Technology

There are times in everyone’s life when it’s impossible to get away, even to attend the funeral of a person who was very important to you. Work obligations, family needs, or financial pressures might prevent you from traveling to a funeral at a distant location. Increasingly, funeral directors are offering webcasts of funeral services to make the proceedings accessible to anyone who can’t be there in person.

Using one or more cameras mounted strategically in the funeral chapel, a funeral director controls the webcast using computer software, usually on a laptop reserved especially for the purpose. The funeral service is streamed online in real time, letting anyone watch and hear the entire event.

After the service, the video is kept online for up to a year, or even longer. The funeral director, in consultation with the family, decides how long the video will be available.

Although funeral webcasts can be left open to anyone, they are usually restricted for privacy. Family members can choose to set up the funeral website with password protection, requiring anyone who wishes to see the service to enter the pre-determined password. They can keep the password protection in place during the entire time that the video is accessible online.

Families can also decide who to notify before the funeral takes place, usually via an email message system. This gives the family another layer of privacy, ensuring that their very personal event is open only to those they’ve chosen to notify. This practice isn’t …

The other day, I was speaking with a thought leader from South Africa working with the schools and promoting the future of innovation with the goal of fostering business entrepreneurship to allow South Africa to meet the demands needed for the 21st Century. One thing that I find interesting here in the United States is that when we talk about energy innovation everyone assumes that we are talking about solar technologies or better wind turbines. They never seem to consider the traditional energy industry and all the technological advances being made there, such as fracking.

There was an interesting article in the ‘corporate news’ section of the Wall Street Journal on December 17, 2012 titled; “Chevron Enters Shale Hunt in South Africa – Company’s Decision Comes as Temporary Ban on Exploration Is Lifted in a Country Estimated to Hold Large Reserves,” by Devon Maylie and Alexis Flynn which noted that South Africa has the 5th largest estimated reserves using the new fracking technologies – maybe more.

Believe me when I tell you that as more fracking is going on around the world to get out gas and oil, there will be new methods, and even more efficient technologies introduced. In fact, it is happening now. If South Africa and other countries continue to develop safer environmental strategies for fracking, and more efficient ways to get at that oil and gas, then we can have the best of all worlds. You see, shale fracking technology is real energy innovation, …

It might seem like we’re in a technology savvy world where the internet is the only source of entertainment and all communications come from cellphone towers, but that is not always the case. Where my home is situated, we don’t get good cellphone reception, so we have to rely more heavily on a landline to get or receive calls. We are able to get on the internet as of this year, but the connection speed is very slow compared to what most people experience when they live in a city or small town. We’ve adapted to this way of life, but some people couldn’t handle it.

Telephone service in our small town is a luxury. We have been lucky enough to have a landline at our home, but some of our neighbors are living too far away from the telephone poles to connect the landline wires to their homes. Without cellphone service or a landline connection, there’s no other way to reach someone from the outside world. If you like living in a remote condition, then you might like living in my neighborhood. However, we need to have the phone operating properly in order to conduct business, so we have had to get someone out to our home to make sure we’re getting calls the way we should. 

The phone line was installed when we bought our home a year ago, but it wasn’t always working perfectly. There were times when the calls would disconnect, and there were some calls …