Techy-Feely

I cannot go to the Air and Space Museum without touching the moon rock. I remember the first time I got to do it..the crowd was so big around the rock, it took forever to get to it. This time, no one was around and I had it all to myself.

Last night was my mother’s 65th birthday. We had a great day but the ultimate techy-feely project was her gift. My siblings and our spouses all pulled together to make a “box set” for her with a song from each year of her life.

We used the Billboard Magazine historical listings to peruse each year’s Top 100 to select possible songs and to know what year was “their year”.
Then, a wiki from Wikispaces was used to list the songs and for each person to claim their songs to get.
GetDropbox.com was employed to gather the songs from all over the globe as we are a spread out bunch.
We put our accounts with iTunes and eMusic to good use as well as finding some of the old stuff on YouTube.
A little Photoshop
A little iTunes
A little duct tape

Voila – a personalized box set!!!

Thanks to all who worked on it..it turned out great.

Ooo..there is a basement down there. The kittens are very good home inspectors. They found the washer and dryer by looking through the holes in the damaged subfloor during our recent repairs.

My grandfather can grow tomatoes like nobody’s business.

So, I spent the United States holiday of Labor Day, designed to honor those who labor, floating in a pool with friends. It was nice, relaxing and sun-burning.
Today, I paid attention to the construction workers that surround my work right now. They are truly laboring. I know I cannot stand the smell and noise but they are with it day and day out and when this job ends, there will be another one (or I hope there is).

I was also thinking about my work and what I do most days. My first “real” job was selling popcorn at the local movie theatre. A job that still exists.

My current job, supporting faculty in their use of technology in teaching at a community college, did not exist then. In fact, it didn’t exist when I graduated from undergraduate school. I wonder how many jobs didn’t exist then?

A quick visit to monster.com revealed even catagories of jobs that didn’t exist back when I was pushing popcorn:

• User Interface
• Information Architecture
• Web Development

And the job titles are just great fun:

• ASP Developer
• Voice User Interface Designers
• Emerging Technology Lead

There are also gurus and evangelists in the techno-world now.

It is an interesting time to labor and I celebrate all who labor, with their body or their mind or both.