I’m not very active on Facebook, but when I post something I get at least a response or two. This morning I shared something that I thought was quite remarkable…and I got absolutely NO response. It was the KONY 2012 video. If you haven’t seen it, you need to: http://vimeo.com/invisible/kony2012
This is an excellent video promoting a project intended to publicize the atrocities committed by one Joseph Kony. He’s an evil man who, over the past 20 years, has by some estimates kidnapped as many as 100,000 children from Uganda and neighboring countries. The boys are involuntarily brainwashed into becoming child soldiers, forced to kill their own parents and mutilate the faces of other victims. The girls are used as sex slaves. I’m not going to transcribe the video’s dialogue…I could never do it justice. The message is delivered so well. You’ll just have to watch.
So why no response from my Facebook friends? They’re perfectly willing to ‘like’, share, or comment on much more trivial matters. My hope is that they just haven’t had time to watch the video yet, and therefore have no opinion or reason to respond. I pray that when they watch the video, they’ll not only be ready to respond, but to take action!
But I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them shrug and move on to mafia wars, or pictures of their friends’ kids, or funny commentary. It’s uncomfortable to think about a community of people living in fear for their safety, day in and day out. It’s inconvenient to take the time to send a few bucks to a worthy cause. It’s easier to just scroll on down the wall to find something else that’s cute, funny, mildly provocative.
Furthermore there is skepticism. A handful of critics call this project ill-conceived. Inadequate. Inconsequential. Wow…
I am not dissuaded by any of the criticism…I support this project and I will be an active proponent and donor. Anything that can bring awareness to the International community with a call to action like this is a winner in my book. I have more to share, but need to sign off for now…
frazernation 
My first WordPress Post!
Ok, so I’ve worked in IT for a LONG time but have never taken the time to sit down and set up a WordPress site, let alone post to it. I don’t need to tell you that I’ve finally done it! You are reading my very first post on my very first WordPress site!
The process was simple, really. So much is wizard-driven. The tough part is being creative. I can be creative technically…just not artistically. The first tough part is picking a name. Since my intention was to make this a family site, I decided to work our name into it. But I didn’t just want my name, as that would appear too narcissistic. I wanted to put a little spin on it. Something that would convey my intent for establishing this site. Since I am, for the most part, going to post entries about things in my family’s life, I tried to think of a word to represent it. I pondered, “My family. A site about my family. A site is kind of like an experience in which people can immerse themselves. It will be an experience of my family’s culture. Perhaps frazerworld? No, that sounds like a lame amusement park. Maybe…” Then I decided to look at some words…one that caught my eye was ‘nation’. The definition:
Well, my family isn’t really a large aggregate of people, but we definitely meet all the other requirements…so it was written:
FRAZERNATION
Pretty cool, huh? Well, maybe you’re shrugging your shoulders, but this was a pretty good accomplishment for me. I had gotten past the first hurdle. Next part was picking a theme.
Oh my…169 themes to choose from, and only some of them free (not ready to pay for anything until I’m WAY into this). Ugh. Time consuming…felt like shopping for clothes, or shoes (some free, some not). Makes the choice even harder because all the free themes were the same price. With clothes and shoes, at least some are more expensive than others which gives me criteria to work with. Now I was having to delve into that ‘artistic’ realm again! So after glancing at the thumbnails, I decided to preview a few of them. That kind of sucked. Since my site only had the content WordPress puts in there for every new site they help create, I didn’t get the full experience of most themes. The thumbnails showed cool pics, columns, different varieties of fonts, colors, borders, etc. When I previewed them, I could almost hear a “wah, wah, wah, waaaaaah” play in the background…like someone just delivered the lame punch line to a 3-minute joke. Nonetheless, I picked one that I thought had potential. ‘Silver is the new Black’, I think it’s called.
Brings me to this point…filling the thing with some content. I suppose I’ll have to post some pictures, and start looking at widgets and other appearance-related items. Don’t want to bore my visitors!
So stay tuned…less commentary and more content to come…