Troy Patterson

Educator, Thinker, Consultant

Page 8 of 31

Weekly Thoughts 50

December 13, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Kottke

Jason Kottke is back to posting. Jason has a long history of discovering and sharing truly interesting things. If you don’t follow him, fire up your RSS reader and add his site.

Thoughts

I believe that it was the wonderful Bob Harrison who posted the following:

COMPUTERS ARE A TOOL THAT ARE UBIQUITOUS IN THE REAL WORLD (SO WHY NOT IN THE CLASSROOM)

I’m still hearing lots of pushback about using computers. I do truly agree that kids shouldn’t be on computers all the time, but frequently I hear reports of full on blocking.

Summarizer & Voices

Two things that I got to pull from my head this week. One was when I was asked if there was a replacement for a website that a teacher was using to “provide accommodations” for students. Since the students have MacBooks, I suggested using Summarizer built into the System. I obviously hadn’t used this in a while as it wasn’t turned on. So, a quick trip to the new System Settings, turning on the Summarize feature (Keyboard | Keyboard Shortcuts | Services | Summarize) and we were ready to go. My Tech Integrator and I talked about the importance of empowering the students by teaching them, and we were ready to go.
The next day, the question of the day was, “Are there better voices available? They all sound very robotic.” The teacher was using a Google extension. Back to System Settings where we explored the variety of built-in Apple Voices (I still enjoy the South African dialect voices).

Hearing Aids

I had a follow-up on my hearing aids. Hearing aids have been a struggle for me. I’m not sure if it’s the general stigma, the relation to being old, or just the acknowledgment that I need them, but I’ve struggled with having to have them. The reality is that I hear much better with them. I don’t miss out on nearly as much sound. However, they still need to be adjusted. Getting the setting right is a challenge.

7th Grade Art

I’ve been co-teaching a 7th-grade Art class. The 7th graders have been just a ton of fun.

The project centered around AI art. Specifically, we’ve been using Diffusion Bee, an open-source version of Stable Diffusion that can be run on our computers. We’ve talked about why we are using this on computers instead of a website.

The project started with a board overview of AI art. The students identified a landscape (or seascape, this is Maine after all) and brought in a picture. The Art teacher worked on Foreground, Midground, and Background. The students did a pencil drawing of their picture. They also described it in words. They would bring their descriptions up and enter that into Diffusion Bee. The result would be compared to their picture. There was a lot of discussion about why they got the picture that they did. This was also a lot of fun (the pictures didn’t always match their expectations). Finally, the students created a watercolor version of their image.

Once we’d been through all of the students, we talked again, as a class about what the images were and how they were created. I then let them know that they could download Diffusion Bee and generate images as well.

We are talking about how to use the program, similar programs, and the future of AI.

The Art teacher wants to repeat the project with some adjustments with the 8th grade.

Amendments

I did a separate write-up on Ranking the Bill of Rights. I have found that future me generally appreciates when past me has written up steps and procedures. Thus, I wrote this up as a full post instead of just sharing here.

ChatGPT

I also did a full write up on AI and text (again, I’ve learned that future me appreciates full write-ups). Generated text is interesting and will continue to be so.

ChatGPT can detect when text is likely to have been generated by large language models, but you can also use prompts for it to generate text that is specifically designed to not be easily detected.

“Generate 200 words on Macbeth in a style that would make it difficult for the text to be detected by a large language model as having been generated by a large language model.”

Social Media & Teachers

I’m really struggling with this one:

But straight up: any person telling other teachers to use Twitter for PD is sending people into harms way.

The US rightwing crowd are targeting teachers. They are using Twitter (and FB, and Insta, and TikTok) to do this.

Sending educators to Twitter now is straight up malpractice. It’s a hostile place, run by bad stewards of data.

This is at least an interesting thought. I’m not sure that I’m ready to go that far, but education is really under attack these days.

*Post image is Lost in thought by @hefedute (https://openclipart.org/detail/223115/multiple-thoughts-man-line-art)

Ranking the Bill of Rights

December 9, 2022 / / 2 Comments

The teacher wanted the students to rank the Bill of Rights. This can be a great discussion exercise. The students decide which of the first ten amendments to the Constitution are “most important”.

The teacher had used a site in the past. However, since it had been used in the past, the stated that voting had already occurred.

Moodle to the rescue. Well, Moodle and Questionnaire.

Moodle -> Questionnaire and 3 minutes of copy/paste, the teacher now has the activity completely under control. No external website needed.

Plus, Questionnaire has awesome reporting. The teacher can decide if the kids do it once or more often.

So our use case is that the teacher is talking about the Bill of Rights in general. Then the teacher will then have the kids rank the Bill of Rights in terms of importance. Once all of the students have ranked them, the class will discuss their rankings and why. Then the students will rank the Bill of Rights again.

This activity uses Moodle and the Questionnaire Module.

Here are the settings that I used:

These Settings are for the Questionnaire as a whole. Thus, these will be set up when you create the Questionnaire. You must give the questionnaire a Name. The Name is what the students will see. You can provide directions in the

Response Options:

Type: I set this to “respond many”. This could easily be set to “respond once”.

Respondent Type: “full name”. This could be set to “anonymous”, but I’d want to see if student answers change.

Students can view ALL responses: Never. If you’ve set the Respondent Type to anonymous, you could let the students see the results. However, I would share the results via the projector.

Save/Resume answers: I almost always set this to “yes”. This is a quick poll, so it doesn’t have to be “yes”.

Activity Completion

The default on Activity Completion is “Student can manually mark the activity as completed”, but I almost always (and out of habit), change this to “Show activity as complete when conditions are met” (and then tick the box for “Students must submit this questionnaire to complete it”

I generally avoid adding dates on activities as that can come back and be an issue in the future. Naturally, you could set the Availability for Allow responses from and Allow responses until if you wish.

I added a question of the type [Rate (scale 1..5)]

Question Settings

I clicked the tick box to make “Response required”

I also changed the scale (Nb of scale items) to 10 since there are 10 Amendments in the Bill of Rights.

I chose “No duplicate choices” as the teacher wants the Amendments ranked.

Question Text is where you enter the question/directions. We entered

“Rank the Amendments. 10 is the MOST important, 1 is the LEAST important. Please note that each column can have only ONE choice. Thus, if you rank Amendment I as the Most Important clicking on Most Important for another Amendment would remove the ranking from Amendment I. “

Next, I copied and pasted each Amendment in the Possible Answers box (make sure that each Amendment is one line – i.e. there are no “hard returns”).

Then I added the Named Degrees:

1=LEAST important
2=2
3=3
4=4
5= Mid-point of importance
6=6
7=7
8=8
9=9
10= MOST important

Save the question. Then use the Preview link to view your awesomeness.

Since this is a questionnaire, we do have lots of options that we could add. For example, we could have students explain why they ranked the Amendments where they did. However, this will be done as a class as a whole group discussion.

Writing, Typing, Cheating, and AI

December 6, 2022 / / 0 Comments

I was listening to the wonderful Mac Geek Gab, (show 958) and Dave Hamilton shared a story from his past that I found fascinating. I think that it is relevant to what we are facing as well.

You can listen to the story on the Mac Geek Gab Podcast – the story starts around 28:05, or follow my condensed, from my memory version, or read the YouTube transcript below:

Dave relates a story of when he was in 10th grade and the family had a computer. The class was assigned to write an essay. Dave wrote his rough draft on an Apple IIc since he had one. He printed it out and handed it to the teacher for the next phase. The teacher didn’t want to accept it as a rough draft because it was printed out. (My favorite line was Dave said, “I’m like, wow, just you wait, go ahead and read it. Like I’m pretty sure you’re gonna disagree with yourself. Actually, yeah, it’s pretty rough. Like I don’t think I’m that good you know”). The teacher’s point was that everyone else had to write out the rough draft and Dave was cheating. The teacher failed Dave. He headed to the Guidance Counselor who agreed with Dave.

So, how does this relate to today? Well, AI writing things is becoming, well, a thing. The kids know it. Teachers are dealing with it. The question is partly, will this become a way of writing? Will we have an AI write the rough draft, or provide alternative points, or proofread what you write, will that become “normal”?

Almost everyone I watch type, kind of defaults to looking for the red squiggles that indicate a word is spelled wrong or maybe used incorrectly (me included). This has become a reality for us.

So what does the future look like? Actually, that’s the wrong question. What does life look like today? Should we be taking advantage of these tools? Should we be teaching kids to utilize them for their benefit?

YouTube Transcript of Dave’s Essay Story

but I will share an anecdotal story from
my own history in high school in 10th Grade I had I
think it was 10th grade when we had to write our first term papers I had uh an
apple 2C at home I was very happy to have this apple 2C at home and
I they you know the process this was to learn how to write a paper so there was
a process to it and the rough draft was probably more important than the final
product right because this we had to write a rough draft and then we would go through an editing process both
individually with the teacher and then also with our groups in the class and then we would you know present a
finalized product and and the grade was sort of on the whole project great like no problem fine
I uh so I went home and I I wrote my term paper and of course I wrote it on
my Apple 2C because I had it and I knew how to type and and it was relatively
new for us this was really our first computer we had a Timex Sinclair before that but you know in terms of I don’t
know Sinclair had it had its new had its utility but so I did it and I printed out my my work
and I brought it in and the teacher was like I can’t accept this and I said uh what what do you what
do you mean they’re like well you’re this isn’t a rough draft you know you’ve printed this and I’m like wow just you
wait go ahead and read it like I’m pretty sure you’re gonna disagree with yourself actually yeah it’s pretty rough
like I don’t think I’m that good you know and uh she’s like well yeah but you didn’t hand write it like the final
product has to be typed but the the rough draft everybody else hand wrote it
I’m like not it’s fine it doesn’t bother me whatever they chose to do I’m like I did this and she’s like well you did
this on a computer right and I said yeah she said well this is like cheating because everybody else in the class uh
wrote it out by hand and then is going to have to after we do the edits it’s going to then have to go and type the
whole thing you know essentially writing it a second time on a different medium and I’m like well I mean that’s on them
like yeah all I have to do is go in and do the edits and then reprint like obviously and that is what every single
person that’s listening to this show would do today but back then what’s that
it was the future then it was no I she failed me for the project and I went
straight to my guidance counselor and I was like like this and I even told her
I’m like this is the future and it’s not like some Hundred Year future I’m like within five years this is how this class
is going to be taught and the opposite will be the exception rather than the rule and my guidance counselor looked at
the teacher and she’s like he’s a hundred percent right this is you did not put in the requirements that people
had to hand write their rough draft this is not a penmanship class yeah this is
an English class and he is getting full benefit arguably more more than full
benefit of this because he’s able to focus on the English part of it and not the pedantic handwriting and rewriting
of this thing over and over again and the teacher was pissed pissed but so 18
and a half four years with her yeah yeah exactly right uh but I I share this
anecdote because right now we all think that using an AI to write our papers is
cheating and someone thought that using a computer to write my paper was
cheating and literally failed me until she was forced not to so

*Post image from Wikimedia: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Artificial_Intelligence_%26_AI_%26_Machine_Learning_-_30212411048.jpg

Image viawww.vpnsrus.com
Date16 August 2018
Sourcehttps://www.flickr.com/photos/152824664@N07/3021241048/
Authormikemacmarketing

Weekly Update 48

December 3, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Gardens AGLOW

We took the opportunity to attend Garden’s AGLOW as a way to “kick off” the Christmas season.

Workbench

I’ve finally started to work on making a basic workbench. This will be a temporary workbench until I can build a proper one. I’m using all recycled wood from around the house. Most of the wood is coming from the “fort” that was in the backyard when we purchased the house or from D1’s contributions from projects are her house.

Lights for Christmas

The outside lights for Christmas have been installed. This is probably the earliest I’ve done so. However, the weather was right.

Moodle

I was able to update my Moodle instance to version 4.1. This is a big improvement as my hosting service had previously been running an older SQL version which precluded me from updating.

Rm Foot

Rm had foot surgery. The surgery went well. She is recovering quickly.

Mastodon

More and more educators are joining Mastodon. It is quickly becoming a useful network to gain links, tips, and make connections. This is what I had been hoping for when I first joined Mastodon in 2017.

I’m slightly struggling with the posts about moving from Twitter to Mastodon, but I recognize that it is a necessary evil for people to make those connections. I do recognize that I could filter those out, and I’m close to doing so, but for now, I’m leaving them as a reminder that different people are at different points of the journey.

It does seem that the analogy of email, everyone can be on different servers but connect, is very useful for people.

Christmas Music

This is probably the earliest I’ve started listening to Christmas music as well. I’m intentionally trying to make sure that I enjoy the Christmas season, and music is a part of that. I’m not going crazy listening to Christmas music all the time, but occasionally, I’m tuning in to the Christmas station.

Art Walk

Rm and I did attend the Gardiner Art Walk this year. There were some interesting artists, some that we’ve seen before. We made a few purchases.

Quick Update

November 25, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Joplin

Well, hopefully, I have my Joplin sync issue resolved. If you are using Joplin and enable encryption, it is best if you make sure to use the same password on all your devices.

Joplin is how I write blog posts (yes, I could write directly on the blog, but, well, habit). Thus, blog posts haven’t been as numerous lately.

Thanksgiving

The kids were otherwise occupied for Thanksgiving. We had intended upon sharing Thanksgiving with some friends, but, alas, a family emergency pre-empted those plans.

Rm did make a wonderful dinner and we had a lovely Thanksgiving. I’m truly thankful for my life partner. She’s absolutely wonderful. She’s kind, funny, fun, sweet, and gorgeous.

The Lions lost, but at least it was a close game.

Fediverse PD

Mastodon is starting to develop educational PD opportunities. I recently found Brenna Clarke Gray’s Blog through Mastodon. She has some wonderful thoughts about education and leadership. (Tip: she doesn’t have an RSS feed on her blog but adding /feed to her URL works).

Fediverse

There was a discussion about Big Social Media, i.e. Twitter, Facebook, etc, and I found this line:

…think of that old story about the pigs marvelling at how well the farmer fed and looked after them

I think that I’ll leave with that.

Week Note

November 8, 2022 / / 0 Comments

ACTEM

ACTEM went pretty well. My presentation was a bit too broad for the group. However, a couple of attendees were inspired to work on creating some materials.

Mostly, it was nice to meet some people and make some connections. It’ll be interesting to see if conferences go “back” to what they were before.

I was also intrigued by the keynote speakers. Personally, I wonder how they ended up with the gig. (This is not a criticism of them, just wondering.)

PixelFed

PixelFed is an open-source site designed to share photos. It is very much like Instagram, without Facebook, sorry Meta, owning it.

The neat thing is that it is very easy to use, very graphically pleasing. The negative is that there aren’t as many as your friends (most likely) on it.

There is no tracking. There is no algorithm to determine what you’ll see. There is no advertising.

There are three basic feeds, Home, Local, and Global. Home is the one of people you follow. Local is all the people on this instance, and Global is, well everyone.

If you are on PixelFed, connect up with me.

PrePandemic Weekend

This weekend was kind of a “pre-pandemic” weekend. Rm and I were able to attend several events. Of course, we masked up for each and every one of these, but still is was wonderful.

Paul Reiser

Paul Reiser may be best known (at least by us) for “Mad About You”. This was one of our favorite TV comedies.

Paul Reiser does observational comedy. He is funny and family friendly. The show included several bits about “getting older”, and was funny and enjoyable.

The venue Waterville Opera House is a nice theater.

Amsterdam

On Saturday, we headed off to see the movie Amsterdam. This was an interesting movie with a few major flaws (like a couple of alternative reality sequences). I would say the movie was good, but not great.

What the movie really brings up is how important knowing history really is. The movie is loosely based on history of a plot to replace Roosevelt. It also brings up the past belief of creating a nation centered on the “right” people. Here it is really important to understand the rise of eugentics.

Violins of Hope

On Sunday afternoon, we headed to the Portland Symphony Orchestra for the Violins of Hope Maine concert. The Violins of Hope Maine is a month long residency program that focuse on playing violins from the Holocaust. The centerpiece of concert is Verdi’s Requim of Hope.

The Violins of Hope Project centers around a private collection of violins, violas, and cellos all collected since the end of World War II. Many of the instruments belonged to Jews during the war. The instruments have been reconditioned and travel the world to share the story with people everywhere.

The Death of Twitter? (And the move to Mastodon)?

November 1, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Some thoughts about moving to Mastodon from Twitter.

Now that Elon Musk has purchased Twitter, there is a bit of a hue and cry to leave Twitter. I totally get that. Musk’s recent tweet (since deleted) responding to Hillary Clinton’s tweet about the attack on Paul Pelosi was nothing short of abdominal. Essentially, Musk helps spread offensive, inaccurate lies. He is legitimizing absolute lies. He is pushing for more attacks on people. The tweet reinforces the fears of Musk running Twitter.

However, I’m not yet convinced that people will leave Twitter in massive numbers. There are lots of people who believe and support exactly that kind of thinking. There are even more people who don’t consider that kind of speech “My problem”.

I’ve never seen tons of hate speech on Twitter. I follow a bunch of educators. Mostly, my Twitter feed has been K-12 educators and a few parody or comedy accounts.

I’ve researched leaving Twitter several times. The biggest alternative is Mastodon. However, Mastodon isn’t Twitter. It is different. It has a different intent. It functions differently.

Mastodon

Mastodon is not owned by a specific company. There is no algorithm to provide you content. Rather, it can be what the community wants it to be. That’s the first difference, Mastodon isn’t a single site, but a connection of sites. Each user joins a Mastodon instance (server, community) that fits their perspective. There are a wide range of Mastodon instances (sites) available. Generally, one starts with the Mastodon instance (site) that fits their interest. Instances (sites) centered on things like Art, Music, LGBTQ+ issues, Programming, and much more are available. Here is a quick link to some site listings. However, just because you join one instance, doesn’t mean that you can’t see things from other instances. So, if you join a community focused on Art, you can still follow people from other communities. Thus, you can create a feed of people that you are interested in. Those people can be on any community at all (pretty much, communities can block other whole communities – which is actually a good thing, very few communities get blocked).

Mastodon seems to be seeing a huge influx of users. Some have closed registrations (new accounts).

Why Scholar Social registrations are closed

We’ve spent 5 years developing a culture at Scholar that is intentionally different from Twitter and even from academic Twitter (with varying degrees of success)

We’re more chill, we’re in academia but intensely critical of academia, we’re anti-racist and pro-queer; we’re “the teacher’s break room of the Fediverse”

I’m not going to throw that all away, trampled by an influx of users who think that this space is just “different Twitter”

Mastodon is comprised of three basic feeds, whereas Twitter only has one. Those three feeds are:

  • Home – those people you have chosen to follow
  • Local timeline – those people in the same community (server) as you
  • Federated timeline – Pretty much lots of things from different communities

Coming from Twitter, these changes are definitely different. It took me a while to understand the differences. Once you understand that the second column is the instance (community feed), things can make more sense. Following people is easy, but there isn’t a company-wide algorithm to direct you to users. You have to find them.

Here are a couple of guides:

Mastodon is not new. Mastodon has been around for quite a long time. Please don’t join an instance and start requesting changes. The community has debated, and decided, how Mastodon should look, work, and feel. If you are passionate about wanting some changes, please be part of the community for a while BEFORE you start asking for things to be changed.

The biggest issue may be a bit ironical. There are fewer users on Mastodon than on Twitter. The same network effect really isn’t in place. One of my frustrations has long been that there isn’t really a Mastodon targetted for K-12 educators. Maybe Twitter will get so screwed up that people will leave and look for something similar, but different.

I’m not yet convinced that Mastodon will replace Twitter. I still think that it’s too early. It is an interesting time though. I’ve tried to make the change a few times. If enough people do try out Mastodon and stick around for a bit, it really could be a better experience.

I remain an open-source advocate. I hope that more and more people will realize the advantages of open-source. Having control is a good thing.

Another resource:

If you have issues with your Mastodon account and are on mastodon.social, take these steps:

  1. Go to https://instances.social/ & do the wizard
  2. Select any instance that pops up that looks nice to you
  3. Create an account there
  4. Set up an account alias by going to Settings -> Account -> Account Settings -> Moving from a different account
  5. Move your account by going to https://mastodon.social/settings/migration

The #Fediverse is distributed, you don’t need to be on the most popular instance to participate.

https://chaos.social/@pludikovsky

Weekly Review

October 21, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Breakfast with a Beauty

Rm (who is definitely the beauty here) and I had breakfast at a new local coffee shop. Breakfast was terrific (we both had Eggs Benedict) and the coffee was good. We pretty much had the place to ourselves, one other diner with a dog arrived, which was nice.

I’m reminded just how special and enjoyable these moments are. I’m extremely blessed that I get to spend my life with her. I’m also blessed that we get to have moments like this.

Moodle Cross State

I’m lucky to be part of the Moodle Cross State group. This is a terrific group.

StudentQuiz

I’m working with the wonderful plug-in for Moodle called StudentQuiz. Essentially, the plug-in allows students to create quiz questions. These questions can then be answered by the students (for points). The students can also rank the questions.

MAMLE

The Maine Association of Middle Level Educators held its annual conference this past week and I got to go. It was very refreshing to chat with middle school people and look at things from a middle school learning perspective.

I also had an opportunity to chat with the wonderful Dr. Monte Selby. Surprisingly, he even remembered me from an interview that Shawn and I did with him many years ago. He really did remember me, beyond just being polite. Shawn and I interviewed Dr. Selby back in 2012 at NMSA (National Middle School Association) Annual Conference. It really does feel pretty special when someone of Dr. Selby’s ilk remembers you.

Sync

Keeping things in sync is nearly magical. The ability to do something in one place and have it magically show up in another is terrific. When this works, it is great. It doesn’t always work though. When it doesn’t, it is time to troubleshoot.

Joplin

I love Joplin. I’ve used it for quite a while. However, it seems as though one device got a bit out of sync with the others. My working belief is that one of the encryption passwords is out of sync with the others.

NetNewsWire

I’ve been using NetNewsWire for years and years. It has a long history, but it is an open-source RSS reader. It is by far the best RSS reader around. I know that not many people use RSS, but I love it. I get control over what I want to read. Basically, RSS is like my social media site. It’s also like my own personal newspaper. I get to follow the blogs and postings that I want to follow. I have my feeds sectioned off into categories, and things mostly work great.

Recently, I noticed that reading things on one device wasn’t always syncing with the others. A quick trip to the support forums (done via Slack) and the developer answers the questions. He asks for a file to be shared. Bing, he answers the question with instructions on how to fix the issue. He also notes that an upcoming update will fix this issue.

So, I get better support from an open-source software solution than I do with most products that I pay for.

Logseq

Logseq syncing is still a project for me. It doesn’t seem to sync reliably. I have realized that the sync is only really assured (happens?) when closing the program. This is not the way most syncing works. So, maybe it’s my fault?

I haven’t had time to fully investigate this issue, but I hope to at some point.

Cover of Brendan James New Album

Week Note 40

October 3, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Tech as a Utility

I’ve had a few discussions with people who want technology to be “like utilities”. That is, they just want the technology to work. I understand this. I wish it were like this too. Essentially, they want technology to be like the water spigot or the light switch. Flip it on, it works. However, at this point, technology is not there. For starters, we may want different things from technology than other users.

For example, hit that switch and the projector turns on and shows the video that you want. Um, where is that video? Are you wired directly to the projector? Do you want this to work wirelessly?

I probably should have some better examples. But the point really is that we may not all want the same thing to happen when we flip that switch. Thus, we’re going to have to learn to make the technology do what we want.

Talk Like A Pirate Day

So this last week was “Talk Like a Pirate Day”. Sadly, not one of my known peeps was participating.

Heated Seats

Well, this week was the first time this fall that I was thrilled to have heated seats. This is one of those little pleasures that I really enjoy.

Brendan James


We went to see Brendan James at the City Winery in Boston. What a wonderful show. I can’t tell you how much I enjoy seeing singer/songwriters perform their work in a small, intimate venue. Like Ari Hest, Brendan James is a thoughtful, singer/songwriter who can make you think and touch your soul. He played great songs and shared a bunch of wonderful stories.

Brendan James also has new album out (Leap Taken). We bought it, directly from him on the honor system. Grab the CD, scan the Venmo code and send him money.

Rm even got to request a song that he played.

Local Comedy

I also got to go to a local comedy show with a friend. It was an interesting evening. One could definitely tell that different comedians were at different points in their development. Timing and pacing are so very important in comedy.

There was a bit too much focus on crass jokes for me. I’m not really a prude, but I also think that you don’t have to fall only to sexual points to be funny.

However, the company was great. It was nice to get out to see a local show.

Darktable

I’m watching some videos trying to learn how to use Darktable. These are very interesting. I’m hoping to at least get good enough to develop some passable photographs.

Weekly Update 38

September 18, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Producing the Podcast

Every week I do a podcast, well, almost every week. This past week, I made a major oopsie (yep, that is the official term). While putting the show together, which is recorded in a couple of segments, I copied in a segment from the previous week.

Acadia

On Sunday, Rm and I headed to Acadia National Park to meet up with daughter #1 and a friend of hers who is here to visit. We had a wonderful hike together. Rm and I stuck around to watch the ocean for a bit. As the ocean came in, we were close, but safe, that we got sprayed a bit.

York

Our continuing participation in the Maine Yarn Cruise, ok, mostly Rm, but I get to go along frequently to see new places. One of the spots to visit was in York. We explored a bit of York as well. Specifically, we visited the Nubble Lighthouse. The Nubble Lighthouse was a nice visit. Afterward, we headed out for dinner. We stopped at a restaurant with outside seating. The restaurant was technically what you would call a “hole in the wall”. Our expectations weren’t high, but we ordered. The food turned out to be excellent (only surpassed by the company). I had a fried haddock sandwich that was marvelous.

Ari Hest

Rm and I went to see Ari Hest at the The Music Hall Lounge in Portsmouth, NH. If you aren’t familiar with Ari Hest, check out his music. While he gets some fame for working with Judy Collins, his music stands on its’ own.

The venue was really nice. It’s a really small space, very intimate. We sat about ten feet away. No opening act, just Ari Hest. We had two lovely table mates as well.

I really prefer these shows over the stadium-sized shows. Smaller venue artists connect with the audience in a way that is impossible in large venues. Rather than spectacle, you get connection. Many of these artists, and Ari Hest certainly qualifies, are the modern-day philosophers, poets, and guides.

Portsmouth also has a wonderfully cute downtown. Rm and I will have to go back when more things are open and we can explore.

Matt Mullenweg

Matt Mullenweg was on This Week in Google recently. I was fascinated by many parts of the show. Specifically, I was interested in some of his views on open-source and usability. I need to relisten with specific attention. But here are a couple of things that struck me:

  • Social networks have to find what makes them special. Matt recently purchased Tumblr. There was discussion about Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more social networks.
  • Conversation versus connection. This was interesting as well. Are we looking for connection (Facebook’s default value) or communication?

So, I’ll need to go back and listen again with purpose.

One of the other things that Matt talked about was making the canvases, and brushes of the internet.

Millionaire Dollar Idea

ig Nobel Awards of 2022. The Applied Cardiology Prize is about blind dating and how their heart rate becomes synchronized. Develop a device with a Green, Yellow, and Red light. Each dater wears a finger clip, the box sits in the middle of the table.

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