Watching live video of the funeral of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il is a rather surreal experience. Between the constant sound of the wailing mourners, the way-over-the-top trembling voice of the announcer, and the sight of the casket mounted to the TOP of an ancient Lincoln Continental (during a snow storm, no less), this is one for the warped file.

While taking a bike ride through North Wales this weekend, I noticed a little piece of history slowly being revealed behind a wall of chipping paint. I have seen this wall advertisement elsewhere - there is a fully-restored version on a building in Pottstown.

On November 5 I lost my Mom to cancer.

Though she had been dealing with this horrible disease off and on for the past twenty years, she never wanted anybody to say she had been 'battling' cancer. To her, it was just something she had to deal with, a fact of life.

What really defined her life, even in her very last days, was her caring for each and every family member, her empathy for all she met (and many she did not), her life-long love of learning and teaching, her creativity, her love of animals, her deep interest in the history her ancestors and the world they lived in.

To try and describe this extraordinary woman in a few sentences would never do her justice - I can only say that I feel like the luckiest kid in the world because I had a Mom who gave me the best gift a parent can give a child - she taught me how to think.

We spent so much time talking about pretty much everything - history, culture, parenting, religion, business, education, news - whatever the topic she had a wealth of knowledge and always a willingness to examine other points of view (even disagreeable ones).

Where she got much of that knowledge was from books. From the time she was a young girl, she was a reader. Our house always had shelves full of books - both her and my Dad collected hundreds of books - history, biography, psychology, travel, art, design, current events - fiction and non-fiction. Mom didn't just read these books - she slipped bits of paper with notes or relevant news articles between the pages to add something should she revisit the book (or for the next reader). Reading wasn't just a way to relax for her, it was a way to understand.

Last year, when she started having trouble reading the small print in many books, my older sister purchased a Kindle for her. Mom immediately took to the device, downloading dozens of books and slipping her hand-written notes into the pocket of its leather case. I have no doubt that had if she been given a couple more years on Earth, we would have needed to expand the memory on that thing to accommodate the huge volume of books she wanted to read. That gadget was a blessing which she used right up to her final days.

A few days after she died, my Dad and I were looking at the list of books she had downloaded, and he remarked how that list really was a reflection of the wide variety of interests my Mom had. I agreed, and that night began transcribing the entire list on to my computer.

Here, for your reading pleasure, is Mom's Kindle list.

____

Babbit (Sinclair Lewis)

Memoirs of a Holocaust Survivor (Icek Kuperberg and Abraham Kuperberg, Ph.D)

The Hunt for Bin Laden (Washington Post and Tom Shroder

Among the Righteous (Robert Satloff)

The Invisible Bridge (Julie Orringer)

WIRED (Douglas E. Richards)

Living in a Foreign Language

What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany

Classic American Literature: The Works of Mark Twain (Mark Twain)

Works of Anthony Trollope (Anthony Trollope)

The Old Man and the Wasteland (Nick Cole)

The Mill River Recluse (Darcie Chan)

The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Leo Tolystoy)

Complete Works of Henry James (Henry James)

The Awakening The Resurrection (Graf Leo Tolstoy)

Strength in What Remains (Tracy Kidder)

Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)

The Last Lecture (Randy Pausch and Jeffrey Zaslow)

Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (Jon Lee Anderson)

The Turn of the Screw (Henry James)

The Buddha in the Attic (Julie Otsuka)

Devil at My Heels (David Rensin and Louis Zamperini)

You Never Know: Tales of Tobias, an Accidental Lottery Winner (Lilian Duval)

Hungry Hearts (Anzia Yezierska)

Miral: A Novel (Rula Jebreal)

Remembrance of Things Past: Swann’s Way I (Marcel Proust)

Sins of the Innocent (Mirielle Marokvia)

Shadows Bright as Glass (Amy E. Nutt)

Secret Daughter: A Novel (Shilpi Somaya Gowda)

Secret Memoirs: The Court of Royal Saxony 1891-1902 (Henry W. Fischer)

A Mountain of Crumbs (Elena Gorokhova

The Palliser Chronicles Collection (Anthony Trollope)

Chronicles of Barsetshire Collection (Anthony Trollope)

Works of E.M. Forster: (E.M. Forster)

Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China (David Kidd and John Lanchester)

Remarkable Creatures: A Novel (Tracy Chevalier)

Einstein (Walter Isaacson)

The Kitchen House (Kathleen Grissom)

The Emperor of All Maladies (Siddhartha Mukherjee)

March (Geraldine Brooks)

Learning to Breathe: One Woman’s Journey of Spirit and Survival (Alison Wright)

Ghosty Men: The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers (Franz Lidz)

Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things (Randy Frost and Gail Steketee)

Homer & Langley: A Novel (E.L. Doctrow)

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (Laura Hillenbrand)

In the Garden of Beasts (Erik Larson)

Three Cups of Deceit (Jon Krakauer)

Oceanstory (Leslie Marmom Silko)

Emma (Jane Austen)

The Warden (Anthony Trollope)

They Are Us: A Plea for Common Sense About Immigration (Pete Hamill)

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Rebecca Skloot)

Bonhoeffer (Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller)

Charley’s Lake (Art Zahn)

In the Kitchen (Monica Ali)

Cutting for Stone (Abraham Verghese)

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake: A Novel (Aimee Bender)

The Help (Kathryn Stockett)

Christmas tree lighting, Mike and Evan Stanley, 1998

Good-bye, Mayor Mike - a quintessential small-town mayor who

genuinely loved his borough and his job. More than that, he was a family friend who always had a huge smile and jackhammer handshake for us every time we saw him at local events (which was often). He watched our boys grow up from infants, and shared his love of antique cars and trucks with them (none of us will ever forget that final ride on his amazing antique fire engine and police 'paddy-wagon', both of which he was so proud of.

Thanks for everything, Mayor Mike. You will be missed.

Mayor Mike meets 'Albert', a teddy bear that went home with every kindergarten student at Gwyn-Nor ES for a few days. Students were to document what Albert did while in their care - when we had him, he met the mayor!

The Bow Ties Ltd, of Vermont, where Mike purchased many of his signature ties, heard about the Albert visit and asked to feature the visit in their catalogue. We happily obliged.

Ben Stanley with Mayor Mike

Merry Tuba Christmas, 2004

Mike and his son, Mike Jr. 2008

Evan greets Mike after speaking during Mike's final Borough Council meeting, 2008

Mike and his collection, 2008

I think all photographers working in Lansdale between 1982 and 2008 have at least one of these photos.

So the big news last week was how Netflix angered their subscribers by splitting the service - and charging twice as much in the process. Now the company is planning to rename the DVD-by-mail service Qwikster, which sounds like a chocolate drink.

The big news this week is yet more changes to Facebook. Now when users open their page, they are presented with more 'news' windows which supposedly highlight topics that the crack team at Facebook thinks are important to YOU.

Or more likely, important to their advertisers.

I was an early fan of Netflix, and we have thoroughly enjoyed the streaming service, despite the fact that it is mostly loaded with 'B' and 'C' level movies. In fact most of the few really good movies are scheduled to disappear early next year after contract talks with Starz broke down recently.

The problem, of course, is that that Netflix simply could not provide all that content for the price they were charging ($8 - $13 a month in my case). That was obvious a long time ago. The price increase was not the surprise, but the way they spun it was a kick in the Wii to their subscribers was. Twice the price? Well, out goes the DVD delivery. Or maybe drop the streaming service, since new alternatives are emerging and I really don't want to pay much for movies that wouldn't even make the marquis at the $2 discount movie theater.

Facebook has been chipping away at customer loyalty for several years - while they provide a free service that hundreds of millions use every day, they don't seem to understand why those users like the service (and what made Facebook kick MySpace into i-blivion).

I don't want to know what my 'friends' are doing at all hours of the day and night. That's what Twitter and Foursquare are for. I don't want pre-selected 'news that is important to me' to eclipse all the supposedly unimportant posts. I don't use FB chat very much, but those who do are complaining that the new format is confusing their friend lists and trying to steer their social interactions.

What do I want from FB? Control. I want to choose what posts I see. I want to control my privacy settings (and not have to re-visit them constantly). I want to control how and when I use the service - Facebook may want to become the new Twitter, Foursquare and ChatRoulette all wrapped up in one, but that is not what I signed up for.

So the question is, when will these companies get it? Treat you customers with respect and fairness. Listen to them. Talk with them, not at them. Stop trying to own the world. Test innovations thoroughly before launching them. Explain pricing and charge fairly.

Loyalty doesn't mean much these days, but if an online entity leaves their users feeling left out, there are plenty of others that will quickly fill in the gap.

18 hours and a little hurricane can make quite a difference: Wissahickon Creek in Upper Gwynedd

If you look at the path of Hurricane Irene, it cuts a good wide path through many of the areas served by the Journal Register Company, owner of The Reporter. These sites are located in eastern Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut (other operations in Michigan and Ohio will likely be spared from this storm).

The digital and print operations of all these sites depends on a vast network of computers, servers and Internet connections that keep them all working together. And of course the print operations rely a highly co-ordinated system of delivery to get hundreds of thousands of newspapers to reader driveways and local stores each morning.

So with what could be a record-breaking storm looming to our south, planning to keep the web sites humming and the presses rolling has been underway for several days.

Sites with generators will host journalists and editors from other sites; alternate print sites have been lined up should one of the presses be incapacitated; alternate and cellular networks are ready to handle the data for both print and online.

In Yardley, PA, corporate headquarters for JRC, a temporary newsroom has been set up in a computer server room is ready to host reporters, copy editors and layout editors from nearby Trenton. This space has a generator to power not only the computers and network machines, but the lights and air conditioning as well.

We don't know exactly what damage Irene is about to unleash on us, but at least our journalists will be able to keep the readers, both on the web and online, informed and updated without a break.