Category Archives: /dev/null

random stuff, without categories

Blogitus Interruptus

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Sorry for the lack of blaaawgifying the past couple of days, I was in a Bob Pike Bootcamp for work the last two days, and was totally wiped by the time I got back home.

But, you might say, didn’t you just get done doing that whole Bob Pike thing.

Uh yuop! you are correct, sir.

The powers that be would like our whole department to be certifiable certified Participant-Centered Facilitators (or some such series of initials), and the pre-requisite requirement for such a certification is to take the Bootcamp, have advanced training, take an assessment and have a classroom facilitation observed and assessed.  I’m doing the steps in a cha-cha-cha fashion, in that the advanced training took place before the bootcamp.

So the last two days were like remedial training for the event that took place two-weeks ago (oh and I took the test already too, scored 90% on it too!)

The training was repetitious for me, but fresh, new and exciting for the other participants, which made it fun for me.  Which is really one of the benefits of a participant-centered (PC) approach.  In a PC classroom, an experienced practitioner of the topic is treated as a resource, instead of a member of the audience.  The acolytes can tap into the experience and knowledge of the more experienced.  It works the other way as well, the vim and vigor of the fresh young faces, refreshes the tired old soldiers into rethinking/reshaping the worn-in pathways of the veteran.

Think about that approach, next time your involved in a class that expects you to sit in your seat and listen, until the time for questions come.  Or wants to by-pass your experiences in order to trot out the speakers talking points.  The PC approach is more than capable of providing a structure for getting those points across, it does so in a manner that honors the participant, and respects his experience.

I’ll have more to share in a few more posts, perhaps giving y’all a way to put participant-centered into your vocabulary, and change the way you share your knowledge with others.

Long Weekend… and Happy Birthday…

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Well since Saturday, we’ve done the church thing (taught SS, brought breakfast) had lunch with friends.

I spent Sunday evening picking my Fantasy Football team:

Lost Numbers Helmet

The Lost Numbers

  • QB – Carson Plamer
  • RB – Brain Westbrook
  • RB – Willis McGahee
  • WR – Hines Ward
  • WR – Donald Driver
  • WR – Rod Smith
  • K – David Akers
  • DEF – Seattle
  • B QB – Drew Beldsoe
  • B WR – Lav. Coles
  • B RB – Kevin Barlow
  • B WR – Nate Burelson

Then the rain came, so Monday wasn’t the last day at the pool, but rather hide out at home while the Woman shopped. Patched up Danny’s leg where his bike bit him, and then went to bed early come Monday night.

See there wasn’t much blogability there… but Matt… (or really Debbi) has a frightening story to tell.

XP-Vista-Tiger-Edgy

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A couple of things on Digg

Windows Vista Versus XP Pricing

and

Ubuntu Edgy Eft Knot 2 Is Out

While everyone else has to decide whether or not to shell out their cash to Microsoft (which, I’m not knocking, from many aspects the decision to go Microsoft is a good decision) I’ll be hapily using Ubuntu (free!)  (DISCLAIMER: Edgy is the development version, it won’t be ready for prime time until October)

One of the things I like about Ubuntu, is that it is constantly under development.  I started using Dapper (the current stable/supported version) when it was in development, and I just recently shifted over to Edgy (a couple of random commands, and the operating system upgraded itself) and I continue to get new packages daily as the developers work on the system.  I ‘contribute’ back to the community by submitting bug-reports and participating in the Community Forums.

As to the discussion in the XP pricing document has it compared to the pricing for OSX.   I’ll just remind people that Ubuntu can be run on both Apple architectures, and has even added Sun’s Sparc to its line of compatible processors.

Gig’em Horns!!!

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or something like that…

Blogging will be light this afternoon and evening (I know… I know, why should today be any different) as the family ventures to Blogospeer Central for a get-together-geek-out-bbq-feast-football extravaganza.

I’m slowly being surrounded by Aggies, last night we ate hot-wings and played board games with our new pals, Michael and Natalie and their sweet young boys. Food was delicious and we had a good time playing balderdash and compatibility. We are trying the ‘power of the pack‘ with toddlers, since their boys seem to act nice and peaceful when they are around our large brood. We sent one of our pack leaders, Brenna, to a friends house for the night, so the rehabilitation may have been limited. Here at Casa de Stueve, we rehabilitate toddlers and train parents. *guffaw*
Another reason for light blogging, I’m teaching Sunday School in the morning, so I need to finish prepping for that, and get organized so we can get out the door early in the morning. We are also on tap to bring breakfast so I need to get prepped for that.

But looking forward to an afternoon geek-out, BBQ and Aggie Football!!!! (though I still love Oregon State – No one licks our Beavers!!!!)

Great Christian News site on the interweb…

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Okay, its parody, and a lot of its content is several months (if not years) old, but it still makes me chuckle.

Articles like this one, for example:

DUTTON, Ohio — Parishioners of Shady Tree Lutheran Church say they’re tired of their pastor, Charles Trigleford, 64, mangling internet-related words.
The chief complaint is the way Trigleford says “w-dot” when giving the church’s web site, rather than the technically correct “w-w-w-dot”.

“It’s as if he doesn’t know the other w’s are there,” said Sher Wanstler, 37, a self-described “very annoyed” church-goer. “If you type in ‘w-dot’ and then our web address, you get nothing.”

Parishioner Bob Fairlane says the mistakes rankle some more than others.

“I cringe a little, but at least he’s trying,” Fairlane says.

Others say Trigleford has a history of messing up web terms. He used to call it the “world wide internet” before switching to “the interweb,” they say.

“There was a few weeks when he kept calling them ‘hot links’ instead of just ‘links,'” says Stacy, 13. “It’s embarrassing. Nobody says hot links anymore. That’s a sausage or something.”

Random Commands Official Seal

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SealSaw this on Digg this morning: Official Seal Generator

They were offline earlier, but the guy scrambled and put up a mirror.

Appreciate his work, and make your own seal.

The text on the seal says “Random Commands – Geek Gentrified” (which was somewhat stole from Discoshaman at Le Sabot Post Moderne who has been hard at work gentrifying the Christian Ghetto…)

There goes that evil StuffMart again…

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swirlbulb From Instapundit comes this article on the emmergence of Compact Flourcent Lighbulbs (CFLs):

excerpt:

Diane Lindsley, the hardware buyer who decides what goes in the lightbulb aisles at Wal-Mart, thinks 100 million swirls is perfectly reasonable. “Yes,” she says, “it’s rational, I think.” Before she started buying bulbs for Wal-Mart just three years ago, Lindsley didn’t even know what CFLs were. Now she pauses in a way that suggests the kind of determination Wal-Mart can bring to bear when its buyers decide they are going to sell Americans something. “We have plans in place to where it may not take that long.”

Which presents a daunting challenge: Wal-Mart’s push into swirls won’t just help consumers and the environment; it will shatter a business–its own lightbulb business, and that of every lightbulb manufacturer. Because swirls last so long, every one that’s sold represents the loss of 6 or 8 or 10 incandescent bulb sales. Swirls will remake the lightbulb industry–dominated by familiar names GE, Philips, Sylvania–the way digital-music downloads have remade selling albums on CD, the way digital cameras revolutionized selling film and envelopes of snapshots. CFLs are a classic example of creative destruction.

I’ve installed a few CFL’s in the past few months in closets and bathrooms to replace bulbs that always burned out quickly. I may expand the list to a few more places around the house.

Bully for Wal-mart though, being environmentally conscious and all that…

New Plugins

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heart of loveFirst off the stack is the NET Bible plugin. This will allow me to type John 3:16 and WP will automagically translate that to a link that point to the NET bible at bible.org. So I can type some things and then randomly comment that this applies to Numbers 10:20 and be on my way without having to make a long drawn out process of going to the site, making the search, copying the link, and then making the link in my post. So… let’s see if it woiks!

Coherence / Coherencia Next, the Page Links To plugin is a simple thing, but makes it easy to create ‘links to’ other areas of your websites, and have them appear on the WordPress page list, so that it looks nice.  I needed it to better incorporate my Flickr Photo Gallery into the pages of this site.  I found the tip at the Glued Ideas Support Forum, which incidentally has created this great theme.

Also installed Ultimate Tag Warrior because I loves me some tags.  Tags are a great way to interconnect  your various posts by applying your own ‘tag’ to each post.  Then look and see how they interconnect by looking at a tag cloud.  I’ve got none of that working at the moment, but UTW seems to have all the options I’d need to get a good tags folksnomy working lickity-split.

Don't make me, Mama! Finally, I’ve installed EditNPlace.  This allows the quick update/edit of a post from the main page without having to go back to the backend, and then to the manage tab, then find the post.  I can quickly (through the magic of AJAX) click and edit the raw text of the entry and then save it.  Good for catching typos, or adjusting the layout real quick, etc… Had something like it for comments on Misplaced Keys, which was handy too.

That does it for this episode of What Plugin have you done for me lately…