Blog Slacker and Electronic Fasts

Shockingly, I almost forgot that I have a blog. How does one forget that?


In some ways, that is a good thing. I'm busy enough to have other things on my mind. But, it is surprising how fast it puts you out of touch. Combine that with forgetting that I have a Facebook account and I must be completely anti-social.


Work is keeping me busy. I'm training a few folks and going to help manage a new contract. This is a good thing. One of the folks I'm training is taking on some of my old job responsibilities and freeing me up to think bigger. That is a good thing. I know the details, but prefer to think big picture.

So, this is my excuse. Blogging just hasn't been on the mind. I wonder if more of us will start having "electronic fasts" just to have some alone time. Thoughts, or are you not accessing my blog because you're on one right now?

Not going private

So, I've noticed a lot of people going private on their blogs lately. I realize that this is important for some, especially if they want to show, and name, their children.

It is a little sad for me because somehow I can either never log in to see their site or their site falls to the bottom of my blog roll and I never quite get to it. It is a shame because they are probably writing some good stuff.

Alas, these are the choices we have to make when utilizing web 2.0 technology, aye?

Of course, I have my little list of secret blogs myself, but that is because I do need a private place to rant when things tick me off during certain parts of the day. Ha. It is a form of detox. Even so, I try to write as if someone from work will discover it. You can never be too comfortable.

For now, I'm out here on this particular blog and plan to remain that way for a while. I'm hoping that some of you will be too.

Education - how will we change it?

Since I'm working in the e-learning and web 2.0 arena, I thought I'd post this video.

It is over a year old and so the data provided has already changed, but the point remains the same. Learning will need to take place differently in order to meet the demands of our changing world.

Visiting Teaching - 2008 style

At church we are assigned to a couple of women to visit each month. We share a spiritual thought, discuss it, and get to know each other and hopefully become friends. It's a way of watching over each other and building friendships.

But, time flies and sometimes it's hard to go each month.

So, in enters web 2.0! I write notes on the Facebook walls of people that I visit teach. It's pretty cool. I can even coordinate with my companion through the Facebook wall. Now, this isn't solution every month, but at least it's an ongoing way to keep in touch and who doesn't like getting notes on their Facebook wall? Plus, it seems to help our actual physical visits even more personable because we've learned more about each other through the social networking.

Anyway, just a thought...

Blog Pickle site!

I set up a separate blog for blog pickles since I figured I needed a place to just go access the information separately.

http://bloggerpickles.blogspot.com/

Technology - Worldwide Telescope - NEW!

Very cool new product from Microsoft that you can download to your computer to view different parts of the universe, planets, moons, etc.

http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/

I just keep wondering - if this is what they give out for free to users, what do they have behind the scenes that they aren't willing to show us yet?

Random Thoughts cont...

After I posted some comments the other day about people saying things that help me change, I got a text message from my friend:

"As I prayed tonight, the following scripture made me think of you. I would be disobedient if I didn't share it with you:

I will bless the Lord who has counseled me; Indeed, my mind instructs me in the night. I have set the Lord continually before me; Because He is at my right hand, I will not be shaken. Psalms 16:7-8

Good-night, Angela"

It was perfect timing because I had someone at work (my boss) that made comments that made me doubt my abilities. I probably took the comments wrong, but either way, it was good to get a little inspiration from a friend through the cell phone.

Blogging and Journals - impact

I admit that it took me a while to start blogging. I initially started way back in 2005, but stopped after only about a month of postings. In January 2008 I started back up again and this time I think I'm hooked. It's good for the day to day downloading of thoughts, but I still reserve my most important and deep feelings for my personal journal.

It is going to be really interesting to see how blogging impacts our society over the next few years. In some ways, there is just too much information out there and some blogs are just plain junk. I can't cite any in particular, but that's because I make that judgement call in the first few seconds and move on to other sites that hold more promise.

In the pre-blog era there were quite a few journal writers, but it didn't seem like the norm. I'd often hear family members or friends say that they were "behind in writing" in their journals and really needed to get back to it. It sounded like a chore. I received my first journal around 9 years old. I was, and still am, a committed writer. Looking back, I realize that it was daily therapy that I needed to let go of the happenings of each day.

My ancestors were big journal writers. Many of their journals have been published as books and my parents give them to all of us as gifts at Christmas or birthdays. These are some of my most cherished possessions because they are irreplaceable. I even found one of my relatives journals online at http://www.ezratclark.org/familyfile_pjcrc_1.asp#1876 which is a family foundation on the Clark side. I started to cry the first time I read from it, and some of the other journals on the site, because somehow the simple entries made me feel close to people I had never met.

Here are a few entries:

June 15, 1884 - Theological class in schoolhouse.
June 18, 1884 - Took 291 cattle to Star Valley, 13 here, 58 at dairy, 6 at Bennington.
June 23, 1884 - W & Jno went to Valley.
June 20, 1884 - Went to Montpelier. Jos. Phelps rec'd letter about death of W. Cooper.
June 21, 1884 - W & Jno. Went to' Pelier. W. paid $65 on land deal.
June 27-28 - I and Emma at Soda Springs.

Simple. Direct. To the point. But, it does tell us a little about these people and their lives in the areas of rural Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and Utah.

I have been spending about two hours a week typing some of my old journals into the computer so I have everything in digital format. I had worried, until I read these entries, that transferring them into the online format would take something away from there meaning. However, reading the journals of my ancestors online have convinced me that scanning a few pages of handwriting from each journal will do. The words have plenty of power in themselves.

Which brings me to blogs. They are so easy to create, update and read. I have a feeling that more people will have a record of their lives as a result of blogs than they would have if this technology had not been invented.

I've learned so much from others blogs as well. A few examples off the top of my head:

• A woman, Erica, in my ward and my cousin's wife are both pregnant and announced this on their blogs complete with a sonogram picture. I found out about the woman in my ward through Elise, my visiting teacher, who had linked to the woman's (Erika) blog. Before blogs, I would have to either get a letter or email from a family member informing me of the news and I'd have to wait until socially acceptable to ask Erica at church if she was pregnant. Even after all that, I would never been at their homes to see the sonogram picture which would surely be posted on their refrigerator. P.S. I think everyone just keeps re-using the same sonogram picture.
• I worked for a year or so with a guy named Howie at a drug treatment center and I never knew that he was an avid photographer and great with using Adobe Photoshop. But, he has a blog and a shop at Deviantart.com. Not only did I order a few of the pictures just to see how they turned out, but I blogged about his talent myself a while ago - http://rebeckeronline.blogspot.com/2008/03/photography-by-ryan.html . Now, as a result of a blog, I have some great photography on my walls.
• Sheila shared about her experiences going through fertility treatments and looking at her blog this past week I found out that she is going to have a baby. Congrats Sheila! However, without her blog entries I would have no idea how difficult this process has been psychologically, physically, mentally and spiritually. Perhaps sometime I will be able to share with someone else her experiences to help them through pain.
• My sister Renaye wrote about her "conference chaos" getting through general conference each year and how the expectations and the reality never quite match up. How many people have gone through this experience? Did they think they were alone? Perhaps, but now they can read her blog and know that this is a normal phenomenon for growing families that are trying to be faithful Mormons while managing kids with short attention spans. P.S. The great thing is that her very next entry was about skin care. Completely unrelated.
• Jared, my artist/innovator cousin, is traveling the world creating art. He has many blogs, but one is devoted to different art that he creates or sees on his travels. I only know where he is and what he is doing by casually visiting his site once in a while. It appears that he is now a "Brooklynite." Oh, but wait. He put that on his Facebook message and not on his blog. By his blog, you would think he is still down in Mexico.
• Somehow I ran into a blog of an old friend in Michigan the other day. Now I know where Dina lives, that she likes scrapbooking and that she has a family. I haven't contacted her yet, but I will. And, I'll contact her sister, Carlyn, that now goes by Carly apparently and owns a scrapbooking company called ScrapGals.

I could go on about how Aaron likes donuts or how I learn a lot about web 2.0 from Mark Oehlert and Ben Bonnet's blogs, or how I keep up with little Alma Cooper by reading Jessica's little witty entries or rare updates from Chris about procrastination, or how Ann is getting married, or Patti's updates on raising her son, or Pam's fun adventures in California, or Meghan's interesting weekend, or that Lori has four kids now, or where Natalie and John will live next...

But, you've heard entirely too much information.

A point, and there is one or maybe two or three, is that the daily activities of our lives are now being documented by individuals and accessible for all. People that normally didn't keep records, now upload photos, track when their children start to walk, share photos or artwork they create, and expound upon random thoughts. It's opened up a world that always existed, but was shared in very small circles. It sounds like it could become one huge gossip network, but the reality is that many people will be inspired, informed, and aware of so much more through this process of archiving and documenting those little things that happen everyday. Speak nothing of the anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists that are having a heyday with all this information...or should be.

Perhaps this column should have been labeled "technology" instead of "blogging and journals," but either way, I get to put a large slew of labels on my posts so they are easier to search later. Hmmm. One of my next entries will have to be about the labels. After all, I'm starting to do more with taxonomies, information architecture and knowledge management.

One last entry from the old online journal:

1912. Jan 29Walter Sizemore hauled 12 loads of manure for 1 ton of hay hauling all himself using my dump boards and dumping the manure in rows on timothy S.W. of first stack ;yard this side of Swampy Meadow. Hay from Spring Hollow--- Gross 3850Tare (sled) 1430Net 2420
1912. Feb 23Bp Hayes gave me $4.80 pay for Deacons outlines.
1912. Feb. 27All were vaccinated.
1912. Mar 14Scab came off
1912. Apr 1. Marie and Julia and Evan Hoff got April Fool on me.
1912. Apr 2This morning Marie and I measured snow in drift on the lawn - 2-1/2 ft deep,.
http://www.ezratclark.org/familyfile_pjcrc_6.asp#1912

Technology and Memory Lane - Facebook

I signed up for Facebook in 2007 primarily to communicate with my brothers that were/are still in college. They tend to respond to me faster from that forum, but the side benefit was also finding current and old friends.


Last week I logged into Facebook and discovered that one of my brother's had re-connected to a neighbor of ours in Michigan. This was the little boy (Chi Wei) that stood at the end of Burrell Court everyday and waited for Bus 53 with me and my sisters. Out of the 12 houses on that court we had quite the eclectic mix of people. We had my family (Mormon, big family), the Jewish family, the Muslim family, the Chinese family, the Episcopalian bishop and his family, the Methodist bishop and his family, the other bishop (?) and his family, the Dow Chemical chemist who helped invent aspirin (at least I think that's the story), the people that were never home, the Dow Chemical scientist or engineer that woke up every winter morning and shoveled the driveway even before we (the Mormon family) left for seminary (early morning church class for 9-12 graders often referred to as "cemetery" because of the early morning dead feeling), and the amazing pianist/organist that we all took piano lessons from. I think I am missing one or two, but there were a couple of moves of people during the nine years we lived there.

Really, it was a great mix of people and there were often holiday picnics where we all gathered in Bishop Gordon's backyard and had the usual "food, folks and fun."

Oh, back to Chi Wei - he just got married and has an awesome wedding video at http://www.chiweiandstacy.com/

Technology - metadata and stuff

So, Jessica (my sister-in-law) commented on my cookie post and it sent me an automatic email to my Gmail account. In the email she mentioned that my nephew likes peanut M&Ms too and so Google gave me an add about M&Ms.

http://www.mymms.com/

So, as a result of Google's smartness, I now know that I can order personalized M&Ms. Kind of cool.

However, I must ask myself this question - Is this one Google Ad more important than the 564 items in the junk mail folder? Hmmmm.

Yes, it is worth it. One idea is usually worth a lot more than 564 bad ones. Of course, maybe there are some good ideas in there as well, but I think they are all in chinese characters and I'm not willing to cut/paste them into a translation tool to find out.

Yes, Napoleon Dynamite's brother is right - I love technology.

Photography - by Ryan

I just ordered my first photo from the Deviant Art website. My friend Howie has an online store with a few hundred photos he's taken primarily in the western Rockies. Here's a link to his store.

The first photo came in the mail and looks great from a photographer perspective, but also because they have quality control of the products that go out to the buyers.

It looks like this Deviant Art site is great for anyone that has art or photos that they want to sell, but don't want to take on the buying of a personal website, online shopping cart, printing out the product or shipping it. Great way to go!

Anyway, I have quite a few friends that are good at photography and art and thought this would be a good way for them to go. Plus, I provide free advertising on my blog. However, it would help if I actually communicated that I had a blog to more people so that the viral marketing approach would actually work.

Technology - TaDa

So, I'm trying a new site for simply managing some tasks. I just started this week and set up a list to test it out - http://dauclm.tadalist.com/lists/public/906479.

I set up lists for a few team members so I can visually see their workload before assigning more tasks. It doesn't track anything or have a robust management system behind it, but it is great for every day use. Plus, we track real deliverables and such in other systems. Obviously, we don't drop everything and put every task in it, but anything that takes more than two hours deserves to have an entry.

Try it out at http://www.tadalist.com/ !

iPOD weekend

Well, this was an interesting weekend of multi-tasking. While performing all of the house cleaning tasks and house painting this weekend, I was able to upload all of my music CDs into iTunes and synced to my iPOD. It took more hours than I care to share, but since I was able to get so many other things done I'm sure the time wasn't wasted. Painting is frustrating to me and so it was nice to see my progress on the computer rewarded. I've used about 12 GB so far and plan to upload a lot more pictures and videos over the next few months. It is at least another means of "backing up" all of my electronic files.

Also, for those of you that are interested...

BYU provided a link and an access code to download some free tunes until April 30, 2008. It's a marketing stint to get people to buy the actual albums, but you can get about 20 or so songs performed by various artists associated with the college. Here's the info:

Webpage - http://magazine.byu.edu/music
Access Code - 1B8Y7U5

iTunes and 80s music

So, I received a very nice iPod as a Christmas gift and have very slowly been adding music to it over the past few weeks. After throwing away several audio tapes from the 80s recently, I decided to buy a few of the greatest hits on iTunes. Luckily, I found an electronic album that claimed to have 80 of the best hits from the 80s. Very cool! I bought it.

Now, I did scroll the list before purchasing and thought I was getting some great hits. However, I neglected to ensure the artists were legit. Let's just say that most of the songs were not sung by 80s stars I had grown up with in the actual 1980s. Imagine the shock of listening to "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)" and finding out Jessica Simpson was the singer! What on earth? As it turns out, Jessica, and most of the other singers, get a big "no value added" by creating the re-makes.

After an internal debate, I've decided to keep the music as a temporary solution until I can research each song individually and purchase the correct version. After all, how else will I be able to remember, and re-create in my mind, all the memories of dances, useless crushes, road trips, and sad moments?

Hmmm, maybe some of those originals shouldn't be found. It may be time to move on...

Merry late Christmas and a Happy New Year!

It's January 4th and I'm barely writing my yearly Christmas letter. It seems that it comes faster every year! But, here it goes...

2007 started out fairly stressful. Work stressed me to the point of my first gray hairs. As a result, I decided to make work a lower priority even though I still go everyday to manage expectations, people and projects. Responsibility isn't all that it is cracked up to be, but we all have to experience the "greener pastures" for at least 5-6 stressful years, aye?

This year I didn't take many trips. Those I did take involved seeing family members. My youngest brother graduated from high school. There's almost an 18 year gap between us! That means that 2009 brings my 20 year high school reunion. Gasp. I'm finally experiencing those weird feelings of being old. However, my first haircoloring erased some of those strange feelings. ..temporarily.


We've had a few family gatherings, but none with everyone. A few of us met up in San Franscisco in the spring to cheer on the BYU Rugby team in a national championship game. BYU came in 2nd place again. All of my brothers (and Mom and some cousins) were there and all participated either as alumni athletes (cheering) or in the game (Craig).



Craig made it to the All American team again and played a great game at West Point in New York. Mr. Adam Brett Clark is making his debut on the team this year and will be the 4th, and last, brother to play on the team. His high school team won the state championship and so hopefully that carries over in Utah. Go BYU Rugby!

The largest event of my year was actually a project that took a few hundred hours out of my life. I converted all of the old family videos onto DVDs so that they could be viewed and shared by all. I had finished the project and backed up on appropriate hard drives only to have two hard drives fried in the same week. Not good. Luckily, the second time around was faster and more efficient with a new round of technology at my disposal. I also compiled all digital photos and videos to date. Let's just say that 10 copies of everything gets old after a while. Costco photo center became a close friend. I got my time back and they got all of my money. (-:

I'm teaching little five year olds at my church. In the past, kindergarten was my least favorite grade, but these little people grew on me. This year I will be teaching 10 year olds. That is typically the age I enjoy working with, but I'm sure my work will be cut out for me.

Other than that, life moves along. I always appreciate interacting with family, friends church members and some co-workers. Thanks to all that stay in touch. I'm a little slow at times. Does everyone get a couple hundred emails a day like me? By the time I get home from work, I'm completely technology weary.

2008 is shaping up to be a great year! Hopefully there will be wonderful news from me and wonderful news to me from you.

Happy New Year and keep in touch, Rebecca

More pics 1
More pics 2
More pics 3

Introduction

Ok, this is about my 6th blog over the last couple of years. But, I'm going to commit to this one. Most of my comments, insights and travelogs are placed directly in my journal. It's basic. I open Microsoft word and save each entry separately in a file that will one day be printed into numerous journal books. So, that's all fairly private.

My blogs have been about retirement planning, women and investing, tall women clothing and musings about becoming a leader. All failed. Not because they weren't good topics. CNBC has been very successful filling the airways every single day with repetitive market advice and I keep listening. It's just that I don't keep writing. Plus, I keep buying my tall clothing from Eddie Bauer regardless of what I discover online because it is always comfortable and fits my style. Since style isn't my forte, I'm not the person that should keep a blog on it anyway.

So, here it goes on another blog. This one will be about just whatever, but not that much of it. The really personal stuff will still remain in my private Microsoft Word document. Here will remain the fluff, the links to funny family/friend videos on YouTube, links to pics on Picasso or Facebook and perhaps an attempt to network with a few of you through Linkedin. Here's for using web 2.0 to meet all of our social networking needs.

Hopefully you will give me the link to your blog to add to my small link list of family/friends. I have a feeling that I will be a connection to interesting blogs, but not contain much useful information of my own. Oh well, here goes another attempt.