This week seems especially charged with websites “going mobile” or at least being mobile compatible. Following in their footsteps (and pushed along by a colleague) I’ve added the Carrington mobile theme to all my WordPress sites.
UPDATE:
I found this article by Bruce Lawson (@brucel) on the Opera Developers site titled Mobile-friendly: The mobile web optimization guide.
I’m putting this in the journal just in case a year from now this works out. I could totally see us doing this with some services at my department:
I’m happy to announce that a new member has joined the Outlook platform family. The new arrival has a long and formal name known as Microsoft Outlook Social Connector Provider Extensibility, but the name shouldn’t stop you from getting acquainted with this exciting new extensibility feature for Outlook 2010!
Here’s what I wrote in an email to my colleagues:
Basically, we could expose – with permission of course – profile information e.g. photo, @exchange email address, etc. to Outlook/Exchange users. This may have already been shot down by the powers that be, but I thought I’d mention it in the spirit of social networking and the future redesign of our intranet.
I installed Outlook Social Connector and connected it to my Facebook account, but I don’t see my photo yet.
Diana, Cathy, Joey, Sandra, me, Andy
What was on my mind 20 years ago? I thought about 2010, the movie, and space travel, getting through college, and getting a good job. Now that it is 2010, we don’t live in space or even travel in flying-cars (they’re working on it), but I graduated college, and got a good job. The year 2010 means it’s time for our 20 year class reunion. It’s time to reflect on what we’ve done and how we got here.
The world has change quite a bit in the past 20 years. Perhaps the biggest change is the Internet and how we interact with it. The Internet came into it’s own around 1994-5. We had a 5-year-old Internet when we celebrated our 10 year reunion, but we didn’t have much more than email to communicate to each other. Flash forward 5 or 6 more years and we saw the birth of social media; communicating in near real time over the Internet.
Now we use social media to connect to classmates. We have a Facebook group. It’s not perfect – not everyone in our class uses Facebook, let alone Twitter – but it’s quicker than email. People are people and finding them will always be a challenge – ask the census bureau.
I don’t mean to be morbid, but I wanted to keep these online as part of my memories. Werner and Dianne were my dad and mom. Ruth was Werner’s sister, my aunt.
WERNER ARTHUR SIEMS, 76, of Clearwater, Florida, died Wednesday, July 21, 2004, at Mease Countryside Hospital, Safety Harbor, Florida. He was born in Evansville, Ind., and came here in 1994 from Virginia. He was a director of public relations for the Coast Guard in Washington, D.C. He was a member of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Clearwater. Survivors include a son, Christopher, Bryan, Texas; a brother, David, Ann Arbor, Mich.; and three sisters, Ruth Siems, Evansville, Suzanne Porter, Copley, Ohio, and Rosemary Snyder, Hinsdale, Ill. National Cremation Society, Largo.
UPDATE: Werner received a Master of Arts (MA) in Slavic Languages & Literatures from Indiana University in 1953.
DIANNE SEABOLT SIEMS, 62, of Bryan, Texas, passed away Thursday, April 19, 2007, at St. Joseph Regional Health Center in Bryan, Texas. She was born in Clearwater, Florida, and was a resident of Bryan for the past year. Visitation will be from 5 to 8 p.m. Monday at Memorial Funeral Chapel in Bryan. Graveside services will be Wednesday at Sylvan Abbey Memorial Park in Clearwater, Florida. She was survived by her son, Christopher Siems of Bryan; and brother, John Seabolt and wife, Helen, of Tallahassee, Florida. b. May 8, 1944. d. April 19, 2007.
Ruth Miriam Siems was born in Evansville, Ind., on Feb. 20, 1931. She earned an undergraduate degree in home economics from Purdue University in 1953, and after graduation took a job at the General Foods plant in Evansville, where she worked on flours and cake mixes. She moved to the company’s technical center in Tarrytown, N.Y., not long afterward. Ms. Siems retired in 1985.
Ruth M. Siems, a retired home economist whose best-known innovation will make its appearance, welcome or otherwise, in millions of homes tomorrow, died on Nov. 13, 2005, at her home in Newburgh, Ind. Ms. Siems, an inventor of Stove Top stuffing, was 74.
Besides Ms. Porter, of Copley, Ohio, Ms. Siems is survived by another sister, Rosemary Snyder, of Chicago; and a brother, David, of Milford, Mich.
If you look at my Projects page you’ll see I added the teamsiems tweets archive. It’s a pretty nice, simple way to archive tweets. In fact it’s a whole new instance of WordPress 3; I’m starting to like pre-fab UI.
Mashable’s Founder and CEO Pete Cashmore declare’s today, June 30, is international social media day.
This is going to be a social media experiment. I want to share my experience as I cook ribs, and maybe get some feedback along the way. I’ll update this post along the way.
It’s Memorial Day weekend and I want to try a new rib rub, Meathead’s Memphis Dust Rub Recipe. I already made wet Memphis ribs back in February, but now it’s hot outside (95 F) and it’s a holiday weekend. Next to July 4th, I think Memorial Day is the best day to bbq. So, this time I’m going dry and rubbed; sauce will be on the table.
Ingredients
3/4 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
3/4 cup white sugar
1/2 cup paprika
1/4 cup kosher salt
1/4 cup garlic powder
2 tablespoons ground black pepper
2 tablespoons ground ginger powder
2 tablespoons onion powder
2 teaspoons rosemary powder
Sides
Now, what sides? On Friday, I asked my wife if she would make potato salad. She wanted to make a pasta salad she found online. I thought maybe a 3-bean salad or corn or baked beans would make a good side dish. That’s how our ‘chat’ online usually goes: we throw out a bunch of ideas and pick one. Well, this time we picked them all. Saturday we went to the store and bought beans for the salad, corn, pasta, fresh parsley, fresh rosemary and a bunch of other things to make all but the baked beans.
Oh yeah, I also bought a big disposable pan. I suggest that you get a slab of ribs and put it in the pan to see if it fits. I made that mistake with the brisket last year. I also bought mesquite chips and a small disposable pan to put them in.
Preparation
Saturday night while I’m preparing the ribs, she was busy making 3-bean salad and pasta salad – from scratch! She was cutting herbs, cooking pasta and beans and bacon, mixing, tasting – hum. That was so time consuming and exhausting that the potato salad would have to wait until Sunday.
My rib rub was a little different from the Memphis Dust ingredients. First, I couldn’t find ginger powder or rosemary powder and I didn’t feel like making them myself. I added about 1 tablespoon ground cumin instead. Second, 1/2 cup paprika is a lot! I ran out at 1/4 cup so that’s all I used. The final rub was plenty spicy so I left out cayenne.
I sprinkled the rub on the meat side of the ribs, wrapped them up in plastic-wrap, and put them in the refrigerator to marinate overnight.
Grill
I have a three-burner gas grill so indirect cooking isn’t too hard. I just turn on one of the outside burners and place the pan on the opposite side of the grill. It is important to let the grill heat up and stabilize at between 220 and 250 degrees Fahrenheit. So I put the pan with apple juice in it on the grill, lit the grill and closed the lid. It took about 20 minutes to heat up and stabilize at 220 degrees. I put about 1 quart of apple juice in the big pan. Then I put a cooking rack on top of the pan and put the ribs, meat-side up, on the rack.
It was hot outside; at least 95 degrees. I tried to do a video but I didn’t like it too much.
Results
All in all everything turned out pretty good. Ribs were tender, potato salad was tender, bean salad was crisp, and pasta salad was still good (after more ranch dressing).
Schools should educate kids about the world around them even if the kids get there first.
Instead of dismissing social media as distracting or destructive, schools should embrace it as an essential part of the curriculum. Not only does this limit the potential for students to abuse the technology, but it opens a new set of valuable educational tools. Source: 4 Tips for Integrating Social Media Into the Classroom | Mashable.com
Dangers in the virtual world like bullying, pornography, reputation, predators, or viruses, are just as real out in the real world. I think teaching them how to play nice and be smart on all Internet activities should be integral to classroom curricula.
UPDATE:
On a more positive note, I kept my eyes peeled for other information about social media in the classroom and behold more stuff dropped on my desktop from the Twitterverse and beyond. I learned a new word, pedagogy, or method of teaching. I found stuff like a plethora of YouTube videos about Twitter in the classroom, tweets about videos that explain things in plain English, blogs about social media in higher education.
Source: The Twitter Experiment – UT Dallas | YouTube.com
I like what she says at the end, “It’s going to be messy, but messy doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be bad.” I think that means, students might use bad grammar in Twitter, they might not like going from 1000 word papers to Twitter and back, but the important thing is that they communicate their thoughts. If their thoughts are closely related to the subject being thought, then mission accomplished. In other words, the important thing is the message not the delivery mechanism.
I think the reverse is true too. How you get the message to the students brain can be important. We know that students learn in different ways at different speeds. If a student can watch and remember a YouTube video about a school subject, and then tweet comments about it, then why not try that method; the school might even save money.
I re-found the blog, Social Media in Higher Education, which is one professor’s views about using social media in college classrooms. I won’t go into detailed description of his site, but suffice it to say he is trying to quantify what others are discovering by doing – that is using social media in a classroom has merit. There are caveats and benefits to this new mode of teaching.
Note-to-self: Likes are the new links. We can use facebook’s “Like” buttons on any content.
Although blogs cover many of the same topics, the study found that bloggers tend to focus on more ideological and emotional stories — particularly those concerning human rights, like access to healthcare services or privacy on Facebook — and often with a personal or partisan angle. Bloggers also like to make a story out of “off-beat” or “buried” items in mainstream media coverage. Source: Huge Gap Remains Between Mainstream Media and the Social Web [REPORT] | Mashable.com.
You think… I’m one of the “off-beat” and “buried.” (Such violent metaphoric language.)
I just realized that I don’t have a “mainstream media” category. To me it’s all media: web and print and broadcast floods our world every day and we might consume 1% of it. If 99% of bloggers get their information from mainstream, and mainstream goes payware, what will happen to bloggers? I think they continue to seek free sources until there is none, at which time we’ll make up our own news from observation of our world. I think a lot of bloggers are already doing this. They add commentary on mainstream sources, but they also report what they observe; issues important to them. I also think if all mainstream media dried up behind the paywall then there would be fewer blogs. But so what. I blog to record my thoughts. I get news from broadcast, from the web and occasional from print. If I see or hear something that peeks my interest I blog about it.
It also suggests that if traditional news companies want to succeed online — that is, if they want to attract a large number of page views and be relevant to users on the web — they may need to alter their content to match readers’ interests.
Well, I for one, don’t what to read about RayWilliamJohnson on NYTimes.com or see what @justinbieber is doing on CNN TV. I think consumers keep the gap between mainstream media and social media for a reason: they fulfill different needs. I watch CNN TV read NYTimes.com for world news. I watch YouTube videos because they’re funny or educational. I use Twitter to stay connected to people. At the end of the day I blog my thoughts about what these other media are saying.
Less than honorable end to Lisa Nowak’s career
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The Navy should discharge former astronaut Lisa Nowak, who lost her NASA job over a bizarre airport attack on a romantic rival, according to a Navy panel that reviewed her case.
The panel of three admirals made the recommendation Thursday after a daylong hearing at the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville.
The recommendation now goes to the Naval Personnel Command. A final decision will be made by the Secretary of the Navy. In the meantime, Nowak will continue working on the staff of the chief of Naval Air Training in Corpus Christi, Tex.
She flew on the space shuttle in 2006, but was dismissed from the astronaut corps after her arrest in 2007. There was no listed number for Nowak in Corpus Christi and Nowak’s commanding officer in Texas didn’t immediately return a call Friday.
The panel recommended downgrading Nowak from captain to commander and giving her a discharge of “other than honorable.”
Source: The Associated Press: Navy panel votes to discharge ex-astronaut Nowak.