JosephBustillos.com » JBB’s Digital Fiefdom http://josephbustillos.com Musings on Education, Technology, Pop Culture, Religion & Staying Curious Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:00:26 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Video Fridays: A Day Made of Glass Parts 1 & 2 – A Shiny Future For Some http://josephbustillos.com/2012/02/10/video-fridays-a-day-made-of-glass-parts-1-2-a-shiny-future-for-some/ http://josephbustillos.com/2012/02/10/video-fridays-a-day-made-of-glass-parts-1-2-a-shiny-future-for-some/#comments Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:00:26 +0000 jbb http://josephbustillos.com/?p=7752 I was watching a shiny ubiquitous connectivity futuristic video forwarded to me by my friend CK when I suddenly realized that I was already living the wall-of-screen lifestyle. Right now I have to admit that it can wreak havoc on one’s ability to concentrate on anything… but mine is already a connected lifestyle. Also, my guess that some would find difficulty with the lifestyle hinted at in the video because it would require that they have plenty of flat surface horizontal and vertical free of clutter. That automatically disqualifies many of the detractors that I personally know about… enjoy.

The second video takes up the story from the young girls point of view. As an educator this video is downright cringe-worthy when they portray the students in class sitting hands folded in rows and columns while the teacher lectures, albeit with very pretty visuals. This is where business shows that it knows nothing about education and especially education of the near future. They do get it somewhat right when they have the video table where the students grab color swaths and use it to select images based on the colors and combination of colors. It’s horrifying when outdate modes of teaching show up in “visions of the future” videos. The lesson here is that even if it’s in a virtual environment, we learn by doing not by sitting in lectures. My moto is if the information needs to be delivered as a monologue or lecture, do a video and post it for students to go over before getting together for class. If we’re “together” we’re doing, or reviewing, not lecturing. Ack! Future education vision FAIL!

Sources:

]]> http://josephbustillos.com/2012/02/10/video-fridays-a-day-made-of-glass-parts-1-2-a-shiny-future-for-some/feed/ 0 The Story of the OLPC: Kids Are the Mission Not A Market http://josephbustillos.com/2012/02/09/the-story-of-the-olpc-kids-are-the-mission-not-a-market/ http://josephbustillos.com/2012/02/09/the-story-of-the-olpc-kids-are-the-mission-not-a-market/#comments Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:11:30 +0000 jbb http://joebustillos.com/?p=2017 At CES 2012 this past January the One Laptop Per Child foundation unveiled their newest model called the OLPC XO 3.0 tablet. The model shown seemed to have gained some weight and was much more boxy than the prototype hyped by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte in 2010. (see videos at the bottom of the page for CES 2012 coverage and the 2010 announcement). The OLPC is near and dear to my heart because I was there at ISTE in 2006 when Negroponte showed off the first OLPC and then got my own OLPC as part of a charity buy-one/get-one program in 2008.

The following video, from TED 2007, highlights some very important aspects of the One Laptop Per Child program that tends to get completely missed by competing programs and tech journalists. It used to drive me nuts when John C. Dvorak or Lance Ulanoff (formerly from PC Magazine) would go off on how it’s not a real computer or what the hell are third world kids going to do with a computer. Even some supporters speculated that this could be used by third world farmers to better market their crops, or some such foolishness. Argh!

The OLPC program was born out of findings of Seymour Papert at MIT and early experiments that Negroponte did taking laptops to Cambodia in the 2000s. From Papert the realization was that using computers in education was not about teaching applications to children. It makes no sense for me to teach Word to a six-year-old, justifying it by saying that I’m preparing that student for the future job market. God help us if they are still using the version of Word that that child learned twelve-years earlier. No. Papert laid out in The Children’s Machine that the real benefit of using computers in the classroom was teaching children thinking through teaching them how to computer program (using simple languages like LOGO). The thing that came from the Cambodian experiments, that sounds very Apple-esque, is that you have to have a vision for the whole process and not reduce things to just hitting a price target. What this means is that Negroponte understood that they had to design the thing to work in the intended environments where there was no infra-structure common to the developed countries. One cannot assume that there’s easily available connectivity or power, so the device has be designed to be extremely low powered (less than two Watts), work well in sunlight, use mesh-networking to get online and be rugged. And of course the software needs to be designed for learning. Alas, Microsoft and Intel tried to undercut the OLPC by going low-cost with their Classmate PCs. Negroponte said it best when describing how this isn’t about laptops, technology or emerging markets: “This is a mission or a market.”


So, what happened to my OLPC? It sits on a shelf in my office. I wanted to use it as a kind of netbook and take it with me to coffee shops and Taco Beach so that I could do my writing when I was out and about. Two things killed that dream. The first was that I couldn’t get the thing to connect to most wifi networks. Duh, it was designed for a kind of mesh-networking that I didn’t have in 2008 in Long Beach, California. The second thing was that, even when I did get a connection, it was difficult to run more than one task at once and switching between multiple browsers screens proved to be too tedious. So, I couldn’t do the writing that I wanted to do with additional windows opened to the resources I’m using, just like what I do on my other computers. Of course, the real failure, that I’m just now realizing, is that I should have used it to learn how to program, that’s what it was designed to do and I completely biffed that one. Doh!

The following videos are related to the coming of the newer version of the OLPC recently announced, the OX-3.


Sources:

My previous OLPC-related articles:

Videos/Images:

]]> http://josephbustillos.com/2012/02/09/the-story-of-the-olpc-kids-are-the-mission-not-a-market/feed/ 0 When Files & Folders Are Better Than Photostreams http://josephbustillos.com/2012/02/07/when-files-folders-are-better-than-photostreams/ http://josephbustillos.com/2012/02/07/when-files-folders-are-better-than-photostreams/#comments Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:00:48 +0000 jbb http://josephbustillos.com/?p=7737 When I was working on my Macworld talk a couple weeks ago I was a bit frustrated because I had my main iPhoto library on my MacBook Air and I was doing most of the work on my iMac and photostream didn’t seem to be syncing the photos on both computers. I love that I can take a photo on my iPhone and it automatically pops up on any of my devices. But what I don’t like is that I want to organize and edit my photos and then I end up with a very different library on either computer. I just take too many photos to have different versions spread over two (or more) computers, or to have them dumped into one large unorganized stream.

So I’m toying with the idea of not using iPhoto except to stream to my iPhone and start just doing files and folders on my Dropbox. Before I left for Macworld I bought an app called Graphic Converter because I have a ton of clip art that I would like to access but I don’t want to have to click through individual images to find the one I’m looking for. Having a virtual catalog would be great. Alas, finder wasn’t really cutting it. We’ll see. I just need something that works better than having all of my images on one computer (the one with the least space & smallest screen), and occasionally backing it up to the other computers. This is such a first-world issue, it’s silly. But I’m tired of not having my media where I want it so that I can work on it, not just to admire. Grhhh!

Sources:
All images by Joe Bustillos

]]> http://josephbustillos.com/2012/02/07/when-files-folders-are-better-than-photostreams/feed/ 0 The Threat the Internet Represents to What We Value in Life http://josephbustillos.com/2012/02/06/the-threat-the-internet-represents-to-what-we-value-in-life/ http://josephbustillos.com/2012/02/06/the-threat-the-internet-represents-to-what-we-value-in-life/#comments Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:10:46 +0000 jbb http://josephbustillos.com/?p=7728 Back from California, I had a great brief visit with family after a wonderful return to Macworld. During my family stay I spent some time doing the tech-support thing and got some work done bouncing between whatever computer I was working on, my MacBook air, iPad and iPhone. My niece exclaimed at one point, “how many computers do you have?!” I just smiled.

One thought that lingers came from a heated conversation that I had with one brother-in-law about the anti-SOPA movement. If the conversation is any indication of what the masses feel about what happened with the anti-SOPA movement that the message is getting really mangled out there.

My brother-in-law, a former science-teacher, is a fellow affectionado for all things NPR and one of the few remaining humans that I personally know who still reads the local LA Times in paper form pretty much every single day. So we’re not talking about some Fox “News” unfortunate. Anyway, the gist of his argument was that stealing/piracy is wrong and that the anti-SOPA movement must be the outcry of those websites and individuals who are benefitting from the continuation of this unregulated, mostly lawless Internet. Hmmm. Did I mention that he’s a pretty smart guy? He admitted that he understood that SOPA was a poorly written law, but this was another example of those connected with the Internet trying to get away with what in “normal life” would be understood as theft. And the fact that there was such a huge backlash that reversed what looked like a governmental done-deal must have meant that these Internet players are pretty big. It’s a safe bet that he feels like these Internet people are all an anarchic selfish bunch who are completely self-absorbed with their Twitters and Facebook.

Trying to explain that SOPA/PIPA had the potential of breaking the Internet, downgrading our first amendment rights and throwing the copyright balance of power to the already powerful media companies, didn’t seem to break his resolve that the anti-SOPA people were just trying to get away with theft. I tried to explain that the infinite copyable nature of digital goods changes the business practices. Nope. Theft. I tried to explain that music and musicians can and are being supported because fans understand that if they want more music from their favorite artists, that the only way for that to continue is to support them by attending their performance and buying their music on amazon and iTunes, and that by keeping the prices low it makes piracy impractical. Nope. In his mind the vast majority of music on the Internet is stolen. Okay. I think this goes beyond distrust of the Internet, to feelings that Internet culture is undermining what is good in life, period.

On the way to the restaurant one night I showed him the little blue dot representing where we were on the map on my iPhone. On the way back from the restaurant he asked if I’d ever unplugged for a week before. I’ve had crappy Internet for a week but I’ve never just unplugged. He asked if I would consider unplugging (for a week). Nah, not really. I tried to explain that this is what I do, being plugged in is part of my fun. I tried the pager analogy, that when I worked for the phone company driving all over Orange County I looked at my pager as a means to have some freedom, that I was always about 15-minutes away from being where I needed to be. So the pager freed me from having to be tied to a desk in an office. My brother, however, thought of his pager as the means for others to keep tabs on him, so he was always leaving the little thing at home. Same device, but I saw it as a means of freedom while my brother saw it as a device of control. Yeah, my brother-in-law wasn’t buying it and I felt the distinct impression that he felt sorry for me because I was deluded enough to believe that my life online was real. Wow.

I know that I live and have lived ahead of the technological curve for some time now. The world has changed and continues to change and it’s not just about pretty toys but the real connections that these pretty toys can enable. Friendships, politics, the classroom, entertainment, they’ve all changed because of these pretty little toys, in ways that even their creators could never imagine. I understand that some of us don’t like change and only see the destructive potential of these things. But just like the pager, this change can something that brings out the best in us and doesn’t have to destroy all the things that we love. I have to wonder what the distrust says about the worrier. So, whether this is the end of what we love or an opportunity for something good will depend on the user of the tool(s).

]]> http://josephbustillos.com/2012/02/06/the-threat-the-internet-represents-to-what-we-value-in-life/feed/ 0 Video Fridays: When Is Machine Music Real? http://josephbustillos.com/2012/02/03/video-fridays-when-is-machine-music-real/ http://josephbustillos.com/2012/02/03/video-fridays-when-is-machine-music-real/#comments Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:26:09 +0000 jbb http://josephbustillos.com/?p=7723 So yesterday I got an email from my girlfriend, Tricia, who was so amazed by this video of this music making machine that appeared to make some really complicated music via shooting balls at the various rhythm instruments. The writer of the original message ends the message with, “Of the all the balls you will see, NOT ONE hits the floor!!”

So, being the kill-joy that I am, when she pulled up the video I said, oh yeah, I’ve seen that before, way back in the Tech-TV days. And then went on to explain that the whole video is computer generated. [fail trombone]. She was so disappointed that she couldn’t be bothered to finish watching the whole three-minute 26-second video. In her mind, finding out that it was all CGI meant that it was all fake. I tried to explain that the original creators didn’t just create a pretty bouncing ball virtual machine and then just dropped in the soundtrack, but designed the virtual machine to “play” the notes, so they had to program the timing to literally play the tune one hears on the video. She wasn’t having any of it. The fun was destroyed.

So I went on Snopes.com to confirm that the video was in fact CGI and alas I was correct, all CGI. The detail of the hoax was amazing (seriously, this was all built using re-purposed John Deere farming gear?!). One cool thing, I did find that Intel had actually built a machine inspired by the CGI machine in the Pipe-Dream video. So, when I was watching the video of the Intel machine, I couldn’t help but wonder if the soundtrack on the video was being created by the machine or a remixed thing overlaid onto the video. What do you think, real music or pre-recorded fakery???

Sources:

]]> http://josephbustillos.com/2012/02/03/video-fridays-when-is-machine-music-real/feed/ 0 macworld 2012, Visual Note-Taking with the iPad http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/30/macworld-2012-visual-note-taking-with-the-ipad/ http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/30/macworld-2012-visual-note-taking-with-the-ipad/#comments Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:00:39 +0000 jbb http://josephbustillos.com/?p=7715 Yes, I just spent the past week at macworld|iworld 2012 and after a two-year break from my previous macworlds and my first participation as a presenter I can say that my mind is fully blown. I created a website for my presentation and play to post the full slide show REAL SOON NOW. You can catch the updates at http://disruptive-ed-tech.com.

In the meantime, one of the more interesting presentation that I attended was by Rachel Smith, called: Visual Note-Taking with the iPad. At first I was thinking that this was a giant step backward in terms of using the iPad to create notes that weren’t really searchable. Ack. But this also reminded me of the recent whiteboard videos where an artist takes a talk and creates a real-time info-graphic of the talk (a la Dan Pink’s video on Drive). This also reminded me of a friend who used poster-board graphics to improve student literacy (something called Project Glad, back in the day). Check out Smith’s video:

]]> http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/30/macworld-2012-visual-note-taking-with-the-ipad/feed/ 0 Apple Announces iBooks 2, iBooks Author and iTunes U (app). QuarkXpress & Schoology Pee Their Pants http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/23/apple-announces-ibooks-2-ibooks-author-and-itunes-u-app-quarkxpress-schoology-pee-their-pants/ http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/23/apple-announces-ibooks-2-ibooks-author-and-itunes-u-app-quarkxpress-schoology-pee-their-pants/#comments Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:00:29 +0000 jbb http://josephbustillos.com/?p=7697

I just watched the Apple Education event keynote and I’m very excited about what I saw. If you haven’t seen today’s keynote yet, run, do not walk to your local device (I got a better connection via my iPad projecting the keynote to my TV) and sit a spell. Nope, Schiller will never have Steve’s dynamic style, but the content is definitely something that we need to be keenly aware of. In a word they are taking book publishing and specifically textbook publishing, and taking it to the next level. The textbook will not be a static collection of words and images frozen at printing but have the portability of a book, the videos and interactivity of a networked computer and the freshness of blog pages, while retaining formatting, typography and layout that tends to be lacking in web-based textbooks.

I was going to try my hand at getting Udutu to work for my stand-alone copyright unit but I’m now going to investigate the possibility of using iBook Author to make the unit. Now we know where all the iWeb brain-power went over the last couple years. And I’m curious to see Full Sail will continue to experiment with iTunes U, in that iTunes U seems determined to become it’s own LMS and not just a lecture delivery vehicle.

I’ve been getting emails from QuarkXpress begging me to check out their new iPad/ePub friendly $299 app (if you have a previous version of QuarkXpress). They’ve got to be peeing their pant. I wonder how Schoology feels about Apple putting more effort/muscle behind iTunes U with added assignment and communication features. Yikes.

Enjoy. jbb

]]> http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/23/apple-announces-ibooks-2-ibooks-author-and-itunes-u-app-quarkxpress-schoology-pee-their-pants/feed/ 1 In the News: Newspapers/Magazines on the iPad, Part 2 http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/19/in-the-news-newspapersmagazines-on-the-ipad-part-2/ http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/19/in-the-news-newspapersmagazines-on-the-ipad-part-2/#comments Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:00:08 +0000 jbb http://josephbustillos.com/?p=7669

Newspapers on iPad examples by Joe Bustillos

So when we last left our hero, I was looking for the best way to consume my daily news via my iPad… I had discovered that the Amazon kindle edition of the Los Angeles Times was much improved from earlier versions. My guess is that earlier versions, because of limitations of the kindle itself, were black and white images only and attempted to mimic the look of the print edition in a single column fashion, which led to some navigation difficulties. I really don’t know because by the time I decided to subscribe to the LA Times they had switched to an Onswipe-like layout with side-scrolling and section navigation on the left. See A) Los Angeles Times – Amazon Kindle edition on the right.

Imagine my surprise when I checked out the free LA Times iPad app and it looked pretty like the Amazon Kindle version that I was paying $9.99 each for. In fact, the free version was a little more advanced in it’s usage of screen real-estate, giving the reader a bit more information and options on each single screen. See B) Los Angeles Times – iPad App Edition (free) to the right.

The free version had the better screen usage because the section menu was drop-down, so it was out of the way when not needed. See C) Los Angeles Times – iPad Edition – Sections Menu to the right. And the free version was not lite on content by any stretch of the imagination. Granted, the last time I saw the paper version of the daily I was shocked at how small the newspaper was. It was hardly a shadow of it’s former self. So my guess is that the free iPad version has all of the same content as the paper version.

Finally, one thing that was very frustrating with the Kindle version of the Los Angeles Times was that if I found an article that I wanted to share or clip there was no way to do that in the Kindle version. I couldn’t select the article to copy it or even select any text that I might want to share. Now that might have been a limitation of the iOS interface but it really made the Kindle version feel like it was just for reading and not for sharing or research. The free version had social-networking built-in. Yeah. I cancelled my Kindle-edition. See D) Los Angeles Times iPad Edition Social Networking Menu to the right.

As I continued to explore the free Los Angeles Times iPad app I couldn’t find anyway to “subscribe” or become a subscriber in the traditional sense. I’m guessing that the free iPad version is being supported by the few ads along the bottom of some of the screens. As much as I love getting the whole LA Times for free, I’m concerned about the sustainability of the free model. That said, I’m not happy at the confusing subscription model being promoted by the New York Times that favors paper-subscribers over iPad/online subscribers when there’s so much less waste in the iPad/online model. Note that when you look at the iPad version of the New York Times all of the sections are locked for non-subscribers – see E) New York Times – iPad Edition – PAID Sections.

So, do I enjoy a free-copy of the LA Times every morning on my iPad with my Wheaties? Not so much. It’s tough to settle into the sit-and-read-the-paper-with-breakfast model that I’ve aspired to. Also, I’ve gotten used to skimming dozens of news sources at a time via my iPad RSS reader of choice, NewsRack. There are dozens of more visual newsreaders that mimic the slider model, but my purpose is to skim and select what to read and if I have to wade through tons of images it’ll slow down the process. I guess I’ve chosen a method of going through dozens and dozens of news sources instead of trusting a couple, or as in my dad’s case, one source.

Actually, now that I think about it, part of my problem is that I’m used to skimming and get a lot of my research links via my Twitter-stream. I tend to skim my Twitter resources before skimming my RSS articles. So, there’s a definite disconnect from the traditional news/magazine publication cycle and how I consume my information. As beautiful as some of these news apps are (like the ABC News and BBC apps) I don’t want to go to dozens of iPad apps or virtual magazines. It’s the web2 model: I don’t want to have to go to the apps, I want the news to seamlessly come to me. Man, this is much more difficult than I expected. This is going to require more thought… to be continued…

Sources:
image: Man Reading Newspaper at Beach – Microsoft Office Clipart, http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/results.aspx?qu=newspapers&ctt=1#ai:MP900401660|mt:2| retrieved 1/14/2012.
image: Newspapers on iPad examples by Joe Bustillos, http://josephbustillos.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/newspapers-on-ipad.jpg retrieved 1/14/2012.

]]> http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/19/in-the-news-newspapersmagazines-on-the-ipad-part-2/feed/ 0 Why Is Wikipedia Broke Today? SOPA-Protest http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/18/why-is-wikipedia-broke-today-sopa-protest/ http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/18/why-is-wikipedia-broke-today-sopa-protest/#comments Wed, 18 Jan 2012 11:00:01 +0000 jbb http://josephbustillos.com/?p=7692 Here’s a great video that explains the problems with PIPA and SOPA (besides being dumb acronyms):

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Tell Congress not to censor the internet NOW! – http://www.fightforthefuture.org/pipa

PROTECT-IP is a bill that has been introduced in the Senate and the House and is moving quickly through Congress. It gives the government and corporations the ability to censor the net, in the name of protecting “creativity”. The law would let the government or corporations censor entire sites– they just have to convince a judge that the site is “dedicated to copyright infringement.”

The government has already wrongly shut down sites without any recourse to the site owner. Under this bill, sharing a video with anything copyrighted in it, or what sites like Youtube and Twitter do, would be considered illegal behavior according to this bill.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, this bill would cost us $47 million tax dollars a year — that’s for a fix that won’t work, disrupts the internet, stifles innovation, shuts out diverse voices, and censors the internet. This bill is bad for creativity and does not protect your rights.

]]> http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/18/why-is-wikipedia-broke-today-sopa-protest/feed/ 0 What Does a Tech-Savvy 21st-Century School Look Like? http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/17/what-does-a-tech-savvy-21st-century-school-look-like/ http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/17/what-does-a-tech-savvy-21st-century-school-look-like/#comments Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:00:30 +0000 jbb http://josephbustillos.com/?p=7656

3d Person Taking Class by David Castillo Dominici

What does one expect when about to tour a public school described as innovative and tech-savvy? Classrooms filled with rows and rows of white gleaming tables populated by endless computer monitors under antiseptic white fluorescent lights? Giant wall monitors in the office and all common areas with the day’s activities scrolling below a looping-video of a professionally produced virtual tour of the school given by an smiling young woman? White-headphone wearing students silently gliding from class to class on hover-boards? Up until the last one, I probably had you thinking, “Yeah.” I had the opportunity to visit a very innovative school the other day and you know what I noticed? The place looked pretty much like any school I’d visited where teachers were interacting with students and students were engaged in their learning. In other words, the place wasn’t a shrine to shiny technology, but educators were busy working with their students using technology. Period.

I’d heard about Audubon Park Elementary in Baldwin Park from coworker, Dr. Bedard, who said that it was as an innovative place where, unlike many schools, students were encouraged to bring their tech from home in the form of e-readers and iPads to the classroom. That piqued my interest. Oh yeah, she also confirmed what we’d heard from other coworkers, that many classrooms have students sit at tables in groups of four on yoga-balls bouncing up and down as they do their work. Interesting. So, while there is tech in the classrooms, the place is not a shrine to technology. Educators, beginning with the principal, Trevor Honohan, have chosen to find effective ways to do their job using technology.

Assistant principal Bryan Dolfi told me that the change began over a year ago when Principal Honohan saw how much impact the installation of interactive promethean boards had and began to look for ways to encourage the classroom interaction. Dolfi said that they were fortunate to be located in an somewhat affluent neighborhood and worked with the community and parents of the 1,150 K-5 students to raise funds to add netbooks to the classrooms. I asked Dolfi how the staff of a bit over one-hundred took to the change. I’ve been on school sites that were awarded huge grants with the accompanying radical influx of technology only to have a third of the staff leave because they were asked to use the technology in their teaching and they felt like it was too much to ask. Dolfi took me to look in on a classroom where the teacher was using the Promethean board, standing at the back of the room asking her students items from their science unit. I’ve been on enough school tours to known when I’m watching the technology-dog-and-pony-show for the visitor and when I’m watching something that’s part of the day to day routine and this was the real thing. Then Dolfi added after we left the room that the instructor had been one of the less tech-savvy one’s who had been scared to use the tech only a year ago and now she was one most called upon to help others get comfortable using the tech. Interesting.

Teacher with students in class - Microsoft Office clipart

Teachers set up to succeed, learning how to use technology in the context of their day-to-day job in a way that helps them reach and work with their students, which make the students more engaged, which makes the parents happy, which make the principal and district happy. This isn’t a story about technology but about smart dedicated people taking advantage of the tools within reach (or making it so that the tools are within reach) and then getting to the job of learning and serving their students. No giant screens with intrusive booming messages or hover boards or student/drones wearing white-earphones, just teachers, students, administrators and communities working together (and taking advantage of tech).

Sources:
Audubon Park Elementary School
Trevor Honohan — Principal
Bryan Dolfi — Assistant Principal
1750 Common Way Road
Orlando, Florida 32814

]]> http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/17/what-does-a-tech-savvy-21st-century-school-look-like/feed/ 0 email: confusing a misused tool for a measure of getting things done http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/16/email-confusing-a-misused-tool-for-a-measure-of-getting-things-done/ http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/16/email-confusing-a-misused-tool-for-a-measure-of-getting-things-done/#comments Mon, 16 Jan 2012 15:00:09 +0000 jbb http://josephbustillos.com/?p=7646 Some jobs, it’s near impossible to know whether one is doing well because the flood of work never stops. This is the dilemma if you’re the local unofficial computer guy on campus when everyone comes to you for any little thing that can go wrong with technology in the classroom. The online equivalent is the flood of email from students asking questions about assignments that greets one every monday and every day. It doesn’t take long for one to make the mistake of assuming that one has done ones job or is doing a great job based on how empty one’s INBOX is. As much as I’ve been proud of having INBOX-Zero status several times in the new year, I have to admit that it’s a bit like the fourth grader who races through the reading assignment and raises his hand first only to not be able to answer the question, “What was the reading about?” What’s the point of all this email versus getting it done?

The Time Management Matrix by Stephen Covey

I love that Stephen Covey put mail and phone calls in the “Not Important” quadrant of his “Time Management Matrix.” There you go, straight from Covey himself, “Not Important!”Makes me laugh, when I left public education in 2008, my principal chided me for trying to get help from support staff through email instead of using the mailboxes in the front office. Email was something that the district used (once they realized that it was a hell of a lot cheaper to do then sending out paper newsletters that no one reads). I love how education is almost always a good ten-years behind the technology curve. And here I am, even though I’m on the computer all day (unlike classroom teacher who told me, “I don’t have time to check the email!”), thinking that there’s got to be a better way to get this done.

What started this quest was the somewhat inefficient practice of saving my emails in folders in my email client based on general purposes. I have folders for my coworkers, folders for my students with subfolders for various repeated tasks (like their capstone projects), then I have folders for social networks and entertainment and blogging, etc., ad infinitum. But sometimes the message doesn’t fit any single folder. Sometimes it’s a message from Dr. Bedard about a student’s capstone project. Do I store it in Dr. Bedard’s folder or the Capstone subfolder for my students? Alas, the search function requires that I know which folder the message is stored in before it can find it. I use iCloud (formerly MobileMe [sound of taps playing off in the distance]) because it’s IMAP and I can access my account(s) and stored messages on all of my devices and am not limited to which messages are stored on which computer, but there is that “which folder” problem. I much prefer the Gmail way of dumping everything into one single Archive folder and using tags to ID messages. Thus, if I were using Gmail I could put Dr. Bedard’s message into the archive with her name as a tag, the student’s name as a tag and “capstone project” as a third tag. Wonderful. But Apple’s Mail app on the computer or iOS devices don’t use the label/tag structure.

So, I decided to check out an email client called Sparrow. It’s very visual and has a “conversation” style. But guess what, it allows for tags and the like and has a unified INBOX but I can’t pull messages received via my iCloud accounts and save them in my Gmail label-drive archive folder. It might look like it’s more conversational and has a reduced footprint on my desktop, but it’s actually even more segregated than how I did email using the default Mail app. I really should have tried out the free demo version before buying the thing. Doh! FAIL. And… and this doesn’t really address the problem of measuring one’s efficiency by the tool instead of perhaps changing the tool to better serve the real purpose of working with students and colleagues.

It’s too bad that Google Wave died. Some have experimented with Google hangouts, but that looks like glorified video-chat. We’ve been experimenting with Manymoon (now called Do.com – scared), but it’s basically just a single-level task-manager where we check off when we’ve done an assigned task with no collaboration and no project building. And, of course, we get all of our notifications through our emails, so it doesn’t diminish that flood. Truthfully, we’re probably just not very good at using this tool. So, here you have a group of highly intelligent tech-savvy online educators, who actually really like to work together and we can’t seem to find a collaborative tool that is worth the effort of getting up to speed on.

Just to take this discussion up to a mind-blowing level, I’m reminded of a Net@Nite interview of Luis Suarez from IBM, who works in the Canary Islands with bosses in the United States and coworkers spread across the world and has virtually eliminated email as part of his workflow. Right. He’s using social media, blogging and collaborative tools to get the job done. Email has been reduced from the conduit to another form of texting, sending short messages. It’s taken all of this time, more than ten-years, for many educational institutions to get everyone on email and now we realize that it was never meant to be the main conduit/repository of our communication needs. It’s just a goddam useful tool meant to be a reminder of some task, not a measure of whether one is getting one’s job done or done well. Check out Suarez’s blog and vision for how we should be working (online) together:

Sources:

]]> http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/16/email-confusing-a-misused-tool-for-a-measure-of-getting-things-done/feed/ 0 In The News: Newspapers/Magazines on the iPad, Part 1 http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/10/in-the-news-newspapersmagazines-on-the-ipad-part-1/ http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/10/in-the-news-newspapersmagazines-on-the-ipad-part-1/#comments Tue, 10 Jan 2012 18:45:06 +0000 jbb http://josephbustillos.com/?p=7620 I have memories of my father spending every morning of his life reading the LA Times, weekdays and weekends. He was up at the crack of dawn and gone before we invaded the kitchen most mornings, but the evidence of his presence was there in the refolded sections of the newspaper. In later years I tried to emulate the morning newspaper practice but my mornings never seemed to be either that consistent or that “leisurely” in having time to read the paper, so the papers just piled up mostly unread until the guilt of the waste would prompt me to cancel my subscription.

These past fifteen years or so, keeping up with tech trends has been my business, and back in the beginning the newspaper would have been of no use (except for the computer store ads in the Saturday Sports section). Local user groups (NOCCC was strong back then) were the first sources of news and computer magazines like Byte and PC World were essential links to information. Eventually TV shows like C/NET TV and the Computer Chronicles and eventually ZD-TV/TechTV filled in the gap as user groups began to fade and virtual communities began to grow through the Internet. TV shows were then replaced by audio and the video podcasts mostly done by full-time podcasters. But I still hadn’t found a consistent “news gathering” process.

When I got my first iPad I was hoping that I would find a much more Eco-friendly way to consume daily news and tech news. I was really looking forward to reading newspapers and magazines on my iPad. One of the first publications to make it’s debut, The Daily, was buggy and I wasn’t really impressed with the quality of the writing style, so I never subscribed beyond the one-month free trial. At the time there were newspaper apps but they were geared for the small iPhone screen and were hardly better than a crippled webpage. This was not the experience I was looking for. In fact the best magazine/newspaper translation to iPad that I’ve found has been the Zinio version of National Geographic. Zinio is an app or wrapper that previously appeared as a Mac and Windows desktop app, but in it’s iPad incarnation not only does it preserve the feel and layout of the magazine but it all offers photo galleries and videos not possible in the paper version of the magazine. The only draw-back is that I have to remember to launch the Zinio app to get to my magazine library, but everything else is pretty seamless. Now that Apple has it’s own “newsstand” version I wonder what the difference might be. Also NG has it’s own stand-alone version. As far as look and feel and multimedia options Zinio works.

Newspaper-wise, in the beginning there was nothing, except for the iPhone versions. Being from the West Coast I was hoping to get the LA Times, but the Times was a Flash-only subscription that wouldn’t work on my iPad. Amazon had a kindle version of several newspapers, but reviews were critical of the offering, mostly related to poor editing and poor image support. But then some time late in the summer I discovered that Amazon had improved their newspaper subscription service and signed up for the Los Angeles Times via Kindle. Ten bucks a month for the daily paper with all of the sections from the original in a semi-blog/onswipe kind of layout. Not too bad. Well, except for when I happened to find almost the exact same version available apparently directly from the LA Times (via an LA Times app), FOR FREE! Doh! To be continued…

Sources:

]]> http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/10/in-the-news-newspapersmagazines-on-the-ipad-part-1/feed/ 0 Four Reasons Why Dropbox Wins the Online Storage Battle http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/09/four-reasons-why-dropbox-wins-the-online-storage-battle/ http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/09/four-reasons-why-dropbox-wins-the-online-storage-battle/#comments Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:54:42 +0000 jbb http://josephbustillos.com/?p=7610 I recently saw an article about an online service called insync that intends to eat Dropbox‘s lunch because they’re connected to Google docs and are much cheaper than Dropbox. Where have I heard this story before. Listen, as a veteran of the online storage wars, it’s gonna take more than being cheap. In fact, unless I can access the latest version of my documents/files at local storage speeds, forget about it.

Speed: I’ve used and spent good money on services like Pogoplug and the woeful MobileMe iDisk and nothing is more frustrating to having a fast new computer and have to watch the spinning-pinwheel of death because all system processes are slowed down to the slowest connection, the Internet connection to the remote hard disk. Dropbox wins because you are working with local storage and only at boot-up and after saves does Dropbox jump in to put the latest version in the cloud.

Most Recent Copy: This may be a first world problem but I don’t want to have to think about where my most recent version of whatever document is stored. I’ve done the floppy-disk/USB-stick/mini-external hard drive shuffle hoping that I saved the right copy to the right disk. Sooner or later the most recent version is going to get over-written by an older version. And I don’t want to have to download anything to work on it. I just want to go to the folder with the document, click, run and save. Period. Any “solution” that requires that I download a version from the cloud to my device, work on it, save it, then push it up to the cloud, is just replicating, the “copy-copy-where’s-the-most-recent-copy” game. No. That’s a non-starter.

Blocked Ports: Generally the first two reasons are enough for anyone to bail on the online storage game. This third one is really ugly and makes one realize that the reason most folks don’t even bother with this space is because getting stuff to work can be much more difficult than anyone is willing to deal with. I love the idea of accessing my files via the Internet from any Internet-connected device. My ISP, apparently, has a different thought about such services and I’ve never been able to get Pogo-plug (version one hardware and more recent software versions) and Back-to-my-Mac to work, I believe because as soon as a connection is made my ISP blocks the ports needed to make the service(s) work. Thus, any service that requires that I have a tunnel from my files on my home computer to my cloud connection is only as good as the link that my ISP allows, and that generally doesn’t work. I’m sure that there’s some secret incantation that might make these services work. I don’t want to find out that my connection doesn’t work when I’m trying to access my work/files from clear across the country. Fail.

Local Backup: One fear of working and storing work in the cloud is only having one copy on the latest version … in the cloud. Things do fail in the cloud. And things do get “accidentally” erased online. So, because the latest version of the files are stored locally using DropBox, one unexpected benefit is that when time-machine backs up my work I have that latest version backed up where I might have a backup solution working (one at work and one at home). That’s a plus.

I use Google Docs for all of my work documents, but I’ve used the files and folders GUI so long that I don’t know if I can adjust to having them only exist in a google doc where they can get lost or accidentally erased. Also, anything that requires that I download a version to work on it goes back to the Most Recent Copy dilemma. No go. So, if Insync can deliver on all of these things AND be cheaper than I might give them a look. But only being cheaper isn’t going to fly with me.

Sources:
Insync: Wave ‘Bye, Bye, Bye’ to Dropbox by Daniel Cooper/Engadget. http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/04/insync-wave-bye-bye-bye-to-dropbox/ retrieved 1/9/2012.

CloudOn Brings Free Cloud-Hosted Microsoft Office Functionality to iPad by Eric Slivka/macrumors. http://www.macrumors.com/2012/01/03/cloudon-brings-free-cloud-hosted-microsoft-office-functionality-to-ipad/ retrieved 1/9/2012.

]]> http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/09/four-reasons-why-dropbox-wins-the-online-storage-battle/feed/ 0 How I Survived a Month Without Blogging: Day One App http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/05/how-i-survived-a-month-without-blogging-one-day-app/ http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/05/how-i-survived-a-month-without-blogging-one-day-app/#comments Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:00:04 +0000 jbb http://josephbustillos.com/?p=7595 Just before I dropped into a “no new blog post” hole that lasted over a month, which was also around the end of National Novel Writing Month (NANOWRIMO), I heard about Day One (app) from Andy Ihnatko as his pick on MacBreak Weekly. Then I started the blog-hosting-from-hell upgrade during which one blog post kept disappearing and then showing up as a Google+ link.  I decided that I needed a plan “B” to use until the blog reliability could be regained. I had no idea that it was going to be over a month, but having Day One not only kept me writing, but as the name implies, bugged me every day to write something new. So, even though I wasn’t posting on my blog, I was writing almost every day and it was a great way to “survive” the whole blog-hosting debacle. And now that I’m back online I have a month’s worth of material to work from (thus the dated material in my last post). And the app runs on all of my devices (macs, iPhone and iPad), synced through DropBox so that I can begin an entry on one device and continue it on another. And even though I could use the WordPress app, it’s cool having an offline synced app that I can do my first drafts on. Only thing that would make the app a bit better would be to have live-linking and image embedding available. But I guess the idea is more about getting one’s thoughts down in a distraction-free environment. The daily bug to write really works. If you’re serious about getting more writing done, when writing isn’t your primary daily task, this really works.

]]> http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/05/how-i-survived-a-month-without-blogging-one-day-app/feed/ 0 How I Spent My Winter Break & Why Godaddy Isn’t My Blog Host http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/04/how-i-spent-my-winter-break-why-godaddy-isnt-my-blog-host/ http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/04/how-i-spent-my-winter-break-why-godaddy-isnt-my-blog-host/#comments Wed, 04 Jan 2012 15:00:21 +0000 jbb http://josephbustillos.com/?p=7582 And no this has nothing to do with SOPA… yet. We’ve been on the run since Friday… Woe, that was two weeks ago. Man, time flies… Christmas eve-eve I was busy working on Tricia’s video, using my blog-woes as a cover story. Alas, the blog woes was more than a convenient cover-story (see below). Friday, last day at work, Tricia had gone back to her place to do all the thousands of things the holidays seems to require of all mothers. Saturday, Xmas eve, was spent outside Tampa with Tricia’s older brother, Mike. I got some NFL in on that day. Then Sunday, Christmas Day, was spent at Tricia’s with her mom, son and granddaughter. It was unhurried and very comfortable. It was perfect.

So around Wednesday, the last week of the break, Tricia asked me what did I want to do with my Christmas break. Was I thinking of going anywhere or doing anything special? Number one, I wouldn’t think about going anywhere without including her and number two, there was only half a week left of my break. So, after a brief pause I told her that I was already doing it. She looked at me, puzzled. I’d spent my days mostly on the computer, laboriously updating hundreds of feature images in my blog after the move to my new blog host and chasing down other bloggy stuff. Hmmm. That was the short, mostly painless version. I really did enjoy having the time to do all of this silly bloggy stuff. But the real story goes back to Thanksgiving week when I began to investigate upgrading my Godaddy hosted blog(s)… Here’s the long painful rendition…

Tuesday, November 29th
Still waiting for last Godaddy website hosting update. Ack. Tech warned that it could be up to 72 hours… Has it already been 72 hours? Damn. I was just in the process of trying to develop the habit of doing at least three posts a week, but I had a post disappear between issuing the last update and when the site was updated. So, as always, I plan something and then have to adjust said plan to wait for other things first. Damn.

So, I had been trying to decide whether to re-up my Godaddy hosting plan or go with something else. Of late I had been depending less and less on my FTP access to my go daddy site. I’d been wanting to move everything away from my expiring MobileMe iDisk hosting, but was getting discouraged because I’d been running into server errors, etc. I purchased a year’s worth of SquareSpace, but I wasn’t impressed with what I could do with the site that didn’t look like a blog (and couldn’t get a “magazine” theme with rotating gallery up top). Damn.

I very briefly experimented with the Onswipe theme to make the main blog more iPad fun. Alas, because I had far more Twitter posts than full-feature posts, Onswipe didn’t really work. Then last week it dawned of me that I could create twitter-specific WordPress blogs and remove them from my main blog so that themes like Onswipe would work. Doh! Now I just have to wait for my hosting plan to return from the “upgrade.”

 

Friday, December 2nd: Friday Sick of Hosting Problems
Friday on a week that didn’t quite equal a full week doesn’t quite feel like a proper Friday. I’ve been sick most of the week and slept all of yesterday, so my poor sense of direction/focus isn’t all that unexpected. Add to that I’m still waiting for Godaddy to pull their heads out of their asses.

Two weeks ago I talked to a tech about upgrading my old hosting service to their new shiny “4GH” and he suggested that I enable a service that would automatically require that they move me to a newer server and then after that the upgrade would just be a check-box. Or so he said. I enabled the first part and it took a bit over 48-hours before I had access to the backend again, signaling that that step was completed. So I contacted Godaddy on the 25th to renew my hosting plan, indicating that I wanted to be moved to the 4GH plan. The tech said no problem, it should take between one to 72-hours for the update and that I should get an email indicating that the change was made. Seven-days later I’m still seeing the “pending account change” status. I contacted their tech on Wednesday and got a trouble ticket and they told me that the connection had timed-out and that’s why the upgrade hadn’t completed. So I waited until today to re-check the status. No change. The tech escalated the trouble ticket and suggested that I might sign up for a one-month hosting plan, move my blogs to the new server then after the month move it back to the “fixed” hosting plan. I told her that I can’t see putting more work into something when they haven’t delivered on the original upgrade. Why should I spend more money, buying a month’s worth of hosting? I ended the call thinking that if I’m not back with backend access in another 24-hours that I should take my business elsewhere.

I don’t know where I’d switch to. I’m thinking that if the problem isn’t resolved then I will cancel my renewal and create a new service and move to the new service. Time to research the alternative hosting services. Ack.

Sunday, December 4th: Web Hosting
I think I know the Godaddy.com hold music by heart now. Sad. They resolved my upgrade issue after seven-days, so that I’m not getting the “pending” message anymore, but, the upgrade to their 4GH plan, the one that I requested didn’t go through. Ah, right. And now I can’t Dreamweaver or Transmit to log into the site so that I can back things up. So…. brain-dead decision, I thought maybe it was a password problem and because I had access to the hosting dashboard, I decided to change the password to something less cryptic. Now the password setting is twirling the “pending change” icon of death. FUCK.

Just called tech support… yeah, something is happening… it’s been escalated to the next level tech support and I should expect another email with another ticket number. Damn. I was actually thinking that I’d like to avoid the hassle, cancel my previous “upgrade” (the one that didn’t happen), and then open another hosting account with the vaunted 4GH service. But now, well, I haven’t posted to my blog in over a week and I’m tired of having to work with tech support just to access my own damn content. Time to move my Internet tent. Damn.

Tuesday, December 6th: Loyalty
It’s completely illogical for me to feel anything or to feel bad about canceling my godaddy hosting account. Sorry if you were expecting something more personal or something along that line. I guess it comes down to caring about things that one spends a lot of time doing and I spend a lot of time in this space, writing, researching, reading, connecting, and so anything that gets in the way of me feeling connected or threatens my continued connection causes an emotional reaction. So, I was looking through my records and I’ve been registering domain names with godaddy since the end of 2006 and started hosting my sites with them since January 2007 and in Internet time almost five years is forever. Yeah, I’m a bit depressed about having to cancel the hosting and hassle of looking for a new provider and then having to build everything back up. And even though these words are not reaching out to the Net (yet), thank god that I found this program (DayOne) that prompts me to do my daily writing. What a godsend. Okay. Back to the business of getting back online.

Wednesday, December 7th: Moving
There’s generally an assumption that anything “Internet” is less than “In Real Life,” that it takes less time, less energy, less meaning. I don’t think that is so. I’ve been working on getting my website/blogs reset/set-up since the 25th and it there hasn’t been anything about this process that’s been “less” anything. So, today i’m now in the process of moving my blogs/websites to a new host. I’ve got the skeleton of the new blog setup on the new host and the right domain name pointed to the right host. All I need to do with wait 24-hours for the information to filter across the Internet so that it works with my browser… More waiting. Damn. I’m going to be glad when this process is over and I can get back to creating good content. Ack.

Thursday, December 8th: Living Online
I started this post yesterday, but got interrupted when I accidentally over-wrote my new wordpress blog with another that I was setting up for Tricia. Live online/die online. Damn.

Friday, December 9th: Living Online, continued
Still struggling with getting a different domain name to work with my old hosting account, so that I can move the main domain name to my new hosting account. This is turning into the proverbial removing the table cloth without losing the table settings trick. Ack. So, besides accidentally 86-ing all the work I’d done yesterday last night when I was creating a separate blog for Tricia (ARGHHH!), I’m now reconciling myself with the idea that I’m going to have to manually reset the main image (feature image) for every single blog post… currently there are 957 posts on this blog. [fail trombone]. Well, back to work.

Saturday, December 10th: Silent Blog
Since my godaddy hosting troubles around Thanksgiving I haven’t posted another blog post. Thank god for Day One, the app that I’m using to record my thoughts (and the fact that the app bugs me every day to write something…). So, I have posts to upload… I’ve just been frustrated at not having a reliable … host. Well, the blog is up on the new host, but I need to transfer my main domain name to the new host and that requires that I get another domain name take over that spot and … well, I’m going to have to call godaddy to get it up and running. Damn. Moving one’s blog is a royal pain in the ass. Oh yeah, I’m having to manually set up the “feature image” on all of my posts and edit the categories to make it run with all the different devices (web, iPhone and iPad). Yay. Be back after the Godaddy encounter. :-)

Sunday, December 11th: Manually Moving Blog Content
Last few days have been spent manually moving my blog media, resetting categories and resetting feature images on the new blog host. Yeah, really exciting. I decided that I’ll go back as far as 2008 to make changes (I have posts that go back to 2003).

Last step was to replace the primary domain on the expiring godaddy account so that the majority of hosted images would point to the new host. Looks like the transfer worked and the temp primary domain seems to work, but I can’t access the admin functions. I can probably do a WordPress reinstall if necessary, but I’m keeping the temp godaddy going just as an image/content backup reference/resource. Time to move my Internet flag to the new place. Onward and upward.

Wednesday, December 14th: blogs and webmail
I’ve been spending the past four days working on bringing my blog back up, mostly resetting, copying and posting images, resetting categories and today trying to get my hosted email account to work. No luck with the email. But they warn that it can 24-hours for the changes to take effect. Where have I heard this before and why does it bother me. So, around 2:30 pm (ET) on Thursday it should all work perfectly. Ack.

Tuesday, December 20th
Going back to add “feature” images to old blog posts and ran into “video pulled for copyright claim”… damn. The internet is not reliable. Surprise.

Tuesday, December 27th: Sometimes Whining Works
That’s right, sometimes whining works, especially on Twitter. A couple days ago I was taking some time to clean up my inbox and working on a bunch of things that hadn’t been working on my blog and ran headlong into a conflict between my flickr widget and my dynamic feature image function and then once I got that working I couldn’t get a plugin called Onswipe that creates a special iPad theme to work. So I did the most constructive thing that I could imagine, I whined on Twitter:

“Frustrated w/ blog,fixed dynamic content display (java script), now onswipe won’t work.If I wanted this much troubleshooting I’d run windows” @jbb

Then within less than a day I got the following message:

@JasonLBaptiste
@jbb hey joe, what’s up? How can we help? j@onswipe.com

So another day later I wrote Jason an email explaining my problem and what I’d been using with my wordpress blog and a bit later got a response with a zip file of an updated version of the plug-in. I’ve been working on the blog today and it’s been mostly good. Onswipe works, but there are some things that don’t quite work.

So, it’s not enough to just complain, but to complain to the anonymous internet! Who knew?

Tuesday, January 3rd: Bloggy Status
So after all of this, what’s the scoop? Godaddy was sacked as my hosting service because they couldn’t deliver on their promised vaunted 4GH service at the beginning of December. I moved to FatCow and they’ve been decent. Moving everything over has been a hassle and took over a month to reset all of the broken links and images. When I dug deep to get conflicting plug-ins to work together I decide to sack my previous expensive theme and go with one simplistic theme that should work across computers and iPads (making getting Onswipe to work with my blog moot). I love StudioPress and might use them for my separate photography and video specific blogs, but it turns out that simpler can be better, hence the move to the MINIMATICA theme by One Designs.

So, the move had nothing to do with SOPA, but I’ve been slowing moving my domains to hover.com for quite a while and the SOPA bullshit has made the decision all the better. My hosting account with godaddy expires in seven days on January 10th. Thus will end five-years of service. Weird that I’d feel funny about that. Thus are the reflections of one who lives so much online.

]]> http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/04/how-i-spent-my-winter-break-why-godaddy-isnt-my-blog-host/feed/ 1 WordPress Theme To the Rescue: Minimatica 1.0.8 by One Designs http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/03/wordpress-theme-to-the-rescue-minimatica-1-0-8-by-one-designs/ http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/03/wordpress-theme-to-the-rescue-minimatica-1-0-8-by-one-designs/#comments Tue, 03 Jan 2012 15:12:37 +0000 jbb http://josephbustillos.com/?p=7570 Found it. A WordPress blog theme that forces me to focus on what I’m trying to accomplish. It has been a long difficult journey since deciding that I needed to do something about my blog hosting around Thanksgiving. I’ll add the frustrating blow-by-blow rendition at the end of this post. I could go back to 2007 to tell this story, but no one would sit through all of that. Suffice it to say that I’ve been on a blogging pilgrimage for quite sometime and what I’ve been looking for has been a platform/theme that would be magazine-like in that with one glance the reader/visitor would be met with the latest stories in an inviting visual fashion. I wanted something that was distinctively different from the list-view offered by most blogs (a la my LiveJournal days!).

In 2007 I found a perfect theme called Revolution that did all the “magazinie-things” and have purchased several of it’s successors since then (most recently themes based on the Genesis framework. During this past Winter break I was trying to get several features working on my blog and came up with the idea that maybe the reason things haven’t been working is because maybe the framework I’m using is too complex and works well, but only if you stay within their limitations. So, I thought that I might need to look around. Yeah, I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on my themes and I was thinking that maybe there might be a free solution.

Looking through the ”newspaper” and “magazine” themes, they all had something to offer, but also a number of compromises. One theme had a great slider option but required that you upload/reset a new “feature” image… What? Why require a new “feature” image when the “feature image” function has been standardized for some time. That was a non-starter. Then I remembered that the big change from the earlier themes was the huge sliding image that new themes presented to the reader/visitor. So I looked up “slider” themes and one popped up called Minimatica and caught my eye because the main screen was a single pane of four half-images in a semi-slider fashion, with no sidebars, multi-panes or any other distractions, just the one window. Brilliant. And it would work perfectly on iPads.

Four posts, that’s it. That forces me to have four posts up front that are worth the reader’s time and effort. And even if one clicks on the links to the categories in the menu, one is then presented with four posts from those categories. It forces me to be much more focused and make categories like featured media and past featured media meaningless. If it’s worth posting it’s worth being on the front page. Archives are listed in a more traditional blog/list view and selected stories get all the full-screen graphic support. I’m really liking this choice. Now I have to just come up with the content worthy of anyone’s time. Back to writing.

Sources:

 

 

]]> http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/03/wordpress-theme-to-the-rescue-minimatica-1-0-8-by-one-designs/feed/ 0 Why Does C/NET Hate Apple? http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/02/why-does-cnet-hate-apple/ http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/02/why-does-cnet-hate-apple/#comments Mon, 02 Jan 2012 16:59:17 +0000 jbb http://josephbustillos.com/?p=7560 I don’t remember what cable channel it was on, but I was so happy to find a future-tech-oriented TV show one day many, many years ago and soon came to appreciate and look for the giant red C/NET logo. That was before Tech-TV, which has come and gone, and before podcasting. These days, I continue to listen to C/NET’s flagship podcast, Buzz Out Loud, not because I’m looking for tech-journalism but because I’m want to know what the haters are thinking about when Apple is in the news.

brian tong and molly wood - image by CNET

Anchored by two very smart and funny tech-observers, Molly Wood and Brian Tong, the once daily podcast seems to have fallen victim to the talk-show radio syndrome where news stories have become launching points for venom and hyperbole. Back when Tom Merritt was part of the crew the balance between news reporting, analysis and rants was well managed, entertaining and worth listening to/watching. The revolving third seat, since Merritt’s departure, has been manned by good people, but all seem to be either too quick to go into rant mode or no one can be found who is strong enough a personality to maintain the news/analysis/rant balance. I’m sure that there are probably constructive reasons for the change, but the reduction of the podcast from daily to weekly isn’t a good sign. And for me, with the rant-a-thon, I can hardly make it through even the weekly sessions.

Case in point, news item: Apple’s Siri voice-service is under scrutiny over it’s apparent aversion to giving info when asked for assistance looking for birth-control. Siri doesn’t seem to have any problem giving assistance when asked for where one can score pot or how to dispose of a body. The latter example, obviously meant to be humorous while the former… well, have you read the Steve Jobs biography? Molly Wood goes into rant mode about Apple’s obvious nanny-mode control issues. Apple had previously responded that it wasn’t a political statement and that, after all, the service is still in Beta. One of Wood’s co-hosts offered that it could have also been a CYA thing, with Apple not wanting to be sued in the future when someone under-age uses Siri to get info and then gets an abortion. Wood wouldn’t have it and called Apple “Beta” explanation bull[shit], and continued the rant. I shut off the podcast and deleted the episode.

What it comes down to is that there’s no one there to pull back on the rants and maintain even the illusion of journalistic balance. It was a little understandable when they were under the pressure of doing a daily tech-news show that they would riff on the headlines and not spend too much time to dig deeper into the stories. And given the ongoing nature of most of the stories and the incomplete record of the events, one does need the analysis. Problem was and is, especially when dealing with anything Apple or Steve Jobs, Wood and Brian Tong always assumed the worst, most controlling, evil motives. To their credit they’ve earned their skepticism over Apple’s motives. Wood has seen how Apple marketing has been savage in their pandering and mistreatment of the press and Tong worked for Apple in the early years of the Apple Stores (which I guess qualifies one for … wounds). Alas, having been poorly treated by individuals or organizations… well, if one is going to be a journalist one needs to rise above it. Where’s the objectivity when one automatically goes for the “evil” reason. I’m not saying that one shouldn’t be skeptical and just buy the marketing fluff, but there is a middle ground that C/NET and Buzz Out Loud seem to have lost a long time ago.

Sources:

]]> http://josephbustillos.com/2012/01/02/why-does-cnet-hate-apple/feed/ 0 Microsoft’s TellMe vs. Apple’s Siri http://josephbustillos.com/2011/12/12/microsofts-tellme-vs-apples-siri/ http://josephbustillos.com/2011/12/12/microsofts-tellme-vs-apples-siri/#comments Mon, 12 Dec 2011 22:12:50 +0000 jbb http://josephbustillos.com/?p=6741

Uploaded by techaudottv on Nov 24, 2011
Video comparison between Microsoftt’s Tellme and Apple’s Siri. The results speak for themselves.

More than 1 Million views!! more than 2,000 comments. You guys are certainly opinonated.

I wonder how many of you read the post wrapped around this video? http://www.techau.tv/blog/microsoft-tellme-is-not-the-same-as-siri-video/

]]> http://josephbustillos.com/2011/12/12/microsofts-tellme-vs-apples-siri/feed/ 0 One Last Thing: The PBS Steve Jobs videos http://josephbustillos.com/2011/11/23/one-last-thing-the-pbs-steve-jobs-videos/ http://josephbustillos.com/2011/11/23/one-last-thing-the-pbs-steve-jobs-videos/#comments Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:00:50 +0000 jbb http://joebustillos.com/?p=6286 I know that I’m venturing dangerously close to Steve Jobs Biography overload, with my last number of blog posts being related to the passing of Steve Jobs and the subsequent publication of his authorized biography… but as I was going through my sources I found the following two PBS documentaries. The first covered familiar territory previously shared in Cringley’s mini-series Triumph of the Nerds (with Cringley making frequent apparences in the “One Last Thing” video). The second documentary was an unedited interview from 1990 when Jobs was still in exile from Apple and working at NExT. Enjoy.

Watch Steve Jobs: One Last Thing on PBS. See more from STEVE JOBS – ONE LAST THING.

Watch An Interview With Steve Jobs on PBS. See more from NOVA.

]]> http://josephbustillos.com/2011/11/23/one-last-thing-the-pbs-steve-jobs-videos/feed/ 0 Eric Whitacre: A virtual choir 2,000 voices strong [TED talk] http://josephbustillos.com/2011/11/22/eric-whitacre-a-virtual-choir-2000-voices-strong-ted-talk/ http://josephbustillos.com/2011/11/22/eric-whitacre-a-virtual-choir-2000-voices-strong-ted-talk/#comments Tue, 22 Nov 2011 15:00:33 +0000 jbb http://joebustillos.com/?p=6133 At TEDx Orlando 2011 we were shown the following video/TED talk by Eric Whitacre. I’ve been working in online education for over three years and earned my master’s degree and worked on a doctorate online, I know how powerful the connections can be. Far from being a weak substitute for “being there,” there is a powerful “being there” that we apparently take for grant when together that is all the more precious when our only connection is via youtube video and scrolling text. As Whitacre hints at in his TED talk, we make it work. The beauty of these thousands of voices, joined in spirit though spread across the world speaks to the power we have to connect and sing with thunderous passions and careful dignity. Enjoy.

The following two videos are from Whitacre’s intro to the project and a finished version:

]]> http://josephbustillos.com/2011/11/22/eric-whitacre-a-virtual-choir-2000-voices-strong-ted-talk/feed/ 0