I have posted on my primary blog host a few times about my unhappiness with many of the changes that have been occurring on the site for the last few months. The reduction of some services, (iTalkr among my favorites) restriction / reduction of widgets and a move for many of these services to accessible to only “supporters.” That said, overall, I have enjoyed my last 2 1/2 years blogging on edublogs.org. I know I have not been the most dedicated blogger on their service (or blogger overall), but I hope that I have made a bit of a difference in at least a few of my readers lives.Every time I happen to look at my cluster map I can’t help but be impressed by the numbers of people who have stopped by to look at my often rambling thoughts. Looking at it this morning, I still l have that sense of awe. It is humbling when I think it all started with this simple post back in January 2007.
The main goal I have one this educational technology blog is to separate my personal views, ideas, beliefs and interests from direct ties to my school and district.
The views expressed here are entirely my own and do not and should not be implied or directly represent or representative of any organization with which I am affiliated or associated.
Wow! Disclaimer out the way… Let’s have some fun discussing leadership, organization, technology, staff development, and of course educational technology!
- Convergence
Gees, this is feeling like a obituary… sorry about that. While not an obit, this post is signaling an end of sorts… for the past few months I have been exploring other blogging and website hosts. I have played with Microsoft Spaces, SquareSpace, Wordpress.com, Blogger, Edublogs “supporter services”, TypePad, as well as self-hosted options like Wordpress MU, and Joomla… For good or bad, for one reason or another I am landing on TypePad. They do not have the most robust storage, but there is a consistence of service as well as support that I appreciate. Additionally, while I am still in the process of setting up my blog, I found a number of features that I really am liking: Lists (introduced to those on my spaces account, glad to see they are part of TypePad), easy easy inbound RSS setup, social links, and more. I know some might say all of those features ar in many of those options you looked at and that is true. I just feel for me TypePad brought them together in a good easy to use package.
So, it is time for me to make the “jump” to a new blog host, my hope is that many or (hopefully all) of you will come with me to my new TypePad blog. Additionally, one other thing has bothered me for years… my url… it was always too long or complicated (that was a huge knock against Microsoft Spaces, but my 25GB of storage and pulling a bunch of services together (file, photo, blog, social, made it tempting…) and there is a person in Missouri that holds the rights to just about every vanishingpoint domain until2013… so vanishingpoint.com was out… The fact that he is not doing anything with them makes it all the more frustrating… so I needed to land on something I thought would work and still be relatively part of me… nothing better than your name I figure! Say hello to scottweidig.com
You will still be able to find VanishingPoint, however, it will now be at www.scottweidig.com I am working with search engines to get the new url forwarded as quickly as possible and into their search results.
I do want to say thank you to edublogs.org for hosting me and for everything that they have done for educational blogging overall. Parting is not without great hesitancy or forethought. I will maintain vanishingpoint.edublogs.org for a while to help my readers hopefully make the transition to the new site (at least I hope you will).
I am hopeful and optimistic about this new chapter for myself and VanishingPoint. I look forward to seeing everyone at www.scottweidig.com
Note: scottweidig.com should go completely live in about 24 hours.
Getting ready for the beginning of another school year is both a daunting and overwhelming task. There are a thousand things to get done, keep track of, anticipate, plan for, and just outright shoot from the hip on. This year for us is no different. In the past, we have used Microsoft Project to manage the summer, we have used (use) a plethora of Excel spreadsheets, we leverage an Access database for hardware inventory, and thousands and thousands of legal pads, post-it notes, and scrap pieces of paper to have things all come together right before the start of school.
This year really has seen little difference, We are running our hardware locations from an Access database, the hardware moves are being planned on a spreadsheet, our web development is in a Project, and we have used thousands of little pieces of paper and legal pads… However, the platform has changed a bit. Instead of using Microsoft Products for most of the main applications, this summer we are using the Zoho Suite of applications to work a bit more collaboratively in some areas. My Internet Assistant and I are sharing a Zoho Projects 2.0 file to plan her development for both our webserver upgrade and the development of our new site leveraging the Joomla content management system. In addition, most of the work I have done to prepare lists for our hardware moves and re-purposing have been done by leveraging Zoho DB and Reports to create quick pivot tables and then print the underlying data. (I created the filtered multi-level pivot table for our outbound inventory in about 5 minutes in Zoho… as opposed to working for almost an hour in Access to create the same thing…) One other tool from Zoho we are leveraging is Zoho Sheet for the tracking and shared updating of our “Ghosting” (re-imaging) schedule (image above).
Now even though I have used the Zoho Suite for about 3 years, I am still far from digging deep into each of the tools overall, and this years push for Zoho to fully integrate their applications has really increased the ease of use and simplicity for integration into typical business practices. I would really like to leverage more of their suite into my typical daily practices, but it is hard when the rest of the environment you work in is resistant to change. In addition, since as a group overall (typical also in many many businesses) we barely scratch the surface of all of the tools and uses for the Microsoft suite of programs as well, so where is the draw to other tools in the average company especially when we/they are paying a good sum of money for Microsoft licensing…
Overall, the biggest benefit that I/we have seen for using the Zoho Suite of tools is the automatic collaborative nature of a “cloud” application. I love the fact that I can be anywhere with an internet connection and a web browser and I have access to my files. Depending on platform, (iPhone or computer) I can update those files as well. It is also exciting that I/we are always using the latest version of a document regardless of who made the latest change AND we are not limited to being on our work network (hoping another person in NOT in the file we want to update at that moment). However, the real excitement is collaborating live and real-time in the applications. This experience was the genesis for this blog post.
Yesterday we began imaging our entire building to prepare the computers for the beginning of the new school year. In the past we have tracked this either on paper, or in an Excel spreadsheet (typically in Excel). While Excel is great for tracking the various stages of imaging (a simple data dump from our inventory database and we are set) it is very limiting for real-time updates or even having more than one person in that file at a time. So for this year, I opted to NOT do the usual. As opposed to completing the data dump, (although I could have easily uploaded the information into Zoho Sheet as well) I decided to create a Zoho Sheet and began setting up our “Ghosting Flights” – the rooms to be ghosted at one time. Then I shared this sheet simply by entering my Network Specialist and Network Technicians email addresses and we were off. While I created the initial structure and entered the initial classroom list, my NS saw that I had some o the flights crossing vLans (crossing vLans does not work well with Symantec’s Ghost – it often quadruples the imaging time making a 40 minute image take 5 hours to complete if it does at all…) so he simply modified the flight room assignments to accommodate, and they were off ghosting with my NT always having the latest information as opposed to having saved a previous version and operating off old information.
I mentioned real-time updates… Here is the experience I had this morning. For the past week most of my family has been ill and I am at crunch-time at work to get everything ready. As such, I have been leaving at about 5:30am to get to work an arriving back home between 6-7pm… Needless to say it has been a it stressful in the household for my wife having to hold everything own (figuratively and literally) when I have not been there for support. So, while Trish slept in this morning, I was giving my sons a bath. However, two of my staff members were at school working to make a dent in the afore mentioned ghosting of the school classrooms. Aside from feeling a bit guilty or both my work-life and home-life, I wanted to check in and see how things were going without interrupting the process. Because we are leveraging Zoho sheet, all I needed to do was to open the shared Ghosting Flights sheet that we are using and viola! I have all the information I needed at my fingertips. I could never have done this using Microsoft Excel (maybe next year with Office 2010 but that is a future post). As a side benefit, Zoho Chat has been integrated into most of the Zoho Suite of apps, so I was able to have a quick chat with them for a few minutes to clarify some of the things I was seeing… All in all, PRETTY COOL!
Note: cross-posted at http://scottweidig.spaces.live.com
By now most of you have to have heard of the U.S. Government’s automotive stimulation plan called C.A.R.S (or more lovingly “Cash for Clunkers.” Even if you hadn’t heard of it before today, you must have at least tripped across the entire day of news being about the wild success of this program… or as others started looking at it… “Holy #&^@ I missed out!”
Through the C.A.R.S program, the government hoped to kill tow birds with one stone. First, infuse the automotive industry (and consumers) with $1 BILLION in incentives in ($3500-$4500 bunches) for consumers trading in older vehicles to purchase new cars. Second, through the trade in of older (hopefully much less fuel efficient) cars and trucks there would be a bump in the lowest average gas mileage vehicles on the road and thereby making a dent in the overall U.S. demand for foreign oil.
This $1 BILLION program was slated to run from July 27, 2009 to November 1, 2009 (or til the governmental funds ran out). Well it only took 4 days… FOUR DAYS… for the American populous to scarf up 250,000 cars draining all of the allocated funds… The good news (I think) is that the OMB worked through the night and “found” 2 BILLION DOLLARS MORE just laying around to provide additional funding to keep the program alive! So, if you found yourself in that “HOLY &^%#” group, you now have a bit more time to trade in that old gas guzzler for a new fuel efficient car payment and the knowledge that you have done your part to help turn around the economy… Twice actually… remember it is FUTURE debt that the government is drawing from to allow you to more easily buy a car today that you will “gladly repay” (flash back to Popeye’s Whimpy burger fetish) for the next five years in the loan and the next possibly 20+ years in the National debt.
For those of you wondering if you qualify here are the specifics:
One-year Proof of Insurance.
Proof of Registration going back at least one-year.
“Clear” title. This means the title must be free of any liens or other encumbrances.
The vehicle manufacturer date found on the driver’s door or door jamb is less than 25 years old when you trade it in.
The trade-in is in drivable condition.
The trade-in is titled in your name and has been for the last year.
The combined (average) gas mileage is 18MPG or lower.
You have not previously participated in the CARS program.
For more specific details, either go to a dealer website to to the official CARS.gov website. Both will contain a handy dandy eligibility guide that will help you see if your older car qualifies.
Here’s my story and why I am thinking about this… I have a 10 year old Honda CRV with just about 160K miles… I was thinking that his might be a shoein to qualify. I have really needed a new car for about two years, but we wanted to wait until my wife’s car was paid off (this past June) and then we thought about waiting to maybe save up some cash… Then I got wind of this program to help benefit the economy and we really started questioning whether it was worth it to wait for a few more months or act now and try to leverage a lower overall cost…
We really got excited when some of the dealers began matching the government incentive… There are stories out there of folks purchasing a $20,000 car for less than $10,000… SWAHEET!!! So, we started to get excited and think more seriously about getting a new car. I dabbled doing some basic research online, we talked about models and our needs / desires… tried to estimate a good timeline for a purchase… then I woke up to the news today… the program was almost out of money and the Office of Transportation may only be able to fund purchased in the pipeline before the end of the day today (if they did not received any new funding). One thing led to another and we reacted… Trish started calling dealers, I started hunting for my title… I called the Illinois DMV, Trish started test driving, and then the one two punch…
My CRV’s new estimated mileage (which is very accurate to my personal experience) was 21MPG (combined) we don’t qualify for C.A.R.S… but we were so excited that we decided to keep pursuing a purchase by leveraging possible dealer incentives… We looked at new, and explored used… in fact currently sitting in my driveway is a 2009 Saturn Outlook XR slightly used with 17,000 miles on it that the dealer would like $32,500. Trish really liked it and the dealership was closing so they let her bring it home to further entice us to make a deal or the car first thing tomorrow morning. So, for the last few hours I have been looking at Kelly’s Blue Book, I ordered a Carfax report on it, I started calling others for advice, I began crunching numbers… Did you know that you have to PAY to receive 0% financing now? $2200… that is NOT 0% financing, it is front loaded financing of almost 5% ($36/month for 60 months actually)… even then the payment would almost be $500 for a 1 year old car with 17,000 miles on it… Hmmmm… are we just reacting to impulse now?
I mean I really do NOT need a car immediately, I don’t qualify or “Cash for Clunkers,” and there are always concerns with used cars… Did you know a brand new top of the line (well one step down but I don’t need an in-car DVD system) Honda Odyssey or list at $33,000? After looking at some new car models and doing some web comparisons we decided to not try to drive this entire process in a matter of hours (especially based on an impulse) I think calmer heads have prevailed overall… We are going to step back from the impulse and try to really determine our needs and desires before we purchase and then we are going to start test driving and visiting dealers to truly get the best deal for our family… who knows maybe waiting will drive dealer incentives in our favor (especially without C.A.R.S).
Anyone want to take the Saturn back to the dealer in the morning for me? Awkward moment coming… Oh if someone is interest Reichert Chevrolet has the Outlook XR above available again. (It really is a nice car.)
I don’t know how many of you mobile blog (using a smartphone to write and post thoughts) but I do more often than not… I just can’t seem to find the time (or energy) to blog once I arrive home, and often I am much too busy at work to break away to blog for a few minutes. Also, I admit it, I would rather read a few pages in a book than blog at lunch unless I have something really pressing on my mind. In all honesty, right now I am sitting in the bathroom monitoring my almost 2 year old in his bath while trying to get this post out. You can see why I might want to leverage the power and resources of my iPhone to post while I am waiting for a meeting to start, or sitting waiting for an oil change, or on a train, etc… however, for the last 3 weeks I have been cut off from posting a mobile entry and just today I got an answer to why…
Let’s go back to July 4th. I posted using the WordPress iPhone app right from my phone just after watching a fireworks display. Shortly there after, the Wordpress application stopped connecting to my blog… needless to say I was unhappy. I did all of the usual trouble shooting… checked my blog, checked the app, reinstalled the app, and then I went to the developers website (automattic itself), and low and behold a number of folks were having the same issue… so many in fact that right now on their main page are this post, and this one. So, I did what any good techie would, I tested a different app to see if it would connect. While I was sitting in the oil change shop, I downloaded Blogpress for the iPhone. and Viola! I have aconnection to my blog again… (and I can post multiple pictures to boot!)
So, I was off blogging again… until last week Saturday… then BlogPress stopped connecting to my blog. I checked their forums, and found a couple of references to connection issues, but no real fixes. I was tempted to download another iPhone blogging application (iBlogger $9.99), but I was concerned that I would have the same issue… I even began thinking that it might be edublogs.org itself. So I started doing a bit of investigation that way…
Running through edublogs.org support site, I got no returns from queries there… Then I checked the forums and the last post referencing mobile blogging was 8 months ago, with “coming soon we are working on making that better” as the result. So, I created a new discussion with my specific issue, and within a few hours Sue Waters replied that edublogs.org needed to turn off XMLRPC access because of stability issues… I am not sure what that means, however, right now, I cannot get to edublogs, so I am getting concerned.
Update: edublogs was going through an update which provided a new dashboard… that is why the service was up and down while I was creating this post. (yet another reason I use a blogging client and do NOT prefer to post directly online.) Still not XMLPRC support… and therefore no mobile blogging…
“One small step for man, One giant leap for mankind.” Forty years ago on June 16th, history was made. I was only 7 months old when the lunar landing was made, but it inspired many many dreams that I had and still have today. Talk about a time of inspiration. I remember when I was 7 or 8 and “wall murals” (basically giant wall paper scenes) were “in fashion,” one entire side of my room was turned into the lunar surface looking back onto the Earth in all of the beautiful blue and green glory.
Over the last week I have been learning more and more about the lunar mission. The goals and dreams of the mission, the challenges, I have even been witness to the launch and landing replayed in real-time. What an amazing achievement. Here are a few resources that have come in handy for me if you are looking to get a fix for your astronaut jones…
For those of you who are skeptics, or know skeptics of the lunar landing, Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter just sent back the first pictures of the landing sites… Really skeptics… REALLY? time to find another conspiracy theory…
What an amazing time we live in. The fact that 40 years ago we could “beam” images back from the moon (or even land on it) to today where we can relive those moments in real time courtesy of technology… think of what the next 40 years will hold. For those educators out there who will be teaching lessons with this material, I would love for you to drop a line on what you are doing. If I can help in any way working to tie our schools together in a collaborative project on the Lunar Missions please let me know.
There are some things that you hate to admit… Being wrong… Occassionally being right… That you liked Millie Vanillie or Vanilla Ice… Or if you are and educational technology advocate that you cannot come to an agreement or find a compelling significance to change from the old standards :0|
Today, I had a great time working with my direct counterparts in my district to discuss the merits and limitations of two online resources: Google (docs and sites) and Zoho suite (office suite, wiki and Zoho Business which pulls them all together in a nice dashboardrd package).
Effectively for about 3 1/2 hours we discused the applications and possibilities for time investment as classroom resources, our own personal use, the future direction of our district, and the possible Microsoft alternative with the launch of the Tech Preview on Office 2010 yesterday.
Some background: As a district we make a significant yearly investment (~$140k) in Microsoft applications. Additionally, this summer we are undergoing a Novell to Microsoft NOS transition to better position us for planned future application and platform enhancents. All of these initiatives seem to be both driving us toward a client based application platform as well as toward a desired cloud based environment. Especially if we begin to realize our planning for a 1:1 computing environment for our staff and 13,000 students. Lowering costs by moving to a cloud based office application suite will help offset the increased hardware need to satisify 1:1…
Our goal for the day was to end up with a strong enough argument to choose one platform (Google or Zoho) and commit to it’s a group for our collaborative use for the next two years. This coupled with a strong desire to have a flexible enough environment that will allow for our sharing outside of the group via a wiki type interface with other members of our community (faculty, staff, and possibly students) on an as needed basis. The last part of the challenge was/is to have a relatively secure enough environment to share some material that may be considered sensitive by some, irrelevant by others, and critical by a few…
While the discussions themselves were great, I was left disappointed that even I struggled to be able to make a full committment to an online resource. I was even more frustrated that some of counterparts were only willing to invest time in a limited subset of applications as opposed to committing fully to a suite in a completely collaborative environment. I was especially saddened because some of the arguments each of us used (myself included) were the same arguments we struggle against when working with faculty and staff in general regarding technology and change: don’t want to complicate things by adding “more,” I don’t need another email account, let’s keep this simple, I don’t have time to learn all of this… blah, blah, blah…
What I am struggling with is the fact that if we (the people looking to drive dynamic change within our curriculum’s and the ones responsible for leading the way into learning centers leveraging technology) cannot move ourselves from the “known” (Office Suite) to the somewhat “unknown” a fully collaborative environment leveraging outstanding web-based applications, how can we ever expect to help move a hesitant, reluctant, faculty and students into this arena? Is there a compelling enough reason to leverage these technologies on a full-time basis for educational and personal use, or is there not? Are gravity and fear of change enough to overcome compelling reason? Can you preach without practice? What will be a significant enough factor that will influence this change?
Schlechty refers to past efforts at reform as “tinkering toward utopia” and says that if we continue to introduce change at the edges, we’ll continue to spin our wheels.
I know I am just taking a snippet of Will’s thoughts and the actual direction for his post are divergent from mine, but there are definite undercurrents of change happening in education today… However, in practice I fear those currents are having the overall impact of canceling each other out. I question whether we can possibly learn as leaders to begin to really align some of those currents to become mutually beneficial to effect the real change that Will and many others are looking towards. Are we spinning our wheels?
So, I find myself in a local oil change place waiting for the obvious and a radiator flush with Noah asleep in my arms. I can’t think of a place that I would rather be… Maybe it’s is because I am half way through the “Big 40″ (no I am not 45, I will be 41 in November) or I am just feeling sentimental, but I am finding myself thinking more and more about family. The need for cohesiveness, the need to be connected, the need for a bond that is real and shared by all members beyond mutual carpooling or “honey did’s”. This summer has been different for me. While I am still working throughout the summer, I am taking much more time off than I usually do…
Over a typical summer I spend 350-400 hours working over the 10 week summer vacation… unfortunately, this also includes 1-2 week completely off for a much needed rest, so if you do the math, the remaining 8 weeks or so I am working about 45-55 hours a week…. Not so much bonding time there with the family you can imagine. I don’t really know what made the difference this year, whether it was the fact that my family and I did not really plan a big vacation, my wife signed me up to be a coach for Joshua’s baseball team, the fact that I have two sons now, and just for sanity sake (both hers and mine) I need to rescue Trish more… of maybe, I am just getting old… But what ever it is, I am finding that I am making a connection with my family in ways I have not been able to before.
I can say confidently that there is one difference that I am very conscious of: I am MUCH happier when I do NOT have a expectation of getting “something” done. You can replace “something” with anything you want: ‘getting all the yard work done,’ ‘finishing the painting,’ ‘going to “X” by a certain time,’ ‘reading,’ ‘working, or doing work for my job,’ ‘getting the boys to bed on-time,’ etc. Once I have an expectation, I am NOT happy with delays or “waiting” or not being able to finish the “task” because I “need” to do something else first or someone else wants me to finish something in an order different from how I imagine it should go… whatever that expectation is that I have created in my mind becomes the overriding rule to my mood, happiness, sense of accomplishment, you pick the positive adjective here… While I know that this is happening, and I cannot consciously stop it once it is in motion, at least I am aware of it, and can leverage this to work toward being in the moment and really happy doing anything that comes before me more often than not.
That said, I am by no means perfect at recognition or at moderating my attitude once I become cognizant of my “expectations,” but just being aware helps me to keep from setting those false expectations in the first place… this in-turn really frees me up to really enjoy living in the moment as opposed to looking towards something else or back on what didn’t happen when it was “supposed” to…
Those “quiet times” that I am experiencing are become more and more frequent and much more rewarding for me and my family. I still stay plugged in to the works and all of its demands on my time, and my “required” obligations, but i am getting to spend more quality time enjoying my family.
How has this translated into practice you might be asking:
Getting back to work, I am now taking 1-2 days partially or completely off each week (often Friday’s to give me a 3 day weekend with my wife and boys). Additionally, when I arrive home after work, I leave work behind, at least until the boys are asleep, and I have spent a little time with Trish, even if we are just sitting watching television. I work to be less strict about “bedtimes” for the boys over the summer as they are not forced to get up with me at 5am, but I still try to keep them from really hurting themselves due to lack of sleep… (Just because they can sleep til noon does not mean that I want them too…)
In relation to my family, I am working to just “be” with the boys… to get lost in that sense of wonder and adventure that only a five year old and (almost) two year old can have and create in their minds and personal universe. With my wife, I get lost in spending quiet time with her, and being open to sitting when I want to move, and moving when I want to sit. I have always enjoyed going with her to stores (especially when I got my first data enabled smartphone and then my iPhone) not because I like shopping… frankly I hate it, but because I like being with her. the iPhone just makes the waiting outside the dressing rooms more bearable (unless we are in Victoria Secret, then waiting is just fine… ;0) Ok, I couldn’t resist… I know that was wrong, but I had to include it =0)
In relation to the educational community I am part of, and enjoy… I am finding that really to find balance I don’t need to unplug from everything I want to learn about… I just need to unplug from the community from time to time… This is not to be hurtful, or demeaning to those of you who really find solace in this wonderful group we run with… But, I am writing this as a suggestion to find a balance with your family, NOT this group…
These are only my rantings and feelings, however, many… many… people have told me and I am finding this to be a FACT not a perception… our children really DO GROW UP TOO FAST. I can remember when Joshua (then 4) was wearing a shirt to go see Noah for the first time after Noah was born… Now Noah is almost 2 and wearing that same shirt… Where did the last two year go? Joshua is starting kindegarten this fall. I re,member when he was just coming for the first time to my school to attend pre-school classes when he was 3. Joshuan is learning to ride a bike without training wheels, and Noah is trying to ride a tricycle… what happened to them crawling and needing help to do that. Make no mistake, I am a very plugged in Dad. I get my boys up just about every day, and I typically am the one that puts them to sleep. I go to the doctor with them and to the movies, I play for hours with them, but I feel sometimes like they are growing everything I blink or am away from them for a few hours.
Again, this is just my perspective, but I see MANY MANY education community members who are SO plugged in… So, so, SO, plugged into this wonderful community they actually provide / pass along MORE information, write more, participate more, twitter more, facebook more, during holidays, winter – spring – summer break and other times where school is out of session. When I inquire about that, their typical response is, “that is the only time I can get caught up on what I want to “publish, share, contribute, read, write, meet up, you insert your reasoning here.” Frankly, intellictually, I completely understand those arguments, but I am finding more and more those “excuses” to be connected with a personal and pre-dominently virtual community to be hollow weighing it against the benefit and need of being connected with our families. Spending time rolling down a hill with our children. Getting lost playing “Indiana Jones” or even hide and seek. Watching an ant hill, chasing “birdies” or squirrels. Spending time AT the store with our family as opposed to “getting through the store.” Playing during “tub-time” as opposed to waiting to get them washed… Changing plans 10 times at the whim of a five year old, and then just walking or finding the “ice cream man.”
I honor and respect every one of you. I have learned more from this community in the past few years than I have through most of my formal schooling… but right now I am thinking it is more important for you (and me) to be teaching our OWN children and more so learning from them how to enjoy life again. If this feels heavy handed, I can’t apologize at this time. Maybe in the future when we are in the rat-race AGAIN I will beg for forgiveness, but as for now, I want to hear from you, I want to learn what you know, but I want it to be about empowering your own families, about great spots to spend time with your family, about what you are learning from letting go as opposed to being plugged in… Oops… time to go, there is a pillow fort / mountain that is calling my name.
We just got back for a really nice fireworks show in Barrington, IL. As with most fireworks shows, the wait until after dusk to start, and ours was no different in that regard. Trish, the boys and I arrived pre-dusk to select a prime location for viewing, and low and behold so did a couple hundred other would be watcher. Now since the show would not start for about 30 minutes, we brought glow sticks (the modern day sparklers) to occupy the boys attention.
My ever present not wanting to miss a photo opportunity of the boys required me to pull put my iPhone to see what I could do to record the event and here is what I caught:
Now while that is what the camera saw, it is definately now what my eyes viewed at the time… However, with a couple of tools for the iPhone, we can get a bit closer to what the image should look like.
This is pretty cool huh? My favorite in iPhone editing tool is Photogene (iTunes Link), and a second great tool by the same developer is called NoiseBlaster (iTunes Link). Photogene allows for a plethora of editing and enhancing techniques while NoiseBlaster simply allows for exposure correction, and it’s primary purpose of eliminating “noise” (color blotches) from a picture. While the picture would be best served to have had a flash, this is not a bad result from an in-phone image editing tool.
Well we are on the way back home and all is going well on flight. I am not sure if it helps that everyone is exhausted, but it doesn’t seem to be hurting at all. Trish is out, Noah fell asleep about 10 minutes into the flight, Joshua is watching his DVD player, and while I would like to sleep, I am afraid of dropping Noey.
The boys have done amazingly well on each of the flights. It was tougher with the layover and later initial flight as both of the boys were way overtired. Tip to self for future flights… They should always be early early morning flights. Trish and I were talking that in a way as Noey gets older it is going to be both a blessing and a curse for travel. He will have his own seat (
Ok, it is easier for the first day at least. I’ll let you know when I hit day 30 or 60… I wil say that there is nothing better to help you succeed at something than forcing yourself to do it…
Today I ran exclusively on Zoho applications (except for my corporate email). I know that this is not really new, but in a way I feel that it was. In the past I always had Microsoft Office 2007 installed on my tablet pc. It was an easy fall back, really easy. Let me explain. Three times today, I needed to open an existing document, spreadsheet, and presentation… in the past, I would unconsciously just double-click the file I needed and poof, the associated application would open. However, without having Office installed, I needed to think twice, and react in a new way.
First thing this morning, I needed to revise the quantity of a parts order. I had the data in a Excel spreadsheet. Oops… No Excel on this tablet anymore… for a second I actually had to pause to think of what I needed to do about this. Then, I opened Zoho Sheet, and simply clicked the "import button" and browsed right to my file. It kind of felt like opening Excel, and then clicking "file open." In about 15 seconds poof the file opened, and I was able to update the quantities, with all of the formulas importing correctly and recaltulating the totals instantly. Pretty cool. As a side benefit, I now had/have that particular spreadsheet available via my iPhone. This came in handy later in the day when a collegue of mind needed information from that same sheet. I was able to bring it up when we were away from our PC’s…
My second, opportunity to interact with Zoho in a completely "Office-like" situation was when I needed to fill out a point of contact document for a video conference call I have with Pearl Harbor this Friday. I saved the attachment from email, and then "imported" it into Zoho Writer. After providing a bit of information, I was ready to send the file back to my contacts at Pearl. This time, instead of going through the "normal" process of saving a document and then "attaching" it to an email, I simply clicked "Share" and "Email Out" in Zoho Writer. I entered a few email addresses, and off the edited document went as the body of the email right from my zoho mail account. Nice.
Finally, later in the day, I reviewed an old PowerPoint presentation for some information that I need for a presentation I will be doing for my Board of Education. This time there was no uncomfortableness in what I needed to do. I launched Zoho Show from the desktop links I created earlier in the day, and imported my presentation, in about a minute, I was moving through the information with ease… All in all it was a really easy day living in the cloud.
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Well, here goes… everything… I guess.
Every time I happen to look at my cluster map I can’t help but be impressed by the numbers of people who have stopped by to look at my often rambling thoughts. Looking at it this morning, I still l have that sense of awe. It is humbling when I think it all started with this simple post back in January 2007.
For those of you who are skeptics, or know skeptics of the lunar landing, Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter just sent back the first pictures of the
There are some things that you hate to admit… Being wrong… Occassionally being right… That you liked Millie Vanillie or Vanilla Ice… Or if you are and educational technology advocate that you cannot come to an agreement or find a compelling significance to change from the old standards :0|
My second, opportunity to interact with Zoho in a completely "Office-like" situation was when I needed to fill out a point of contact document for a video conference call I have with Pearl Harbor this Friday. I saved the attachment from email, and then "imported" it into Zoho Writer. After providing a bit of information, I was ready to send the file back to my contacts at Pearl. This time, instead of going through the "normal" process of saving a document and then "attaching" it to an email, I simply clicked "Share" and "Email Out" in Zoho Writer. I entered a few email addresses, and off the edited document went as the body of the email right from my zoho mail account. Nice.