Monthly Archives: November 2010

Nov 20 2010

Concert 2.0

We attended the Montgomery Gentry concert in Windsor last night and red necked it up with about 5000 others for a great evening of entertainment.  Always looking for the technology angle, it was fun talking about other concerts that my wife and I have been in the past and listening to her talking about the good old days without technology.  Those would be Concert 1.0 events.  We have moved along though!

  • Cell phones – Do they really need to tell us all to turn our phones off?  (Actually, yes, but I think she was the only one in the hall that did…)
  • Tickets – Remember the good old days when they tore your stub off?  Now, they just scan it with one of those things.  (Yes, and I can also scan the code with my phone even though I get that disapproving “you’re such a weenie” look…)
  • Recording – Do they really have to tell people that they can’t record the concert? (Sadly, yes.  Record devices are so small that it’s pretty easy to bootleg a concert.)
  • Look at all those people with cameras.  (Actually, most were using their phones.  It’s so seamlessly done and you do want a picture or two to remember the event.)
  • Isn’t it nice that the Coliseum is designed to be inclusive of all guests?  (Absolutely.  Those who need help with mobility are seated nicely on the main floor.  Kudos to the event staff who were visibly doing a great job accommodating everyone)
  • You’re going to blog about this, aren’t you?  (Hell yeah! I’ll even throw in a video…another thing that can’t be done in the good old days)

Despite all this, there are some things that never change.

  • Despite the concert starting at 9pm, people were still arriving at 9:30.
  • Some folks, unfortunately, do drink to excess to be annoying to others.
  • Lots of people leave before the concert ends…(have you never heard of encores?)
  • People behind you talk all through the concert. (Thankfully, if you focus, you can tune them out)
  • People everywhere sing loudly and way off key.  (Actually, I think that was me.  Since my guitar playing days, I have the ability to play in one key and sing in another)

Fortunately, most people are ready for Concert 2.0.  After all, some people change.

Nov 19 2010

Posting 11/20/2010

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

By dougpete • Posted in Links
0
Nov 19 2010

Some FollowFriday Fun

Google does its best to help you while you search with its search suggestions.  Often, they can be used to refine your search strategies on the fly.  On the other hand, there are some fun suggestions that can pop up.

I went about searching for some of the folks on the Ontario Educators’ List…

For example, when I wanted to “Look up Anita”, the suggestion of “anyone” seemed to be divergent thinking!  Not quite performance in the Teacher-Librarian world.

Even Google gets confused when asked to “spell Cyndie”!

Nobody really know “what zoe teaches”

I think it’s a compliment that Safina gets confused with Santa when asked “where does Safina teach”

 

Hmmm.  ”Why does Brenda continue to chair the ECOO Conference?” Belly buttons may be too personal an answer…

“Who is Peter and what’s that on his face?”

And we all are curious as to “Why won’t Peter be at Symposium”

It seemed like an innocent enough question to ask if “Can digitalnative present?”

Even Google thinks it’s cool that “Alana is on a train!”

And, finally, Doug has been called non-creative in the past, but this one hurts!

Happy FollowFriday.


Nov 18 2010

Posting 11/19/2010

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

By dougpete • Posted in Links
0
Nov 18 2010

The Friendliest of Browsers

It’s important to stay on top of what’s happening in your digital life, right?  For many, that digital life is on Facebook.  It’s an easy log in and log out on a computer, but what about on your iPad?  With all of the resources that are available for the site itself, the iPad seems to have been left out of things.

There is a Facebook app for the iPod/iPhone and it’s pretty good for those devices.  And, yes, it will run on the iPad but it’s still at the smaller screen size.  It  really doesn’t take advantage of all of the display area that the iPad affords.  Sure, you can hit the 2x button, but it’s not the same.

For a while, I had just created a Mobile Safari shortcut and put that in my launcher instead.  It works fine since you’re working right in Facebook itself.  But, navigation is still best done with a mouse.  Using your iPad, your navigation demands are just a little more…..

Into the game, comes a very powerful little application called Friendly.  It’s available in both a Lite (Free) version and a $.99 pay product.  A partial list of features appears below, courtesy of the developers.

  • Read and comment your newsfeed
  • Chat with your online friends
  • Upload photos from your ipad
  • Read or write Facebook messages
  • Update your status
  • View your photos, and friend photos full screen
  • View and respond to events
  • Keep up with your Facebook notifications
  • Quickly login with multiple Facebook accounts

Navigation is quick and easy and you’re in and out of the areas that are important to you so quickly.  After just a couple of days, I found very little need to go into Facebook via the web at all.

Quick and easy access to your “wall”, toggling between your live feed and your news feed, check your events, update your profile, check your friends, access your Facebook messages – all are just a tap away – without the advertising!

In fact, the only reason why I feel the need to go into the website itself now is to let my so-called friends and family beat me at Family Feud!

If you have an iPad and you’re a Facebook user, you really owe it to yourself to check out this application.

Nov 17 2010

Posting 11/18/2010

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

By dougpete • Posted in Links
0
Nov 17 2010

More responding to spam

And, this is why we all hate spammers and so spent the time fixing things on the blog.  Here’s what Akismet captured overnight as inappropriate and kept from being shared with the public.  Just thought that I’d give them each a response.  They all came from the same internet location!

Doug says – You’re ugly too.

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Doug says – Is “schuchs” a cross between school and church?

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Doug says – Me feel good. That’s why me blog.

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Doug says – Because you’re an idiot.

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Doug says – Hey, how’s it going?  I love insightful responses to my thoughts.

——————

Doug says – There’s nothing sadder than a keyboard with a broken period key.

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Doug says – Thanks for testing your keyboard.  Those three keys work but hardly make a word.

——————

Ah, it’s nice to get it out of my system.

Nov 17 2010

Moving On

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that I try my best to share the weblinks that I find on a daily basis.  It started out as just a personal project so that I wouldn’t lose anything.  It worked out well just recently.  A colleague recalled an article about cell phone use but couldn’t remember it.  Fortunately, I had tucked it away and a quick search allowed me to help her locate it.

A while ago, I had used Delicious to keep track of things but just for my own personal reasons.  I showed a friend how it worked once and she was the one that suggested I work on finding a way to share these “finds” with others.  It made sense – we’re all better when we’re rowing in the same direction.  I dug around Delicious and found an experimental feature that posts your links daily to your blog.  For the most part, it worked really nicely.  Every now and again, however, it seems to go wonky and makes repeated posts.  It’s annoying, to be sure, and I found that I was doing a lot of back fill maintenance to stop the blog from looking like a dog’s breakfast.

The latest episode happened last week.  So, I decided to go through and try to do some maintenance and see if I could figure out what was going wrong.  Alas, I’ve been presented constantly with the following message.

That was my call to action.  After all, I have so much to share!  For a few days, to give Delicious time to orient itself, I was doing the posts manually.  But, there’s no resolution in site.  I decided to pursue another angle.

My posting process actually has the links being posted to Diigo first and then cross posted to my Delicious account.  I’ve kept both accounts going for a number of reasons including, and correctly as it turns out, for redundancy.  It turns out that Diigo has the same sort of functionality for posting.

Then, it was sit and wait with fingers crossed.  It turns out that it works nicely.  It’s posting to this blog as it should and posts sent to Diigo are stored there as well as being forwarded to Delicious.  I have the timer set to do it in the evening so that I can monitor it rather than its traditional, hopefully non-intrusive, 1:00am timeslot.

Does this mean that Delicious is done?  Absolutely not.  It’s a great service and I’ve got a nice network of followers over there.  It’s also great to have a redundancy backup for this process as well.  It’s just a shame that things aren’t working the way that they should.

The problem with robotic posts is that when robots go wild, strange things happen.  I just felt like I had to so something as it had gotten out of control but I was “spamming” people inadvertently.  And, everyone hates a spammer!

Nov 16 2010

Posting 11/17/2010

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

By dougpete • Posted in Links
0
Nov 16 2010

Shrinking URLs on iOS

One of the most read entries on this blog happened in August of this year.  I had written a post called “A Fresh Start” and it dealt with the real advantage of a new school year and how it lets teachers re-invent themselves every year with the coming of a new class.  The link to this posting is at: http://dougpete.wordpress.com/2010/08/29/a-fresh-start/.

Like most blog postings, the URL is a little daunting and requires some careful typing, or copy/pasting or access by a link or QR code or something.  In a Twitter message, the content would take up a whack of the 140 characters available!   Typically, if I was to find a link like that and retweet it, I would use a URL shortener to take the long URL and make it considerably shorter.  There are lots of shorteners available for your use, free of charge – my preference is bit.ly because you can create an account on bit.ly and get some really interesting analytics if you’re so inclined.

In the traditional computer world, it’s a pretty easy process with the appropriate plugin to your browser and certainly Seesmic Desktop does a nice job of shrinking URLs.  But, what happens when you’re using an iOS device?

To the rescue, comes a sweet little application called shrinkURL.  It’s sole purpose is to take a big URL like my blog post example above and run it through a URL shortener to give you a small one for easy sharing.  It supports bit.ly, j.mp, and TinyURL.  Just select the one that you’re going to use.

image

That’s all that you really need to do to get started.  If you have a bit.ly account, you do have the option of entering a Username and API key.  Using it couldn’t be easier.

In Mobile Safari or whatever browser you’re using, just highlight and copy the URL to be shortened.  Open the shrinkURL application and the contents of the clipboard are automatically sent to the shortening service and you’re presented with the shorter link for sharing.  The whole process requires little user interaction once it’s configured.

image

Take the results and share them.  shrinkURL also has a handy history feature so that you can keep track of the URLs that you’re shortening using the application.  What could be easier?