technology

Robot puppet/cirque performance, part of the entertainment during the Vancouver Convention Centre open-house - April 2009.

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Thursday Challenge

Next week:  MUSIC (Singing, Dancing, Playing, Instruments, iPods, Concerts,...)

reading the new way

It's only been about four months since I downloaded the (free) Kindle app onto my iPod touch. In that time reading on this handy little device has found a very secure place in my reading habits. Here are some reasons I love this new way of reading:

1. Adjustable font size
Whenever I tell people I read on this 2 1/2  x 4 1/2 inch gadget with its 2 x 3 inch display, they ask: Isn't it hard to see? My answer: Not at all.

Unlike when you read other materials on the iPod and need to adjust the tiny font size with a finger motion on the touch screen, the Kindle program comes with five pre-set font sizes. You can choose the size that's comfortable and never worry about it after that.

2. Backlit
I can read in bed - and with the lights out! However, it is hard to read  on a backlit display in bright sunlight.

3. Highlightable and Notable
I stumbled across the highlight and notation function quite by accident. During the reading of my first Kindle book, I noticed once in a while as I was "turning a page" (done by sweeping a finger across the screen to the left to go forward, to the right to go backward), a symbol. Under my swooping finger appeared what looked like a magnifying glass. When I lifted my finger from the screen the word from under the glass remained selected with dots - handles - attached. I discovered I could then touch those handles, stretching the selection to cover many words and choose to "Note" or "Highlight".

If I chose "Note" the keyboard appeared and I could type and save some text to identify the spot. If I chose "Highlight" the selected text turned yellow as if I had used a highlighter on it.

 You can later find the spots marked this way in 'bookmarks' (appears as a book icon in a toolbar when you touch the bottom of the screen). 

4. Easy to save my spot
Dog-ear the page by touching the right upper corner of the screen. (Un-dog-ear it by touching it again.) The program also 'remembers' the farthest place you have read or paged to in the book.

5. Many books with me all the time
I love never being without a book. I can tuck this virtual library into a tiny pocket of my smallest handbag. My little iPod book collection has helped me pass the time while waiting in restaurants, at the doctor's office, whenever I have a minute to read. It includes writings by Andrew Murray, George Muller, G. K. Chesterton, Charles Spurgeon, and ten classic children's novels.

No, my little reading device doesn't smell like a book, or feel like a book. But I have grown quite fond of it anyway.

(First published 06-12-10 on Inscribe Writers Online)

the scoop(s) on digital publishing

"Opposing Voices in Digital Publishing" by Tyndale House Publishers

lasts

An interesting title caught my eye on twitter Tuesday. I couldn't resist checking out "If you had only one month left to blog"  It's a thought-provoking post.

Maybe it's my age or the fact that since the death of my mom in 2006, death seems closer and more inevitable for me too. Contemplating lasts is something I do more now than I used to.

In that vein, I started a new playlist on my itunes a little while ago. I call it "Final Testimony" and I'm putting in it the songs that define me in some way. They are songs that articulate what I believe in and stand for. In plain talk, the songs I'd want people to play at my funeral (sounds delightfully macabre, doesn't it?).

Besides enjoying that collection of songs myself now, it will be a great benefit to whoever is around to plan my memorial service. All they will need to do is sync my ipod, plug it into a player with a dock and play the list (that is, if ipods and docks are still around when I exit -- hopefully a loooooong time from now! ).

baby steps - what I've learned in my first two weeks on twitter

1. So this is where everyone's hanging out. I was beginning to wonder where all the people that used to poke me, throw things at me and ask me to forward stuff for them on Facebook had gone. They're all tweeting.

2. Mr. Hyatt is a very persuasive man. It was several of his blog posts that finally convinced me that joining Twitter might be a worthwhile thing to do.

• 12 Reasons to Start Twittering

• Beginner's Guide to Twitter

• The Quick Study Guide to Social Networking

3. People join Twitter for lots of reasons. This post even advises having Twitter goals. I've given some thought to mine - and realized they aren't as cut and dried as I originally thought.

• Twitter for beginners - 5 things to do as a new Twitter user

4. The difference between a Retweet and a Reply and a Direct Message and where all these things live on my Twitter page. To worldly wise Twitter users I'm sure this all sounds painfully basic but in the early days I retweeted something but erased the URL I was forwarding, treated a Retweet like a reply, and tried to send a Direct message to someone I was following when he/she wasn't following me (it isn't possible). And of course there are all the mistweets - where the tweet goes and a split second later you realize, there's a typo or the link doesn't work. I usually delete and start again.

(Does anyone know, what happens to these mistweets? Do they hang around somewhere in the vapors - or what?)

• How to get retweeted

5. Followers, following, do I reciprocal follow or not, block apparently smarmy types who follow me or not? I'm learning as I go. I've made a sort of rule of thumb: If someone I don't know starts following me, I look at the ratio of following to followers. If it's way out of proportion (following way more than followers), and especially if the web site doesn't work, I block.


6. I bless the day I found and installed Tweetdeck. Suddenly it all made sense and felt doable, mainly because in Tweetdeck you can make groups. I put all my writing friends in one group, friends and family in another, big names that I follow for all their good information (poobahs) in a third, news sites in a fourth. Facebook status updates appear in still another. It's all organized neatly in columns (never mind that the 'deck' takes up my whole desktop!)

(Perhaps you my FB friends and family are wondering why I've suddenly become responsive. It's because everything is there in one place with status updates chirping as they come in and your profiles just a click away.)


7. There's a blog devoted solely to Twitter (probably more than one), but I follow this one . There's lots to learn, but there's more than a little help online.


8. Twitter is fun, and addictive, and interesting... Wanna follow me?

frivolous friday - the Ikea car?

Apparently our local Costco outlet had boats - yacht-type boats - on the lot last week. If Costco is selling boats, maybe the news I heard that Ikea has designs on GM is not so far-fetched.

Oh my!

of worms and websites

f you've been listening to the news this weekend, you've probably heard of the Conficker worm - an internet virus that has apparently infiltrated the bowels of thousands of Windows computers and is just lurking there, waiting for its next assignment. That could come as early as April 1st.

60 Minutes did a segment on it last night. Lesley Stahl didn't seem to have a clue about what its next move might be. The NY Times bits blog claims a bit more knowledge:

"Given the sophisticated nature of the worm, the question remains: What is the purpose of Conficker, which could possibly become the world’s most powerful parallel computer on April 1? That is when the worm will generate 50,000 domain names and systematically try to communicate with each one. The authors then only need to register one of the domain names in order to take control of the millions of zombie computers that have been created."

The Symantec article on Conficker tries to sound like they have the situation well in hand - of course: "If you’re worried about the Conficker worm striking on April 1st, don’t be." Of course, the spiel after that is to use their software to purify your computer.

Here's PC World's "Protecting Against the Rampant Conficker Worm."

(It's times like this I'm really glad I have a Mac, she whispers, trying not to sound gloatish.)

On another topic, find out how your website rates marketing-wise by putting it through its paces at WebsiteGrader.com. I did for my various blogs and website. I can tell you right now, yours won't have any trouble rating better than mine! It's obvious I'm fairly baffled by the process. Every single site I checked is missing meta descriptions and meta keywords. What are they, and how/where does one attach them?

mistrial for googling

When you're a juror, Googling to do research on the case you're hearing, or twittering, updating Facebook, your blog can lead to a mistrial according to a March 23rd National Post article "Google Mistrials' derail courts."

A couple of tidbits from the piece:

"We are so hooked on this instantaneous communication, we can't seem to drop it even for a short period of time in order to discharge a civic duty."

"He (Alan Young - law school prof) believes jurors go against judges' instructions more often than the legal community would like to think, at least partly due to modern society's addiction to constant communication and information consumption."

And this telling little paragraph:

"The law is not about truth-finding. It's about, ‘Can we convict this guy based on the rules of evidence?' " he said. "That's something that really has to be stressed over and over again" (bold mine).

I'm thinking rather than endangering all future court cases by maintaining the status quo, we'd be better off updating the judiciary to fit with our technology - oh yeah, and making the process less about semantics and more about convicting on the basis of truth (a novel concept indeed and - in Canada at least - one that may well net one the conviction of contempt of court.)

chameleon tendencies and other aspects of online life

Jennifer Lowther (Vancouverite and on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and other social networking sites) quoted in a National Post article:

"I have definitely found that my online life is now bleeding into my personal life.... People I have never met follow me on Twitter and they know me, and they expect me to know who they are."

Managing multi online profiles ("The average Canadian has seven online profiles, according to Microsoft Canada research") can be tricky. Living online has its drawbacks. The article points out several:

no secrets: "You can meet a girl or a boy and before you've had your first or second date, you know who they have been with, who was their last boyfriend or girlfriend - it makes for interesting conversations."

a type of curfew: "If I don't upload a photo on Flickr, or update Twitter for two days, people send out a rescue party," Krug (Kris - Vancouver photographer and member of multi social sites) said. "I don't want my digital life to be the entirety of my identity."

dossiers: "It's also leading to a 24/7 surveillance that would make spies look like mere slouches. We are assembling the kind of dossiers that most intelligence agencies would kill for and we are doing it without them lifting a finger .... I'm not suggesting this is going to be some massive Big Brother conspiracy, but it requires a little bit of thought - how much of our lives are we revealing and how much do we want to reveal?"- Rob Cottingham - Social Signal

Read all of "Twitter, Facebook beget the 'social chameleon' and self-surveillance."

My feelings on the subject:

Why I don’t twitter

What are you doing?
What am I doing?
Who needs to know

I’m currently contemplating
another trip to the fridge
and all that coffee
has sent me to the bathroom
gazillion times?

I don’t care
that you heard from your big-name agent
are over-the-top excited
and just posted to your blog

Tweet tweet
Scratch that trip to the fridge
I’m going outside
where it’s spring
and I can listen to the birds
twitter back and forth

What a return flight
First dibs on this tree
I’ve found true love!
Tweet tweet

© 2009 by Violet Nesdoly

photography

Self-potrait

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Thursday Challenge

Next Week: HOT (Sunny, Fire, Coffee, Cocoa, Stove, Oven, Food, Spicy,...)

is the internet messing with your head?

Do you think and read differently since you've entered the era of internet grazing? Nicholas Carr (The Atlantic Monthly) is wondering what's happening to his brain:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.

A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think.

Read the rest of "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

And regarding an item about Kindle and the end of books and that I blogged about a bit ago, a writer on Slate begs to differ.

We'll do more and more reading on screens, but they won't replace paper—never mind what your friend with a Kindle tells you. Rather, paper seems to be the new Prozac. A balm for the distracted mind. It's contained, offline, tactile. William Powers writes about this elegantly in his essay "Hamlet's BlackBerry: Why Paper Is Eternal." He describes the white stuff as "a still point, an anchor for the consciousness."

Read the rest of "Lazy Eyes - How We Read Online"

What about you? Can you still wade through dense writing on paper? Do you have the patience? Or do books actually calm you down?

Personally, if books really do have a Prozac-like effect, that may be just the reason I need to resist getting a laptop. Now when I'm away from the computer, I'm away. For the foreseeable I should probably resign myself to keeping it like that - to preserve brain normalcy if nothing else.

the end of books?

Do you think we're coming to the end of the book era? Paul Krugman, writing in the NY Times thinks we might be.

...According to a report in The Times, the buzz at this year’s BookExpo America was all about electronic books. Now, e-books have been the coming, but somehow not yet arrived, thing for a very long time.... But we may finally have reached the point at which e-books are about to become a widely used alternative to paper and ink.

That’s certainly my impression after a couple of months’ experience with the device feeding the buzz, the Amazon Kindle. Basically, the Kindle’s lightness and reflective display mean that it offers a reading experience almost comparable to that of reading a traditional book. This leaves the user free to appreciate the convenience factor: the Kindle can store the text of many books, and when you order a new book, it’s literally in your hands within a couple of minutes.

It’s a good enough package that my guess is that digital readers will soon become common, perhaps even the usual way we read books.

Read the rest (you may have to sign up for a free NY Times account to access the article)

And what's this Kindle thing all about? Check it out here.

pod school

This Christmas I finally joined the i-poders (got a very slim and streamlined ipod touch!). Besides loving the portable music, I wanted to own this toy to be able to download messages and teaching. Here are some sites I've found from which you can download sermons, talks, interviews etc.

The podcast page at Oneplace.com is an index of Christian ministry podcasts, including such popular programs as Focus on the Family and Desiring God Radio (John Piper).

Ravi Zacharias's mp3s (Let My People Think) are listed here.

Joyce Meyer's teaching podcasts can be found on this page:

If you enjoy some of the literary stuff on the CBC, their radio broadcasts "Between the Covers," "Writers and Company" and a slew of others are available as podcasts. You can subscribe to them here.

Happy listening (and learning)!

frivolous friday

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

...and today I have one more thing to add to the conglomeration above - an exterior hard-drive which I bought yesterday and must now learn to use so that I can back up my computer, which hasn't crashed to this point, but a faint and steady beep from the CPU the other night had me a little worried.

web camboree

There's nothing like a web cam for snooping on weather almost anywhere. We usually check the web cams of these mountain passes before we make a trip to the interior.

Coquihalla Snowshed cam (elevation 980 meters)
Coquihalla Summit cam (elevation 1220 meters)
Brenda Mine cam - on the Okanagan Connector (elevation 1230 metres)

Of course, web cams are good for a lot more than checking on road conditions and weather. Cams set up at local spots of congestion - like ferries, bridges and border crossings help gauge the lineups so you can plan your trip.

This B.C. government page has links to web cams stationed on highways all around the province.

This Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD) page has links to the dozens of web cams around the lower mainland.



Today the weather where I live is cloudy and mild (9C). The proof is in the web cam shot I just snatched from the screen of the Langley Redwood Golf Course cam (the closest web cam to where I live). Click on the link during daylight hours for our current weather whenever you happen to be reading this.

Should you want to keep an eye on traffic in Croatia, watch Niagra Falls or check on the weather in Capetown, this earth cam page (five pages of links) will give you your fill of cams from all over the world.

They also have a list of the 25 most interesting web cams of 2007.

Now surf on over to Rebecca Writes, especially on any Tuesday and Friday in January to read about the weather in the rest of blogland. Rebecca is hosting a weather theme all month. Join in by posting something about the weather where you live, then go here to find out how to be part of Weather Reporting in blogland.

new look

Did you notice the new look here? Well, not entirely new. I kept the old template but had to re-do the sidebar when I updated to the new generation of blogger templates. But it's finally done and I'm asking myself, why did I wait so long? Now I can change to a different template any time without having to replace the sidebar goodies again.

I probably went a bit overboard because of the choice of things I could add -- like the everlasting list of labels visible in the sidebar, and the slide show of murals playing under the mural blog link. My apologies if you're viewing this on Safari which seemingly insists on its own type of variety - posting every other picture sideways. What's with that?!

Also, I haven't yet installed 'Haloscan' comments. Thus all old comments will not be visible.

If there are any other problems (like parts you can't read, links too light etc.) please let me know.

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Addendum - Dec. 31

I changed the header picture from one of the North Saskatchewan River (Sask.) to a B.C. scene (that's for you, E.). I took this photo of pigeons hanging out on the White Rock pier last Thursday. The sun was shining but the wind was sharp and cold. However, these birds seemed oblivious. They were perched facing the wind, almost as if they were playing a game of dare to see who would chicken out first vs. who could stand it the longest.

In other template news, I tried replacing Haloscan comments yesterday. I got them to display just fine - but with their installation the header disappeared. So I have decided to go with Blogger comments for now. It means that none of your fine comments left over past years will display (sigh).

passwords - strong like bull

If a new computer is part of your life since Christmas, new passwords will be too. How are you at making them up? With this password checker you can test any proposed password before using it.

Though it proves I've been pretty pathetic at making up passwords in the past, there are all kinds of articles with hints about how to make strong ones. Even I was able to concoct such a thing after I'd read these articles. Trouble is, those strong passwords don't only test the ingenuity of a potential hacker or thief, they also tax the memory of their owners. So what's worse - a computer that's been hacked into, or one that you thought was your friend but has just locked you out?

apple cake

It's a month since I brought home a new iMac. I blogged about the initial experience here.

In the intervening weeks, along with devoting myself to house tasks, I've spent time getting familiar with the new environment. Perhaps predictably, I soon came to prefer the Mac, and there were many days I didn't turn on the Windows machine at all.

But the time for play ended last week. I have an article due at the end of the month. I needed to get the new computer installed in the 'place of honor' on my computer desk so I could actually do some work on it. In order to take down the old one, though I needed to transfer a bundle of files.

So most of my time on the computer last week was sent combing through the folders and files on my old computer, and manually converting each file I wanted to move from WordPerfect to Word. It took hours and hours!

The actual move, though, was easy. After I'd burned the files I wanted to move onto a CD, I could simply drag them into the appropriate folders on the Mac.

All the converting and moving took me till Friday morning. Then I had one more hurdle to get over -- set up our house accounts on the new computer. To do that on the old, I've used Quicken forever (as in using Quicken 3!). There is a Quicken program for Macs (Yaaay!!). And when I went to the Apple store on Friday afternoon, I was able to snafu their last copy in stock.

Saturday, then, was spent reconstructing the last month or two of our spending on Quicken 2007 for Mac. (I know there is a way to import data from an old Quicken account to a new one. But the instructions are so complicated, I decided to start fresh. Next tax year when we need to access that old information, we'll just have to get it from the old computer, which E. now inherits.)

Then on Saturday night, after all the above was done, I officially took the old system apart, and installed the new one on my computer table. I am now an official Apple user -- and don't regret making the move.

Of course I'm still learning how to do stuff on here -- and keep other stuff from happening. In that last category, for example, yesterday for no apparent reason (I must have done something to make it happen but I sure don't know what) everything on the screen (the dock, the screen picture, the tool bar at the top) began shifting around as I moved my mouse. Somehow the screen picture also got enlarged and so as I moved the mouse, sometimes the dock would disappear, or the tool bar at the top would disappear. Yikes! To remedy this, I simply restarted the computer.

Here is my list of pros and cons after using Mac for a month:

PROS:
- Reliable, fast, elegant, quiet.
- "Help" is easy to understand.
- Lots of nice features to organize photos.
- Software has been simple to load.
- Can enlarge print on screen with a keystroke.
- Love the smooth scroll ball on the mouse.

CONS:
- I still wish I had my ergonomic keyboard.
- Mouse action took some getting used to.
- Don't have the option to print a 'selection' from the internet. I must do it in two steps, e.g. copy/paste my selection into a text or Word document, then print.

The Apple store where I bought the computer offers a free class. As I come across things I can't figure out I'm making a list, which I'll try to get answered when I attend the class in late June.

I'm glad I was able to transition slowly. Looking back on the experience, aside from all the file conversion necessary, I can say it was pretty much a piece of (Apple) cake.

(Apple Cake photo from dolcitalia.net)

is your face in the book?

After a kid was murdered by a fellow teen in a stabbing here last weekend, Facebook made the news when threats against the murderer appeared on the Facebook page of one of the murdered kid's friends.

In an article "Frowning on Facebook: Is the internet really to blame?" Peter Jon Mitchell, Research Analyst, Institute of Marriage and Family Canada, explains social networking sites, which include Facebook and MySpace. Though he calls them "Kids networking sites..." that's hardly the extent of it. Many adults and big name personalities are on Facebook too - president Bush in the U.S., and in Canada, Stephen Harper, our P.M.

In the article, Mitchell encourages parents to explore these places with their kids. I actually did one better and joined myself. It's one of the few places on earth you're allowed to write on walls! And so far, it is helping me keep in touch with the younger members of my family. It might do that for you too -- that is if they want to be your 'friend.'

wherein we speak of apples and windows

Well, my introduction to the Mac has been up-and-down. For starters, when I took it out of the box on Saturday, turned it on and was directed through the setup process, somehow I goofed in setting up my password – this being THE PASSWORD – the password that I need to input every time I turn on the computer, every time I try to load new software. Basically it’s the key to the computer. ARGH! So all weekend I simmered over that (you know the feeling you got when you were given a new toy and in taking it out of the box, you dinged it, so that ever after when you looked at it, you felt bad – that feeling).

Monday saw that problem solved - and a couple of new ones created. For once I reset the password, my 30-day trial of Office for Mac was no longer recognized, and other programs (like email and the web browser) asked me for the password and when I didn’t give the one they expected (the original one which I typoed), kept slapping my hand with denials. I did finally get them straightened out.

Another matter which still isn’t solved is how I’ll get my writing files transferred over to the new machine. It’s my fault, since I’ve used WordPerfect software for years (preferring it to Word, which I also have on my old Windows machine). When I transferred some files via CD, the Word files opened just fine but the Mac couldn’t decipher anything WordPerfect. In sleuthing around on the internet, I read that the Mac version of Word doesn’t support conversion from WordPerfect to Word, as the Windows version of Word does. So this means I’ll be spending a fair few hours converting files from WP to Word on my old machine before moving them to the new.

As for the move – I was hoping a memory stick would be my moving van. But it seems probably not. For the ancient Windows program I’ve been using needs a driver to download onto such a device. I’ve tried downloading the appropriate driver from the internet from at least two different places and it downloads as a Word file! (It’s probably in a zip-type file format that’s way too hip for my ancient machine to recognize.)

All that to say, the transition isn't going to be without its bumps. But yesterday I did manage to get the printer installed on the Mac and today I bought an extra long printer cable and another cable connection. Then I rearranged my office for the long haul so that both machines can be accessed comfortably, using the same printer and plugged interchangeably into the one cable connection by me simply crawling under my desk and unplugging/plugging in the cable (instead of moving the one cable from machine to machine). That way I can break in on the new machine slowly while being able to efficiently do the stuff I need to on my old clunker because it’s still in service.

The Mac is elegant and zippy. It’s also super quiet. As for having to shut down and boot up again because of some problem (which happens on average about once a day with the Windows machine) – it hasn’t happened yet. I can leave it on all the time. It just goes to sleep - in fact it’s sleeping quietly on the desk behind me as I type.