personal
Archived Posts from this Category
Paragliding: an “us” thing
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 31 Aug 2011 | Tagged as: aviation, personal
This spring my spouse Ducky and I took up paragliding training. The training so far has given us many vivid experiences, and I’m itching to share those stories with you. Let me start by telling you why we wanted to enter the sport.
I’m a big fan of flying, in just about every form. I’m a licensed private pilot. I’ve done skydiving in the past. Â I go nuts over airplanes and airshows. I have dreams where I’m able to simply leap in the air and swim (wait, so does everyone else). I enjoy scuba diving and swimming in part because they let me move in three dimensions. My beloved spouse, however, isn’t really excited by any of these pastimes. We have gone scuba diving together. But she finds my powered small aircraft to be noisy, cold, and boring. Flying has mostly been a “me” activity, without her participation. She in turn has her “me” activities that don’t involve me. Continue Reading »
In honour of Derek K. Miller
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 31 May 2011 | Tagged as: culture, digital preservation, meetings and conferences, personal, Vancouver
I never met Derek Miller. I take that back. I may well have met him, say at the Northern Voice conference, the annual gathering of the B.C. blogging and social media scene. I almost certainly heard him play drums; I’m told his band, The Neurotics, played at the start line of the Vancouver Sun Run, our annual 50,000 person 10k stampede. Certainly we had a lot of friends in common. But I became aware of Derek Miller through one of his intriguing ideas. I then grew to admire his bravery, his unsentimental clarity, his humour, his compassion, as he compellingly narrated his own journey towards death. And as the community, in which he made waves and I bob in the ripples, mourned him, it became clear how many people loved and admired him.
I first came across Derek when researching what people were learning about digital legacies: what happens to one’s online persona and works when one dies. Derek apparently coined the term “digital executor”, the person who has the responsibility to take over all one’s blogs and accounts and presence on the net on one’s death. I think it is a brilliant term. Continue Reading »
Spencer Conrad Boise, 1924-2010: what a wonderful man
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 30 Sep 2010 | Tagged as: personal
Our dear uncle Spence, Spencer Conrad Boise, passed away earlier this month.
This is a personal blog post: a chance to say, for the record, a little of what this wonderful man meant to me, and to us. Those of you who are here for i18n or technology stuff, we’ll get back to that next time.
When we family gathered to pay our respects, it was one of those bittersweet occasions — wonderful to see everyone, terrible about the reason; a sad event, but then, when a good person leads a long and happy life and has a quick and peaceful death, a happier outcome than others we could imagine.
When I was a young child growing up near Cincinnati, Ohio, Spencer and his inseparable wife Marty, and their five children, lived right next door to us. It gave our families a close bond, which persists to this day. In fact, soon after I met Ducky and we took our first road trip together, it was to visit Spence and Marty, and some of their kids, in Santa Barbara.