I’ve had an idea for some time that I wanted to have a way to promote SeventyTwo within the adoption community. It seems logical that other people like Gina and I, who have adopted, would want to become engaged to work with orphaned children who are left behind and haven’t been adopted.
Well, my first idea about doing this, other than talking with them directly, is to begin setting up a blogging community online. If there is anything that I have noticed with people who have adopted, it is that we definitely tend to connect. There is a deep satisfaction in connection through the joy of adoption, especially after what has been, in many cases, a lot of pain to bring you to the place of deciding to adopt. The internet, clearly, is a deeply connected place, so it isn’t a bad place to start.
The other thing that we’ve noticed is that as that connection happens, we want to tell our stories and show off our kids and our families. You should see the forums that my wife frequents and all of the picture uploads and story telling that happen there. Its really cool…
So, with our desire to reach out to people who are adopting to tell them about our work with orphans, and the adoption community’s desire to connect with one another, I thought it made sense to offer a place where we could do both. I’ve obtained adoptblogs.org and am in the process of setting up a site where you can create your own blog and begin telling your story online - for free. All of the technology is in place and adoptive families will be able to soon sign up for a blog where you can write your posts, upload pictures, embed YouTube videos… you name it. The address of your site will be something like mysite.adoptblogs.org and it will be powered by WordPress, the best blogging software available. It will be offered and promoted from SeventyTwo, although actually powered (and if you decide to complete an upgrade) purchased from Ryan Web Services.
So, hang tight… We’ll be up and running soon! Looking forward to having your story in the mix.
Trying out a FireFox add-on that I saw today as I was browsing for something else on the FireFox add-ons page. It is called ScribeFire and was super-simple to set up and make work. Basically, I blog directly from my web browser and then it uploads the content to my blog which it easily connected to after I installed. Go check it out… very nice!
My wife and I went and saw Iron Man last weekend and really liked the movie. But this guy is *really like* Iron Man in that he is flying, over the Swiss Alps, at 7,500 feet, at 185mph. He’s got the delta wing and 4 jet engines strapped to his back. Amazing!
You can see the story over at CBS as well as a picture gallery from his flight.
I’ve thought for some time that it would be fun to list out some of my favorite technology tools that I use on a daily basis. Here are a few… I’ll probably have to update this over time.
I really love that Google hosts your domain to not only provide email, but a host of other applications as well. There are several things that you get in that package:
Gmail for your domain - I use this continually for my email communications. I actually have multiple domains tied to the same account and aliases set up to forward to my primary email address, ryan@ryanjhale.com. That way, no matter what domain or identity you are addressing me at, it will land in the same account and then I can choose which account or identity I want to respond to you with.
Google Calendar - I use this as my primary calendar. I like the feature that allows me to share it with family and add editing rights to individual accounts, even those outside of my domain.
Google Talk - Its an IM client with my own email address as the identity to connect to me.
Google Docs - I haven’t yet used this to its fullest extent, but I am beginning to do more and more, especially as the offline Google Gears application allows me to synchronize the online documents with my offline computer if I am flying or somewhere else that I’m not connected to the internet.
This is an excellent online task manager that gives you a lot of control. It also integrates with Google Calendar, so you can easily access tasks from the calendar. Additionally, they also use Google Gears for offline access to your tasks. Very cool… I’m just waiting on Google to buy them, since the G-team doesn’t have task management at this point.
I’ve been running my own web services and hosting company for the last few years and Manila has been the backbone of the websites that I have hosted. It was one of the first and best content and website management systems that gives a lot to the techies and engineers while making it super-simple for the non-technical end user folks to manage their site. This software will continue to be the engine that will manage sites for years to come.
While Manila is running the full websites for my company, I’m convinced to use WordPress for blogs and other smaller sites. I think they have done an incredible job of making the interface easy to use for all types of blog writers.
I wouldn’t consider me one of the Mac zealots. I’ll say up front that I had used Windows PCs for 10+ years and never had one hard drive or operating system crash where I lost data. In the last 9 months, I’ve had 2 hard drive crashes where we lost data, one for my wife’s computer and one for mine. Despite that, I’ve stuck with the Mac for these reasons:
I really like the ease of use of the operating system and how it enables interoperability with other hardware and software packages.
I use Parallels software and have installed WinXP as a virtual machine to run any applications that are Windows only. Easy flexibility to do it all on the same hardware.
Good productivity apps with iWork ‘08 using Pages, Numbers, and Keynote for only $80 while also having excellent media applications with iLife using iMovie and iTunes amongst other excellent apps. Perfect balance of software that works with all of the various file types in each.
I’ve been making significant progress with SeventyTwo, setting us up to be ready to move forward with the blogs for the adoption community and with the charity auction in September. There is more and more that we will be doing. I’ll be thinking out loud about this process here to put my thoughts in writing, so you’ll see the process, but it is all subject to change!
In the meantime, we’re moving forward with the trip to Swaziland. May 1st is the deadline to join and all of the updated trip and travel details are over at http://www.seventytwo.org/travel/swaziland/june2008.
I don’t write about politics all that much, not because I’m not thinking about it, but because I generally don’t think that I’m thinking too many original thoughts that other people aren’t already saying… last thing we would need is another hack saying the same thing as everyone else. We have enough of those!
But I haven’t heard others say this, so maybe I’m on to something new… apologies if not.
I would say I’m about as conservative as they come, but Barack Obama has seemed pretty intriguing. I think that the Democratic party and their candidates for so many years have run on platforms of crises…crises that only the government can fix, and I think that is why, when Obama comes along, he seems like such a fresh voice and gets the youth vote and inspires everyone without getting into the details behind his plans and policies. I think it is also why he seems to have this air about him that puts him above all of the mud-slinging politics of the election. He is a fresh face that, instead of talking about the “healthcare crisis”, the “Medicare crisis”, “Social Security crisis”, or any of these other things, he talks about Hope, standing in direct contrast to the rest in his party. Hope is quite an amazing thing. It is very empowering for people who have it, and that message stands in direct and significant contrast to “we’re in a crisis” and “you must be rescued…and we’re the party to do it”.
Now, of course you obviously have to judge what he means by hope. You have to understand what the policies are that stand behind the declaration for hope. I personally don’t agree with much of anything that he suggests as a solution or a policy. I don’t actually believe that the policies themselves will empower anyone…just the opposite, in fact. But, I do feel like I understand why people are so excited about his candidacy, and I think that it makes sense to approach politics in this way. To give people hope, to help them understand that they can be empowered and are can be more than what they are today… it seems to me that this is exactly what government should be about and should drive our politics.
I’ve been meaning to post this for some time. My wife Gina had seen this posted and pointed me to it a while back. I liked it because there is an obvious connection since this pastor is working with AIDS victims in Africa and is discussing how he is at a loss for what to do other than be present to these people. The other thing that I think is significant in this idea of being present is that it really isn’t all that much. It is deciding to show up, to be there, and I think that is a big difference in any situation. Many, including myself, are good at talking about this problem or that. We talk a good game, but we don’t DO. We don’t show up, and that is what we’re talking about here…showing up.
While we can always do better, I think we’ve felt that we’ve had a pretty good start with SeventyTwo. At this point, we’re moving forward with our next steps to introduce our organization to an ever-wider audience and begin to engage more people to help orphans where we are working in Swaziland and China. Here are a few things we’re working on:
Trip to Swaziland
We’re headed to Swaziland in June for our first project there. We’re excited about the impact that we will have through this project. We’re still looking for additional supporters or partners for this project, so if you are interested and able to give, please get in touch or make a donation.
Video documentation of our trips
One of the things that we’re doing is to have a videographer go with us to Swaziland. We’d like to develop several videos that we’ll make available on the SeventyTwo website as well as provide on a DVD for potential partners to review as they consider taking on a project in China or Swaziland.
Free blogs for the adoption community
We’re wanting to begin allowing the adoption community a way to keep in touch with friends and family during their adoption process while also helping them understand how to help orphans that are left behind and will not be adopted. This is exciting for us because we have all of the technologies in place and only need to begin the final implementation stages and promote the service. For families who wish to provide financial assistance to SeventyTwo, we’ll offer feature, service, and disk space upgrades with 100% of the monies going to help orphans in China and Swaziland.
Charity auction
We’ve begun working with Rob and Tina Weiman of Mound City Auctions who offered to help us by providing a charity auction. We’re targeting the end of September for that event and need to get started right away. We’re working through the details of this now and I am going to begin thinking through those details here on this page… Exciting stuff because we will be able to begin introducing SeventyTwo to a large audience, including potential corporate donors.
There are certain times in life when you begin to feel that you have marked the next stage in your life. I’m sitting in the Kansas City airport on my way out to Denver for a meeting tomorrow making a guess that this is one of those times. I mentioned yesterday that I am looking into a new position with my company. That’s what the meeting is about… trying to figure out how this is all going to come together. One of the implications, assuming this moves forward, is that we will likely need to move to Denver to work there. We’re considering this with a pretty fair amount of weight, especially given that it will mean that we will need to uproot from the relationships that we have developed here in St. Louis after moving here in August 1998, at that time also with work.
I think there are several things that allow us to say that we could see this as a possibility. Here are a few:
I’ve worked from home for the last 10 years. I’m not tied to a particular place geographically with my work.
We homeschool our girls. There are some great resources for homeschool families in our area, probably at a level that we may not find in many other places, but the reality is that, while it is nice, I don’t think we have to have five different choices to offer science supplementary classes.
We’ve recently started a non-profit called SeventyTwo, and while it is today based in the St. Louis area and we have begun to introduce it to people and organizations here, there isn’t any organization that I would say has made a full commitment to partner with SeventyTwo to go and care for the children we are working with. It would probably be a different story if we had several organizations that we worked with directly in St. Louis…that just isn’t our reality.
Many of our relationships over the last several years have come about because of our affiliation with the churches that we have been a part of. While we definitely do have good friendships in St. Louis, friendships that I would hate to leave, the truth is that we only see these folks somewhat infrequently and share life on a “let’s catch up” basis. I wouldn’t have guessed that was where we would have ended up, but it is where we are today.
On the other hand, we have some motivation to get moving on with the next stage. Right now, we’re in a house that costs us a significant amount of our monthly income, and while it isn’t that we’re in horrible shape, we could be much better from a financial standpoint and unloading the house and moving on could be a great move for us.
So that’s a little about our thought process. We hadn’t anticipated being asked to move somewhere else, but we have and I think that if ultimately works out, we’re up for doing it.
One last note… We’ve had a couple of people tell us that they wonder about the timing, that maybe this is all a distraction from what we’re supposed to be doing. I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about this and honestly I’m not exactly sure what that is, what the alternative would be. We could stay in St. Louis, not move forward in my career and continue doing what we’re doing with the rest of our life… or we could move to Denver, move forward in my career, and continue doing what we’re doing with the rest of our lives. I can’t imagine SeventyTwo suffering. The rest won’t either from everything that I can tell. Truly, the only other option that I can imagine is to completely chuck all of this life and move to China to care for the children there. I’ve actually considered this somewhat seriously, but don’t really feel that we have a bunch of open doors to make such a radical move and departure from where we are today.
Things have been crazy-busy around here with a lot of transition going on. I’ve decided to try out WordPress for my blog, primarily because that is going to be the standard offering with my web services company. For now, if you had previously been to my site and are looking for anything there, you can find it over at http://manila.ryanjhale.com.
I’m also working on moving my picture gallery and will have that included here at this site as well. It is at http://www.ryanjhale.com/pictures for future reference, although the pictures aren’t there yet.
So, to the transition thing… Much to say here, but I probably won’t get it all, so maybe just a few bullet points.
I’ve been in the process for some time of considering a new position where I work. I had actually written a proposal for a new group about a year and a half ago to help the company provide services, especially to our larger customers who often need to have additional help in thinking through the implementation of products across a significant number of people, campuses, and systems. It can be quite a challenge, but over the last few years, we’ve developed some skill at it and have helped many customers do this. It appears to be time to try to expand that, so that is what we’re discussing. It looks like we might actually need to move to Denver to do this, which honestly is both a bummer and exciting at the same time. There is more to say here, but that is a start…
At the same time, we’ve been in the middle of a lot of work with SeventyTwo. We work with orphans in China and Swaziland and you can see more information over at http://www.seventytwo.org. It has been quite a ride already in our efforts to connect churches and organizations to these projects, with some fits and starts. A ton has happened and we’re standing at the edge of some even bigger projects. Looming large on the horizon is a project in Swaziland with the village of Mgambeni where we have funded a small agricultural micro-business that the church in the village will develop, run, and use the profits to pay for the expenses of the orphaned children in the area. We’re going over to Swaziland in June to help them get the project off of the ground. Details on that trip are at http://www.seventytwo.org/travel/swaziland/june2008. A charity auction in September and a trip to China in October are up next. Whew…
And at the same time, I’ve been working to revamp my web hosting company into a web services company. We will still offer servers and the standard kind of space on the web that we have in the past, but really, the point is to help people get up and running on the web with the things that they’re wanting. We’re offering blogs, full websites, e-commerce, business applications, online courses, and more. One of the exciting things that I’m working on now is actually for SeventyTwo where we’ll use WordPress to set up a blog community and offer free websites, initially to adoptive families who are wanting to blog their experiences in adoption as we have done in the past, and then possibly to other organizations as well. The thought here is that, while we’re already part of the adoption community because of our experiences in adoption, we want to connect into it further with SeventyTwo. We’ll offer the free sites with upgrade packages including additional space, picture galleries, and the ability to use your own URL without any banner links back to SeventyTwo. I’m hoping to use that model to offer similar services to other organizations as well.
