Sometimes, when you've been going out with someone for a while, you get used to and don't see other things that are around you. This things are sometimes better for you and have lots more to offer than your current relationship. That's why for the last three months I've been trying something new and today, I finally commited to my new one.
I'm talking about my e-mail address of course.
Now I'm a happy Gmail user and I stopped using Yahoo! for good. I changed my address in all the important things I use and unsuscribed the Yahoo! address.
Google has a lot of things to offer, like Docs and the e-mail management system in Gmail so this is it, do yourself a favor and create a Gmail address!
As part of my UAM-X activities, I gave a FreeMind workshop today and it went pretty well. I taught half of the portfolio group a little bit of mind mapping theory and then I explained the program to them.
They were very enthusiastic about learning this and I think that probably there'll be more workshops of this kind. While trying to export our mindmaps to XHTML, Internet Explorer gave problems because it tried to block the content, so I recommended Opera to the teachers and they'll probably download it.
If that's the case, I'll give them an Opera workshop, which shall be interesting. The main objective of the workshop was to create a text based on ideas organized in a mindmap, a report, for example.
I've used this technique several times and shared it with other people with very nice results
DreamSpark is a program set up by Microsoft to provide students with software design and development tools at no charge. The program was originally directed at college students, but now it has been expanded to include high school students.
Because I worked/work at IPN, I got the benefits of this program through my @ipn.mx account. Now, I'll be able to download free-of-charge, legal copies of Windows Server 2003 and 2008, Visual Studio and SQL Server. That would have been very helpful during the week when my server went down, but heck, it's still a nice offer and sooner or later they'll be helpful.
Today, it was brought to my attention that my blog is about to become 5 years old next March. I have been reading my first posts to remember some events from that time and it has worked as a charm, making my blog a useful remembering tool.
Speaking of which, I've just downloaded a to-do list manager for the mac called Check Off to help me with the to-do list Pau is making for me, since she's now responsible of that sort of matters, so if you've got any suggestions regarding the tasks I have to tackle on in the next couple of days, please address her directly.
I'm not talking about the Taiwanese brand of computer supplies. I'm talking about iTunes 8 newest feature. Genius scans your library and compares it to the iTunes Store catalogue. This is intended to let you create coherent playlists, not based on search terms but in "songs that sound great together".
I must say that I didn't have much faith in this, but after several tries and some dumped lists, I got a couple of nice playlists that I thought were actually good.
Talking about upgrades, the lab at work finally was upgraded in RAM and we even got our own IP address where a weblog created using ThinkJot can be accessed from the internet when the server is up (not the case right now, but if you're curious, PM me and I'll give you the address). The interesting point is that we were using (for tests) 40 IP's and after I figured out the correct configuration, we dropped 39 and kept one, the other 39 are subnetted within the intranet!
Tomorrow I'll install SP3 on the XP boxes that -believe it or not- don't even have SP1 installed!
I've got to say that the Mac actually comes with a lot of neat stuff out of the box. In the last few weeks I've been learning a lot of some unsung features of my computer:
Dashcode: It allows me to create Dashboard widgets, from scratch such as my l33t sp33k translator and from templates like countdowns and RSS readers.
Text-to-speech: This feature speaks for itself (literally), Alex reads your text aloud and can make audio files from it.
Automator: It allows you to create workflows for different tasks such as joining PDF pages together, creating audio files and controlling iTunes.
iMovie: I made a couple of videos and uploaded them to YouTube.
It's really great to make the computer work for you, just like with my self-grading Excel spreadsheet ^_^
I went over to Manato's to get the pictures from the trip, you'll be able to see most of them at his and Federico's blog when they upload them. Among the pictures were some videos shot by his camera and I couldn't resist to try to make a movie using them.
So, when I got home, I opened iMovie and started to learn how to use it (I was going to, anyway) and I realized that first I had to convert every video to m4v using iSquint, otherwise iMovie won't import them. So after several minutes of choosing a song, adding video and photos and finally editing Eric's butt flashing, I finally got a nice video but couldn't stop there: I also made a "music" video for the IPN anthem using footage I had on my cellphone (so the video is rather low quality).
The best part, is that iMovie allows you to upload directly to YouTube, so now you can see both videos there, just log on to my YouTube site and enjoy my having nothing to do while I learn that in Campeche there's no Leon beer and I'm not at the party I was invited to.
I think I'll buy myself a video camera with my next paycheck. Gosh! Don't you love your Mac?
At school we have a computer virus epydemic and since I have a Mac it doesn't affect me. I'd love to run my server on Linux but I guess that Windows 2003 is all that I'll get in vacation. The point is that everybody's USB drives are infected and whenever I have the chance I try to clean them using my Mac.
ClamXav is a free virus checker for Mac OS X. It uses the tried, tested and very popular ClamAV open source antivirus engine as a back end.
It is great to check and clean my USB drive after using it on infected computers and in this way, I could handle a vaccination campaing among my fellow teachers and students!
If you're a Mac user, give it a try, don't become careless about other people's infected files, because they don't affect you doesn't mean that you can't infect other poor Windows soul (which they deserve for using that OS).
It's free and open source, BTW. Oh, and I spent all morning drinking the Chai tea Manatito gave to me yesterday ^_^
Leet (written 31337, 1337, L337, 1337z0r, 13370rz, and l33t), or Leetspeak, used primarily on the Internet, uses various combinations of ASCII characters to replace Latinate letters. The term is derived from the word "elite", and the usage it describes is a specialized form of symbolic writing. Different dialects of leet are found on different online forums.
I wrote a Dashboard widget for the Mac that makes that for your just by copying your text and hitting "Translate".
Almost all blogging software depends on PHP and a database to work. At school, my server is Windows based and has little resources, installing a DB engine is not an option. I wanted an easy and fast option to publish info onto the labs intranet, that is a blog.
I downloaded and installed TJ on IIS and it really gave me a hard time! There were some tings that needed correction and some others had to be installed o the server first (like the .net framework, but I foreseen that and installed it first), the documentation wasn't clear enough on this, it also didn't tell me that I had to create a virtual directory, but after playing with IIS for a little while I finally got to publish on the root. So, after going to breakfast and a couple of hours later, I finally got it up and running.
ThinkJot is an asp.net based blog that doesn't use a database, perfect for my lab, not so much for a website.
Tomorrow's tasks are to customize it, take a screenshot for this post and start publishing stuff on the intranet (and make an easy pathway to the online exams we're planning). I expect this to be a very useful add to the lab and of course, it's open source, another pennyless tool to help me take over the IPN system!
WIDGETIZE