An iTunes Christmas

Well, I am just so proud of myself. My one surprise gift for my wife is all set and ready to go. Eight hours of custom iTunes mixes burned to CD and labeled with a nice collage of album artwork, with the help of Fireworks and Freehand. I think she's gonna love them, and it will be the one gift that she hasn't picked out for herself already, or even bought and given to me to wrap for her. (Anyone else's wives help you out by buying their own gifts?)

You gotta love shopping like this--or at least I do. I can sit at my trusty Mac and pound on my credit card for a while to get a nice mix of tunes from the Music Store. (I won't admit how much I spent, but let's just say that there were a lot of "Ooooh! Gotta have that one!" moments.) She gets a collection of folk songs that I know she'll like, with plenty of Bonnie Raitt, Joni Mitchell, and Carole King. A 60's and 70's mix with Aretha, Jackson Browne, Marvin Gaye, Al Green, and The Eagles. And a couple of car tunes mixes with "Love Shack" (gotta have Love Shack!), some John Hiatt, and other goodies that I know she likes to sing along with. Oh yeah, and a tasty Tom Petty CD with all her favorites.

It's been fun, and a little nostalgic thinking about all the songs we've enjoyed in our 18 years together, and then digging them up at the Music Store. Some of these songs take me back to those early days when she had a VW convertible and would buzz all over town with the stereo blasting. And even though she drives a mom-mobile these days, it's nice to listen to a song that helps me remember what things were like back then, and that beautiful laughing girl I married.

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PalmBeachLearns.org Launched

I took part in a news conference yesterday with the Mayor of West Palm Beach, our District superintendent, and a bunch of other luminaries from the Urban League and the city. The big news? Two items actually. First, our district announced a new partnership with the communities in our county to make web access for students and parents who don't own their own computers more easily available. In community centers, churches, and even county shelters for abused children we'll be working hard to get computers into any place that provides open access to students and their parents. As part of that plan our high school and middle school students will be refurbishing computers that have reached the end of their 5-year life span in our schools and putting them into the hands of non-profit groups all over Palm Beach County.

The second half of this equation is to provide an Internet gateway to all our educational offerings in one place. This is the part of the project that I've been most heavily involved with and you can see the results of my efforts to organize our resources and work out a navigation scheme and design at PalmBeachLearns.org. Yep, even that domain name is new, something we added last week to make it easier to market the site throughout the county. PalmBeachLearns.org is whole lot easier to promote than the previous address: www.palmbeach.k12.fl.us/learning_tools Whew! Makes me tired even typing it. (We also registered PalmBeachLearns.com for the inevitable occasions when folks tack on the .com extension regardless of what you tell them.)

Lots more to come in this effort of course, but it's exciting to be a part of a project to get web resources into a format and a place where people can find them and use them with their kids. Whether it's a teacher in the classroom or a parent at home, or an after-school activity director in a city park we want to make sure that everyone in our county can find the instructional resources that we offer and make full use of them.

You can read a nice synopsis of the news conference at the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel.

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To the New Fathers: Welcome to The Twilight Zone

I have a bunch of friends and acquaintances and coworkers who are new Dads these days, and thought this would be a good time to clue them in to some of the mysteries of parenthood. (My own daughter just turned 12 so I've had some time to reflect on this whole thing a little bit.) Here's the deal. The best way to get through all of this, especially the first 6 months, is to just treat it like an episode of The Twilight Zone:

Welcome New Father,

We here at the Planetary-visitor Opportunity Orientation Program (P.O.O.P.) wish to thank you for your selfless decision to accept one of our alien visitors into your home.

We assure you that your wife will stop being angry with you in time, although we do recommend contrition and obeisance in the interim period. This transition period for your marriage may last anywhere from several weeks until the end of your natural life.

During the first 6 months with your alien visitor you will be faced with many challenges. As the visitor becomes acclimated to our climate here on earth they will require almost constant attention from a human. Basic functions such as the required nutrition and (ahem) elimination that your visitor needs will be totally in the hands of yourself, your wife, and any unwitting volunteers that you can dupe..strike that...convince....to assist you with its care and feeding. As you will be deeply immersed in the required acts of contrition (see Paragraph 1 above) you can expect that your wife will be nearly as demanding as your visitor, which will place a great deal of stress on your sanity. This is a completely normal turn of events and we assure you that the overwhelming levels of stress and lack of sleep will not kill you, despite reports you may have read.

Following the initial period of climate acclimation your visitor will become more and more accustomed to life here on earth, and will begin attempting to communicate with you. This is known as the Cute Phase, as opposed to the Oh My God I Can't Go On Another Day Without Sleep Phase which immediately precedes it. Your alien still requires constant and unrelenting care during this time, but there are small rewards when they begin to communicate with you and your partner. You may find that your partner also begins to communicate with you again during this phase about subjects unrelated to care of the alien.

Many challenges lie ahead after this initial orientation phase is over. Your alien will actually learn to speak our human language after only a year or so. While it is true that they often revert back to their own alien language in the years following "age" 12 or so, the early years you have with your alien will be filled with much communication as they are endlessly curious about Earth.

Once again, we here at P.O.O.P. want to assure you that the first 6 months with your adopted visitor are by far the most challenging, and that the difficult times will most likely fade from memory. (We believe that this may be some sort of telepathic power that the aliens possess but cannot confirm this theory.) Evidence of this memory erasure are evident all over the world as many parents actually decide to adopt multiple visitors.

We are certain that you will also find the total experience to be gratifying and rewarding in the end and wish you the best of luck in these early days of low sleep and high stress.

The Committee

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Merry CSS-Christmas from Community MX

Community MX has released a new JumpStart page extension today called North Pole. (Disclaimer: I am a partner at Community MX and share in the proceeds with the other 30 or so authors and experts in our merry band of whatever we are.)

The North Pole extension is free as our group's gift to you out there in the web development community. If you're not familiar with the JumpStart series, these extensions for Dreamweaver allow you to build fully CSS-positioned pages that are WAI compliant and fully validated for both XHTML and CSS.

What's cool about JumpStarts are the included tutorials that come with each package as well as all the images to get you started. Add in the extensively commented CSS file and you get a great way to learn how objects are positioned and styled in CSS. I've learned a lot pulling these things apart and putting them back together again, and look forward to seeing how I can restyle the North Pole design. And if things go wrong--as they often do when I'm learning new things--having an extension to create an entire site in a few seconds is a great way to go back to the drawing board and try to figure out where things went wrong.

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Scholarly Research on Virtual Communities

Well, who'd have thought that there'd be a need for research on virtual communities? Actually, on thinking about this a bit, the ever-expanding world of social groups, newsgroups, and other forms of technology-enabled community groups is a pretty interesting topic.

In A Typology of Virtual Communities: A Multi-Disciplinary Foundation for Future Research Constance Elise Porter
of Notre Dame dives into a revised definition of what virtual communities are and how different groups are alike and how they differ. Her premise that the groups can be defined by 5 metrics is a sound one:

Purpose (Content of Interaction)—This attribute describes the specific focus of discourse, or focal content of communication, among community members.

Place (Extent of Technology Mediation of Interaction)—This attribute defines the location of interaction, where interaction occurs either completely virtually or only partially virtually.

Platform (Design of Interaction)—This attribute refers to the technical design of interaction in the virtual community, where designs enable synchronous communication, asynchronous communication or both.

Population (Pattern of Interaction)—This attribute refers to the pattern of interaction among community members as described by group structure (e.g. small group or network) and type of social ties (e.g. strong, weak, stressful).

Profit Model (Return on Interaction)—This attribute refers to whether a community creates tangible economic value where value is defined as revenue-generation.

An interesting, if scholarly look at this phenom, the article is worth a read if you're considering creating your own communities on-line or are trying to promote existing ones.

Via The e-Learning Centre.

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Keep an Eye Out For Phishers

A new round of annoying idiocy is probably making its way into your Inbox as I type this. This one comes, supposedly, from PayPal and asks for just two little bits of information--your account name and password. Hey! Sure strange unknown anonymous person claiming to be PayPal! I'll send you my information. If you haven't seen the previous examples of phishing from CitiBank or NationsBank then you're in for a treat.

So how do you know if it's a real transaction? First of all, no reputable company is going to send you an e-mail asking for account information. So as soon as you see one of these you know it's phishy (sorry, couldn't resist that one). Secondly, check that URL. It should show the main domain name of the company that allegedly is contacting you. In this case the URL shows the IP address (a series of numbers) rather than the familiar paypal.com address that you'd expect. Finally, if all else fails, check the lock icon in the Status bar of your browser (that little part of the window waaay down at the bottom.) If the lock is unlocked then your sending your information in the clear so to speak.

OK, be safe out there everyone. There are some phlatulent phrauds out there just waiting phor you to phall prey to this latest nepharious scheme.

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15 Minutes At a Connected Teacher's Desktop

Mrs. Maldonado is in a hurry. Of course, as a 7th grade Language Arts teacher she's always in a hurry. It just goes with the territory. There are papers to grade, lessons to review, and of course, she wants to stay in touch with the world outside her classroom door. Soon enough her room will fill with the first group of the 100+ students she'll see today. She smiles as always in anticipation of the mixture of young teen drama and enthusiasm that will descend upon her and her classroom in 15 minutes.

OK, time for work. Mrs. Maldonado takes a seat at her teacher station and logs on to the computer. This is always such a fascinating time of the day. So many new things have unfolded in the world of how she uses technology in the classroom, yet she hardly thinks of it as technology anymore. Just more tools to get her job done more effectively and reach those kids she'll be seeing in a few minutes. Behind the scenes though, a wide array of technologies have been woven together to bring communication and collaboration resources, engaging professional development assets, and standards-based curriculum materials into one place for her to review and use to better teach her students. Without really giving it much thought, Mrs. Maldonado's teaching world has changed in fundamental ways. More...

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My Bad

For taking the Lord's name in vain.

While stringing up the lights intended to celebrate His son's birth, when said lights fell from the roof for the fourth time.

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Another Rule to Live By

When doing metal work get a little further away from what you're working on if you smell burning facial hair.

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Sucked Into a Political Blog

Although I have an interest in politics, along with a relatively unused degree in political science, political blogs are not my cup of joe. Yes, I've posted some of my own political thoughts and experiences here in the past, but I can't work myself into a suitable lather to be a real political blogger, anymore than I can listen to rants from the right or left on the radio.

All of that leads to this, a post at the Daily Kos that makes some general comments about how liberal blogs seem to attract more people using non-Microsoft products (alternate browser, Mac heads like me, Linux, etc.) as opposed to conservative blogs where the majority of folks use MS (Windows, IE). Interesting.

But Whoa Nelly! Reading the comments made me feel like that old Star Trek episode, the one with the puddle of evil, talking black goo that pulled people in and wouldn't let them out. Man, there are some people out there in serious need of a life, or something that resembles it. The comments toss around acronyms for certain blogs (LGF = Little Green Footballs--a conservative blog which you can find on your own thank you), like the things that go on there are life and death.

Shoot folks, it's just someone sitting at their keyboard expressing their opinion. No one's coming into your living room and trying to stuff their ideology down your throat. Take a walk, get another hobby--do SOMETHING that doesn't involve reading things that make you angry. Otherwise you become angry too, and we have way too many angry people in the world already.

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Free MS Word Video Tutorials

I've been listening to the murmurs coming from Lee Keller in the cubicle adjacent to mine for the last few weeks as he records a series of Camtasia Studio videos on various topics. This is part of an initiative within our District to get as many short "snippets" of training information onto the Web for any-time training of our staff, students, and even parents. But hey, once it's on-line why not share it with the world?

Lee is about three quarters of the way through his narration of a course for Microsoft Word, and even though it's not quite done, it's worth a pop in to see what he's created. I like the way the material has been organized by focusing on the major menu items in the Menu Bar, which gives a good launching point for people needing to perform particular tasks. And of course, putting video into the Flash format through Camtasia allows for full motion recording of screen actions, a good clean voice-over, and insures that folks in our target audience will be able to see our offerings regardless of platform or browser.

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Brushing Up on Dreamweaver Templates

I've got some new projects going where I really need to get back up to speed on the more advanced properties of Dreamweaver templates.

The always-helpful, always-cheerful (except when he hasn't had his nap) Murray Summers offers up some terrific tutorials on DW templates at his Dreamweaver MX Templates site. He's got some great articles on creating breadcrumbs with parameters and expressions, controlling button states within templates, and incorporating SSIs with templates in a Contribute-enabled site. Excellent stuff all, and for those of us working between Dreamweaver and Contribute an invaluable asset.

I once shared a taxi ride with Murray right after the release of Dreamweaver MX, during which he enthused at length about the new parameters and expressions possibilities built into the new release. I listened politely as Murray went on about how these tools could be used for all sorts of things, without ever really having a clue what he was talking about. Just so you know Murray, it's only taken two years, but I think I'm finally getting it.

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