Metamedia

Hawaiian Shirt Fridays

We have a semi-tradition at work for wearing Hawaiian shirts on Fridays in the summer. At first, I thought this was really silly. However, this summer, I have gotten into the spirit of the thing.

Some people, of course, wear them more often, and some prefer the bitter dank of all black. De gustibus... I like a little color and festive tropical views. And it fits in with the more usual office theme of Pirates, as well.

I buy my shirts at Goodwill and other second hand stores, very cheaply. Most of them are excellent quality cotton shirts, though the Palm tree one below happens to be silk. I avoid those awful rayon synthetic ones: they may look nice, but you can't wear such a thing in the sun without melting.

I usually Twitterpic my shirt of the week. Here are some of those pics so far from this summer. Click on them for larger detailed view.

I will keep the updated photo set on Flickr.

 

FFF: More PocketMod

I've used the Pocketmod system for a month now and can safely say it will be a permanent part of my arsenal of organization.  I even took it out of town with me on a trip: no PDA, no laptop, no Moleskine, just a Pocketmod in my shirt pocket. Worked great.

Notes from my experience so far:

1) The other side is useful

You can unfold the Pocketmod and use the other side to write notes on, too.

I also tried to double print a Pocketmod, one on each side of the paper. In theory this sounds great, but in practice my printers don't line up the paper so well, so the formatting on the back side doesn't align properly when you fold it.

In the end I ended up putting some reference mods (eg yearly calendar) and lots of blank spaces on the back side. That works well.

2) A simple and useful Word template

I found a nice and simple Word Template at Feed My Pet Brain. I like it better than the more complex one at Eyes of Calvin mostly because I can type my text into it upright (for half of mods anyway, the others being upside down, so I leave those blank and lined). 

I put a weekly calendar in it and type in my current appointments, along with a to-do list, shopping list, and film rental list in the top four mods.

3) Weekly Review

Each Friday, I do a mod review, and put everything I need to from the mod to the computer. Then I edit the Word document and delete old things and add new things for the upcoming week.

Since the mods are simple tables, you can format and edit them as you wish. And of course, you can cut and past the images of from the standard mods and then paste them into a table as a mod, too. So you can create a mod from any picture you want. Very nice.

4) The Fisher Space Pen

I bought a Fisher Space Pen and now it goes everywhere with me, because it is small and sturdy enough for me to just toss in my pants pocket with my keys. I hate carrying stuff around with me, including pens, which are just too big. But the Space Pen when folded up is small and unobtrusive.

One change I recommend is moving to a fine point instead of the medium the pen comes with. I find it easier to write on the Pocketmod with it.

FFF: Person-centric email

Ask and it shall be ...

Recently I asked the question why are email applications still tied to the inbox-outbox metaphor which is designed to primarily service its transportation architecture, rather than moving to architecture which is information centric.

Here's one ingenious solution: Coglink, an email program that is person-centric instead of transport-centric.  It uses a social software type personal network model.

See the story at University of Oregon, College of Education : In the News.

"The e-mail program CogLink doesn't look anything like what you're used to. No menu of buttons across the top. No inbox or outbox. No list of messages sent and received...

Now, obviously CogLink is designed for a very specific audience, but the basic idea could be generalized. Of course, it still doesn't address the narrative issue as a whole, but it is a different way of looking at the problem.

FFF: PocketMod: The Free Disposable Personal Organizer

I think I have finally found the perfect PIM for me: PocketMod: The Free Disposable Personal Organizer.

And guess what, it's just sheet of paper!

A sheet of paper, folded in an ingenious way to make a booklet of 8 pages that fits in a pocket, and that can contain various types of template formats: lines, checklists, grids, shaded tables, daily or weekly appointments, and many more.

Pocketmod is a Flash application that runs over the web, though there is a local client version as well. In both, you arrange the 8 pages with the templates -- called Mods -- presumably short for modules. Then you simply print it, and then fold the paper in a special way to make the little booklet.

It fits in a shirt pocket, or even a wallet. And all you need to use it is a pen.

Now, I hate to carry stuff around. That's just me I know. In my decade of corporate scullery, I wore a suit and tie, and carried my PalmPilot with me everywhere. Suits have pockets.

Now that I work in a world of sweaters and jeans, I need an organizer to be both small and vital in order to convince me to spare the pocket space for it.

And Pocketmod fits the bill. In fact, in just a week, I have taught about ten people to use it and even to fold the paper.

One person I showed it to said, "That's nice, but I want to type in my lists in something simple like Word." I said, "Great idea, I'll just make a Word template for you..." but as usual, someone on the web had already done it by making a nifty Word template and blogged it (thanks, Eyes of Calvin!).

Even better, Pocketmod now has a PDF to Pocketmod convert on its site. So any PDF page of information can be turned into a mod.

And the mods on the site are expanding. There's a nifty storyboard mod (shown as the front page on the layout above), a music staff and a guitar tab, grids of varying resolution, and numerous references mods, including a very readable year calendar (shown above as the Back page.)

And even better still, some more or less traditional PIMs are now starting to use this as a printed format as well. For instance, both Thinking Rock (a nifty GTD java app I have started using on a USB drive) and Toodledo both can now output in Pocketmod format.

I've been converted.

After a week, mine is worn out: it has collected a shopping list, video rental list, a movies to see list I made while browsing in the video store, a couple of telephone numbers, some items to add to my to-do list for work, entries on the calendar, things to do around the house on the weekend, notes from a software training session I did. Oh, and a reminder to get the new Harry Potter book !

But I will only copy over just the stuff I need to the new one and put the rest where it belongs: in the computer or in the recycling bin.

Now if I could only remember to carry a pen around with me...

FFF: Haiku joins the LMS gang

Link: Create a classroom website - Haiku LMS

Haiku is the name of a new online Learning Management System. 

The leader in this area, so far, appears to be Scholar360 though in a basic way, all the popular LMS systems (Blackboard/WebCT, Desire2Learn, Angel, Moodle, and Sakai) are browser based, and hence online. But such systems are really intended for schools and colleges to set up and manage the servers themselves.

But there is a lot to be said for giving your admin headaches to someone else. Not the least of which is it allows you to focus your time on pedagogy instead of eduministration.

Haiku is new and basic: so basic, it is almost not quite ready for prime time yet. 

For instance, it lacks a gradebook. That's pretty important; and it is on the to-do list for the next version.

It makes up for this lack of a full feature set by having a terrific AJAX based interface. There are nifty drag and drop tools in it that make it easy and fun to use, unlike the traditional heavy duty LMS experience. And it is very friendly to online media storage sites like YouTube, Flickr, and Odeo.

It has the other standard features of an LMS: upload files, make web links, organize the class by topic, create a student list, do discussions.

Haiku has its strengths, but I wouldn't switch just yet. It's a good start though.

FFF: Return of the Night of the Living PIMS

I love PIMS.

In the medieval period -- the 1980s -- I spent hours with my favorite Personal Information Managers, not just using them, but tweaking them to fit in the old DOS high memory spaces with the other TSRs. Our PCs were crammed with useful programs like PopUp Tools, Borland's venerable Sidekick, and my favorite Tornado (renamed InfoSelect), as well as a slew of lesser known, one purpose tools, including gems by Michael Mefford of PC Magazine fame.

Some PIMs, such as Infoselect and Sidekick, made the leap to Windows 3.1 and later Win 95, but many did not: Lotus Agenda and GrandView being two of the most lamented. New more graphical PIMS like ACT!, Ecco, Lotus Organizer, and Zoot arrived.

In the pre-32-bit, pre PDA world, PIMS were most of all highly personal.

People developed very personal relations with their favorite -- idiosyncracy could be a virtue rather than a flaw.  And that meant even in the world of centralized corporate standards for email and scheduling, there was still lots of room for PIMS on business desktops.

But PIMS were killed, or at least seriously wounded, by two things: the PDA, especially the Palm Pilot, and integration of PIM functions with email in MS Outlook.

Page Too

Well, PIMS are back. Not on the desktop, but on the webtop.

A Couple of Reviews

• Web Worker Daily: 7 Apps for Online Note-Taking
• Read/Write Web: Roundup of free online Web. 20 tools for students

The Three Heavy Hitters

iGoogle -- The rebranded Google webtop, with the sparse, utilitarian interface only a penitent could love. But it is the 800 pound Gorilla with a devoted developer base.

Zoho -- Trying to match and then outdo Google in a feature war, especially in webtop versions of traditional desktop applications, but it has moved beyond that arena. But they don't have Google's base or leverage. Zoho has some very nice apps, feature rich, that will find a niche among those who needs advanced features, but ultimately can it avoid the fate of Lotus, Wordperfect & DBase?

Facebook -- Here is where the real action is. A superb interface, strong user demographic, a well designed architecture, and a newly released API that is terrific. Forget MySpace, which has none of those things, Facebook's real competition is Google. Sound far-fetched? Just watch the dozens of new applications being added everyday to it. This is the space to watch.

Some Tools of the Sort I Like

I like sticky notetaking type tools with multiple types of organizations ranging from hierarchical to free form tagging. My favorite PIM of all time was MicroLogic's original DOS version of InfoSelect. Alas, it changed unrecognizably when it make the leap to Windows.

Here are a few of the ones I have tried out in the recent past and am still playing with, each with strengths and weaknesses:

• Stikkit
• Backpack
• Notefish
• Stikipad

I will review then anon. There are so many web-based sticky note applications, so I will have to post about them separately.

Lots of choices: at the moment. But I predict that history will repeat itself -- PIMS on the webtop will shake out in much the same way as they did on the desktop a dozen years ago.

An important difference will be the app and your data are up there somewhere in magical server land, not on your desktop. So guard your data.

FunFridayFind: zoomFox In On Images

Today I have for you a screencast of how to install and use a nifty tool called zoomFox. 

It's an add-in for the Firefox browser that allows you do to something wonderful with images: zoom in and out, and pan around inside of them.

That may not sound like much, but if you are teaching Art or Art History, or any sort of Humanities or culture class, or any sort of class at all using pictures or photographs in a web browser - and who doesn't these days - you can do that very easily with zoomFox.

Being able to zoom in to see detail is useful, sometimes indispensable: landscapes, faces, maps, paintings can often benefit from zooming in on detail.

And don't underestimate the occaissional ability to zoom out of busy images to gain perspective.

zoomFox does about 80% of what much fatter and proprietary applications do.

And while you over in the Firefox addons section, you will find other applications that do similar things, but for perfect simplicity, zoomFox is my choice: it does one really useful thing really well.

[Firefox Nerd Alert: zoomFox has some issues with Greasemonkey, so check the details of the zoomFox page.]

Friday Fun Find: Wikivid

Link: Main page - Wikivid

Wikivid is an interesting idea for a wiki: it is a central repository of links to already existing content rather than content itself. 

And those links are to video tutorials, specifically tutorials about how to use software, at the moment, but I can easily see it expanding to links to all sorts of tutorials and howtos.

Wikivid is a wiki built on the Mediawiki platform, so it is - if not easy to use - at least well known. The emphasis is on organizing and describing things.  Currently it is in alpha state, but of course since it is just wiki software, it works fine as I can tell.

FridayFunFind: Screencast-O-Matic

For this Friday, a fun new site that will allow you to make poor man's Camtasia screen capture videos.

The site is Screencast-O-Matic, and is a terrific java application that allows you to capture a live session on your screen while doing a live voiceover. Then you can save and post your video screen capture onto the site, and/or convert it into an mov file for download.

Though still in beta, the basics work well. Of course, you can only record and not edit it later: your choices are to save it or discard. So, for anything other than one-off simple screen captures, you still need Camtasia, which I love, but Screencast-O-Matic (despite the name) will have a definite place in my arsenal.

In fact, I see this as being very useful for quickie visual how tos -- because often it will be easier to record a screen capture with voiceover than it is to write up an email giving instructions on how to do something.

As an example, here is a short video I made of How To Download A YouTube Video in Firefox Using Downloadhelper (my first video, so excuse those coughs).

This is a visual follow up to my post of earlier this week about how to download YouTube videos.

Give Screencast-O-matic a try. Give them feedback. It's useful even in its developing state, and it's fun.

I predict this will be a big hit.

"Press 1 to Shut Someone Up Now"

I've been on vacation, so don't have a write up of some interesting social software for this week for the Friday Fun Find, but I do have something silly and annoying: an instance of a PRS aka "Personal Response Systems" or "clickers," used in a theater rather than a classroom.

Normally, I wouldn't pick up something on boing boing, since it is too obvious, but this strikes a nerve and is one of my most vehement pet peeves: the wretched and disgraceful state of public cinema. The boing boing report is about a Silly gadget for reporting bad picture, sound, and piracy at the movies.   

Funny it comes from Regal Cinemas, who are truly evil (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and I mean that in a nice, Nietzschean way, too. 

I've watched probably a thousand films in the last three or four years, but none in a Regal cinema, and never will again. In fact, I've come to pretty much utterly detest the entire commercial movie going experience. When I go to the cinema, it's a local art house one.

Anyway, the picture on this page is my mock up rendition of the buttons I prefer, though I could add a few more.

Strangely, about a month ago I picked up a copy of Mark Crispin Miller's (who I have to say I enjoyed much more as a media critic than as a political pundit, but c'est la vie) edited collection of articles about film entitled Seeing Through Movies, which contains a fascinating article by Douglas Gomery on the history of movie theater and theater going experience.

After reading that, I understand now why the cineplex experience became so horrible, but worse, how the height of movie theaters was in the late twenties: it's been all downhill since then.

I do remember vaguely when I was a young kid that there was such a thing as an usher at a movie, with a flashlight, and they shooshed those who talked. Or was that just a dream? Or maybe it was in a movie...

So go see a movie: at your local independent art house cinema, or just watch one at home. Need some suggestions ? Just pick one off my list at random and your are sure to enjoy it.