Tag Archives: Great Britain

Kindertransport

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My thoughts today turn to an acquaintance who is very gravely ill and may not live much longer. Her name is Ines and she has a twin sister, Eva. I’ve known them all my life and also known that they have a rather interesting, and tragic, history. You see, they are survivors of Nazi Germany, Jewish by birth, who were separated from their family when they were only eleven or twelve years old and sent to Great Britain in 1938 or 1939 as part of the Kindertransport (see http://www.Kindertransport.org/ for an excellent history of this rescue operation). As far as I know, they never saw their family again and I assume they were all killed. My Grandma McCallum knew more of their story but this is as much as I know. I don’t recall Eva or Ines ever talking about this experience, at least, not when I was around.

They are really special people and I fondly remember staying with them a few times over the years when attending what we called “special meetings” (basically, a Bible conference held over a three-day period, usually Friday to Sunday) in New York. For a number of years, Ines worked in the World Trade Center. In spite of what they had been through, I don’t ever recall them being downhearted. They were always cheerful and full of hospitality to others.

Last year I watched a moving documentary of the Kindertransport, called Into the Arms of Strangers (see http://www2.warnerbros.com/intothearmsofstrangers/), which was presented with an Oscar for best documentary film in 2000 or 2001. I encourage anyone who doesn’t know about this part of recent history to look it up in your local library and to watch it.

Blog visitors: some interesting facts and figures [Updated]

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I’ve been using Google Analytics since mid-November 2005 to gain some knowledge about who visits this blog, how much traffic it generates, and from where. It’s not a perfect tool but hey, it’s free and it’s easy to use. I’ve read that others question the results given to them by Google Analytics and I think it is a good policy to try to track usage in more than one way (e.g. by adding in analysis of server logs, depending on whether your ISP provides access to that kind of information).

It’s now been about two months since I put in place the necessary tracking code. Here are some interesting facts and figures that I’ve come up with so far:

  • the site averages about 21 visitors each day (interestingly, that corresponds exactly to the number of subscribers it has on Bloglines)
  • about 37% of visitors are recurring and 63% of them are new during that two month timeframe
  • visitors come from all over the world, including (as far as I can tell) the following countries: the U.S., Canada, Australia, Great Britain, Sweden, Germany, Norway, Spain, France, Israel, Hungary, and Poland.
  • visitors find their way here mainly via Google, Technorati, or by entering the URL to this site (what Google Analytics terms ‘direct’)

I have seen steady growth in access these last few months. The traffic this site gets (and therefore its ‘impact’) is quite low, but that’s fine with me. It’s just kind of fun to know a bit about visitors, especially where they come from.

[Update: For reasons I don't quite understand yet, I discovered this a.m. that if I look at Google Analytics results for this site on a weekly basis, I get different results than if I choose to view the results for the complete length of time I have had Google Analytics running (approximately since mid-November 2005). The above statistics are derived from a two month summary rather than from analyzing results week by week. One major difference is the fact that a much larger number of countries are sources for visitors to this site than I had previously believed. These include China, Indonesia, Brazil, New Zealand, United Arab Emirates, Philippines, Romania, Italy, Netherlands, India, Vietnam, Mexico, Switzerland, Belgium, Thailand, Venezuela, Argentina, Peru, and Czech Republic. I think this is pretty incredible geographic coverage for a very low traffic, English language site, and it gives real meaning to WORLD Wide Web.]

A wedding weekend

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This past weekend was spent with my side of the family. My eldest niece, Britta, was married on Monday to Roger. The marriage ceremony was held underneath the spreading branches of the huge old oak tree in front of her parent’s house, and it was a beautiful setting. The weather was sunny and warm and couldn’t have been better. About 100 or so people were present, many from Great Britain and elsewhere (Roger is from Great Britain). Some photos by my brother, Jeff, are available here. It is hard to believe that Britta is all grown up and now married. I saw a lot of people at the wedding whom I hadn’t seen in years and it gave me a sort of Rip Van Winkle kind of feeling, like I had been in a time warp and had just woken up to see that everyone had grown up or gotten a lot older while I was asleep.

Teaching an online course

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Today is a sad and troubling day because Michele and I heard from my mom that my sister-in-law, Linda, is very sick again and hospitalized for intense pain in her stomach region. She spent two weeks in hospital about four months ago for similar pain and had an operation to clear up intestinal adhesions. Now we wonder if that really is the problem or not. She is in surgery as I write this and we are praying for her and my brother Tim, as well as their children. Fortunately Linda’s parents are over here from Great Britain and staying with them right now. I’m regressing into feeling worse again with this cold or whatever it is, and it looks like Tristan has come down with it, too, judging by his runny nose and general crabbiness. Today I accepted an offer to teach a course this fall as an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science in their distance education curriculum, known as LEEP. It’ll be a great experience but it scares me to death as I’ve never done something like this before. Just the thought of developing a syllabus is awfully intimidating!