Monday, November 13, 2006
I've always been a map/navigation freak, so it's no surprise to me that I have found this geocaching quite addictive. I enjoy the creativeness of the quests. I like how each of the caches that I have found so far have introduced me to a place that I would probably have not otherwise visited. I'm also pretty stunned by how big the community around this is. Here's a couple things that I have learned in my short time doing this
Monday, November 6, 2006
I mentioned the term geocaching in my last post. Geocaching is a sort of scavenger hunt, or hide-and-seek game where someone hides a small “cache” and then puts information online to help people find it. The clues online include GPS coordinates to where the item can be found typically with some vague visual clues to help once there. My wife and I tried our first last night as there was one only a few blocks from our house.
Monday, November 6, 2006
The sour feeling that’s in my tummy this morning tells me that today is Student Vote at Lincoln Public Schools. This is the fourth time that we have done student vote online (we do it every two years) and I’d like to think that I’ve gotten a little better at it each time – until this year. Things have really felt like a mess this time around. The biggest thing that has killed me is not having ballot information until the middle of October.
Thursday, November 2, 2006
While Flock is still my favorite browser, I’ve been working a lot with Firefox to see what I think of it. I like it. As is typical, I think that the appearance of the windoze version seems a little more polished than the mac one (which is funny since they used different themes for them this time). I think the greatest thing that was added in this version is a built-in spell checker that checks anything you type into any web form.
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
I attended a session today covering the use of HTML and Javascript with Adobe’s upcoming Apollo product. Among many other things, Apollo will allow web applications to be deployed as desktop applications. For this to happen, Apollo must have its own HTML rendering engine. To my great surprise, that chosen HTML renderer is WebKit (the same used in Apple’s Safari). Want to make a web application apollo-ready? Design for Safari. Cool.
Friday, October 6, 2006
If you haven’t seen a demonstration yet of Acrobat 8 and Acrobat Connect, you can catch one here (done of course with Acrobat Connect - formerly Breeze). technorati tags:acrobat, breeze
Friday, October 6, 2006
Have you seen songbird? It’s an open-source application that looks a lot like iTunes. I’ve always thought it was an iTunes knockoff to give all those poor folks on Linux something to feel included with. This screencast on the songbird site showed me and will show you that while it looks like iTunes it is much different and if you like audio files on the internet, may deserve a place on your computer.
Thursday, October 5, 2006
A newly available flash plugin supports full-screen video. You can download the plugin here, then try out some samples here. It looks great and is very welcome on the Macintosh where full-screen video is hard to come by. Quicktime doesn’t support running embedded movies as full screen. Real does, but few use it anymore and DivX also supports it but again is rarely utilitzed. Prepare to see it everywhere. technorati tags:flash
Thursday, October 5, 2006
Contribute 4 has been released by Adobe. I was pretty surprised as Macromedia NEVER released a product without announcing them almost a month in advance. I have downloaded it and am using it right now to create this blog posting. That’s a new feature in Contribute 4! Don’t get too excited thoughâ??this is the most painful posting experience I have ever had. So painful in fact that I’m going to stop right here.
Thursday, October 5, 2006
On this blog, you will find increasing amounts of ‘religious’ news. I didn’t just find anybody, but have become the webmaster of my congregation’s web site. Since this blog serves as the center of the content I put online, it is unavoidable that content I collect for this relatively new site to arrive here. Because I am also the webmaster for a public school and this blog is aggregated on a page there, there could be issues.
Thursday, October 5, 2006
I’ve added my links back to my blog. I’ve posted about this a few times and I’m sure that no one cares, but I want my thought process to be here. I have long had my del.icio.us links displayed on my blog, but I have gone back and forth on including them in the blog postings. It’s easier to say why I think that this is sometimes a bad idea. First, if you have a bad system, as I have had from time to time, you can end up with a lot of empty posts if you aren’t creating del.
Wednesday, October 4, 2006
This can be filed under “posting so I can remember later”. Darwin Ports has become MacForge. This is a super useful, albeit geeky resource for open-source projects that run on OS X. technorati tags:macforge
Wednesday, October 4, 2006
Today is the deadline for presentation submissions for the National Educational Computing Conference occuring in Atlanta next summer. I got mine in last night. I proposed a three hour workshop covering the creation of web pages using web standards (xhtml, css, xml, etc.). I’m not real hopeful as it sounds dull and I was tired when I wrote the submission so I may have not sold the idea real well. Sometime in December I’ll learn whether I’m in.
Wednesday, October 4, 2006
A co-worker of mine sent this out today. It’s called “How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot in Any Programming Language”. My favorite is CSS: “You shoot your right foot with one hand, then switch hands to shoot your left foot but you realize that the gun has turned into a banana.” Read it here
Sunday, September 17, 2006
It’s a Web 2.0 application that serves as a directory to Web 2.0 sites. I wonder if it lists itself…