July 2005 Archives

I just finished a great book and highly recommend it.

"The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century" (Thomas L. Friedman)

Friedman, who writes for the New York Times and has won at least 2 Pulitzers of which I'm aware, writes about a complex issue, Globalization, in a very assessable way. His book gave me a lot to think about as an educator, especially in light of all of the international and national collaborations of which I've been a part this month.

I especially liked what he asked George W. to do: rise to the occasion! Be another JF Kennedy. Summon the nation to action: develop a sustainable energy substitute for oil and fund science and education to make it happen within 10 years. Friedman suggests that we don't have time for a new president to do this for the nation. We can't afford to wait 3.5 more years if we are to remain globally competitive!

I fear he's right!

Check out this podcast with the author.

Sorry I haven't kept up with the blog. Mom got onto me about it. She actually checks it every day. Way to go mom! Who ever would have thought it! :o)

I've been extremely busy with work. In fact, I've been working all weekend! We just got the CO (certificate of occupancy) for the school last Friday. The nearly $9,000,000.00 in construction and renovation has all but been finished. Now we have to work feverishly to get the building cleaned up and everything unpacked. School starts in a week and a half.

I am amazed at how so many day to day routines have to be completely restructured to accommodate the significant changes in the physical plant. But it's very exciting.

Wow! I'm astounded. timtyson.us has had its highest number of hits ever. I wonder if it's because of the conference I attended at the beginning of the month. Each month the number of unique visitors rises, but this month it shot up almost 33%!

Total unique visitors: 3,409 hitting over 50,150 pages! And I am fascinated that about 25% of visitors are visiting for 15 minutes or more!

Well, I hope everyone enjoys their visit!

Technorati Tags finally make sense to me. When I was at the Apple ADE Summer Institute in San Jose, those who were blogging were asked to use the ade2005 Technorati Tag. So I did. So did other people who also were blogging about the event.

So check this out, and you will see what the value of the tags is: http://technorati.com/tag/ade2005

The ade2005 at the end of the URL is the tag everyone used.

This weekend marked one of the deadliest in Iraq since the U.S. invasion began more than two years ago. In three days of suicide attacks, more than 150 people have been killed with nearly 300 wounded.

And, by the way, we are approaching $200,000,000,000 for the cost of our "military intervention." That would have paid for 24,052,998 children to attend a year of Head Start. Or, we could have insured 108,742,650 children for one year. Or, we could have hired 3,147,155 additional public school teachers for one year. Or we could have provided 8,803,586 students four-year scholarships at public universities.

But instead, we killed 25,881 Iraqis, which works out to about $7.75 million dollars per murdered person. As I have caustically said before, can't killing people be a little bit more cost effective than that?

OK, enough. My ranting does no good.

Suspending disagreement into the contemplative state of possibility thinking is the magic that becomes the impetus for creation.
--Me

I heard several people throughout this past week discussing whether or not they agreed with this presenter or that presenter's ideas. In my humble opinion, we place too much emphasis in our culture on consensus and become too intolerant of the outliers (from the newly shaped norms). We even are quick to do this in our research! We study the mean and do not give deep consideration to the outliers. I think the outliers are far more interesting!

One of the most important and often overlooked aspects of discourse is not agreement/consensus, but grappling with ideas, weighing oppositional strands of thought, the careful consideration of conflicted thinking, remaining open to the possibility of being wrong or only containing a piece of solution-making. Sometimes I think that the more brilliant the mind, the more accomplished the person, the more egocentric the personality, the more difficult this process may be.

This is one of the reasons I value Alan November as such a good speaker. He attempts to shake us off center, provoke thought and contemplation. Agreeing or disagreeing is not the point. Suspending disagreement into the contemplative state of possibility thinking is the magic that becomes the impetus for creation. O my god, did I just say that?! I loved that thought so much, I had to quote myself! LOL

Fluidity! It's about fluidity!! We resist fluidity while grasping for norms that can shape and inform our perspective. One person briefly touched on perspective this week. Man, I would love to take a whole course on this!

And then there's that whole thing about being addicted to form and not paying enough attention to function. But I'm just not going to get into all of that right now.

That's just what I think...for now anyway. :o)

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I have to apologize to all of my new visitors (from the conference). I shut off comments to my blog a couple of weeks ago as my server space and bandwidth were being gobbled up with advertising SPAMmers even with all of the efforts I've used to prevent them. If you want to comment, feel free to email me. I can best be reached through the email address provided in the ADE community.

When I can find the time, I plan to upgrade to MT 3.x which has much better SPAM control. Comments will then open up again.

During the week of the institute I spent very little time outside, which was a terrible shame as the weather was glorious! People were complaining about how hot it was. Hot?! They should never visit Atlanta! I took a little quick walk, just around the hotel Friday late afternoon, and shot these pictures, which I offer without comment--except for the really cool door at the bottom which is a picture of what's on the other side of the building! How cool.

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I can never remember what I programmed my function keys to do. I forget which one does what. But what if every key on the keyboard could be a glowing color picture of what it does in the keyboard map?!

So, if F1 launched Quicktime, it was the colored icon for Quicktime. If F2 were Safari, it showed the user the actual Safari application icon?! For editing in Final Cut Pro, each keyboard shortcut could be displayed as the icon associated with that shortcut.

And what about those pesky little control and option keys! For the life of me I can never remember which weird funky little symbol goes with which. I always wished they would put the icon on the key, instead of the words, like they do for the command key! With this keyboard the user could do that!

This has a lot of potential for cool!

Check out this keyboard. If it makes it to market, it will be worth exploring.

At the end of the day we enjoyed an incredible dinner, and all of our new members (which included me!) got our institute certificates. We also all received a copy of all of the Pro applications: Final Cut Studio, Soundtrack 2, Motion, Shake, DVD Studio Pro 4, and Q Master. I was beside myself! I love these products and did not have the latest upgrades. I'm having heart palpitations!

We also received the latest book from Peachpit Press: Getting Started with Final Cut Studio. I love this company's books and have many of them!

I've met some incredible minds, wonderful hearts, and delightful personalities--all wrapped up in individual people from all over the world! This has been an incredible week, allowing us to peak into what is about to explode in education: a transformation that will empower children to go as far as they want to go as fast as they can manage! What an exciting time to be a part of this profession.

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QuickTime
Today we visited the Apple Campus in Cupertino. All of the new ADEs had our picture taken in the courtyard at 1 Infinite Loop. After our picture we had a meeting in Town Square--a theater for information dissemination.

Our first speaker is in charge of QuickTime product development. He was not just a witty and engaging speaker. He was very informative as well. The new capacity in QuickTime for HD (high definition) is completely impressive--visually astounding, and we were just viewing the demonstration on a standard definition projection device. Several things were highlighted:

• Version 7 is the most significant product enhancement in many years.
• New improvements include 1 button recording of DV and audio
• The new H.264 video codec is fast and gorgeous, incorporated in iChat AV, and is about to show up in video streaming technology!
• Creating a Podcast in Quicktime Pro
• The scalability of QT movies from cell phones to full screen. Scalability is even live. The codec is so efficient as to allow the user to alter the size of the movie window on the fly--while the movie is playing, with no disruption in playback. Astounding!
• Sound now includes 5.1 Surround Sound! The sound in the demo blew me away!

And all of this is available today, now. Well, we don't have High Definition streaming yet, but it's on it's way. If you, like me, can connect the dots, you see what is about to happen here. Maybe they will call it iFlix! I am just offering personal speculation here.

Product Design and Engineering
We also had the amazing privileged to hear from Jonathan, head of the Apple Design Team. He rarely makes public appearances. In fact, his last speaking engagement was to this group last year. The guy is just out-there brilliant.

He spoke of Apple's commitment to providing a product that is of the highest quality and functionality. He just entertained our questions for nearly an hour. He spoke of the care that is taken in every aspect of product design. He stated that if the user/customer is aware of problem they had to solve, let alone its complexity, he feels he has failed.

He gave this example: the complexity that is the opening of the laptop. Few people realize that to open any non-Apple laptop requires the use of two hands. "What if the user doesn't have two hands?" he asked. One hand has to hold down the bottom of the machine while the other lifts the top because all of the competitor's products are solely friction based.

When you press the latch on an Apple laptop, it pops up just a bit to make opening it easier for the user. Then, the lid (or display) is counterbalanced so that with one hand you can easily lift it open. Once the user has the momentum of the opening lid, then the friction kicks in that will keep the lid open when you let go of it. The engineering of this process is intense, but this attention to detail is what makes for the legendary user experience that the Apple user knows and cherishes.

The Apple Store
This is the only store at which one can purchase official Apple logo products such as shirts, etc.

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Well, I worked with our group for 24 hours without sleep--reminded me of college days, but now the body is far less willing! :o)

The workgroups all presented today--brilliant ideas for project development that will support teachers and students in the transformation that is taking place quietly in education right now. I suspect that in a short period of time that transformation will be pervasive and receiving a firestorm of attention and resources. What an exciting time to be in this profession.

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Today we worked all day with our project teams and enjoyed the vendor fair.

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ecto is having some issues! I'm starting this post over again. Hmm, always save!

Alan spoke this morning before we started work in our project teams. (I've been assigned to the iPod/Podcasting team.) He started by recapping his main points from last night:

• Global Benchmarking
• Family Learning Portal
• Students as Producers
• Innovative Management

He asked what the single most important question was concerning the impact of technology on learning. Everyone made suggestions. Well, OK. He spoke of fearless learners, which appears to be his theme for this year. You can listen to more about that in his presentation on the Apple Site. It's an excellent presentation. I highly recommend it.

Based on survey results in the UK, he stated that the number one thing students want from their school is a personal relationship with their teacher. They obviously didn't survey 7th graders! And yet, this is my fourth year of substantive teacher allotment reductions! Right! He also mentioned that students need to present more to adults than just to their peers. We have certainly found this to be an effective learning strategy at my school.

He presented the following problem solving procedure:

• Come up with a good-enough-to-criticise problem
• Who is your global network for review? (board of directors)
• What evidence (not opinion) supports your efforts to solve this problem
• Retest the hypothesis: Is this a valide problem to solve?
• Who is the authentic audience for presentation
• What results do you want?
• What are your desired outcomes?

He did his typical presentation about searching for information on Teoma and Altavista. However, he added Technorati and Bloglines this time. He did a phone call through Skype.

When asked what he was reading, he replied with the following books:

"The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century" (Thomas L. Friedman)

"The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference" (Malcolm Gladwell)

"As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Life, Work, Health & Wealth" (Juan Enriquez)

"Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" (Malcolm Gladwell)

I've shared some information about Blink before on this site. He also referenced this source:

"The Age of Unreason" (Charles Handy)

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Regrettably I did not write down the names of the presenters, but another blogger did. The presenters were: Ken Tuley and David Wallace. This presentation was a wonderful overview of some of the features of the 10.4.1 operating system that make it the teacher's best assistant.

Some things to revisit with teachers:

• Smart Folders
• Burn Folders
• Slideshow directly from email
• And naturally, Spotlight

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Great stuff. The future isn't what it used to be. Nuff said.

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I am privileged to be on the same team of people as those who did the podcasting of the NECC event. Listening to Barnaby's podcast from NECC is really what got me all excited about podcasting to begin with. You can check out my initial efforts with podcasting at our school site. Barnaby, who did the introductory presentation about Podcasting at the NECC event, is acting as the lead for this team here this week. Jason Ediger is our link to Apple.

The iPod and iTunes team leaders from Apple came for us to present ideas and suggestions. John Couch spoke to our group. Linda dropped in several times as well. It was a pretty intense time. But I am sworn to secrecy and can say no more.

Well, I will say, even more cool things are in the works.

We are charged with working on a year-long project of our choosing. This should be good as we have a team of very bright minds and driven personalities.

Several cool tools and resources were mentioned by various team members which deserve further exploration:

SubEthaEdit, a collaboration tool
Cog Dog Blog
Kitzu
AudioScrobbler
iStoryCreator

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I haven't engaged in a blistering tirade against the Bush administration lately. It's way past due!

I loath the way Karl Rove works. His only ethical standard appears to be to further whatever his objective is at the moment--at any price. If you have followed his career at all, you see he has had this MO since he was in college. You would always want him in your corner. He plays dirty, and he plays hard to win, at any cost. In my estimation he is powerful and evil. Check this out.

I love this by Eli Pariser:

On Sunday, Newsweek magazine revealed that Karl Rove, the President's key political advisor, was responsible for disclosing the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame. Rove's lawyer has confirmed that he was involved.

Last year, President Bush promised that anyone at the White House involved in the leak would be fired. We believe that the President should stick to his word. That's why we're calling on him to fire Karl Rove.

Think he will? Huh, huh, huh?? Do you know the history between Rove and the Bush family? I invite you to do a little research before the spin machine can reframe the context of the information.

Today I attended a particularly wonderful session on Quicktime 7 Pro presented by Keith Mitchell. He introduced me to a couple of applications of which I was unaware and very impressed. He used this first application to wirecast the presentations for the ADEs that were not able to attend these sessions.

Wirecast
This information is located at their website:

Wirecast makes it easy to create dynamic webcasts. It has been designed for building detailed multimedia broadcasts with many web cameras, images, titles and movies etc.

Wirecast introduces the unique concept of shots. You can package up your selected cameras, graphical overlays, movies and titles into a shot. Once you have built your list of shots, you can transition the broadcast between them with a single mouse click.

Controlling your broadcast in real-time is easy. With Wirecast's multiple layer support, it's simple to place a background music track over your webcast, while changing between the cameras you want your viewers to see.

This is a simple and very cool application that yields astoundingly professional-looking results with little technical expertise.

Videocue
This product is also produced by the same British company. This information is located at their website:

At its core, Videocue is a unique new application to help you create striking movies of you reading your words aloud. Without Memorizing a single word.

Using the Application is simple:
Enter the text of your speech
Drag your camera icon to the storyboard
Press record

Once you're done, you can save the finished QuickTime movie to your computer or upload to a remote FTP site. Videocue lets you publish a link to the movie and the text of your presentation to most popular blogging and vlogging services.
Going Further

Of course, adding titles, photos, and other media to your presentation is just as easy.

You drag them to your storyboard and they'll appear when you speak the line of text they are next to. That's it.

Use our professional titles or your own photos and movies to make a presentation stand out.

Again, a great little application!

Keith also talked briefly about what was once commonly called QTVRs (QuickTime Virtual Reality). His own work with all of this technology is rather impressive. He mentioned these resources.

• CubicNavigator
• For a tripod head that will work well use this site
• For a step by step How To Create 360º Panoramas
• The magic of this free plugin

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Most of the podcasting team from NECC was present. Barnaby Wasson, from Arizona State University, presented the same presentation he gave and was podcast at NECC about a week ago. I stumbled on the podcast on iTunes just after it was posted to the internet. It's good stuff but presents something that is a little complex for the average user at the moment. However, I have a hunch that things will change here soon, and the tools needed for podcasting will become easy-to-use and pervasive. At the present they are complicated and a bit obscure.

John Couch will be speaking tonight. He is expected to make some exciting announcements. My guess: they pertain to podcasting. We will see!

For more information about my experiences with podcasting and some tips on how to do it more easily, search this site.

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Alan November discussed this article in his presentation tonight. He frequently refers to the boomerang generation: those children, in their 30s, who are forced to come back to live with their parents because their jobs are not viable. It's an interesting article.

A Passage From India
By SUKETU MEHTA
Published: July 12, 2005

ACCORDING to a confidential memorandum, I.B.M. is cutting 13,000 jobs in the United States and in Europe and creating 14,000 jobs in India. From 2000 to 2015, an estimated three million American jobs will have been outsourced; one in 10 technology jobs will leave these shores by the end of this year. Stories like these have aroused a primal fear in the Western public: that they might soon need to line up outside the Indian Embassy for work visas and their children will have to learn Hindi.

Just as my parents had to line up outside the American consulate in Bombay, and my sisters and I had to learn English. My father came to America in 1977 not for its political freedoms or its way of life, but for the hope of a better economic future for his children. My grandfathers on both sides left rural Gujarat in northwestern India to find work: one to Calcutta, which was even more remote in those days than New York is from Bombay now; and the other to Nairobi. Mobility, we have always known, is survival. Now I face the possibility that my children, when they grow up, will find their jobs outsourced to the very country their grandfather left to pursue economic opportunity.

The outsourcing debate seems to have mutated into a contest between the country of my birth and the country of my nationality. Of course I feel a loyalty to America: it gave my parents a new life and my sons were born here. I have a vested interest in seeing America prosper. But I am here because the country of my ancestors didn't understand the changing world; it couldn't change its technology and its philosophy and its notions of social mobility fast enough to fight off the European colonists, who won not so much with the might of advanced weaponry as with the clear logical philosophy of the Enlightenment. Their systems of thinking conquered our own. So, since independence, Indians have had to learn; we have had to slog for long hours in the classroom while the children of other countries went out to play.

When I moved to Queens, in New York City, at the age of 14, I found myself, for the first time in my life, considered good at math. In Bombay, math was my worst subject, and I regularly found my place near the bottom of the class rankings in that rigorous subject. But in my American school, so low were their standards that I was - to my parents' disbelief - near the top of the class. It was the same in English and, unexpectedly, in American history, for my school in Bombay included a detailed study of the American Revolution. My American school curriculum had, of course, almost nothing on the subcontinent's freedom struggle. I was mercilessly bullied during the 1979-80 hostage crisis, because my classmates couldn't tell the difference between Iran and India. If I were now to move with my family to India, my children - who go to one of the best private schools in New York - would have to take remedial math and science courses to get into a good school in Bombay.

Of course, India's no wonderland. It might soon have the world's biggest middle class, but it also has the world's largest underclass. A quarter of its one billion people live below the poverty line, 40 percent are illiterate, and the child malnutrition rate exceeds that of sub-Saharan Africa. There's a huge difference between the backwater state of Bihar and the boomtown of Bangalore. Those Indians who went to the United States, though, have done remarkably well: Indians make up one of the richest ethnic groups in this country. During the technology boom of the late 1990's, Indians were responsible for 10 percent of all the start-ups in Silicon Valley. And in this year's national spelling bee, the top four contestants were of South Asian origin.

There is a perverse hypocrisy about the whole jobs debate, especially in Europe. The colonial powers invaded countries like India and China, pillaged them of their treasures and commodities and made sure their industries weren't allowed to develop, so they would stay impoverished and unable to compete. Then the imperialists complained when the destitute people of the former colonies came to their shores to clean their toilets and dig their sewers; they complained when later generations came to earn high wages as doctors and engineers; and now they're complaining when their jobs are being lost to children of the empire who are working harder than they are. My grandfather was once confronted by an elderly Englishman in a London park who asked, "Why are you here?" My grandfather responded, "We are the creditors." We are here because you were there.

The rich countries can't have it both ways. They can't provide huge subsidies for their agricultural conglomerates and complain when Indians who can't make a living on their farms then go to the cities and study computers and take away their jobs. Why are Indians willing to write code for a tenth of what Americans make for the same work? It's not by choice; it's because they're still struggling to stand on their feet after 200 years of colonial rule. The day will soon come when Indian companies will find that it's cheaper to hire computer programmers in Sri Lanka, and then it's there that the Indian jobs will go.

Of course, it's heart-wrenching to see American programmers - many of whom are of Indian origin - lose their jobs and have to worry about how they'll pay the mortgage. But they are ill served by politicians who promise to bring their jobs back by the facile tactic of banning them from leaving. This strategy will ensure only that our schools stay terrible; it'll be an entire country run like the dairy industry, feasible only because of price controls and subsidies.

But we have a resource of incalculable worth right here to help us compete: the immigrants who've been given a new life in America. There are many more Indians in the United States than there are Americans in India. Indian-Americans will help America understand India, trade with it to our mutual benefit. Just as Arab-Americans can help us fight Al Qaeda, Indian-Americans can help us deal with the emerging economic superpower that is India. This is the return of the gift of citizenship.

And just in case, I'm making sure my children learn Hindi.

Suketu Mehta is author of "Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found."

Source: The New York Times

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Alan November was brilliant tonight--as he typically is. I've blogged about him before. You can search this site for the previous post. He had some unkind innuendoes about our administration--no wonder I like what this man has to say. I think he enjoys posturing himself as a global citizen as he travels a great deal. I want his job! :o)

As part of Alan's presentation, we had a brief presentation by Neeru Paharia from the Creative Commons organization. She had a video explaining the history of Creative Commons--in a phrase: cut out the middle men. The video was simple and powerful. I've also heard Lawrence Lessig speak about the immorality of corporate America "owning" culture. The video didn't go there but promoted the freedom to think and share you ideas freely. She went on to talk about some specific Web resources to help users find Creative Commons-licensed content. Her suggestions:

• Yahoo! Creative Commons Search for all manner of digital content so licensed
• Flickr for cc images
• Soundclick for cc music
• Prelinger Archives for video footage (and other little goodies) all under cc

Folks, this could change everything. The media moguls know this and these projects are under huge legal attacks in an effort to kill them.

She also highlighted two Creative Commons tools. The first, CC Publisher, helps users tag content with the proper Creative Commons license and then uploads that content to the Internet Archive which can include pdfs, flash, audio, video, etc. This is free bandwidth! They will host the content for free as long as it has a CC license! Talk about cutting out the middle men... With CC license and free bandwidth for life, this has unprecedented potential.

The second, CC Mixter, is a tool to build a media sharing site that can be linked to other CC Mixter sites on the Internet. She talked about the potential for building a CC Mixter for teacher lesson plans. I talked with her afterward. She said CC is willing to set this tool up for Mabry. We need to go here. This has some serious long-term implications for cultural development and teaching children about the freedom of freely sharing ideas to better the world.

I won't even get started on a discussion about the very essence of authentic assessment, but this is it! Allowing the world to grade your work, even as a child. How? By awarding it consideration for further development, expression, and sharing.

It's too comprehensive to fully elucidate here, but CC Mixter allows everyone to see who used your work to remix culture...sort of documented breadcrumbs for cultural development.

Alan November: things that need to be changed:

• Kids collaborating with only the kids in the classroom needs to become the past. Today's students should not just be technologically literate but need to be globally literate, collaborating with the world.
• Learning capacity needs to focus on the whole family, not just the child, so that technology is used to enable the whole family to be the center of learning.
• Children need to stop writing reports that are graded and then returned to them and start contributing to the knowledge base of the world. They need to publish to wikipedia! Let's talk about authentic assessment: posting your thinking for the whole world to evaluate.
• Management that can attain their vision without the problems associated with systems

Naturally i was devastated when about a half dozen ADEs said they already have students doing this, (some in elementary school!), and their work is still up on the wikipedia.

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I know more about Final Cut Pro than I think I do I guess. I love this suite of applications. So I decided to attend this session. Even though one can not cover a lot in a short 1 hour introductory presentation, I did learn several things.

• You can use the shift key while dragging the in and out point handles of a clip in the viewer to time-shift the location of the selected footage without changing it's duration. Cool!
• The following apps are included in the hefty newly priced suite: Final Cut Pro 5, Soundtrack Pro (a completely new application, not a remake of the old), Motion 2, DVD Studio Pro 4, Compressor 2, Cinema Tools 3, Apple Qmaster 2, and LiveType 2. I guess the price isn't so bad when you consider what is included.
• These little cursor accentuation applications will come in very handy when presenting How Tos for staff development: PinPoint and MouseLocator.

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I'm finally here for the ADE Summer Institute. Getting here was an ordeal! Normally getting to the interstate from my house is only a 10 minute drive. Today it was 52 minutes! Trees were down; cars were flooded out; traffic was a mess with the hurricane making its way through Atlanta.

At any rate, I finally got here. The weather in San José is too nice! What a change. Apple is hosting us at a 5 star hotel, The Fairmont. It's very nice!

Big day tomorrow I'm sure.

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I just returned from a movie and then dinner. The movie's story line was very unusual but a delight. The music was glorious! The cinematography was also wonderful. I love period pieces.

Two sisters engage in a subtle war for the affections of a man half their age in this British comedy drama. It's 1936, and Janet Widdington (Maggie Smith) and her sister, Ursula (Judi Dench), are a pair of elderly spinsters who share a home in Cornwall on the coast of England. After a storm, the sisters discover that someone has been washed up on the beach in front of their house. Bringing the body inside, they discover the victim is a handsome German man named Andrea (Daniel Brühl) who has suffered a broken ankle and speaks no English.

As the sisters patch up Andrea's ankle, Janet dusts off her old German textbook from school, and begins getting to know more about their guest. It isn't long before Janet develops an infatuation for the good-looking stranger, which is more than a bit maddening to Ursula, who has fallen head over heels for him, especially after the sisters discover he's a gifted violinist and hear him display his craft on a borrowed instrument. As the sisters find themselves vying for Andrea's attention, they wonder if they should report his presence to the authorities, especially after Olga (Natascha McElhone), an attractive woman in her early thirties who lives nearby, becomes aware of Andrea's presence in the home and wants to make contact with him. Based on a short story by William J. Locke, Ladies in Lavender marked the directorial debut of actor Charles Dance.

~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Mother, the dogs, and the house are fine. She just arrived back home from the shelter. She just has no power at present.

The rains and tornados are hitting Atlanta as I type.

This past week, the remnants of the first of the hurricanes made its way through Atlanta. Throughout the week I have been rather surprised to see the number of very large trees that were toppled by the winds.

As I type, my mother is heading off to the shelter. She lives in Pensacola.

I don't recall if I've mentioned in the past that an have been named an ADE: Apple Distinguished Educator. I'm off to the ADE Summer Institute on Monday, a week with the other ADEs from around the world. I'll blog about my experiences as I have time. I've already made a list of the things I want to be sure I leave knowing. You know, questions like, what is the meaning of life?

I was on my way home from breakfast. I was meandering through my little neighborhood. I saw a common sight: a lady up ahead of me walking her dog. They were coming toward me.

Suddenly, without any warning, al-Qaeda struck in my neighborhood, at least so it seemed. In the split second that it happened, I thought a bomb had gone off. Directly across the street from the woman walking the dog, was a tremendous explosion!

A ball of sparks much like fireworks on the 4th of July exploded into the air and flew 3/4 of the way across the street, almost hitting the woman and her dog. A small mushroom cloud of smoke rose from the top of a power pole. I suppose the transformer unexpectedly blew up just as the woman and dog were directly across from it.

Needless to say it terrified the poor woman, who somehow in a single bound, transported herself 10 feet away from the explosion while clutching her chest. The dog was equally amazed at her feat and was certainly appreciative of the expandable leash that kept him from getting a whiplash. The woman stood dazed.

Once I drove up to the site of the explosion, I asked the woman if she was OK. She implored, "What was it?! What happened?!" I told her that I suspected that the transformer had exploded. She stated. "It must have been that poor squirrel!"

I looked on the other side of the street and saw a squirrel lying dead in the road. The hair all over its body was standing straight out making it at least twice its normal size. It was a strange color of brown with steam rising from its body. Poor thing. It never even knew what happened.

Has been annoying the hell out of me... (back off jack, the man's in a mood!)

From time to time the server that provided the completely inaccurate count of the number of visitors to my blog and the number of visitors currently reading my blog, which was never accurate either, would bog down causing my page to take forever and an additional three days to load.

Well, no more. I took them off. I want to do some additional work on my css and template files this week too. So things should load much faster.

Now I need to chat with my friend Evans, who hosts my blog, about how slow his server is running these days.

Get out of the way, I'm coming through!

Today I am shutting off all comments to my site. The SPAM thieves continued to hit my site all day, wasting my bandwidth and annoying the hell out of me. Once they find you, they don't stop.

Few people posted comments any way. Most of my readers send me email instead of posting. Hmm, I must have shy readers? :o)

I will ponder my options. Stay tuned. The war over bandwidth continues.

what I really hate! ...

These jerks that steal my bandwidth with their crappy ads posted as comments! I loath them! In my estimation, they are nothing short of thieves.

I pay for the bandwidth and I give no one permission to advertise on my blog. I'm not interested in spending any of my money to help anyone else make money. That's not what this site is about.

This site is personal property that only welcomes non-commercial comments that do not advertise any product or service.

(Can you tell I had a spam attack today and had to purge all of their @#$* out of my comments sections?!)

I even hate junk mail in the snail mailbox, but at least that doesn't directly cost me money!

...with a leisurely walk in the Emory Forest, which I've blogged about several times in the past year. Both this morning and this evening the air was heavy with humidity and the wonderful rich smells of summer. But here's what I want to share:

A little tike, not even 2 feet tall, went rushing full speed ahead to the lake's edge. His father and I both were quite convinced he would end up in the water. His father was in a dead run to catch him. (How can a child with such tiny legs run so incredibly fast?!) The little boy, consumed with delight, just before plunging into the water, inexplicably plopped to the ground at the water's edge, threw his hands high into the air, and with tremendous exuberance exclaimed, "Hello, little ducklings!" He seemed too young to even know the word "duckling."

Of course, all of the ducks and "little ducklings" had rushed in terror into the lake to escape the frenzied excitement all balled up into this one little boy. But when they saw how delighted their presence made him, they quickly returned, quacking away, up to his little feet dangling over the small bank. No child has ever been happier.

OK, today it's official: I'm a geek because I:

• figured out how to and then navigated to a specific location on my computer using the command line terminal!
• wrote my 2nd xml file
• successfully executed a script from the terminal command line
• even found several errors and successfully solved them in the instructions for the use of Chapter Tool

I've always freely admitted to being a geek. Today, it's official! By the way, Chapter Tool is cool!

If you want to submit your podcasts to the iTunes store, which is what I was doing today that necessitated all of this outrageous behavior, here are a few things you need to make your life easier:

1. The directions on how to publish a podcast to the iTunes store
2. Chapter Tool, which will make your podcast do the crazy things Steve talked about in the Apple Developers' Conference.
3. This is also a handy link to a free RSS 2.0 validator at FeedBurner, the specification iTunes requires

Now, some advice for those geeks out there who want to get this to work. I give the advice because I had to resort to reading French and German websites to try to sort this stuff out. I'm serious. And I don't even read French or German. Google translation is way cool! There's not much information out there right now. I hope this information helps.

1. There are some errors in the instructions!

• If you use the sample.xml file Apple provides as your template for the xml file you must create, beware that the author forgot to close 2 <picture> tags. They close with /picture> and not the required </picture> tag. Those that know xml know it is utterly unforgiving on such things. Your project will not work with these incorrectly closed tags. Be sure to fix them in your document.
• In the "About Chapter Tool" document, there is a typo "./ChapterTool -x mypodcast.xml -a mypodcast.m4a -o myenhancedpodcast.m4a"-- one dot at the beginning of the command instead of 2. As I was blundering my way through trying to make this work, this just complicated things. I luckily assumed it was supposed to be 2 dots. It is!
• In step one of the same file, the reader is directed to use the command line in the terminal to navigate to Music/ChapterTool in your home folder. No. The way the remainder of the directions are written, I do not think this is accurate. I believe you must navigate to Music/ChapterTool/MYPODCAST where MYPODCAST is whatever name you give the folder you are directed to make for this project's files. Only then was I able to get the command line to execute without error.

2. If you need help learning Unix commands in the terminal, today I learned everything I know (which is not much) at these two web addresses:

• This link will teach you everything you need to learn about the Unix cd command.
• This index has other helpful information. Readers beware!

3. The AAC file format, which has the .m4a file extension, will not work in Safari! It doesn't work in IE for Mac either. I don't know what happens in Windows. Unbelievable after all of this work!! Apple is working to resolve the issue--using my site to test it might I add. I spent a good bit of time bonding with them this afternoon when it all didn't work! Safari just downloads jibberish. And since it's a large file, it's a lot of jibberish to download! Even with Quicktime 7.0.1's MIME setting correctly set to enable proper handling of AAC and MPEG4 files, it doesn't work.

Firefox works properly by passing the file off to iTunes. Apple wanted to say it was a server-side configuration problem. I don't know. It could be. I'm working to sort that out and will let everyone know. But I rather doubt that. If Firefox can handle the file properly, Safari should be able to as well.

4. The mp3 file format works fine--just without all of the cool features made available in AAC--which is why I went to all of the trouble to learn all of this today. So, I decided to convert my m4a (AAC) file to the mp3 format in the mean time (until Apple gets it fixed). This is no longer an intuitive process. In fact, I searched for a long time trying to find where Apple hid the MP3 encoder--no mention of it in the Help files or on Apple's support site at all, grrr.

I'll save you the hassle I had. I don't think you're going to find this documented anywhere, and I knew it was in iTunes because I had used it years ago. I worried they had dropped the encoder because of a licensing issue. Here's where it is:

• In iTunes, under Preferences, click on the orange importing button.
• "Import using:" must be set to MP3 encoder.
• This then changes the drop down menu under [Advanced] for "Convert Selection to..." from whatever it was (mine was AAC) to MP3.
• It makes no sense whatsoever that the import preference changes the "convert selection to" command! This is somewhat akin to having to click on "Start" to shutdown a windows machine! Horrific thinking here! Apple needs to add to the preference button a selection drop down for "Convert selection to:".

OK, since you suffered through this whole post, you must have some interest in doing this. Here is the link to what I'm working on right now. You can see what works and what doesn't and how it behaves and misbehaves. If you figure out why, let me know.