Tag Archives: Wheaton College

Still not up to par

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I’m still not feeling up to par so stayed home today. Michele and the kids (except for Tristan) are going to my in-laws to help them with last minute cleanup and work to prepare their house to be put on the market tomorrow. We hope and pray that their house will sell quickly in spite of the bad economy. They need to sell their house in order to be able to retire from their jobs and move up to Honey Rock Camp in northeastern Wisconsin, where they will serve as full time, unpaid volunteers. They already have an apartment to live in up there, provided by Wheaton College, and are anxious to be able to move. p1050382.jpg

I’ve been excited by “meeting” old friends, classmates, and neighbors via Facebook recently. The opportunity to reconnect in this way is wonderful, and I hope more and more of my acquaintances will join.

After a two year hiatus we are planning to send out Christmas cards once more. I hope we can take care of gathering the addresses, writing the letter, including a family photo, and get everything mailed this weekend.

Keegan goes fishing

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Yesterday my brother-in-law, Bryan, came to visit for a short while and then drove back home with Keegan. Today they are leaving for Honey Rock Camp, Wheaton College’s Northwoods Campus in northern Wisconsin, for a weekend of fishing and fun. My parents-in-law are already there and they will all share an apartment. Keegan was very excited about the trip. I’m glad he was able to go.

Using comics to promote free or open source software use (Updated)

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Tectonic — Linux and open source news

I was notified of this news item via a PubSub alert and I’m glad I took a look at it. This blog (Tectonic: Africa’s Source for Open Source News) entry talks about a method for getting the word out about free or open source software in Namibia. The problem appears to be with teachers or educators, who don’t seem to know much about what is freely available for classroom use. If you find this interesting enough to follow the link (above), be sure to click on the graphic showing a comic. I did, and found mention of things like Wikipedia, OpenOffice, and Project Gutenberg. Interesting!

Many people don’t stop to think about the international benefits of these kinds of projects. I know that many librarians in third world countries are very interested in or are already using open source library software like Koha. A few years ago, I met with two librarians from Kenya, Charles and [Daniel], for the purpose of helping them (along with colleagues from Wheaton College, who were much more heavily involved with them, e.g. in sponsoring their U.S. trip) investigate Koha and/or other free software that they could use to automate their libraries. Charles and [Daniel] are leaders in the library world in that country. I hope that they and others are also paying attention to open-ils.org, a.k.a. the Evergreen Project in the state of Georgia here in the U.S.