Archive for personal

The internet is a small place

April 16, 2010 ajwms No comments

I know that I have already blogged about how BIG the internet is. But, in many ways, it does feel small.
For example….

Earlier this month, I was sitting in a webinar learning about new functionality for a system used at my school. It was quickly getting over my head so, of course, I went to Tweetdeck to see if anybody was tweeting about the same webinar. I found one person who mentioned he was watching the same session. Okay. One other person. Fine.

Later that same day, I was dealing with a technical issue with a plug-in for our WordPress Multiuser system and started working via email one-on-one with the developer of the plug-in. He was very helpful and we got the issue resolved relatively quickly. (it was one of those issues where it finally started working with settings that made no sense but neither of us wanted to take the time to figure out why it broke or why is was working with those settings – sometimes you just have to take the victory and run).

After working with him, I decided to check on Twitter and see if he was there. One search query later, I found his Twitter page and in his tweet history was the ONE TWEET about the earlier webinar.  He was the one person I found also watching the same presentation.

Small world, isnt’ it?

featured, Feely, personal

Are you in this year?

March 27, 2010 ajwms One comment

Last year, I celebrated Earth Hour in my home with my pets. I will do the same this year with my family.

Are you in for Earth Hour this year?

personal, Personal Projects

What I have been doing lately

March 16, 2010 ajwms No comments

Yes, poor little T-F has been neglected as of late. But, I have been quite the blogger over on another site this past week.
http://blogs.pstcc.edu/variations2010/

Blogroll, personal

January Snow

March 4, 2010 ajwms No comments

Went back to Vuvox to remind myself how it worked and found the Vuvox Express. Fun and fast!

multimedia, personal

Thinking about the new meaning of online “privacy”

February 15, 2010 ajwms No comments

It’s a snow day, which means I “get” to play on the computer more than work since it is a Monday and all. I have had the new interface for Facebook for a little while now. I like it. Cleaner, easier to use and things make sense up at the top rather than the bottom of the page.

But, the changes have got me thinking about other changes in Facebook from December as well as other social sights as well as with my own thinking about privacy. Facebook basically appeared to do a 180 degree turn in their thinking. What used to be a very closed network that only allowed first folks from one school ever increasingly morphed into a site that only those with a “dot edu” email address and then full tilt when into encouraging well, the entire universe to join. The founder of Facebook basically has said that “privacy is over“.

I hope he is wrong.

I am not thrilled with 100% open with no privacy. I want to have control over what I want to share. And, if you give me enough time I usually get comfortable with it. I started out on Twitter and protected my tweets. Eventually I decided to open it up to all to see. While many social network types seem to think that if you don’t open your tweets you are not “worthy” to follow. I have also read some pretty good reasons on why someone would not want to open up their tweets.

It’s all good.

Different streaks for different freaks, I always say.

The point is, on Twitter you have that control. So far on Facebook, you do have some control But, the controls are much more granular and much more, shall we say, complicated. On something like Twitter, the binary of YES or NO is pretty easy. Facebook becomes shades of gray very quickly: “Let’s see, I want my family to see that I am a fan of HGTV but I don’t want my co-workers to see what 80s hair band best fits my name”. Hmmmmm?”

But, if the privacy controls are too hard to use, way too open upon creation of an account and more opt-in for increased privacy rather than opt-out for increased openness, then I am thinking that will become a “count me out” opt-in for this girl.

It might be all about control and my friends and family will be the first to tell you that I certainly enjoy things my way. But, in the case of privacy, that should be the case all of the time. Privacy should be MY way on any site.

So, check your Facebook settings. Organize friends into groups and apply settings for each group. Take yourself out of search if that is what you want.

Need more help? I like this guide as a starting point and this one does a good job of helping you think through the options as well.

Image: ‘Privacy is not a crime‘

featured, personal, ruminations

Year End/ Decade End Listings and such…

December 31, 2009 ajwms No comments

I am a big fan (sucker?) for the end of the year summaries that abound at this time of year.
And, I love lists. So, here is a list of lists….

Presenting my faves for the end of 2009 and the end of the first decade of the 2000s (naughties? noughties? oughts? aughts? What did we call them?)

DJ Earworm – United States of Pop 2009

NPR All Songs Considered Best Music of 2009
I always find new music via NPR’s All Songs Considered

Lifehacker’s Most Popular Hive Five Topics of 2009
Crowdsourcing has grown in popularity, easy and usefulness. And why not? It usually works!

Entertainment Weekly’s Best of 2009 (highs and lows)
Since this is my guilty pleasure reading at the gym, I felt that I must put it in here

The Top 10 Everything of 2009  and the Best Movies, TV, Books and Theater of the Decade from Time Magazine
well, they said everything…

Top 10 Internet Moments of the Decade from ABC News

And, for good measure, I just had to use the “My Year in Status” application in Facebook to build a status collage for 2009.

I also had to go visit Wordle and do something there with my blog posts from 2009. And, here it is.

fun, infographic, Links, multimedia, personal, ruminations, Techy

Blog Action Day: How we connect and unite in action against Climate Change

October 15, 2009 ajwms One comment

Today is BAD ’09! Blog Action Day. If you are on Twitter, the hashtag is #BAD09

This is the third year that T-F has participated and I am happy to do so, as always. This year’s topic is Climate Change and it is something that has been on my mind a good deal in the past few years. I have some close friends who have made very radical changes in their lifestyle over the past two years as they work to become as sustainable as possible in the expectation of the changes they expect in the world after Peak Oil. I admire them, yes. I emulate some of their choices, yes. Can I do everything they are doing like sell their house, farm most of their own food, make their own bath soaps, etc? Well, I probably could given enough time and training but will I? Probably not.

And climate change is a direct result of our lifestyle choices, it does seem so this is something that I do struggle with. Especially given my current employment. It is directly driven by computer technology and directly draws on natural resources for energy and, given my current location and energy source, directly impacting climate change. So, I try to find ways to help reduce my carbon footprint as much as possible in other aspects of my life since my career feeds into it. This is where the carbon calculators like the ones you find at Earth Lab, the Nature Conservancy Carbon Footprint Calculator (see my results below) and the United State Environmental Protection Agency Household Emissions Calculator

I feel like we do a pretty good job as a household of being as low impact as possible while keeping a fairly modern, technologicaly lifestyle. But, I know I could do more, especially with hot water and lighting.

As much as I learn from my more activist friends, I also learn from the social network I have created within Twitter and other sites where I engage. Participating in Earth Hour last March was inspiring as is writing this post today. I really did like watching the earth go dark for an hour in a wave around the globe. It was fascinating to be a part of it as well as just absorb it. If we can pour the energy that folks had just sharing what they were doing during that hour via photos, tweets and video.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by AJ Wms

The increased use of technology to promote action, while also using energy and producing carbon dioxide, does allow us to feel much more aware and connected with others who feel the same way and to empower us to feel that our actions are not being done in a vacuum. I feel like that is very important as the issue of climate change is certainly not going to be solved by one country or one organization but by all of us and one way we can feel involved is to take part in these global actions, which is made so much more easy by today’s technologies. Can anybody say conundrum?

Want more global community actions to connect and be involved? Try these or share something else in the comments:

International Day of Climate Action (October 24)

Join TckTckTck: Global Citizens for Climate Action alliance of faith groups, organizations, trade unions and individuals.

infographic, personal, Personal Projects, ruminations

This is my generation of movies

August 9, 2009 ajwms One comment

Feel like I have been saying goodbye to a good part of my childhood/young adulthood lately.

RIP – John Hughes.

Feely, multimedia, personal

Happy 3rd Birthday to Techy-Feely!!

August 6, 2009 ajwms 3 comments

Army+of+CutenessIn some ways it seems like a much longer time has passed since I blogged for the first time here at my own little corner o’ the Intarwebs! And, in other ways, I still feel like I am just figuring stuff out. I certainly am on other parts of the web. But, I clearly recall installing WordPress and then staring at it going: “Now what?”. Now, I have a version of the multiuser platform running at my college and I feel much more comfortable diving into the database tables and taking a peek.

But, today marks the third anniversary of this here website. It has been joined along the way by several others in my account – mostly for friends and family but I also grabbed my own Vanity URL because I truly believe in the not to distant future, it will be crucial to control and own your personal space on the web. Not necessarily for “brand control” – although for folks who live and die by their online rep, that is not a bad idea but just because it can serve as a central point to pull together all of the places where you are on the web into one spot. Makes the whole out of the parts, so to speak. Still working on that project for me as well.

Anyway, enjoy some virtual cake for Techy-Feely today! Between the Project 365, finding tidbits to share with my three readers and just plain thinking “out loud”, it has been fun – even if only for me!

The Inaugural Post from 2006: Techy-Feely ยป Hello World!

Image: ‘He’s so Pleased!!‘
www.flickr.com/photos/48915783@N00/28051595

personal, Personal Projects, ruminations

Where were you forty years ago?

July 20, 2009 ajwms No comments

http://www.hightechscience.org/Apollo_Lunar_Excursion_and_Command_Module_1b.JPGI am a space fan, I am the first to admit. I almost have to be, don’t I? Can you claim the word “techy” and not have at least some passing interesting in space and space travel?

Besides the requisite Star Wars and Star Trek fandom, I am also a big fan of NASA program and have been since I was a youngster. All of the excitement and re-enactments of this historic fortieth anniversary (See http://wechoosethemoon.org/) has got me reminiscing back to those days.

Of course, I answered “astronaut” on the forms that asked: What do you want to be when you grow up? (I also rotated between TV cameraman, nurse, teacher, paramedic and cowboy – among others). But, space and traveling through space has always fascinated me. And, it still does. I applied to the Teacher in Space program even though I was still in undergraduate school. I remember talking with other teachers about it later and them asking if I could still want to do it after the Challenger accident that claimed Christa McAuliffe. My answer is always: YES!

I WANT to see the Earth from above.
I WANT to see the moon up close and personal.
I WANT to feel the lack of gravity
I WANT to see so many stars that my mind cannot comprehend what it is seeing

I remember watching the Apollo 11 mission with my family. Mom and Dad got a new television that summer and I have always heard to reasons: one to watch the lunar landing and the other (since it was a color TV) so that Mom could see the red hair on some character on a soap opera she watched. I pretty much believe either one but chose to go with the first reason.

So the names of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were easily thrown around our house like we knew them. I built NASA models like the one above (my favorite but I also build many of the rockets and the lunar rover buggy – that one was hard!). I read books about NASA history. In fact, I totally latched on to the Mercury astronaut Gus Grissom as a favorite. I think I picked him out from a group photo and decided he was my favorite. When I read that he died when I was about 5 (before the space fascination began, I suppose), I remember being pretty sad about that.

So, as we have the web sites with historic photos, NASA releasing digitally enhanced videos and many Twitter historical re-enactments, take a few minutes to think about how awesome this trip of Apollo 11 truly was: we did go where no one had gone before. The technology itself might seem less than sleek and modern but it got the job done and the feeling that crew must have had when they landed back in the capsule splashing down in the ocean must have been something else.

I will enjoy my Twitter feed today as we think back 40 years to the one giant leap we made.

personal, ruminations
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