Day: December 22, 2019

My Week Ending 2019-12-22

by dougpete, posted in Just Rambling

Here’s a summary of some of the things I learned and published this week.

Readings 

You can follow my daily readings as they happen here.  Below are a selected few, with commentary, from the past week.

  • These pictures are well worth the time to scroll through and enjoy. It’s like a history of the past year of some things I knew and some things I didn’t.
  • I’ll admit that I absolutely hated the Edge browser that Microsoft shipped with Windows 10 and pretty much crammed down our throats. The new Chromium based one isn’t all that bad at all. I’m sure we’ll still eventually get nagged to death to use it under Windows.
  • I think everyone needs to get up to speed with the terminology behind VPNs. I see this in everyone’s future.
  • Here’s a story about teacher salaries. Now, in Ontario, things are currently better but the story is much the same.
  • Has there been anything more promoted about the future in connected users than 5G? Interesting article about it in the house.
  • You’d think that, with a title like this, it would live up to itself as people played it. I can tell you that not everyone got perfect – at least in the circles that I run.
  • This is a source for great Christmas wallpapers if you’re into changing your wallpaper for the season. Other good stuff too.
  • Good for Google. They need to keep developers honest. I’m very disappointed in these products; they were once held with high regard. Now, not so much.
  • It almost is enough to scare you off the internet or to find one place where you can authenticate to. Then, when the worst happens, you just change one password.
  • If this doesn’t make you double-check resources you find on the Internet, I don’t know what will. But, it begs a bigger question – who is the ultimate arbitrar?
  • Guess what? Another article about which is the best web browser. You should know by now that I’m a sucker for these.
  • I thought that a “complete guide” might be overkill until I read the article Google Chrome has so many different places where it might be installed and it functions differently depending upon location.
  • This is genius for wrapping Christmas gifts. Actually, for any gifts. Who says that there isn’t room to learn new things daily?
  • With so many different vendors and equipment and processors, it comes as no surprise that Windows 10 had so many mistakes this past year.
  • It’s only by one day but enough to scare some people. On the other hand, Labour Day would be embedded into the fall semester.

Blog Posts on doug … off the record

My daily contributions to this blog.

#FollowFriday – December 20, 2019

https://wke.lt/w/s/RvBWSy

voicEd Radio

My on demand radio page can be found here.  

This week’s show – https://www.spreaker.com/episode/20854909

Intro song

Blog posts this week came from:

  • @zeliamct
  • @Jay__Dubois
  • @MzMollyTL
  • @mcguirp
  • @greeneterry

Technology Troubleshooting

I always wonder at the value of doing this blog post every week. Does anyone actually read it? After all, everything (except this section) has appeared somewhere on this blog. But then I remember the #1 rule of blogging; you do it for yourself. It’s a nice opportunity to review my past week’s personal learning.

Normally, I sit at a desk with a mouse and real keyboard when I type it.

Not so this morning. I have my MacBook Pro in my lap and I’m typing while I watch the pre-pre-game show for today’s football events.

This is definitely the “linkiest” blog post that I do every week. I find that it’s taking longer than ever to write because of the trackpad scrolling and the keyboard highlighting of text.

I don’t see this as being the new norm for writing this. It’s really painful compared with working with a real mouse and a real keyboard. I’m in awe of people that can write blog posts on a tablet.

Video of the Week

What’s Christmas without Burl Ives singing?

Photo of the Week

A favourite display from the King’s Navy Yard. And, yes, the feathers are animated.

Thanks for reading. Please join me daily for something new and, hopefully, interesting.

dp

This blog post was originally posted at:

https://dougpete.wordpress.com/

If you find it anywhere else, it’s not original.

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Whatever happened to …

by dougpete, posted in Just Rambling

… tinsel?

If you have a Christmas tree within eyesight, it will be interesting to share whether or not you have tinsel on it.

These days, it can come in many different forms. Growing up, for us it came in long metallic strips and we had it all over the family Christmas tree. Real trees in the beginning and later artificial. When I branched out on my own, it was a tradition that didn’t follow. Although …

It was a big deal for my mother. After the tree was up, the decorations added, the lights arranged, the crowning touch was strips of tinsel all over the tree. The effect was impressive. The metal in the tinsel amplified the lights making it appear that there was much more than there actually were. Leading up to Christmas, it was hard to deny that it really made for a beautiful effect.

It was after Christmas that the real pain hit. It was a tedious process because the family would all gather to take the tinsel off and carefully wrap it around some cardboard for storage until next year. We worked hard at it and yet there was still this stuff seemingly everywhere including out by the street for the real tree pickup date. When we moved to the artificial tree, some of that stuff ended up being packed away with the tree, only to return next year.

It was also a personal decoration for some of my high school girls who would weave it into their hair for an effect. At times, it became a classroom management issue. My room had carpeting and if you didn’t have running shoes on with rubber soles, you could shuffle your feet and touch a tinsel strip in the hair and get a yelp from the static electricity! But the worst thing ever happened when a strip got sucked into a desktop computer and caused a short as the tinsel made contact with places that didn’t need contact. Needless to say, banning of tinsel from the classroom didn’t help my Scrooge image.

I’d like to say that tinsel is not a thing around here these days. But every now and again a strip appears. We’ve inherited my parent’s old tree and many of their decorations and every now and again, one appears. That does bring back memories

For the last Sunday going into Christmas…

  • do you use tinsel on your Christmas tree?
  • is there a secret to collecting it all after the fact?
  • does tinsel appear in any different form at your place?
  • have you ever experienced the static electricity from tinsel or any other decoration?
  • as for the decorative effect, yes or no?

Please share your shiny thoughts in the comments below.

This post originated from:

https://dougpete.wordpress.com

If you read it anywhere else, it’s not the original.

OTR Links 12/22/2019

by dougpete, posted in Links

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