aerik

I lost a friend today.  The last time I talked to him, he was in the hospital, trying to work after having blood transfusions.  I've never seen such a hard working person in my whole life.  He was also a man of great fairness and integrity.  I'm sorry I didn't get more time with him and I will miss my friend.  Goodbye Martin, and thank you.

Today I went to a conference for Salesforce.com (we're using that at work) and there were a few surprising speakers at the keynote.  One of them was John Gage, the guy who started "Net Day" in 1995, a project to wire schools for the internet.  At the Salesforce conference he said he's starting a new project - he wants to get a ton of engineers to volunteer their time to go back to the schools, but this time with a goal of helping them become more energy efficient.  I'm gonna sign up.  And evangelize.  Awesome.

Today I talked to Causecast.org - they are interested in syndicated volunteer opportuntiies (yay!  a good connection!)  and I also recently dug out USAService.org's feed (you can get it by manually editing the URL) and added it to Eventfeed.  Very cool.

I've been reading more and more in the news about yesterday being a day of service, and a surge of patriotism across America and a continued call for Americans everywhere to get involved in their community and their country.

And I continue to think that Americans who want to answer the call will ask, "where do I go? what can I do?" And the answers are spread across hundreds of websites... so a part of the big answer, is for websites to share that information with each other, so people can spend their time helping, not searching hundreds of websites.

Eventfeed.org isn't website - it's an idea. It's a proposal and a project. An initiative for greater communication and accessibility. If every website that published events marked them up with a little special markup, then pretty soon you could Google for charitable events in your area (as well as other kinds of events).

I was looking at some site statistics, and saw that 9 people googled me in the last  month.  Me, personally, not my websites.  (Okay, six of them could have been googling for some other "Aerik" but three of them googled "Aerik Sylvan".)

That gives me kind of a wierd and interesting feeling... Not sure quite what I think of that.

I've always been grateful to be an American.  After 9/11 I felt patriotism in that I was connected to the rest of the country in my mourning and anger. But I've never really experience pride in my country.

But today, reading the news of record voter turnouts and the history making decision we collectively made, for the first time in my lifetime, I felt truly proud of my country. 

This country, the America of November 4th 2008, the country that voted this man president, this is the country that is moving forwards.  This is the country that aided its allies in World War II.  This is the country of hope, the land of opportunity, the home of the free, and this is the country I am proud to be a citizen of.

I've surfed more in the last year than in whole rest of my life before that.  I went twice this week (which I don't expect to keep up, but there was a good swell, low tide in the later afternoon, and the weather was beautiful - clear and in the the 70's).  

Surfing is apparently one of those things that gets funner and funner the better you get at it.  Yes, "funner".  "More fun" is just to formal sounding for surfing.  Joann said our friend Jen, who died last year of breast cancer, once gave her a quite a bad time for saying "funner".  Jen, when she was sick and we were all confident she was going to get better, had asked me to teach her to surf some time.  I'm sorry I won't get a chance to do that.  I think she would have thought it was funner than a lot of other things too.

So, Eli and Ben have both told me about a school rule that says there is no touching. know that can't play tag, or have any kind of contact like that, but they both insist that the rule means no touching.  So we talked about nice touching, and unwelcome touching, and that I was sure that it was okay to offer a hug to another child if they looked like it might be appropriate.

But they are sure there is no touching.

That would be quite a cold environment, and I have a hard time accepting that.  From knowing the school, and some of the teachers, and from meeting the principal and having an idea of where he stands, I doubt that they really mean that.  So, I emailed him with the story and with my concerns.  I hope to be able to got back to Eli and Ben and tell them I was right...

We'll see...

UPDATE:  I talked to the principal, who is a very genuine and sincere nice guy.  I explained the whole deal to him.  He said that the did have a "no touching" rule, but that it was really about games and pushing, that kind of thing.  He agree that hugs (as long as the other child wanted a hug, and it wasn't distracting to the class) were of course okay.  It was nice to be able to report this back to Eli and Ben.

My dad, today:

"A guy doesn't get too many chances to set an example, so when he does, he'd better run with it."

I like it. It was worth writing down and remembering.

I feel strongly enough about the civil (human) rights being being violated (hundreds of people locked up for 5 years, no habeas corpus) to be motivated to do more than vote and write letters.


So, here I am:
http://actagainsttorture.org/photo_gallery_13Jan2007.html


This group is cooperating with Amnesty International to raise awareness about (and help shut down) Guantanamo.

I'm a fuzzy blob holding on to one side of a sign in the 10th picture just left of center in the background.

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I was talking to my mother today about all this - this inspiration to be more politically active, and she said "Aren't you afraid? Afraid that you'll end up on some FBI list somewhere?" (I may be almost ready to wear a tinfoil hat, but I'm pretty sure my mom has one in her closet.)

At first I said no, not really, that I was pretty sure I wouldn't do anything extreme enough to get myself disappeared or anything like that. But a little later in the conversation it hit me: You can't make decisions about stuff like this based on fear - you've gotta do what you believe is right. That's what I believe and what I want to teach my children.

So then tonight I saw this tee-shirt on Amnesty's website store that says, "All it take for evil to triumph is for enough good people to do nothing." So I bought it.

Using the can opener to trick the latch mechanism to make the dishwasher think the door is closed while you look for where it's leaking.

We went to the library last night. What a nice way to spend the evening. It's so neat to see the kids so into looking at books and choosing books to bring home. It's amazing how much we forget about the simple things.

Further on that note, we've got a cold going through the household. It's one of the few things that forces me to slow down and not burn the candle at both ends. I hate being sick, but it's been really nice to relax and lay around the house...

So, I finally did something I've been thinking about for about a year: Drove over the hill to capitola to sit in this coffee shop and work on the computer. So, this isn't just any coffee shop, it's in Capitola, a very cute touristy beach town. The coffee shop is right on the beach as a matter of fact. I've been here a couple of times after going to the beach (boogie-boarding) and noted that they had free wireless, and thought "hmm...".

So, tonight I drove over. I went for a swim (waves are negligible, not worth boogie-boarding). The water was unusually warm (okay, that means it wasn't freezing.) There is a live band playing 50's and 60's music on the end of the beach. Cool. So I'm sitting here, working, and it gets busier and busier. Then a lady starts playing the piano - and she's actually really good. Sounds a lot like Nora Jones.

Kind of a surreal evening.

Oh, and I should mention that I went boogie boarding Saturday and saw what must've been a 15 foot shark eat a seal (Brett saw it better: http://www.sharkresearchcommittee.com/pacific_coast_shark_news.htm)

Interesting few days...

Well, after being frustrated with ehostpros (they broke my webpages) I've moved to Fremonthost - actually, I'm still moving. Just finally got the email migrated and our weblog working. Ugh.

I am transfering one of our (11 year old!) wedding videos to our PC (to make it into a DVD) and I've been watching it a bit as it goes... tonight, in particular, the number of changes strike me:

• A friend of mine that died several years ago
• Joann's grandmother, who died just a couple years ago
• My dad, before he got cancer
• Joann's god-daughter is in the video - she was 7 years old then, and now she's in college
• and those are just some of the biggest ones...

Just seems particularly striking tonight...

I bought some peaches at the grocery store the other day (they were actually ripe!) and on each one was a little label: www.ripenready.com.

It's more than just the "information age" - maybe "interconnected age" is more accurate.

There was an article in Discover about how we are becoming addicted to being connected, checking our email, voicemail, text messages... think "email-checkers anonymous". You know, they're right too. I have sat at working hitting F9 (checks for new mail in Lotus Notes) more than once.