My 93 year old mother lives nearly three hours away from me, and not much less away from my sister. About 10 years ago I persuaded her to get a laptop, with a printer, and she soon took to emailing friends and family and looking at the photos we shared with her. In her youth she had used a typewriter and those skills very quickly came back.
With the arrival of the first tablets I soon realised that here was a device that she could adopt as her ability to type declined as her arthritis limited her dexterity. She’s now on her second iPad. It’s been a godsend. As well as her email which she still uses regularly, she uses the social network Google+ to chat with her grandchildren, and watch the progress through videos of her great grandchildren. She plays online scrabble with a grandson in Australia, and others as well and she occasionally wins – which gives her a huge amount of pleasure – as does the occasional Facetime (video call – skype-like) session she has with us.
She also reads the news off the web and browses the internet using Google. Just recently she took her first photograph using the iPad and shared it with the family. All of this in a safe and secure IT environment with privacy ensured so that only the family share in these communications.
The iPad has kept her in touch with her family. She passionately advocates its use and adoption to her friends as a way of them keeping in touch with their relatives and with her. It’s become an essential part of our “care package” for her.
Papa Smurf goes bananas
Well … what a day in social media world I had yesterday!
At an unearthly hour of the morning I received a text from my son to say that he always read my blog posts because even though he might not understand them – he always felt that he ought to, just in case there was something he could actually TALK to me about … rather than just converse via Google+ (we live approximately half-a-mile away from each other)!
This was then followed by a Google+ comment from my sister – also before I’d fully woken up, and finally my wife (away for a few days) who wondered what was happening to her Google+ app on her iPhone which was being bombarded by posts from me.
By this time I’d observed for myself that for some bizarre reason, three really old posts on an old blog were being published to Google+. Why? How? I couldn’t see to the problem immediately – I had to give DJ a lift to the airport. Then I had to attend to a central heating problem and then, to cap it all (and by the time I’d sat down) – the broadband was down and wouldn’t be up until the afternoon, meaning I wouldn’t be able to do more than sticking plaster stuff on the blog until I could get full access. So I just disabled any plugin that could in any way be associated with Google from this blog and deleted all the posts from Google+, put up an apologetic post and hoped I’d arrested the flow of “spam” posts.
I hadn’t 🙁
By the time I got the broadband back it had become obvious that the problem lay with my dormant former “Just thoughts …” site and by now, exasperated and fed-up with deleting Google+ posts I took the nuclear option and just nuked the site! It’s gone, no more, I’ll get a proper redirection in place as soon as possible but for now all you can see is a simple index.html file – diharrison.com is no more 🙁
What caused all this heartache? I don’t think I’ll ever know … what I needed was access to Brainy Smurf to provide all the answers. Was it an out-of-date WordPress installation? Was it a change in a Google+ API? Was it just Friday 13th? I don’t think I’ll ever know. Certainly not now, as the website has been sent to the Room 101 of websites where all redundant and unneeded websites should go. I sent a follow-up apologetic post.
A while ago, I posted on revising my blogging strategy and the need for simplification. I think I need to review this yet again.
Why the Smurfs … I think you need to ask a couple of great friends that question.