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

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 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:

• image: Image: ddpavumba / FreeDigitalPhotos.net retrieved 1/13/2012.
• image: The Time Management Matrix by Stephen Covey from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, (c) 1989/2004.
• image: MM900234754.GIF, microsoft clipart, http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/results.aspx?ex=2&qu=email#ai:MM900234754|mt:3| retrieved 1/13/2012.
• Video Podcast: A World Without Email, Net@Night, episode 204, http://twit.tv/show/netnight-amber-and-leo/204 retrieved 1/13/2012. 
• Blog post: Reflections from 2011 – A World Without Email – The Documentary by Luis Suarez, http://www.elsua.net/2012/01/06/reflections-from-2011-a-world-without-email-the-documentary/ retrieved 1/13/2012 

Uploaded by imetthewalrus on Jun 17, 2008
In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced him to do an interview. 38 years later, Levitan, director Josh Raskin and illustrators James Braithwaite and Alex Kurina have collaborated to create an animated short film using the original interview recording as the soundtrack. A spellbinding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit and timeless message, I Met the Walrus was nominated for the 2008 Academy Award for Animated Short and won the 2009 Emmy for ‘New Approaches’ (making it the first film to win an Emmy on behalf of the internet).
Category: Documentary Animation & Cartoons The Screening Room
Starring:
Jerry Levitan John Lennon
Directed by:
Josh Raskin
Produced by:
Jerry Levitan
Written by:
Josh Raskin

Uploaded by 13640 on Apr 22, 2007
John Lennon and his wife Yoko

Whereas “Imagine” evokes nostalgia and some sadness at what the world lost when Lennon was murdered, this next version of Lennon’s “Merry Xmas” calls us to task at how little we’ve accomplished in fulfilling the message of Christmas, that the world should not be the playground of the powerful stomping on the weak. We have so much to fix and undo…

Uploaded by johnlennon on Aug 24, 2010
The Official video for John Lennon ‘Merry Xmas (War Is Over)’

Sources:
I Met The Walrus: Lennon’s Brain Animated by Maria Popova, http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2008/11/21/jerry-levitan-i-met-the-walrus/ retrieved 01-13-2012.

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.

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:

• Buzz Out Loud 1568: That’s just the Google Maps guy, ignore him. http://www.cnet.com/8301-19709_1-57334959-10/buzz-out-loud-1568-thats-just-the-google-maps-guy-ignore-him-podcast/ retrieved 12-30-2011.
• Petition To Correct Siri’s Apparent Anti-Abortion Bias Collects Nearly 30,000 Signatures by Laura Bassett/Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/01/siri-abortion-petition_n_1124281.html retrieved 12/30/2011.

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/

I was there in 1974 when the “Jesus Movement” hit Southern California. I heard about Chuck Smith and Calvary Chapel, the first of Frisbee’s two mentors. But by the time I was old enough to venture to Costa Mesa the scene had changed and I was busy learning from the Jesuits and Catholic Charismatics at Loyola Marymount University in West Los Angeles.

Vineyard Long Beach worship team, by Joe Bustillos, circa January 2006

It would be another 30-year, while I was playing with a worship band in Long Beach, when I began to hear the stories about a non-conventional personality who had been there in the beginning. A friend talked about this crazy guy who led huge revival meetings in Long Beach, but then faded from history. I didn’t think much about the stories until I happened across the documentary, Frisbee: The Life And Death Of A Hippie Preacher, on PBS one late night many years later.

My friend was right: Frisbee was one unconventional dude… but then it was the late 60s/70s, a most unconventional time. I’m reminded of the child’s book, The Clown of God by Tomie dePaola, when I think about Frisbee’s story. I can tell you that nothing is as clean or perfect as the church folks would want you to believe. However one might feel about miracles and whether God did miracles through Frisbee, I have no doubts that Chuck Smith or John Wimber (the second pastor to “employ” Frisbee) or Frisbee himself believe that God was using Frisbee to so “something great” through him. That Smith and Wimber made a calculated choice to use Frisbee’s anointing to promote their ministries was also pretty obvious. Alas, unlike The Clown of God, this one is a tragic story, one by which it would seem that God anointed a young man to do something miraculous, but a young man with the one flaw that traditional Christianity and his mentors could not accept. Lonnie Frisbee was gay.

Chuck Smith one time said from the pulpit that maybe God left the fossil record to fool scientists and the like. I rejected that notion because it would make God out to be a deliberate deceiver. That the pride of men can allow for us to be deceived or more often to deceive ourselves is one thing, but for God to deliberately do such a thing kind of goes against the notion that God is the embodiment of Truth. But then given the contradictory elements of this sad take, maybe God is a trickster, like Anansi in the West African tales. I mean, He picked a young man to do great things, but then to confound those who would naturally recognize Frisbee’s anointing He complicated the story by selecting a young man who was physically attracted to other young men. Here was someone who spread the New Testament grace of God’s forgiveness and then, in a very Old Testament manner, was struck down much too young by AIDs. So sad. Even at his funeral, the Trickster might have transpired to show that the mentors didn’t get it, when Chuck Smith spoke and equated Frisbee with the Old Testament story of Samson, lamenting that Frisbee could have done so much more if he had just not given in to his homosexuality. Smith and Wimber and others wanted to be a part of what God seemed to have done through Frisbee but they tired and then dismissed the man when they couldn’t control him.

And then to add insult to injury, Frisbee’s role in the early Calvary Chapel and Vineyard Church movements was either minimized or almost completely missing (In The Radical Middle Frisbee is mentioned by name by the author, but when he quotes Wimber Frisbee is referred to as “the young preacher”). Let’s just say that I attended various Calvary Chapels and Vineyard Churches for over twenty-year but had never heard Frisbee’s story until the mid-2000s from my worship leader/buddy. Not good. So, for all of my prior whining, I’m glad that I wasn’t mentored in that fashion and that I had to make my way in the world, learning what I could without someone’s restrictive and destructive theology limiting my explorations. Lonnie Frisbee, Hippie Preacher, RIP.

Sources:

• Lonnie Frisbee Project, http://www.lonniefrisbee.com/ retrieved on 11/1/4/2011
• Lonnie Frisbee, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonnie_Frisbee retrieved 11/14/2011
• video: Frisbee – The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher Trailer – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv3O8SseOio retrieved 11/14/2011
• John Wimber, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wimber retrieved 11/14/2011.
• Chuck Smith, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Smith_(pastor) retrieved 11/14/2011.
• image: Vineyard Long Beach worship team, by Joe Bustillos, circa January 2006
• amazon link: The Clown of God by Tomie dePaola
• amazon link: The Quest for the Radical Middle: A History of the Vineyard by Bill Jackson.

A link showed up in my twitter-stream to a website dedicated to the belief that they got ripped off attending the university where I teach. It was more than a tad depressing to have my university called a diploma mill or that it’s accredited by the same organization that accredits dog grooming schools. I’d say that the person behind the website was one unhappy customer/client/former-student. I wish that I could say that this was a new experience but we’ve had a few students… former student go-postal on their Facebook pages. Thus, I normally wouldn’t waste energy on the disgruntled rantings of an unhappy former-student, but the added one-two-three combo of this website and the call for greater government scrutiny on for-profit universities recruiting practices plus the $100,000 challenge from a silicon valley millionaire questioning the value of college challenged me to also ask: What are you getting for your college education dollar?

To start with, what follows are my own observations as an educator (K-8 & university) and lifelong student and does not represent anyone’s official opinions about anything. Okay, that out of the way, anyone who tries to reduce a college education to post-college Benjamins is going to be sorely disappointed because a “satisfied life” cannot be reduced to Benjamins. Period. I have long held the belief that a college education in the early part of the previous century was meant for the rich and the upper-middle class, to give their young men (and women) greater experiences of the larger world that they would later apply to helping with the family empire/business. After World War II and the G.I. Bill the possibility of a college education became much more universal. And as with many things in the 1960s to 1980s, somehow the possibility became an imperative and instead of being an option for the ambitious became the destination for those trying to find themselves. The traditional university as the road to riches lost its historic moorings and started to believe its own PR.

Image: smokedsalmon / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I began my college experiences in the mid-1970s and as the son of Latino working-class parents I was lucky enough to benefit from the belief that there weren’t enough Latinos pursuing college degrees. This gave me access to scholarships and student loans that helped me as I earned my three college degrees and worked toward my doctorate. It might not have seemed fair to some that I benefitted from the under-representation of my heritage, but my mom always said that one must take advantage of any opportunity life presents, understanding that luck might open the door but it’s going to take hard work to see things through. So I looked at my own experience as one I was lucky enough to have had, by no means something I was entitled to and not something that was meant to make me rich somehow. The latter fact didn’t always translate well for some.

One weekend when visiting the folks during my sophomore year at Loyola Marymount University my dad sat me down, put the LA Times in front of me and told me that I wasn’t to get up until I had circled all of the jobs in the Wanted section that I was qualified to do with my one-year-plus of university. He meant well, but didn’t understand when I tried to explain that it doesn’t work that way. It probably didn’t help that I was a Religious Studies major at a Catholic university and my Christianity of choice was with the other guys, Protestantism. On many levels this didn’t make any sense to my folks. If college isn’t something connected with getting a better job, then what’s the point?

Well, this isn’t meant to be a smart ass answer, but I guess it depends on where you are at life, what your educational objectives are and what options are open to you. The answer is very different for an 18-year-old with no responsibilities, no obvious skills or gifts but an unconfessed fantasy to be a rock star (not me!) versus a 30-something single mom who likes to paint versus a newly unemployed 40-something journalist from a small-town paper. And reducing the equation to just money cuts one off from countless possible options. In fact the first thing to consider is that one does have options and that the goal has to be something more meaningful than what is easy and what is going to get one the big bucks. Add to that, one has to realize that there is no one answer for any of us.

Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I had one friend I was jealous of because he cruised straight through university as an accounting major, landed a solid job right out of college and married the boss’s daughter. Then out of nowhere, he quit his job and opened a mattress retail business with his wife (also an accounting graduate) running the back office while he sold mattresses to OC folks who weren’t happy with their sleeping situation. Switching from a name-brand accounting firm to running a retail establishment wasn’t anything that I could have anticipated, but in the end he was happy and seemed to be on solid ground. Conversely, I’ve known my fair share of undergrads who drifted in and out of several majors before they looked at their transcripts late in the game and selected a degree program based on what would require the fewest additional units for them to graduate. Surprise, they ended up with a degree in something completely unrelated to anything they cared about, much less loved. So, one should not be hindered by the thought that there can only be one path. Additionally, the straight line isn’t always the quickest one to one’s goal. There’s also the part where one should not expect to get out of an experience beyond what one is willing to put into it.

I sat in a classroom for one of my teacher training credential courses at an expensive private university and the instructor had set things up so that a few of us would give presentations on language acquisition issues every class session, until everyone in the course had done a presentation. Consequently very little time was spent with the professor doing any lecturing. At one point, when the professor wasn’t in the room, a student loudly complained that we were all doing the work and that the professor wasn’t doing anything. How was this worth the thousands of dollars we were spending taking this class if we’re doing all of the work, she demanded. Not that she was actually interested in any attempt at an answer, but by this time I fully understood that it wasn’t about sitting in on lectures, but what happens beyond the lectures. A good college education is a combination of passionate educators who have pulled together powerful and timely curriculum and engaged learners working together to synthesize the curriculum into their own practices and understanding, in the end adding to it as the learning is passed forward to the next generation. What is generally missed by those bitching about getting ripped off by their institution is that one generally gets what they put into the endeavor. It’s not enough to have the best in the industry as instructors using cutting edge techniques and equipment if the students are just going through the motions. There is a great burden on instructors to strive to pull out the best and inspire their students, but ultimately it is a partnership between instructors and students that will make a difference. It’s too easy for instructors AND students to blame each other for a less than satisfying experience. It’s a combined effort and if all parties have been hard at it but are finding no fruit then it’s time to move on. Period.

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It’s good that college recruiters are held accountable for what they promise, but this is true all around whether one is looking at traditional universities or at for-profit institutions. Let the buyer (student) be ware. But also one has to let go of the idea that it’s the institution’s or it’s staff’s responsibility to turn undisciplined teenagers into solid academics or award winning artists. It’s a partnership that demands from both parties. I’ve attended five private colleges and universities and one state university and there was not a perfect one in the whole bunch. But when I was there I was inspired to learn and push myself harder than anyone would have expected from me. Don’t be fooled into thinking that the only way to a better life is through a college education. But if you do have the chance to spend time learning something you care about deeply from the best in the field, grab it and make it part of your life story. At the same time don’t buy the line that the only way out is by paying big bucks to some institution that will give you a piece of paper and that will magically lead to the land of riches. The piece of paper is just a symbol of what you have accomplished and mastered while at the institution. What will get you the job is what you can do and the expertise and passion that you uniquely bring to the effort.

It’s a mistake to expect a college education to be one’s economic panacea. It’s also a mistake to discount the opportunities presented with a college education as a frivolous waste of time and money. Some learn the lessons of life despite the college curriculum and some have to retake the courses over and over again before it starts to make sense. Some wear the cap and gown but never graduate and some graduate long before their courses are complete. And some never get it.

At one point in my journey I made a lot more money working for the phone company than I did as an educator. And if it had just been about money then I wouldn’t have quit the phone company job to teach 6th graders in Hawaiian Gardens, making half the pay for twice the work. But like my university experiences, teaching pushed me and made me a better person for the effort. And my time with the phone company had made me a trouble-shooter, not hindered by the “way things are done” when it came to my classroom. So, it wasn’t the straight-line or the big bucks, but I got something from every experience. I’m proud of all of the institutions and experiences and I cannot imagine my journey without the years spent challenging and being challenged by my professors, colleagues and eventually, my own students. It’s sour-grapes and childish to blame the institution. But this isn’t to say that there aren’t those out there looking to take your educational dollars with less than honest intentions. It’s important to choose wisely, like anything else that you might spend tens of thousands of dollars on. You shouldn’t need a college education to figure that one out. Well, most shouldn’t.

Resources:

• College Montage by Joe Bustillos. Source files: (top, left to right) http://pastriesandbacon.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/side-note-its-gym-time-baby/, http://buzznet.com/~13d1747, http://theskyisbig.blogspot.com/2011/01/fuller-seminary-library-at-sunset.html, http://www.akahmai.com/blog/?p=1284, http://calstate.fullerton.edu/news/2009/014-us-news-world-report-ranking.html, http://www.squidoo.com/biola-university?utm_source=google&utm_medium=imgres&utm_campaign=framebuster, Retrieved 11/04/2011.
• For-profit colleges under fire over unpaid loans – Houston Chronicle, http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/For-profit-colleges-under-fire-over-unpaid-loans-1702408.php, retrieved 11/4/2011.
• PayPal Co-Founder Hands Out $100,000 Fellowships To Not Go To College : The Two-Way : NPR, http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/05/25/136646918/paypal-co-founder-hands-out-100-000-fellowships-to-not-go-to-college?sc=fb&cc=fp retrieved 11/4/2011.
• FRONTLINE: College, Inc. 01/04, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJSPkXiVDhE&feature=youtube_gdata_player retrieved 11/4/2011.
• For-Profit Colleges Under Fire – CBS News Video, http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6838088n retrieved 11/4/2011.
• Thiel Fellowship Pays 24 Talented Students $100,000 Not to Attend College – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com/article/Thiel-Fellowship-Pays-24/127622/ retrieved 11/4/2011.
• Is a College Education Worth It? – FilEntrep: The Millionaire Mindset!, http://filentrep.com/is-a-college-education-worth-it retrieved 11/4/2011.
• PayPal Co-Founder Gives Out $100,000 To Not Go To College – Slashdot, http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/26/1322248/paypal-co-founder-gives-out-100000-to-not-go-to-college retrieved 11/4/2011.
• Image: smokedsalmon / FreeDigitalPhotos.net, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=2038 retrieved 11/4/2011.
• Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=1152
• Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=659 retrieved 11/4/2011.

When I first heard about iCloud’s photostreaming feature I was really hoping that I’d finally have a much better workflow for my photos than being tied to my iPhoto library that was getting much too big for my little macbook air’s little SSD. Sure enough, once I got my macbook air, 27-inch iMac, iPhone and iPad all on iCloud photos taken on my iPhone started magically showing up on all the other devices, just like Apple had promised. Yay! I started imagining that, with all devices being synced, I could just choose the best place to edit and organize my collection and the results would flow across to all the other devices. Well, the images flowed okay.

I started with an image of a restaurant menu from a favorite sushi place using my iPhone’s HD setting, which meant that the iPhone produced two images automatically. Then once I had the images on my iPad I decided to rotate it so that the words were in proper orientation. I did it to both versions of the image. Okay. Now out of the four images I wanted to keep one and toss the other three, but there was no delete option for any of the four images hosted on the photostream. Um… yeah, not good.

Getting images effortlessly flowing from camera (phone) to any connected device is good, not being able to toss any image posted in the photostream is completely flawed. I come from the school where one might easily take 300 images to come up with three decent ones. Granted I’ve been know to post 100 of the 300 images on my flickr photostream but even then I’m deciding what images to post and which ones to toss. It just seemed inconceivable that one is forced to keep any image that gets on one’s iCloud photostream and the only way to pull one down is the pull all of them down (AKA disable photostream) or to wait for the undesired image to be the 1001st image. What?

Then, when I was experimenting with the iCloud photostream I made an event folder in iPhoto and added some images off of the stream and now the name of my stream seems to be connected to this event folder. Ugh. I’m afraid to add any of my pre-stream images from my iphoto library to the stream. At the moment it seems to distinguish between photos saved in the photostream and photos saved locally (on the “camera roll” on the iDevice), but does that mean the same images in both places are being saved twice. And when I organize my photos on my macs in folders (by events), will that organization get lost in the stream if I drop the photos back into the stream. The lack of controls makes me wonder. I mean, I wonder if the only way to organize my photos and share the organization back to my iPad and iPhone is to hook the devices back to a host Mac. Ugh. This is definitely a version 1.0 product.

I was able to find several video tutorials on YouTube about how to “delete photos” from photostream (one example listed below), but they were all about temporarily disabling photostream on all devices, then deleting all photos on the photostream and resuming using photostream… Not the workflow that i’m looking for. Damn.

resources:

• photostream screen grab by joe bustillos, http://joebustillos.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/2011-10-27-photostream.jpg retrieved 10/29/2011.
• iCloud logo by Apple Inc., http://www.apple.com/icloud/ retrieved 10/29/2011.
• “Photostream Your Photos on All Your Devices” by Apple Inc., http://www.apple.com/icloud/ retrieved 10/29/2011.
• Delete Photos from Photo Stream in iCloud – iOS 5 [LONG VERSION] by docrock808, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MRhMtBeCkQ retrieved 10/29/2011.

Sources:

• Microsoft ribs Google’s tech with “Gmail Man,” by Josh Lowensohn, http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20085072-75/microsoft-ribs-googles-ad-tech-with-gmail-man/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20 retrieved 7/30/2011.
• Gmail posts intervention tool to wrangle non-users, by Josh Lowensohn, http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20084396-93/gmail-posts-intervention-tool-to-wrangle-non-users/?tag=mncol;txt retrieved on 7/30/2011.

So, the deal is that when the DVD is finished burning and spits out the burned disk DO NOT click the DONE button. Take out the burned disk and slide in the new disk to be burned. If you click DONE you are telling iDVD to reset for the next project. Ack!

This reminds me of the word/color game where they quick flash the names of colors in front of you, requiring your to say the name of the color but the word is printed in a different color so you have to stop the visual cue and go with the literal word. It think they think they simplified the process so that it does not require a button click, just drop in the new disk and go. But if you’re done, click DONE. Alas, we’ve all been trained to respond to pop-up windows by clicking on the button, without reading what the button says. Oops. Wow, even Apple can get UI wrong. jbb

Unmotivated Students are easy to find in most American Public High Schools today. Action needs to be taken to motivate those students. In this video i show some of my unmotivated students. Then propose some Challenge Based Research to motivate these students.

Then the years began to slip by and the world continued, such as it was, some years not so great and other years pretty good. I know that Chuck Smith and others continued to talk about these being the Last Days, but we started growing up and having families and setting different priorities than our own personal salvation. It wasn’t that the world had change as much as that my relationship to it and to life had changed. I began to see each year as a gift and my friends as connections, instead of as sinners in need of salvation. Salvation was what we did with each day, accepting the challenges and set-backs and looking for the best in ourselves and bring it out in our neighbors. I didn’t know any better as a teenager and young person, to not know that the world is a pretty big place and that living in fear of Divine judgment or the anxious expectation of Divine intervention wasn’t a very constructive way to live one’s life. It sadden’s me that an 89-year-old former engineer hasn’t figure that out.

Worse than that Harold Camping, president of Family Radio and chief proponent of the May 21st Rapture Date, is changing the course of many, many lives with his numerological nonsense. There’s the couple, Adrienne & Joel Martinez, quoted in the NPR article, saying that they quit their jobs and moved here to Orlando to spend the last days handing out pamphlets, reading their bible and spending time with their two-year-old. And they say that they have just enough money to get to May 21st and none should there be a next day for them. Oh and Adrienne is pregnant with a little one that’s set to arrive in June. Camping has lived his life and when May 22nd comes he’ll come up with another reason why his calculations were off (he previously predicted the Rapture for September 6, 1994). The Martinez family and possibly hundreds of others will probably have a bigger problem to deal with.

Imagine how different the world would be if all of this energy spent on ripping families apart, moving to different cities and days spent on the streets harassing strangers with a false gospel of fear and foolishness; what if that energy was spent on getting to know our neighbors and listening to them when they are lonely or sharing a meal with them when they are hungry, how different would the world be. Too bad Camping hasn’t used his numerology and wealth to feed the hungry, clothe the needy and visit those in dire straits. Maybe, instead of counting the years in books that know nothing of the Gregorian calendar, he should have read what was in the books, the stories about compassion and mercy and love. Engineers [sigh]. I’ve heard whispers on Twitter from some jokesters who are planning on Saturday to leave articles of clothing all over their cities for the laughs. This isn’t funny. That people would buy this stuff and leave their jobs, homes and families, speaks to level of their needs to be loved and heard. This is, in fact, something that we all need. Jesus was all about meeting people at that level. Too bad nobody listened to him until he was killed. Too bad these troubled seekers aren’t listening to him right now (in that he said quite plainly that no one knows the day or the hour of his return). We could all use with strong dose of compassion and connection right about now. May 21st be damned, the only day that counts is the one you are living right now.

Sources:
Is The End Nigh? We’ll Know Soon Enough by BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY, http://www.npr.org/2011/05/07/136053462/is-the-end-nigh-well-know-soon-enough?ps=cprs, retrieved May 19th, 2011.

Believers Sound The Alarm: Judgment Day Is May 21, NPR Talk of the Nation,
http://www.npr.org/2011/05/18/136432488/believers-sound-the-alarm-judgment-day-is-may-21, retrieved May 19th, 2011.

I don’t know if this governor expected such a huge backlash and just assumed that the unions would take it lying down. So let me say it plainly, this isn’t about balancing a budget as much as political bullshit. Fix the problems. The unions have shown that they will work with you, if you actually had a working plan. Here’s the link to the NPR story: The Long-Term Effect Of Wisconsin’s Union Battles.

WI “Budget Repair Bill” Protest (Feb 20-24?) Pt. 3 from Matt Wisniewski on Vimeo.

We are peaceful. We will stay peaceful.

Around four days of footage (Feb 20-24?) from Madison, WI protest against the SB11 “budget repair bill.”

You can see all the amazing emails I’ve been receiving from people all over the country here: www.mgwisni.posterous.com/​

Mgwisniphoto@gmail.com If you would like to embed the video somewhere, please email me. Please keep sending me encouraging emails of support from wherever you are.

Job’s ended his keynote introducing the iPad 2 on Wednesday saying, “technology alone is not enough, that it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.” It’s an important point that gets missed in all the noise and hype and features lists from all the tablet PCs introduced over the past year and going back over ten years. My first thought was whether this was something that might meet the needs of my 80-year-old mom in Arizona. See, my mom cares nothing for the latest or greatest, but to her computers have pretty much not been worth the effort since I set her up with one of my hand-me-down PCs about 14-years ago. All she does is email and occasionally attempt to print out photos for her children and grandchildren, so you’d think that that wouldn’t be a big deal. But like I said, it’s been largely a missed opportunity for her.

Having watched her pattern of usage (or the lack thereof) over the years I’m anxious to see if the iPad (version 2) can meet her needs in a way that other PCs have not (including the mac mini she currently has). It comes down to down to three basic ideas:

1. Reliability/Simple UI
2. Usable-in-any-room
3. Value-Add/Worth the effort

Reliability/Simple UI

It’s a mistake that almost every geek makes when they decide to pass on their older systems to siblings and elders, to assume that because the siblings’ and elders’ needs are less complicated that a hand-me-down system will do. The problem with this assumption is that those of us who use computers every day for hours on end for years on end have no idea how much we put up with when it comes to tech-troubles. We’re unaware of what a pain in the ass technology tends to be. We’ve been doing it for so long that it doesn’t even consciously register for most of us anymore. Such is not the case if the recipient of our hand-me-down gear is a tech novice or tech phobic. Every unexpected beep or boop is another excuse not to use the thing or requires a tech-support call to yours truly. So, the computer has to be rock-solid, uncomplicated, with the simplest UI (user interface) possible and still get the job done.

For my mom that meant getting her off of the hand-me-down PCs and buying her a mac-mini. That solved most of the reliability problems but there have been some UI problems because she got used to the PC way of doing things. And since I’ve moved to Florida mom’s main tech-helper, my older sister, is a PC-die-hard and her “fixes” have tended to leave mom confused about what she did wrong. Consequently, when mom runs into problems it “encourages” her to just not use the thing. That would be a FAIL.

When I was visiting over Christmas I showed her my iPad, but couldn’t really get her to play with the thing. Taking on learning a new device is very much like learning a new language and one cannot learn a new language over a weekend. So, as intuitive as the device may be and there are few computing devices as intuitive as the iPad, it still requires using it enough to get over whatever learning trauma one may have had at the hands of previous computer platforms. So we have to free the usage of the device from former habit of where and how we used to use our computers.

Usable-in-any-room

My mom has a computer room set up in one of the spare bedrooms. I have no real idea how frequently she might go there to check her email but I do know that when it doesn’t work it’s a simple matter of just ignoring the room until one of us asks her if she got our last message. So, how about we reverse the pattern and instead of her visiting the computer room every once in a great wall, let’s take the “computer” and have it on the couch where she spends most of her evenings, or the kitchen table where dad reads his paper every morning. Let’s make her routine of checking email be as easy as picking up a book and catching up where one left off.

She could accomplish the “usable-in-any-room” requirement with any laptop, netbook or tablet. But remember the objective is to keep things simple enough that her focus isn’t on learning how to use computers as much as not thinking about the device and just checking emails or photos of her kids and grandkids. Besides, having a 10-hour battery life, which few other devices offer, really makes the thing something that one can spent time with in any room at any time.

Value-Add/Worth the effort

As much as it might seem to those who know me that I get all of the latest tech because I’m in dire need of a 12-step program, I think long and hard about how all of the pieces need to work together and whether it’s worth it to me given the expense. So, I have no expectation that anyone should use this stuff unless there’s a real reason that’s important enough for them to make the effort. That’s been part of my frustration with how technology hasn’t met my mom’s relatively simple needs.

One thing that I’m keenly aware of, living across the country from my family, is how much better it is whenever we’ve used our iSight cameras and I’ve called in to some family event on the West Coast and had conversations with these faces that I’ve known all of my life. It’s so much better than being on the phone getting passed around the room, a peripheral voice that’s not really part of what’s happening. Alas, prior video-phone “solutions” have been way too complicated, requiring there be geeks on both ends of the call to set things up. For me, and I’m hoping mom, FaceTime and the built in cameras are the killer app for iPad 2. I mean, if we can’t have jet-cars, the least we can do is easily connect with our loved one across the world with a simple click on the FaceTime button and then be speaking with a familiar face.

March 11

There are enough changes from version 1 to version 2 that I will probably get one for myself, but I’m going to get one for mom first. I know that I’m probably going to have to do some instructional videos for her first, just to get her up to speed, but that is part of the fun of what I do. I spend a lot of time knocking these things around and separating the wheat from the chaff (and believe me, there’s a lot of chaff), and finding the stuff worthy of sharing with those whom I care about (and will have to do tech support with, if I get it wrong… ack!). It’s great when one can see the human potential beyond the technology in one’s hands.

Why do we do what we do? Some might respond that asking such questions is a typical first-world problem, that it’s the modern equivalent to trying to figure out how many angels can dance on the head because with so many people going hungry in the world and in our own country, how dare we waste time entertaining such things as “motivation.” It should be pretty damn clear that we do what we do so that we can feed ourselves and our families and keep out the dangers of the outer world. It’s all about higher and higher levels of survival. Once you have enough bread for the day, then you need to make sure that you have enough bread for the week and then once you have that you need to make sure that you never go without having enough bread. But can one ever have enough bread?

During 1980s and early 1990s I worked for a local telco as a well-paid technician. We worked in a union-shop so whenever we worked overtime we got time-and-a-half and if we worked enough over-time early in the week we could reach double-time. With construction booming in Southern California there was a lot of over-time to be had. I noticed that the technicians who were the best at what they did liked getting the over-time pay but were motivated to do the quality job that they did because they liked fixing problems and liked being good at it. The technicians who were just about getting the over-time pay rarely were the ones one could count on to get the job done right the first time. In fact, for all of the time they put in, they could be guaranteed as spending most of their time avoiding work. And neither group like having management breathing down their necks, telling them what to do at every turn. Even the self-motivated ones would let things slip through the cracks because micro-managing stole their incentive to do better. Just like the video said, getting properly compensated helped, but it was no guarantee that the job would get done. When I left the phone company to go teach we were working so much overtime that it was almost a 50% cut in pay for me to leave. And even much later when I left California to come to Florida I took another huge cut in pay. One has to make a living and should be able to do so without resorting to endless part-time gigs, but it’s not about the pay. It’s unfortunate that it’s generally only highly funded companies like Google, where they have a 20% time policy where employees can work on personal projects for 20% of their on-job time, where they explore such things as “motivation.” Too bad.