Tag Archives ⇒ phone

Retooling after Google Reader

July 16, 2013
· Martin Kelley

I must admit I’ve been thrown off my blog read­ing by the demise of Google Read­er, closed July 1 with only a few months warn­ing. I remem­ber when Google’s was the newest mem­ber of the RSS read­ing options. Its sim­ple inter­face and relatively-solid per­for­mance even­tu­al­ly won me over and its com­peti­tors grad­u­al­ly stopped inno­vat­ing and final­ly closed. 

In the last few months oth­er ser­vices have tak­en up the chal­lenge of replac­ing Read­er, but it’s been a chaot­ic process and a gam­ble which would be rolled out in time. One of my go-to pro­grams, Reed­er, now works for the phone but not the Mac app. It runs off of the Feed­ly ser­vice, which I now use in the brows­er to access my feeds. 

I rely on these blog read­ing ser­vices to keep track of over 100 blogs. RSS may not be sexy enough to be a mass-market ser­vice but for those of us whose tem­per­me­nts or hob­bies run toward cura­tion, it’s an essen­tial tool. As the new sys­tems mature, I hope to keep up with my Quak­erquak­er read­ing more thoroughly. 

I thought I’d try an experiment

November 8, 2011
· Martin Kelley

My life is now such that I don’t have the time to do long-form, thought­ful blog­ging. When I have time to think about big ideas expressed in well-chosen words, it’s as edi­tor at Friends Jour­nal. I have a rather long com­mute but it’s bro­ken up with trans­fers, I often have to stand and I usu­al­ly don’t have a lap­top on me. What I do have is a smart phone, which I use to keep up with Quak­er blogs, lis­ten to pod­casts and take pictures.

Despite this, I can usu­al­ly write a few para­graphs at a time. Kept at steadi­ly those could amass into blog posts. But the finishing-up effort is hard. I have a 2/3rds com­plet­ed post lav­ish­ing high praise for +Jon Watts’s new album sit­ting on my phone but haven’t had the chance to fin­ish, pol­ish and pub­lish. So what if I seri­al­ized these? Write a few para­graphs at a time, invite com­men­tary, per­haps even alter things in a bit of crowd-sourcing?

Any feed­back I’d get would help keep up my enthu­si­asm for the top­ic. This infor­mal post-as-chat was actu­al­ly the dom­i­nant ear­ly mod­el for blogs, one that fell away as they became more vis­i­ble. It’d be nice to get back to that. The medi­um seems obvi­ous to me: Google+, which allows for extend­ed infor­mal posts. So I’ll try that. These will be beta thoughts-on-electron. If they seem to gell togeth­er, I might then pol­ish and pub­lish to Quak​er​Ran​ter​.org, but no promis­es. This is most­ly a way to get some raw ideas out there.

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Introducing Gregory Kelley Heiland

January 5, 2011
· Martin Kelley

Bothering babies to make them make cute faces is fun!

On Tues­day, Dec 28 my love­ly wife Julie gave birth to our third son. After some dither­ing back and forth (we’re method­i­cal about baby names) we picked Gre­go­ry. Every­one is hap­py and healthy. Vital stats: 20 inch­es, 7 pounds 9 oz. The broth­ers are adjust­ing well, though Theo’s first response to my phone call telling him it was a boy was “oh no, anoth­er one of those.”

Francis is now also a big brother! Proud brother

That’s 5yo Fran­cis (aka “lit­tle big broth­er”) and 7yo Theo (“big big broth­er”) meet­ing their new sib­ling at the hos­pi­tal. More pics in the Gre­go­ry! and Gre­go­ry in the Hos­pi­tal sets on Flickr.

As you can see, we’ve basi­cal­ly bred triplets spaced over three years apart. As fur­ther evi­dence, here’s Theo and Fran­cis in their first pics (links to their announce­ment posts):
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As I men­tioned, we’re method­i­cal about names. When we were faced with Baby #2 I put togeth­er the “Fall­en Baby Names Chart” – clas­sic names that had fall­en out of trendy use. It’s based on the cur­rent rank­ing of the top names of 1900. blank“Gre­go­ry” does­n’t appear on our chart because it was almost unused until a sud­den appear­ance in the mid-1940s (see chart, right). Yes, that would be the time when a hand­some young actor named Gre­go­ry Peck became famous. It peaked in 1962, the year of Peck­’s Acad­e­my Award for To Kill a Mock­ing­bird and has been drop­ping rapid­ly ever since. Last year less than one in a thou­sand new­born boys were Gre­go­ry’s. While we rec­og­nize Peck­’s influ­ence in the name’s Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry pop­u­lar­i­ty, Julie is think­ing more of Gre­go­ry of Nys­sa [edit­ed, I orig­i­nal­ly linked to anoth­er ear­ly Gre­go­ry]. Peck­’s par­ents were Catholic (pater­nal rel­a­tives helped lead the Irish East­er Ris­ing) and were pre­sum­ably think­ing of the Catholic saint when they gave him Gre­go­ry for a mid­dle name (he dropped his first name Eldred for the movies).

Exciting Philly Convergent Friends opportunity

March 8, 2009
· Martin Kelley

ppThe most excel­lent Peg­gy Sen­ger Par­sons of Ore­gon’s Free­dom Friends Church emailed me today say­ing she and the equal­ly excel­lent Marge Abbott will be co-leading a work­shop at the Philadel­phia area Pen­dle Hill Retreat Cen­ter from 3/27 – 29. These two were cross­ing the­o­log­i­cal bound­aries and pio­neer­ing the Con­ver­gent Friend ethos long before Blogs, Twit­ter & Face­book. The work­shop is called “Are we still a dan­ger­ous peo­ple?” and as rock­ing as that sounds, I’d be will­ing to lis­ten to these two read the Salem, Ore­gon phone book for a week­end. If you have a pil­low stuffed with some extra cash ($200 for com­muters) then you should def­i­nite­ly try to make it (unfor­tu­nate­ly I don’t have a lumpy pil­low­case and can’t afford to take anoth­er three days off). 

Peg­gy wrote that she wants to make her­self “avail­able for the Sat­ur­day after­noon free time for a con­ver­sa­tion with any Friends who want to drop in and crash the par­ty.” That sounds good to me! If I can rearrange some child­care sched­ules, I’ll try to make that. That would be Sat­ur­day the 28th from 1:00 – 3:30pm.

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