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.

The air is nice up here, anyone want to join me?

Well it is a new day, and we have “Sprung Forward” (Day Light Savings Time, US) so I am continuing my adventures in the cloud… I almost feel like I am renewing a new year’s resolution.  Interesting feeling…

Im my press forward to continue my adventures, I recently needed to do a clean install of my OS as, even against Microsoft’s own recommendation, I upgraded my Tablet’s Vista Ultimate install to Windows 7.  While the Upgrade went very smoothly, I had a some software that just did not want to play well in the Win7 environment… Also, it just reinforced why I never recommend a upgrading an OS, ALWAYS do a clean install!  Interestingly, one of Microsoft’s own packages (Live One Care - AV-Firewall-Anti-Spam) in not compatible with Win7 and it let me know that all the time.

So last week, I migrated all of my data to my 16GB Corsair USB Drive, and performed a clean install of Windows 7.  Ok, well I actually did the install twice. The first time, I upgraded to the 32bit version and it only took about 15 minutes total (now that was pretty cool).  However, I have a 64bit Intel Core2Duo processor, and I wanted to try out a 64bit OS, so I went through the OS install again with the Windows 7 64bit installer this time.  It took about 25 minutes for the 64bit install (again not to shabby).

Now, up into the “Clouds.”  I am really working hard NOT to install Microsoft Office 2007 at this point.  As I know that this will force me to truely use an online office suite.  My choice (not any big guess for this choice for those of you who know me) for an online office suite is Zoho.com.  While there are a number of reasons or this choice, Number 174 is blogging right from Zoho Writer, and Zoho’s use of Google Gears for “offline” editing and document creation, and Number 190 Zoho’s support for the iPhone which gives me access to almost ALL of Zoho’s application suite right on my iPhone! That said, to simplify my life a bit, I am using Outlook 2007 because it is allowing me to leverage Apple’s Mobile Me application to join my corporate email / calendar to my iPhone. I tried hard to use Zoho’s business suite (with mail and calender), but I found that I need my phone to “ping” me when I have an upcoming appointment… if it doesn’t, I sometimes don’t get where I need to be :0( I have put the word out to Zoho that I would really appreciate it if they could develop a true iPhone application that would sync with the iPhone mail / calendar / contacts… for now, I check my Zoho Business account regularly, but not enought to keep me from missing meetings.

Tomorrow will be a real test for me I think.   am going to be converting my current inventory database into Zoho DB and Creator so that I can begin running reports against the data to start planning for my technology bid and summer moves and technology repurposing. With the clean install of Windows 7 and Zoho Business Suite, so far I can say, the air is fine up here “in the cloud” want to come up and join me?

Photo Attribution: People, Clouds, and Triumph by cuellar

This is a test post from Zoho Writer

Well if I am going to live in the cloud, I can’t really use my favorite publishing tool Windows Live Writer can I?  So, in keeping with my “cloud initiative” I am looking to potentially use Zoho Writer to directly post to this blog.  Additionally, this is a nice test for Zoho Writer’s capabilities. 

Well, the first issue I had was setting up my blog, I was missing the xml.rpc piece to the blog url… Didn’t know it needed to be there, but this was easily corrected by looking at the FAQ’s for writer… My second issue was trying to get the picture you see above and to the left into this post.  Although the image dialogue box says that you can enter a url for an online photo… the dialogue would NOT let me type or copy and paste the url… when clicking in the filename/url box it would open my My Pictures folder… for me more interestingly, when I put the url in my WIndows File dialogue (like I was going to upload a fiel from my hard drive, Vistas nicely found the file in my temp browser folder, and I was able to select it that way. Hopefully it will upload.  We’ll see in a minute.

Well, it has been an interesting week.  We got back from a three-day weekend, President Obama took office, and Google actually began stepping back from  providing applications… I learned about this from an eWeek article, but then confirmed the information released on January 14, 2009 at the Google Notebook Blog as well.

While I have not b

een a huge fan of Google Notebook, I have used it and showcased it in a presentation on Digital Notebooks at the IETC 2008 Conference last November.  I know that many educators really liked using Google Notebook.  Now overall for existing users it appears that Google will maintain the Notebook service as it is:

we’ll continue to maintain service for those of you who’ve already signed up. As part of this plan, however, we will no longer support the Notebook Extension, but as always users who have already signed up will continue to have access to their data via the web interface at http://www.google.com/notebook. – Raj Krishnan, Product Manager, Google Notebook

The loss of the Notebook extension I think will be a bigger hit to users as it made it so easy to grab thoughts and ideas… Ironically, on January 12, 2009 Will Richardson blogged about his reading practices and archiving the snippets of web-based thought that challenge him:

I’m growing increasingly enamored withe Google Notebook as a way to capture the best snippets and ideas for a variety of purposes. More and more, I read with an ear for saving the most salient parts, which is really challenging me to think of my own organizational schemes in a good, but somewhat frustrating way. – Will Richardson, Weblogg-ed.com

I hope that everyone finds a new tool that meets their needs for gathering, organizing, and leveraging digital content.  I would like to provide a an alternative, that to those of you who know me well will not be surprised… Zoho Notebook… I have always felt that Zoho provided a much more robust tool for gathering a plethora of different types of information be it text, audio, video, embedded, graphical and much more.  Additionally, 6 days after Google’s announcement Raju Vegesna, Zoho Evangelist, posted that Zoho had altered the Zoho Notebook firefox plugin to enable an import from a users Google Notebooks into Zoho Notebook.  Detailed directions are included in his post, but for some reason, the link within my Zoho Notebook in Flock did not take me to the location I needed… So, here are the instructions if you are looking to try.  The add-on worked flawlessly for me within Flock:

To import with ease, you can use our add-on for Mozilla Firefox.
Install or upgrade to Zoho Notebook Helper 1.0b2
On restarting Firefox, please point your browser to chrome://zoho-notebook/content/g2z.html and follow the instructions given there.

OR

To import your notebooks from Google Notebook into Zoho Notebook, please upload Google Notebook as Atom(.xml).
You can export your Google Notebook as Atom in Google Notebook’s interface.
Step 1: Click Manage notebooks on the left hand side.
Step 2: Click export on which notebook you want to export.
Step 3: Click Atom, You will be prompted to save a file. Save that file to your disk.
Step 4: Now click Browse or Choose file button provided below, to select the saved file.
Step 5: Click Import.

I also have heard (but not confirmed) that Evernote is looking to develop a similar import tool.

On a final note, Google is stopping it’s print ads business as well… In no way is Google hurting, but this is the first time I have seen them pull back … many are speculating what else will be getting cut as well… We all know 2009 will be a difficult year for everyone, but together we can and will get through these hard times.  For the last two years I have been enamored with Zoho, and hope that you will give Zoho Notebook a try.

OK, This following video video won 2nd place in a film contest titled “U @ 50″ I recommend that EVERYONE take a minute to watch this video… the message is:

Stunning! 

What a great find, I compliment my wife for making me aware of it.  It is a great message especially coming on the heels of President Obama’s Inaugural Speech (below of you have not seen it).

All, I am going to be messing with my theme for the next few hours trying to get something straightened out. I find myself blogging about three things right now… technology, gadgets, etc., now my iPhone, and then education… I am going to try to move to a theme that will represent all of those at once in a magazine type format… at least for me it makes sense. Also, I want to get some of the sidebar elements back that I had running like “what news am I saving” as Jennifer Jones (injenuity) has been putting together a great series on social networking called On Ramp that I wanted to highlight.

So, if you troll along here and see things looking out of sorts, please be kind and return as the dust should be settling shortly…

~Scott

I just wanted to take a minute and post an embed with President Barak Obama’s Inaugural Address.  This feed comes curtsey of CNN.  I am looking for his swearing in as well.

For those of you who read here occasionally, or that know me, know that I am NEVER without my phone.  That said, I rarely being my 7.1MP camera along… I often wish I did, however, well… I don’t. That said, I ALWAYS have my phone and my recent acquisition of the iPhone 3G has not changed that… in fact, I seem to be carrying the iPhone more that even mt Motorola Q and I can count on one hand the number of times I think I was without that phone.  Now, starting with my Moto Razor, I entered the world of cellular photography… I upgraded to a 2.0MP camera with my MotoQ, and stayed right there with the iPhone.  However, with the MotoQ at least I was able to change some of the lighting, timing, white balance, etc. right in camera. heck it even had an LED flash… All that is gone with the iPhone… basically you get a point and shoot 2.0MP camera (that is often subject to simple human jitters…)

Even with the lighting issues, and the occasional “soft focus” from my unsteady hand, I have taken approximately 1200 pictures since December 23, 2008… Ya think I love my kids? (ok 202 pics are of my livingroom photosynth (future post).

Now one day I was looking for a quick way to crop a photo (on my iPhone) that I wanted to upload to facebook and I stumbled across Photogene.  What a blessing I found.  I honestly bought it for cropping that (and planned future photos) … hey it was $2.99 at the app store. Photogene has become one of my most used apps on the iPhone.  Al right I hear you… why not just upload your pics to  the PC and then do all of your editing there… yes I can, but I am doing less and less on an actual computer now and reallying liking it… so since I take a lot of pictures on the iPhone, I might as well do a bit of touch up work

there too… Photogene handles a ton of work almost effortlessly, and it is pretty gosh darn intiutive as well.

When you first open the app, it asks you whether you want to take a picture and then edit it, or of you wish to edit one from your camera roll, or photos that are stored on your phone.

From there you can choose your photo as I have and then you can adjust color and lighting:

From there you can select a “frame” … I really like the soft rounded edges:

Here is the adjusted photo:

Finally in a touch of the silly, you can even add “bubble thoughts” or captions to your photos…

and then simply save your edited work of art!  Photogene saves the new creation right back into your camera roll.

This is really a great tool for those of us who live a very mobile life.  Now you will have to go back into your PC or camera roll to delete the originals if you would like or keep the duplicates, but what a difference Photogene can make.  Below are a few of my originals and the adjusted versions. As you can see mainly I “auto” adjusted the color and removed the hard photo border.  As a final note, you can accomplish all of what I state above in under 30 seconds… Too cool!

Ok, I have been trying to decide if I had given in to the “popular pressure,” or perhaps I couldn’t stand firm with my choice to use a windows mobile smartphone… Maybe I needed a new “man” toy… Some might even critize that I couldn’t “see the light” or refused to use a “real consumer focus product.” Heck I know that I often enough made the statement that if I touched an Apple product (toy) that my hand would fall off…

So, for anyone to find out that I had received an iPhone for Christmas was a major deal (especially since I needs the tell beautiful wife Trish exactly what to ask for at the AT&T store). In fact, I had three of my collegues audibly laugh when someone informed them of my new acquisition.

Well, what I can say is that I did all I could to make an informed decision… I researched the newest phones from many… many… manufacturers, I demoed 8 phones, and debated over mobile OS types and versions. I was even so concerned about the soft keyboard of the touch phones so I borrowed an iTouch from a good friend over a long weekend.

In be end, I landed on the iPhone and I have not regreted my decision at all. That is not I say that I have not at times been frustrated when I could not do something very basic like cut and paste, or and an mms message, but overall what an amazing device.

For instance, I have been able to download a number of useful apps like Photogene, the weather channel, newswire, and even this wordpress app while allows me to mobile blog. Apple got a ton of things right. In the last 6 months, the app store has pushed out over 5,000,000 downloads and has 15,000+ apps available. Some good, some silly, some just plain stupid, but hey there is a ton to choose from.

In a previous post I put forth what I used my motoq for, and aside from video (and the afore mentioned mms) I can do everything I could in the winmo world, and I can also view almost all websites in their true form, I can mobile blog, I can get indepth weather, I can edit/crop/color a photo and then upload it with a few clicks.

Heck I have even begin using facebook because of the iPhone app… Like my motoq, my iPhone is with my almost every moment of the day, and even after a month, I really find it hard to put down.

Wow!