Geno's World

Sent email after I completed Thing #23

2008-04-27T20:53:00.000-07:00

I emailed OTC-Learning@ci.stpaul.mn.us on 04/27/2008 at about 11pm:
Now that I'm finished with Thing #23, is there anything else I need to complete?
I seem to remember an Excel spreadsheet related to the process, but that may have been just to organize our thoughts...

Thing #23 - Is this really the end? Or just the beginning....

2008-04-27T19:55:00.000-07:00

I thought it was a great idea to start by offering people completing the program a $25 gift certificate (I'm choosing iTunes) & to be entered in a drawing for an iPod shuffle! I also liked the idea of checking into many of the technologies that the average teen seems to understand really well, despite the fact that the average adult does not know much about them. Good time to pick up a bunch of this stuff, even if I need help from one of my teens!

Blogging was one of the first concepts introduced and through all of the sessions we got to keep adding to our blogs. I liked the way some of the sessions then introduced different ways to add Pictures, Videos, Clips, etc to our Blogs. When I last checked I hadn't gotten any comments to my blog, but did get one commenting on the Clip that I pulled out with Clip-to-Blog. :)

One thing I would change is to add more Bonus Exercises, so that those particularly interested in some concepts would have some good "next steps" by checking them out further. One example of this is in the area of MP3 players and files -- for which we did check out Podcasts and I had a lot of fun with them, but would have liked more.

If offered another discovery program like this in the future I would definitely choose to participate!

Making use of Thing #22 -- Clip-to-Blog

2008-04-25T23:48:00.001-07:00

Alex asked me to visit his blog.
Pretty cool way to check it out and grab a few word for my blog!

clipped from pilotsdream.blogspot.com

Hello, this is Alex B., my dream as a pilot is to become a pilot for MAF, (Missionary/Mission Aviation Fellowship) or another christian aviation organization.

Thing #22 - Discovering Web 2.0 Tools

2008-04-24T21:47:00.000-07:00

Selected http://clipmarks.com/ from the list of Web 2.0 Awards nominees at http://www.seomoz.org/web2.0/

I got hooked with the description of "Clipmarks" as gives people the chance to save web content that makes them sit up and take notice and to share that content with others in the hope that it will make them go "wow!" To check it out I created Clipmarks account genebyland, with email sent to gene.byland@gmail.com

Could I see any applications for its use in a city office setting?
Yes! Since Clipmarks lets you Clip-to-Blog, Clip-to-Email & Clip Videos -- it gives you a useful way of saving Web site info visited and to share it with others.

BTW: I've been asked to set up a cross post for http://pilotsdream.blogspot.com/
which I should be able to do with Clip-to-Blog. I found most of the usage of Clipmarks pretty intuitive, but didn't get the part of posting right (it brings up a final piece asking how/where you want to post) until I tried it a few times.

Thing #21 - Web-Based Apps: They're not just for desktops anymore!

2008-04-23T22:22:00.000-07:00

Created free account gene.byland using gene.byland@gmail.com for me in Zoho Writer using URL http://www.zohowriter.com/
Explored the site and created a few test documents.
Tried out Zoho Writer 's features.

Thing #20 - Playing Around with PBWiki

2008-04-22T22:28:00.000-07:00

Added a few entries to the Learning 2.0 wiki http://otc-learning.pbwiki.com/.
1. Added my blog http://genebyland.blogspot.com/ to the Favorite blogs list.
2. Played with PBWiki by adding to the lists of favorite books/movies an entry for
Harry Potter and the goblet of fire by J K Rowling.

Thing #19 - What's in a wiki?

2008-04-21T16:57:00.000-07:00

For this discovery exercise I checked out some city wikis:
* Rochester, NY
* Davis, California
* Sacramento, California
* Twin Cities, MN ******
* City-Wiki-Center - a city-wiki-canter gathering city-wikis worldwide.

Quite a few different styles of web sites. I liked the fact that the Twin Cities one http://saintpaul.openguides.org/ allowed a “feed” of frequently changing content on this site. I subscribed using my Bloglines account!

Thing #18 - Explore WebJunction Minnesota

2008-04-19T20:43:00.000-07:00

Registered for the WebJunction account genebyland with gene.byland@gmail.com as corresponding email account using Internet Explorer. To sign up for an online course on MS Word 2003, I went to the Courses tab and Browsed the WebJunction Course Catalog to search the E-Learning Clearinghouse. Clicked My Courses to access the course(s) in which I had enrolled, which is currently just Word 2003.

Apparently this launches an EXE, because after this point I got the "Access has been Denied!" message because Access to the page:
http://courses.mindleaders.com/dpec/scripts/tmslnch.exe
... has been denied for the following reason:
Banned extension: .exe

Looks like although I started this post on 4/19, I'll comment on 4/21 that I'll have to continue the lesson later at home where this is not banned...

Thing #17 - Tag! You're it!

2008-04-18T20:32:00.000-07:00

Tagging sounds like an interesting addition to blogs. Checked out "tag cloud" at http://www.librarything.com/tagcloud.php, which was a visual depiction of a user's or site's tags. In this technique tags are weighted so that those that are used more often appear larger than those that are used less often.

Also got an idea of what this looks like, take a quick look at the Booked in Saint Paul blog http://bookedinstpaul.blogspot.com/, which had labels down the left side of the screen and at the bottom of each post.

To add labels to a blog post, look for the space at the bottom of the form marked Labels for this post. You can enter whatever labels you like, separating each label with commas. Labels can be a single word or multiple-word phrases.

Thing #16 - Tagging & Social Bookmarking in Del.icio.us

2008-04-17T15:59:00.000-07:00

Took a look around Del.icio.us using the sppllearning account that was created for this exercise.
Explored the site options and tried clicking on the Podcasts bookmark that had been used by a lot of other users. Looked for comments they added about the bookmark and the tags that they used to categorize it.

Thing #15 - Roll with Rollyo

2008-04-16T15:10:00.001-07:00

I have a group of websites that are my favorites AND a set of online resources that are similar that I frequently use to answer homework/reference questions. Well Rollyo may be the tool for me to allow me to create your my tool to search only the websites I know and trust.
I added the Public Domain eBooks Search Engine to my Firefox™ Search!

Explored Rollyo and created an account for myself called gene.byland and sending password to gene.byland@gmail.com
Then created Searchroll name Geno's World SearchR with Tag of General Questions.

Thing #14 - Discover Google Earth

2008-04-15T15:18:00.001-07:00

Installed Google Earth -- free software from Google that combines the power of Google Search with satellite imagery, maps, terrain and 3D buildings to put the world's geographic information at your fingertips.
Used it to get directions to a site visit for tomorrow and to look at the map!

Thing #13 - Play around with Image Generators

2008-04-14T15:50:00.000-07:00

He's Here today, There tomorrow

http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/map.php

Thing #12 - Finding Feeds

2008-04-10T10:09:00.000-07:00

I Explored some of the search tools noted above that can help locate some news feeds, starting with Bloglines' Search tool http://www.bloglines.com/search

Using Topix.net - http://www.topix.net/ I added a feed for Apple Valley News by clicking the icon in the address bar. I had to start with Farmington News and then guess at the name for AV News. Pretty cool.

When I used Technorati - http://www.technorati.com/ which was pretty fast at finding Stanley Cup Playoff Scores. I found general scores, but couldn't find an icon to Subscribe until I got to the subsection about Minnesota Wild scores.

Thing #11 - Make life "really simple" with RSS & a newsreader

2008-04-09T20:11:00.000-07:00

Created a free online Bloglines account for myself
(using gene_byland@yahoo.com at http://www.bloglines.com/)
and subscribed to 10+ newsfeeds to the reader:

Bloglines | News
Boing Boing
Comic (Dilbert & For Better or For Worse)
Hard Core Gamer (GamePro.com / Daily Update)
Music Lover (iTunes Just Added Albums & iTunes Top 25 Songs)
Movie Buff (USATODAY.com Movies & VH1 Movie News)
Pop Culturist (VH1's Today in Music History & USATODAY.com Pop Candy & VH1 Best Week Ever Blog)
Dictionary.com Word of the Day

Thing #10 - LinkedIn

2008-04-08T15:12:00.000-07:00

Explore how you can network professionally using LinkedIn.

Found that little had changed with my MySpace andaccounts that I created a year ago. FaceBook wouldn't even let me back on my account;NBD. Established a LinkedIn account for myself and discovered who's already in my network: Joyce Bluel & Girma Daka in PW. Andrea Casselton, Glen Fingerholz & many others in OTC.

Thing #9 - Podcasts - No iPod needed!

2008-04-07T16:05:00.000-07:00

I looked for my Delirious? album "Touch" that went missing.
I couldn't find it on Podcast.net or Podcastalley.com or podcastdirectory.com

On http://www.podcastdirectory.com I checked out Berkeley Groks Science Radio Show Podcasts,
but found that I need better speakers to hear it decently!

Now that I think about it I heard that Dave Ramsey's has a Radio program and Podcasts,
so I looked in http://www.podcastdirectory.com/ and found a few of his recent programs.

Thing #8 - You too can YouTube

2008-04-07T15:31:00.000-07:00

Explored YouTube and found a video that I had told my kids about: Michael Jackson-Thriller.
I rememember when MTC was young and they had Premieres about Videos.
It seems like Thriller got a lot more promotion than most videos and some people even had parties over the event!

Anyways I described the hoopla around Thriller to my kids and they found it on www.youtube.com
as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtyJbIOZjS8 complete with some voice work by Vincent Price.
...so now that I'm blogging about youtube I get to share it with you!

Thing #7 - Blog About Technology: SQL Scenarios

2008-04-06T18:14:00.000-07:00

So the thing I've had the most fun with lately that's technology related (yeah, besides Web 2.0) has been trying new stuff in SQL.

One of these is Inner and Outer Joins. I don't think I've had to grab these guys out of the toolbox for years, but now that Synergen moved some of our Customer's fields for Closeout from the main Service Request table to Activity Tracking I've found the latter is useful because they didn't migrate all of the records. So that gives us an interesting case where we need to still do a Select on Service Request records that may or may not have associated Activity Tracking records. You can handle this with a Where clause like the following:
where sr.service_request_no = at.service_request_no (+)

Maybe not that exciting to you, but helped our users out a lot! One of the next devices I like to use for interesting Select situations is using them in "Set Theory." Using a First Select "minus" the Second Select has been a great way of identifying missing records (like the above situation) that need to be created. Another that I'm going to try next is a nested SELECT statement that shows the UNION of two tables (ex: stock and items); also looking toward using two other set operators INTERSECTION and EXCEPT.

Thing #6 - More Flickr Fun

2008-04-06T17:23:00.000-07:00

So now that I've explore some of the fun Flickr mashups & 3rd party tools that are out there for playing with photos, I get to make a blog post about one that intrigues me.

Well the Flickr Color Pick probably intrigues me because most guys I've met don't "think" in that many colors -- I'm pretty sure they can do some of the basics and get at least to 8 of them, but beyond 16 most are pretty clueless. Crayola Crayon strikes me as fun, but the Bedroom Color Schemes as too much.

Thing #5 - Discover Flickr: Parents House in Saint Paul

2008-04-06T16:51:00.000-07:00

Does this only count as a "Beautiful picture or photo of Saint Paul" if you like Snow?

Thing #5 - Discover Flickr

2008-04-06T14:22:00.001-07:00

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

fancy?!?

Thing #3 - Grab Yourself a Blog in Three Steps: Random Thoughts

2008-04-05T21:31:00.000-07:00

So is this Blog going to be like an online Dear Diary or just random thoughts?
As long as I'm sitting at the keyboard tapping away it might as well have a few coherent thoughts. Well...maybe just a few.
Like should it be about Hobbies like Sudoku or Learning Hebrew?
Or should it include Family Activities?
Maybe of interest to a very few family members,
but not of much interest to others...