TeenAIDS - PeerCorps > AIDS Education and Prevention > Home ( DNN 3.1.0 ) - My Love/Hate Relationship with Technology

Location: Blogs Dr. John's Personal Blog
Posted by: host	3/8/2006
I did my Masters of Science (M.S. of V.S.) at MIT in Cambridge. That degree might make me appear like a brilliant scientist but nothing could be further from the truth. Truth be told, I need help inserting a plug in a socket (well, okay, my eyesight isn't as good as before and I hate to get down on my knees except in church). Let me tell you about three pet peeves of recent technology hassles. Bank theft click here for a newspaper article on the Bank Fraud Yesterday, I got an urgent call (well, actually it was a message) from Sovereign Bank's ATM Fraud division. A young woman named Luc left a message in a calm but nevertheless urgent voice, that the TeenAIDS bank account had six recent, suspicious bank withdrawals. Stolen was almost $2,400 in three days from various ATMs in Ontario (shame on you scum, for ripping off a charity - and from Canada to boot, the birth place of my mother). Luckily, Luc cancelled my card that was being misused. I had to go down to the local bank, sign an affidavit of unauthorized ATM card use and take it to the Police station. There has been a rash of VISA debit card withdrawals reported in the papers lately. I really didn't think TeenAIDS would be affected but I wasn't surprised either. Someone, somehow, has figured out a sneaky way to manufacture bogus ATM cards with the key information on the magnetic strip. My biggest surprise was when I discovered that the card number they were using had been cancelled by me previously. Sovereign can't seem to explain why the money was illegally withdrawn using a cancelled card, except to say, "maybe the card wasn't cancelled" due to a technical problem. Oh, great!?! Supposedly, the money will be returned to our account soon. As a non-profit, we live "close to the margin." We raise and spend money on bills that need to be paid on time. I told the bank not to bounce any checks during this period. We'll see Site crash On Tuesday afternoon , February 28 (the day after my B-Day), we put 8,000 postcards in the mail announcing the launch of our newly revamped website. The mailing involved considerable expense. High schools and university libraries were the main recipients of the announcement along with a number of AIDS organizations. The color postcard is a stunner (click to see it) and has garnered a lot of favorable attention. The message side touted the high tech features of our website. Two days later, the cards began arriving locally - by Friday, the bulk of the cards were being delivered nationwide. I had just returned from a meeting with Harvard film/video teaching assistant Pacho Velez who is working on creating two DVDs from my overseas footage of PeerCorps trainings (at the request of TeenAIDS Board member Robb Moss, his Harvard professor of film). Progress on the films was moving along. I was feeling great. However, as soon as I got back to the office in the afternoon and opened my emails to read what I had missed in my absence, I got shocking news. The first one was from California I think. A man named Daniel said that he had received our postcard but when he went to visit us, there was NO website - evidently, it was lost in cyberspace! I panicked. Most of the staff had left for the weekend. Did I ever lose my cool! After raising the funds to post the cards about the expensively-revamped website, the bleeping site had gone AWOL. I placed frantic calls to our web team. They got on it immediately contacting the server who wasn't readily available (what can you expect for $10 a month?). In my exasperation, I grabbed my Yellow Lab and gave him a few vigorous hugs to calm myself down (isn't a loyal pet incredible?). As it turned out, the server had shut us down suddenly because of technological problems, with only minutes of notice that no one in the office saw until Daniel sent his email. Everything was resolved three hours later but how many people looking for our site gave up when they couldn't find us, perhaps never to return again like the impulse buyers that we are? After years of rarely interrupted service, we went down on the most important day due to technology problems (are you getting an inkling of my frustration with technology?). Domain name porno By even reporting this, I'm probably setting in motion a few more hits for a despicable site and its purveyors of cheap smut. Although I shouldn't really blame this domain problem on technology, I will. Our original website was posted in 1994, in the pioneer years of the internet. I remember being given html templates that I used to post much of its content based on my Harvard doctoral thesis. The original TeenAIDS-PeerCorps site used the URL suffix ".com" that was available then. However, by 1997 when TeenAIDS was officially organized as a non-profit charity, I gave up my original URL suffix for ".org" that was then being made available. Because I was paying all the start-up bills myself, I couldn't justify paying for extra domain names and URLs. I never imagined that there would be a downside to this decision that continues to hurt our efforts to help save teen lives from HIV/AIDS. Imagine my surprise when I received an email from a young woman who was greatly disappointed and upset that my old URL, listed on the information cards that I pass out everywhere I go, brought her to a porno site! I checked and she was right. TeenAIDS' original domain name was re-sold to pornographers who liked the fact that it was getting traffic after its first three years and because it had the word "teen" in it. Upon investigation, I found out there was some connection to x-rated porn sites out of Lithuania and the Netherlands. I couldn't believe it. I tried contacting the bums but they would do nothing to return the original domain name unless I paid a thousand dollars. Recently, I tried again to reason with hem, but it's just business to them. This is money that I didn't have then and still don't now, being a passionate volunteer in this battle against youth AIDS (who doesn't accept my annual salary when the limited monies raised from our wonderful donors go to our education programs). Conclusion? Technology is both a blessing and a bummer. Modern advances allow this website to replicate my work a thousand-fold, every hour of every day in every corner of the world. Wow! When you think about it, technology is amazing. Thousands of young lives are getting life-saving information that they don't receive in school or from the media. But what a headache it can be too. Special Thanks I want to thank and recognize the excellent web design team that has produced our revamped website. Kyle Laughlin of California originally designed our website in 2002 through an in-kind donation from his employer Sapient Corporation. In the summer of 2005, Kyle and I talked and agreed on a new version that would offer the latest technological advances to deliver our educational content globally. He is the chief person responsible for this site and works for a number of big time clients during the day. My colleague since 1998, Steve Lim, has been a consultant with TeenAIDS since he was a freshman at MIT and set up the earlier version of the website as I began the Global series of Walks in 1999. He is a wizard with MACs (my weakness). He has also dedicated many hours to seeing this site get up and running. Together Kyle and Steve have made a major contribution to our outreach efforts. Kevin Pelletier is a Senior at Fitchburg State College and is our full-time intern working on the website. He has great experience in website design and keeps us on track from the Fitchburg office. He works closely with Kyle and Steve. In future blogs, I will thank other staff.

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