Keeping Track of Details: Blog Role

Written by Administrator Sunday, 18 March 2012 16:56

Over the past month, it has become evident that my organizational strategies, to-do listing, and prioritization processes, while effective as a doctoral student, are not cutting it as a professor working .2 FTE. In two weeks, I'll be full FTE and have loads more work. So, in an attempt to stave of chaos, confusion, and/or panic, I've returned to practices that I know work. These practices, however, are more sophisticated than my applications in the past.

First, I have a centralized platform for recording, organizing, and publishing my work. This website fills that role. In addition to providing a place to record and organize my material, I'm able to search, keyword, and organize my works, thinking, references, resources, and so forth. Instead of sorting through staggering piles and files, I'll have one location to sort online.

Second, I am using DropBox across all of my computers for all of my school-related documents. While this is taking some time to get used to, and my filing system is still not as sophisticated as I would like it to be, it will be even better in a month or two. I know that DropBox is the best solution in terms of keeping track of all the different files.

Third, as much as possible I am only using one computer: my WOU MacBook Pro. I should probably name him, but I find personifying IT a bit strange. If anything, I'd probably call him Philip after Philip K. Dick.

Fourth, my note taking used to occur on multiple platforms in multiple media and over multiple software. That made it impossible to find a lot of notes. So, I'm shifting to my general "to do" hard copy notebook and using the notes aspect of the Mac Mail for all of my rough notes. Once things get taken care of or develop into more full ideas, I can then revise and grow the notes into decent documents to be filed.

Driving Polk, Yamhill Counties

Last Updated on Sunday, 18 March 2012 11:47 Written by Administrator Sunday, 18 March 2012 11:41

Today we're going for another drive doing what we like to do: driving throughout Polk and Yamhill counties. While Polk County is quite pretty--I do like it here more than Benton County where I was raised--the light and the hills just don't seem as radiant as in Yamhill County. Perhaps it's my bias for filbert trees and the relatively sparse housing. Maybe it's the look of vineyards. Maybe it's just accurate.

As always, we have little idea of where we are going or how long we are going to be there. One thing I know for sure is that we'll hit the Arctic Circle in McMinville because, according to Dieter, it has the best shakes around.

March To Do List

Last Updated on Sunday, 18 March 2012 16:50 Written by Administrator Sunday, 18 March 2012 11:18

There are some definite things to do with Joomla.

First, I need to make sure and/or correct that the Twitter and FB feeds are working. Last time, they were not working very well.

Second, the article editor has serious formatting issues or I'm missing something. When I select H2 for one item it has formatting different from H2 for another item. So, Size, Color of fonts. And the spacing of/after tabs is messed up. Finally, the -- does not become the emdash. Hmmm. Frustrating.

Third, figure out how to embed GMaps in Joomla. At this point, copy & paste embed code with frames fails.

Fourth, figure out how to have things appear on the front page for a limited amount of time.

Fifth, figure out how to give equal space/balance to items on front page.

Sixth, is it possible to have the front page only be single column and not two column for all the content that remains there?

First Quarter Update: Part 1

Last Updated on Sunday, 18 March 2012 10:19 Written by Administrator Sunday, 18 March 2012 10:05

I have obviously neglected my site/blog for a while now. It is time to get on track, and I'll be using the blog, again, to document my work, thinking, scholarship, research, and so forth. I'm not only looking forward to that, I am excited about it.

Several weeks ago, I received my official WOU computer. MacBookPro with Thunderbolt monitor. 2.4 Gigahertz i5 Processor and 8 Gig DDR 3 Ram. Very happy about that. Adobe CS 5.5 suite. Lots of time spent there already.

I've joined two committees associated with the Window of Opportunity budget-savings project. One is IT related and the other is grant related. That promises to be interesting.

A number of hours have gone towards understanding how networking, VDI, terminals, and communications work at WOU. Goals/interests here: improving UX, saving money, increasing speed to enhance program offerings, and understanding my environment. Discussions with Bill Kernan (head of IT) have gone well.

Lots of learning about embedding video into Acrobat documents.

Much reading into different coding languages. Assessing coding's actual value to my role as a teacher educator versus it's sparkly allure. In light of time demands, I don't think I'll be able to move the most basic interactions and coding with multiple languages. It is not on the front plate.

Little to no contact on Facebook. While Facebook worked well during doctoral work to remain in contact with people, I've not found it helpful these first couple months. While I do miss my people, at the same time there's a high noise to signal ratio--and I can't go there right now. Moving, adjusting to Oregon, learning a new job, etc.--Facebook is just distracting. And I don't miss it. Really. I'm barely interested in Twitter, too.

The most interesting parts of technology at this juncture are figuring out the different layers and connectivities in information exchange networks and which devices impact the user experience--what's going on in the IT black box, as it were, that users don't usually see or know about. I'm also curious about the parallels which may be present in these different levels of connectivity and the layers approach to document design and image creation in software like Photoshop as well as CSS.

I've been testing out CSS and HTML. That's going pretty well. The OS video training is going pretty well too. A more thorough review later.

End of update 1.