New Horizons In Technology

I am nothing if not cutting edge. I come by it honestly, too. When I was a little girl my dad started a new business and turned half of our garage into an office. I'd come in from school and help him sort punch cards for his database of subscribers and operate a mechanical collator to help with his mailings. He had a wonderful gadget for dictating letters that would record his voice to thin plastic disk just like those single 78s you'd get at the record store only a little thinner and kind of floppy.

That was cutting edge in 1965!

I've always been curious about what's new in technology. I'll read up on the latest gadgets and all their features and figure out which ones would be right for me. That way I'll know exactly what to buy when my Publisher's Clearinghouse check comes in.

Hey, it could happen.

My husband and I bought the very first Apple Macintosh computer in 1984 with its whopping 128k of RAM and its single 400k floppy drive. Who needs a hard drive anyway? We had matching Palm IIIe PDAs before most of our friends had anything like that. We could often be seen beaming important contact information or documents back and forth to each other.

That's not to say we've ever made a habit out of buying the first and the best new items on the market. Except for the Macintosh, which we knew would last us for years. And we did, indeed, use it for years, long after upgrades and newer models had passed us by.

Now I've given up the Palm Zire 72 I've been using for years and I'm getting used to the Palm TX that once belonged to my husband (he graduated to an Ipod Touch he got for Christmas). The Palm TX has a faster processor, larger screen, and more memory. One thing I'm really enjoying about it is the portable bluetooth keyboard my husband had for this. Now I can sit in my rocking chair, put my feet up on my footstool and write my blog entries (like this one) much more comfortably than sitting at my desktop computer. It doesn't matter if it's not cutting edge, as long as it gets the job done.


Who knows, maybe I'll be inclined to write more often. I might even get started on one of those books I've still got tucked away in my head....

Hey, it could happen!

Blizzard of '10 Part 3

I don't know how many more inches of snow we got during the blizzard that blew through here Tuesday and Wednesday. It was impossible to take a simple measurement because of the winds and drifting snow. Here's how it went (click on the photos to see them full size)....

On Tuesday, 2/09/10, the day started like this:

By 10:00pm it looked like this:

And it ended like this, around midnight:

We slept late Wednesday morning and as I walked to the front door around 11:00 to look out the window here's what I saw:

Outside that door, the world looked like this:

At about 1:30, after a few more hours of heavy snow and wind gusts of up to 40 mph here's what it looked like:

And at 3:30:

Here's a view of our townhouse community's parking lot... notice the icicle on the right. The snowdrift was as high as our window.

We were pleasantly surprised to see that our evening paper had been delivered by late afternoon. But with snow still blowing in 30-40 mph winds, you have to ask yourself, "How badly do I want to read that paper...and how long will it take me to dig it out later...?"

The snow had stopped by 9:00pm and the winds had died down so my husband decided to start looking for our front walk and that newspaper:

The snowdrifts to the left and right of our door:

To give you a better feel for the storm, the blowing snow, the high winds, here's a video montage of it all, shot from my windows, front & back, downstairs and upstairs...

Blizzard of '10 Part 2

I took a little walk out in front of my house yesterday afternoon with my daughter. My camera's battery was recharging (gotta remember to get a spare someday!) but I took these with my phone. Keep in mine that my daughter is about 5ft 10in tall, so that will put things in perspective for you. Oh, by the way, they're predicting more snow for tomorrow. They say we could get as much as 10 inches. Oh boy.

Blizzard of '10

This is one we'll be telling the next generations about.

It started snowing at my house near Annapolis, Maryland at around 11am on Friday, February 5, 2010. It didn't stop snowing until after 10pm Saturday night.

Here are two photos taken from my front door and my back door a little before 2:00pm on Friday:

At some point Friday afternoon my husband shoveled about 4 inches of snow off our deck. Here are photos from about 5:00pm on Friday:

This was a little before 10:00pm:

I took more pictures just before I went to bed a little after midnight:

I woke up around 3:30am and took these pictures:

Here's what I saw when I woke up Saturday morning, about 7:30am:

About 1:00pm Saturday he decided he'd better try to clear the deck so the weight of the snow didn't damage it. We measured 24 inches of snow.

Then he tackled the front walk:

The last light of day, Saturday, February 6, 2010:

My husband did a little calculating, based on the size of our deck, the depth of the snow and the average weight of wet snow like this was and figured out that he had shoveled 2.5 tons of snow from our deck. It had to go somewhere (note the height of the lawn mower handle on the left):

Let me encourage you to read my husband's blog entry, "Little Townhouse on the Peninsula" for today, . He has some photos of his own and some wise words to share.

It's Only a Soap Opera ...for Haiti

I have a friend, a doctor, who has been working with the relief efforts in Haiti the past few weeks. I've actually never met her in person. We met on Twitter because of our common interest in a soap opera. Over the past few months we've shared laughs and observations on parenting and seen each other through the illness and death of loved ones. If anyone says that online friends aren't real friends, I beg to differ.

My friend will be leaving Haiti in a matter of hours and others will take up the work there as it will surely continue for the foreseeable future. I was thinking of what I could possibly do to help the cause. I’m not a doctor and I’m never going to have much spare cash to give to relief efforts, either. But I think I’ve come up with something that could make a difference and at the same time honor my friend and the work she’s been doing with Doctors Without Borders.

I came up with a series of designs a few months ago that I’ve expanded into a full line of products in my Zazzle shop. It started with the phrase “My life is a soap opera…What would Erica Do?” That’s referring, of course, to Erica Kane, the character on All My Children, played so beautifully by Susan Lucci for the past 40 years. I came up with some other phrases, all beginning with “My life is a soap opera…”, adding other characters from Guiding Light, One Life to Live, General Hospital, and the Young & the Restless.

Recently when Crystal Chappell (Carly Manning/DOOL, Olivia Spencer/GL) was on The Bonnie Hunt Show, Bonnie did a comedy bit during the opening of the show, playing her own evil twin who was aghast at the awful things Crystal’s character had done on Days of Our Lives. Crystal picked up on that during her interview, too, and they had a good laugh. (You can see a clip of the interview here.)

The next day when Crystal was on Twitter I sent her the link to this mug:

My Life is a Soap Opera #2 Mug by donnapool

Crystal saw it and tweeted back, “Hilarious! I love it!” Apparently quite a few people took a look at my Twitter profile page to see what I’d said to her that was so hilarious and clicked on that link, too, because that mug was among the Top 10 Most Viewed Mugs on Zazzle that day!

My conclusions... you can reach a lot of people through Twitter and there are a lot of soap opera fans out there.

So, here’s what I’ve decided to do. From now through the end of February, I will be tweeting links to all my Zazzle products in the “My Life Is A Soap Opera…” line and hopefully my fellow soap opera fans will be retweeting them. I will keep track of all the sales of those items and send all my proceeds to Doctors Without Borders to be used in their relief efforts in Haiti.

I know that every dollar makes a difference in Haiti right now. Using these designs for a fund-raising project like this makes sense because so many soap opera stars go out of their way to get involved in charity projects. For example, recently, Nancy Lee Grahn got on the phone and gathered several of her soap star friends on very short notice to meet fans in person at the Rose Bowl and take donations for Haiti. (I have a “…What Would Alexis Do?” design in my Zazzle shop for the character she plays on General Hospital.)

And who knows, maybe I’ll find some other soap fans out there who will offer to match the amount I bring in and Doctors Without Borders will benefit even more.

So look for me on Twitter… I’m DonnaDPool …and if you see my tweets with these links, please take a look, and if you like what you see and want to buy it, know that all of my earnings from each sale (above Zazzle’s cost for producing the item) will be going to help the people of Haiti. I’ll be adding new items throughout the month. Oh, and I do take requests so if your favorite soap character isn’t represented, just leave a comment here.

I’ll be sure to keep you updated here on this blog.

Thank you.

Listen

In a few hours the president will give his State of the Union address. I'll tune in, like I always do, because I'd rather watch it and draw my own conclusions instead of waiting for somebody else in the news media to tell me what they think I'm supposed to think about it.

Earlier today I was glued to a website that offered live-blogging of the Apple event that announced the new iPad. I couldn't attend the event but I wanted to see for myself what the presentation actually said and get my own first impression as best I could before reading the tech bloggers and news media reports about this gadget that may or my not be revolutionary.

Watching what people are saying on twitter about this gadget shows that the opinions are many and varied and quite a few people are, shall we say, not entirely sold on the name yet. But some of the comments show how well people are listening, or rather, what they were listening for.

For some, the things this gadget will do fall by the wayside if it doesn't do that one thing you wanted most... whatever that may be. Plug your TV into the video-out port... no, it doesn't have one of those. Make phone calls with it? No, it's not a phone. What?! No camera?! Not this time.

Considering the leaps and bounds of the technology industry it's still a pretty impressive gadget. My husband and I bought the original Macintosh when it came out in 1984, with it's 128k ram, single 400k floppy drive, no hard drive, and greyscale screen and it was pretty impressive back then, too. Guess everybody's got to start somewhere. (Personally, I was reminded of the PADD or Personal Access Display Device from Star Trek: The Next Generation, which I thought was pretty cool!)

The reason I mention the State of the Union speech and this announcement from Apple in the same blog post is because I want to challenge you to do something tonight that some did not do this afternoon.

Listen.

Don't listen for anything in particular that you're hoping he'll say. Don't eagerly await the utterance of certain buzzwords that will give you the excuse you need to jump up on your own soapbox and wave your banner for whatever cause has ignited your passion these days.

Just listen to what the man has to say. And while you're listening, don't turn on that internal translator that says "Well, what he really means by that is...".

Just listen ... once ... all the way through.

Then take some time to think about what he's said and draw your own conclusions about what it means and what you need to do about it.

Then you can turn over the reins to your preferred network and let them lead you around by the nose if that's your thing.


The economy....

Global politics....

The impact of technology on our everyday lives....


I think if we're ever going to find the answers we seek we have to start by listening to each other.

Glenda

My husband was campus minister at the Univ. of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton, Texas and each year he would take a group of students to a conference in New Mexico. I went with him one year and met the girlfriend of our of our students. Lara was a student at the University of Texas in Austin and was staying at a cabin near ours. She sang with a group and their cabin didn't have a piano to play for rehearsal but ours did. So one afternoon, she and 3 other girls came and practiced their songs.

At the time, I was working as a photographer, looking to bank some candids of students I could sell to magazines and they let me take pictures of them...I shot several rolls of film...up on chairs, down on the floor...I told them to just ignore me and I'd be invisible amd they let me get away with it. After an hour or two I finally introduced myself to them and we became fast friends. That week I also met Lara's mother, Glenda, since she was there that week to serve as their cook. She was the secretary for their Baptist Student Center on the UT campus and knew and loved all the students and they loved her back.

A couple of years later I sold some of those pictures of Lara and her friends to the Baptist women's missions magazine I was writing for. Lara's relationship with the guy from our campus didn't last but our friendship did and we continued to write and call and visit through the years. Last spring Lara stayed with us for a week while she was doing research at the national archives in DC for her job.

I remember one day when our friendship was new I was on the phone talking to Lara's mother. I said something funny and she laughed and said, "I pray for your family every Thursday!" She kept lists of people she prayed for ...daily, weekly, monthly...thousands of people all over the world that she prayed for year after year after year. Her health limited her activities for years but her touch was felt around the world. Because of the impact my family had had on her daughter & friends, she prayed for us on Thursdays.

Amazing woman.

She prayed my daughter through the emergency c-section and 11 days in the NICU When we brought our daughter home, she insisted Lara drive her up from Austin to Belton just to see her, even though they could only stay a half an hour because they had to get home for another event. She prayed that same daughter through her eye surgery when she was two and she prayed us through more than one job transition and our move to Maryland.

When I was trying to decide whether to accept a series of big assignments from that Baptist women's missions magazine I called Glenda to ask for her advice and prayers. She told me she knew I could do it and vowed that if I accepted, she would commit to pray for me daily for as long as the assignment lasted. Of course, I did it. That was one of the most challenging and enriching years of my life.

When Glenda had heart surgery a few years ago, we prayed for her. Lara told us that her mother was disoriented as she was coming out of the anesthesia in the recovery room and Lara had to get right up in her face to try to calm her down. Then Glenda began to say names and Lara realizes she was reciting the names of the people on her prayer lists. She was in the recovery room after heart surgery and she was still praying for others.

Amazing woman.

We never lived in the same city, never spent more than seven days in the same place.

Glenda will be remembered for her laughter, her love and her prayers.

I will remember her as my friend.