I spent some time doing something nice for a local family for Christmas, and I thought I would share the experience with you all ...
Besides spending a whole lot of time & effort on, and having knowledge of plugins, I also am an avid gardening-nut. My friendly (and very devout Christian) neighbor family asked me to do a short intro talk on composting to their family. Through their home-schooling contacts, they had been asked to share the knowledge of composting I would teaching them with members of an Auburn, CA farm, which is ~200 miles north-east of us. Before this off-the-cuff gathering for me to give a rudimentary intro 101 course, I rebuilt/reinstalled my laptop and prepared a presentation on it of web pages, and built a website with those same links to share with their farm member friends. I had also included several EV page links that wanted to show them after the instructional presentation (to get in some my type of 'EVangel' work in as well). With long power cord and laptop in tow, we met at the appointed day&time, and walked down to a nice outdoor place to sit and let me share my knowledge. However, it was a bright sunny California day (despite having freezing temperatures at night). Though the laptop was working just fine, no one could see what was on the laptop screen (especially my old-eyes). So, using the laptop was out, I continued on with the on-the-fly instruction using as my teaching aids the books I had asked them to get and read from our local library. All went well (they were pleased with my presentation and thankful for my time and effort). They now had a better knowledge of what to later share to those on the farm. But, I was not able to show them my EV pages (oh well, a missed opportunity to show them a taste of what is happening right here and now, and all around them in the plugin-world. C'est la vie). They had always heard me talking about EVs, but they only really thought of me as that old-guy that was really good at growing plants. I could see that they were really missing out by not having access to the Internet at home. These kind folks were happy and doing OK, though living on a shoestring/low budget. They did have a laptop given to them by a family member. Before we parted, I asked if they had made any progress getting it connected to the Internet. It was the same old story, I have seen way to often when dealing with laymen using computers. It had previously been hacked when on the Internet, so their laptop was now unusable (It's dead Jim). While this devout Christian family likely knew every square inch of the bible, they were lost when it came to the outside world. Needless to say, they felt quite burned about the whole 'being hacked' experience. It was a couple days before Christmas, so I decided to offer taking their laptop and see what I could do to breath life into it. In the past I would do this type of pc repair work for members of my local EAA chapter at a minimal cost ($400 worth of effort for $50 that would go to help the EAA, not my pocket). But these fine folks could not afford even that, so I planned to make the effort for free as a Christmas gift to this quite religious family. Their laptop was a challenge, as the laptop's OS and files were unrecoverable. I was able to breath life into the beast, but this time made it run off Linux, so as to greatly reduce the chance of this family being hacked again. I had spend most of the night achieving this goal, and came over Christmas-eve morning with their laptop in hand. They were pleased that it lived again, but before I left I told them I needed to spend time familiarizing them with how easy it was to ease them into using this OS. Like a sampler platter, I had put three flavors of Linux on it for them to try out and see which they liked best (mint 15 cinnamon, pclinuxos-2013.12-lxde, and puppy-5.7.1-retro). They are now in a better position to use their laptop for their family's home schooling of the children, and I hope later they will make a effort to use the information I gave them to get it connected to the Internet. They had been using our local libraries for that access. After all of that, I was able to squeeze in some time to share with them my knowledge of plugins as I had also brought over my laptop and used the EV page links I had previously prepared. Because I had mentioned EVs to the their children before, when the family was out-n-about, they had fun noting when they 'thought' they had spied an EV on the road. I was able to show them that there were many more plugins than what the TV had told them about. They never knew of the: Mitsubishi iMiev EV, Ford Focus EV, Honda FIt EV, Smart FourTwo EV, Toyota RAV4 (gen2), and the pih I showed them. I also showed them the stacked GM EV1s http://www.ev1.org/gmboob8.jpg and they were dismayed at GM's devious bad behavior to limit the public access to them with a three year waiting list, and then tell the media no one wanted them. Then to use a legal loop-hole to dump/give-away golf carts as EVs, and take back all the EV1s, to crush and destroy them. When I had showed them the GM EV1 funeral former EV1 drivers had http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/EV1_funeral_DSCN8571.jpg they could not believe GM's insanity in destroying those new EVs, and only thought of how really wrong that was for GM to do. I ended my time with them by also showing them the pages of some the EVents I had arranged or attended. I had often let them know of my local Chapter's free annual EVent http://brucedp13.20m.com/eaasvr2013/ http://brucedp12.20m.com/eaasvr2012/ but they had never spent the gas money to attend (perhaps they will come next year). They especially thought it was interesting to see a 'younger' Bruce when I showed them images of my promoting EVs when I had my S-10 Blazer EV conversion. I had lost a some sleep over all that effort. But all in all, I thought it was a time very well spent, helping them both with their pc, and to let them know a little more about my Evangelizing efforts in the plugin world. I suppose now they think of me as that old-guy that grows stuff really well, 'and' he's an Electric-car nut! {brucedp.150m.com} -- View this message in context: http://electric-vehicle-discussion-list.413529.n4.nabble.com/An-EVangel-s-Christmas-gift-tp4666894.html Sent from the Electric Vehicle Discussion List mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
