use and with which I am most familiar. Then I take them through the creation of a blog and once they have their blogs created, we look at the various things you can do to tweak them.

I logged into Blogger, as I always do, and discovered that the city had now put some sort of firewall on its computers which prevented people from viewing personal blogs. Swell.

We called the guru again to see how to bypass the firewall, but he admitted he didn't have a clue what to do about that and wished me luck. The warning screen I was getting said that you could override the system for a 60 minute period of time, but that it would have to be done in 10 minute segments, which really didn't work for what I was trying to do, but I tried to go ahead with it anyway.

I set up a test blog like I always do, but I couldn't really have the students set up their own blogs and go around and help them, because every 10 minutes, it timed out. We did get blogs started, but it was very choppy and I was thrown off my game.

I finally just had people ask me questions. The person with the most questions was the 14 year old, who sat at the far end of the room and spoke barely above a whisper, so every time she asked something I had to walk back to help her. She had also brought her own computer, which had print that was very tiny and a screen that was very dim.

People in the class asked more questions that I couldn't answer and I had to say "I don't know" more times than I have in the past, which was embarrassing for me.

In the end, I think people learned some things but I didn't enjoy it at all, and left feeling that I really didn't want to do it again. I'll have to think seriously about this in the future.

---

I had to take Walt to the Sacramento airport at 5 a.m. this morning. It was after midnight before I got to sleep and my internal clock (aided by dogs) woke me up at 4 a.m., so I just stayed up, fearing I would otherwise oversleep. I felt like a zombie when I got home from the airport and ended up taking a nap until a very strong muscle cramp hit the top of each foot and sent me into an upright position trying to walk the cramps out.

I was still groggy when I drove downtown to have lunch with my friend Ruth and when I got home the only thing I wanted to do was sleep again, so I napped off and on almost all afternoon, waking intermittently to more foot cramps.

I'm still feeling groggy, my stomach somewhat unsettled by the Chinese lunch I wasn't really ready for, and, amazingly, another nap sounds pretty good right now, but if I take a late afternoon nap, I won't be able to sleep tonight!

What? No Apple??

Aren't students supposed to bring apples for the teacher? I didn't get so much as a strawberry. But I sure got a hefty dose of ego-boosting.

Last night I taught another round of my blogging class. I did this last year and didn't think it went well, though people asked for a follow-up class. I had I think four students who came. All of them seemed to be needing a web site, not really a blog. The only one who was possibly really wanting a blog was going to use it to write a cookbook, but over the year when I checked back on her site, she never did anything with it.

This year I made sure that the course description included a brief explanation of what a blog was, and, more importantly, what it wasn't.

When I checked on the status of sign-ups last weekend, they had nobody signed up and my hopes rose that maybe nobody wanted to come. Maybe blogging was so common now that nobody needed to be "taught" anything about it.

But then I had word that three people had signed up. By the time of the class there were seven people who came to learn about blogging and none of them really needed a web site--they were interested to learn about blogging.

Of course I had performance anxiety. I don't really think of myself as a teacher, but if there is anything I can teach at least fairly, it's blogging. I at least have lots of experience.

Tsui, from DCN, and I went to the lab to meet with one of the tech guys to learn how to set up all the new equipment. Good thing we did, since there were a couple of little glitches that needed to be fixed and he was able to do that for us.

Then we returned at 6 to get all the computers up and running. I put some links into the machine so I wouldn't have to type them over and over again, and we waited for students to arrive.

Seven is a full class (that's all the computers there are), and we had exactly seven students show up. Now performance anxiety sets in.

I had them go around the class and introduce themselves and explain what they hoped to get out of the class. I expected to have the same result I did last time, with people not really being there to learn about blogging, but surprisingly they were, to one degree or another. One guy runs a Mac Users group at the senior center and also wants to start a blog for his Sons of Norway group. Another woman is setting up a blog for deaf users. A woman from Congo has a lot to say on her blog. A gentlemen, who is probably in his 90s, just wanted to find out what it's all about. Another woman was interested in blogging but concerned about privacy issues.

There were all sorts of levels of experitse, from people who knew the lingo to the older man who had difficulty moving his mouse and whose hearing impairment made it difficult for him to understand everything.

I had everyone set up a blog on Blogger, because that's the site I'm most accustomed to, but I also gave them a handout with several other blogging sites and examples of blogs from each of those sites, if they wanted to check them out.

It seemed that everyone had either problems I couldn't solve, or questions I couldn't answer because they dealt with situations I had never considered before.

Tsui was a godsend, because I've learned that you can't do this class in an hour and a half with only one person. Everybody needs individual attention and Tsui was able to handle one side of the room while I took the other.

When we left, everybody had a blog set up, whether they ever use it again or not. They had all asked for a follow-up class, which I agreed to teach. I had promised the older gentleman that I would make a step by step instruction sheet for him, and even offered to come to his house where we could work one on one and he could do it at his own speed. I had also offered to help the woman from Congo by proofreading her writings in English, which she has been looking for some help with.

The ego boost came when the woman from Congo was shocked to learn I was 66...and later referred to me as "Professor."

So I guess it wasn't as bad as I always think it's going to be.

But nobody brought me an apple. (Though, come to think of it, this was a PC class...what did I expect? LOL.)

Addicted? Who US?

I got up this morning and came in here to check e-mail, as I always do. I had none. NONE. No personal messages. No notes from lonely Russian girls wanting to send me their photo so we could chat. No requests from either Move On.org or Equality California asking for yet another donation to help them get through to election day. No notifications from lotteries from any country that I had won countless millions. No requests from Nigerian potentates to make me rich beyond my wildest dreams.

What the heck? That's like going for three days without receiving a single catalog in your mailbox. Unheard of.

The Internet seemed to be working just fine, so I went to my Gmail account and sent myself a test message. It never arrived.

I called the DCN help desk (which, of course, is closed on Sundays), hoping there would be a recording explaining what the problem was, but there was just the "sorry we're closed" message. I contacted several people who I either knew or thought I knew had DCN and who also had either Twitter or Facebook.

Jon, who was the best man at Jeri and Phil's wedding, got my message and almost immediately sent me an Instant Message on Facebook that he hadn't received any e-mail since 3 p.m. the previous day. He said that the server seemed to be fine (not sure how he checked that,but he used to work for DCN, so I'm sure he Has His Ways) but that mail just wasn't getting through.

In the meantime, I had sent myself an e-mail from my G-mail account and noted that it did not arrive, so it wasn't just that Nigerian Potentates, Russian girls and political fund raisers just all of a sudden decided to give up on me.

I realized how dependent we have become on electronic communication, and laughed at how I had set up back-ups for myself, with g-mail, Twitter and Facebook. I could still be connected electronically; I just couldn't get my DCN e-mail, but at least I could contact some of my friends thru Twitter and Facebook.

The extent to which we have become dependent on electronic communication was brought home when a Davis friend and I were having an IM chat on Facebook about the loss of DCN e-mail. She said that she had sent an e-mail to a friend to cancel a lunch date they had and had asked her friend to respond so that she knew the message had gotten through.

Well, we discovered that outgoing e-mail was OK, it was just incoming e-mail that was jammed up somewhere. She laughed that she might actually have to pick up the telephone and call her friend to make sure that the cancellation e-mail had been received.

A few minutes later, I received the following message:

I thought you'd enjoy this. To avoid the phone, I sent my friend another email (since our email is being sent) and told her to go on Facebook (where we're "friends") and IM me letting me know she got my email canceling our visit. I'll see if it works.

I told Walt that I wondered if the two women lived as close as Joan and I do to each other--2 blocks apart and most of our communication is done on notes attached to notices that one or the other of us has made the next move on our now three-year old Scrabble game.

---

This afternoon we went to the dog park for the second birthday party for the Rainbow puppies. Last year all ten of them were there, as well as their mother, Callie....

...the only one of the dogs who is not black and white!

The dogs, of course, don't remember each other and, since we had the time wrong and showed up an hour early, by the time we decided to leave, Sheila and Lizzie were very glad to leave the park and get into the car. They came home and collapsed.

But all the puppies are healthy and happy and a great time was had by everybody, including Bosley, the Boston Bull terrier who decided to join the group and absolutely loved everybody.

The Technical Liaison

When your title is "technical liaison," it does not give a good impression when it takes you thirty friggin' minutes to log onto the Internet!

I have volunteered to be part of a DCN (Davis Community Network) team helping non-profit organizations get web sites up and running, using the tools developed by DCN. The idea is to create a web site which will outlast the one your brother-in-law created five years ago, before he moved to Toledo, and which will be simple to maintain by a trained team working in your office...or whatever is the facility of record for a non-profit.

Of course the team of DCN people working on this project has been developing it for years and I am a Johnny-come-lately. A 65 year old Johnny-come-lately who has sadly begun to realize that she doesn't learn things as quickly as she used to. I've been designing web pages, for myself and for other people, for ten years, but this is a new system and it takes awhile to figure it all out.

Figuring out the terminology, for one thing. I've been struggling to understand what an MOU is (finally got that one down - Memorandum of Understanding - but I have to stop and work it out each time) as well as the other host of abbreviations that are part of the common language of this group.

There are four non-profit groups who are part of the pilot program and I volunteered (because I felt that as a new member of this board, I should Get Involved in something) to work with Tree Davis, which seemed the least complicated on the list.

Unfortunately because of time conflicts (there was that little "wedding" thing, you may recall) and misunderstandings of schedules, I have missed all the one-on-one meetings up to yesterday. So the groundwork has already been laid, the groundwork that I was counting on to help me bluff my way through this "technical liaison" business, and yesterday was the meeting to collect the MOU and the outline that the Tree Davis people had put together and to start actually working on the site itself.

I met Kari, who oversees all the projects, at Peets Coffee downtown at 3 p.m. The guys from Tree Davis were coming at 4 to meet with us. She was going to bring me up to speed.

Unfortunately, there were no empty tables for 4 inside the cafe, so we set outselves up at a lovely table on the sidewalk. I went in and got a drink and the code that would let me into the Peets wi fi connection.

As we sat there, we realized that there was a horrible odor coming from...somewhere. Dog poop. Or vomit. Or rotting food in the garbage can intensified by the sun shining on it. Whatever it was, when the gentle breeze blew it our way, it was decidedly unpleasant.

So were the big black flies that flew around us.

But we gamely mushed forward and eventually the two Tree Davis guys came. After introductions, Kari suggested I fire up the laptop and we could check out what one of them had done on the site already.

That's when all of my "technicial liaison" credentials went down the tube.

First, it takes forEVer for my laptop to start. Probably five minutes. And then it looks for available internet connections. Now I should add that I almost never connect to wi fi. I can connect in my home to a network that a neighbor has (yes, I know that's a no-no, but I almost never do it. I think I've done it three times in the past two years). I connect at my sister-in-law's house, and I've connected once or twice in a motel. Otherwise, that has not been an issue. And when I am in a place where I've been before, it just automatically connects me to that network because I've used it before.

SO, I can't remember where I look or what I click to get me the box that shows what the available networks are. That was my initial problem. How to find the box that showed me where the Peets connection was, long before I ever entered the right code so that I could use it!

I was also hampered by the fact that I did not have a mouse with me and I hate...hate...HATE the fingerpad. I can never control the cursor with it. Well, I CAN, but not without a lot of cursing and frustration.

FINALLY I found the box and I didn't see anything that said Peets, so picked the top network and it brought up a log-on screen. I tried logging on using the password they had given me, but of course that didn't work. After much frustration, I went back inside to get help from the clerk, who told me I had to use the Peets network and that people outside never had trouble before.

Well, I did finally find it, but I had to log out of what I was trying to log in on...then FIND the damn box again, then find Peets and finally I was logged in. That was only the first step, and it had already taken a good 15 minutes.

Next, I had to log into the Tree Davis page and of course all my information was in e-mail on my desktop because I hadn't thought to move it to an actual bookmark so I could pick it up on the laptop. But with the help of the Tree Davis guys, I did get on and we commented on the work that had been done.

Then I decided to log into the site and see about editing, but when I did that, something happened and I was suddenly logged out of the network. And I couldn't find the damn box again. And when I did, it said I was logged into the network, but when I tried connecting to a web page, it told me I wasn't.

By now I had spent half an hour just trying to log onto the friggin' internet! Kari kept up the meeting with the guys while I sweated with my laptop and everytime she mentioned me as their "technical liaison," I could just imagine what these two guys were thinking.

We finally decided it was too late to do anything and that we were all getting sick of the smell and the flies, so we set a meeting for next week in a different location. I will bring a MOUSE next time, will make sure that everything is BOOKMARKED and, if possible, learn how to find the damn list of available internet networks before I head off to the meeting.

My one saving grace was that they are trying to recreate their current masthead, which is made up of two different graphics, and they didn't know how to do that. I asked them to e-mail me the graphics and I sent them their masthead within 5 minutes of receiving the e-mail, so I hope that I salvaged a BIT of confidence in me as their technical liaison. I may be slow in the workings of the DCN simple sites--but I'm damn good at PhotoShop!

But we'll see how it all goes next week.

Plastics

OK--let's have a show of hands here. How many of you red the title of this and immediately thought of either Dustin Hofman or The Graduate?

Congratulations. You are officially a "Boomer."

I had a meeting on Sunday with a woman I've met with before, about a year ago. We've kind of known each other peripherally for many, many years, back to when she was working in the early days of Davis Cable TV and Ned and his friend Greg made the first made-for-Davis-TV video, Ned & Greg Investigators.

Our paths crossed again when I attended Vloggercon in San Francisco in June of 2006. Shortly after, she contacted me about joining together to work on a project with the Davis Community Network. At the time she was thinking about a way to encourage people to contribute to a site that would kind of unite the town electronically.

She was going out of town and said she would contact me when she came back. She contacted me a year and a half later. Even then, our meeting was delayed because she forgot the original date. But it was worth it.

The objective has changed in the interim, but the possibilities are much more solid. She was asking me to join the Board of Directors for the Davis Community Network. They are working on a project I'm not totally clear on, but it will offer nonprofit organizations a way to use the facilities and expertise of people at DCN to publicize their organizations.

Or something like that. I know it's more complicated than that.

During our hour at good ol' Mishka's coffee (where I plugged in and logged on using their wi fi during the blackout), I learned a lot of the lingo of the networking biz.

We talked, for one thing, about the difference between the way the Boomer generation gets its entertainment and the way entertainment comes to kids of today--called "millenials," a term I had not heard before. Apparently "Millenials" are the next group up from "Gen-Xers." It's even more of an "instant gratification" generation, who can't be patient to sit through a whole television program, when they can get 5 minute YouTube videos on their iPhones while they're in the middle of doing three other things.

(It was also depressing to discover that I don't seem to have a "generation." Apparently the "Greatest Generation" ends in 1942 and Boomers start in 1947, which leaves us poor 1943-6 people as the "between the cracks generation.")

The upshot was that I agreed to come to a Board meeting the following Tuesday, last night.

What were these butterflies in my stomach as I drove to the meeting? I always get so tense when I go cold into situations with people I've never met before and worry that I won't live up to anybody's expectations, but my fears were laid to rest as soon as I walked in the door.

The meeting was held in the old room where, back in the early 1990s, I first learned how to get onto the Internet, in the days when it was all done in code.

There were about 12-15 people in attendance and some were people I hadn't seen in about 10-15 years, even though we live in the same town.

I will admit that my head was spinning by the end of the meeting. This seemed to be kind of a follow-up meeting reporting on things that had been discussed last month, so there were "codes" to learn (what's an "MOU" or an "OPC"?)

But when they started talking about the project we had discussed over coffee, building new web content in Internet 2 protocol (which I'd never heard of before Saturday, but which I kind of vaguely understand, having been using it for a long while and not aware of it), it all began to be a bit less dry and a lot more exciting.

So... Everybody seems to want me to join. It sounds like it's going to be interesting. They vote the two of us newcomers in at the next meeting, and then I'm committed for a new year term.

A new chapter begins!