Migration to New Blog

Hello Readers!  Except for a widget installation here or there, I am ready to roll out to you my new blog – yippee!  I will no longer be updating pygmea.wordpress.com, although I will leave it around for a while since that’s the one everyone knows about.  My new domain is my name – www.sarastreeter.com .  It’s hosted on the same space as a fabulous equestrian website – www.equi-works.com  – which I just happened to design.  Check that out too if you’re interested – especially the articles, written by Jerri Streeter (my mom).  Thanks for your interest in my work!

Scaling The Tower of Babble – Managing Information Overload

Lots of stuff, too little time.  I find that when I am looking for something in particular, either I find it right away – it’s at the top of Google’s list – or I wade through pages and pages of irrelevant material scanning for what I want.  Then there’s reading through feeds in Google Reader – one RSS feed after another that I should have skipped.  Then there are all the e-mail accounts I need to check, one for work, one for school, one for personal/junk, one for personal/private, etc.  Don’t forget the social networks I’m on – need to skim through those and see if anything interesting has happened.  When Robert Scoble was recently banned from Facebook (his account was reinstated after a slap on the wrist), I wonder if he didn’t secretly think to himself “good, one less social network to keep track of”…

Another interesting aspect to this question is how I manage my output of information.  I generate photos, posts, all sorts of login/password/identification info, and somewhere out there that’s all taking up space on various servers.  I know I’m a drop in the bucket as an individual, but every little bit helps.  What can I do to consolidate and “defragment” my online presence?

I recommend applying the 80/20 rule – inspired by Pareto’s Principle.  The idea is 80% of your resources – like your time and attention – are consumed by 20% of your activities – like reading e-mail or RSS feeds.  If you identify the 20% that’s sucking up all these resources, you can narrow down your activities to the ones that give you most bang for your buck – and free up some of that 80%. 

Applying that to my case, I notice that I spend way more time looking at my iGoogle home page than I do checking any of my social networks.  I haven’t looked at my LinkedIn profile, MySpace, or YouTube accounts for probably a month.  Who knows what interesting things are going on there.  Rather than making a special trip here and there to those various social networks, I can funnel them all into Google Gadgets and stick them on the front page.  Ahh, Google.

As for managing my output, it’s all about streamlining.  Consistently using the same user name is good thinking, since it makes me recognizable.  I have a blog, a social network profile, and a personal web page, but I need to merge them and give people a better experience trying to find me.  Taking the time now to do all this will generate time and increase productivity, especially as my online presence grows to be a more fundamental part of everyone’s experience of me.

Call for Predictions for 2058

In 1938 they took a shot at predicting what it would be like in 2008 – and here we are, so now it’s our turn.  What will the world be like in 2058?  Since that’s so wide open, I’m going to put out a few seed questions:

Will we have figured out how to positively affect the global environment, like patch up the hole in the ozone and moderate, if not reverse, global warming?

Will we have started opting for computer implants by then (I know people are always talking about this jokingly, but might it happen)?

Will telephone poles still be around?

Will we have ID numbers instead of last names? Hi my name’s Sara 902-85396.

What will be the dominant language on the planet, and will there still be lots of different languages?

2007 Little People Awards

Who am I to judge?  Exactly!!!

Here are people who make the cut when it comes to sheer awesomeness – I’ll put down first names only along with a description of why they’re so cool.  By the way, everyone I know deserves an award for awesomeness, so I’m excluding people I speak to on a regular basis, just to be fair.

Phil – self-employed real estate agent, recommends the Hillsdale Imprimis (www.hillsdale.edu/imprimis – check it out), with his own money gave out plaques to local businesses that were making the papers just to recognize effort, he is overcoming a physical handicap that at one point threatened his ability to walk

Steve – professor of medieval studies, has overcome a sight handicap to become an expert on Hildegard of Bingen

Lyn – author of children’s books, started a program to encourage fourth graders  in literacy and writing

Roberta – director of a local horseback riding program for the handicapped

Ken – professor of biology, has defended the study of evolution in schools and written a book about preserving faith while still believing in the scientific method, also volunteers as umpire for middle school softball games

People make a difference one kind act at a time.  Their example inspires me to actively pursue goals that will enrich my own life and the lives of those in the community.

Apology to the participants in my last Newbie 4357

I accidentally deleted the last episode of the Newbie 4357 show on Operator 11 – crap!! I apologize to the people who participated in it – I was trying to delete the episode that had the sound problems.  Not a good night for Op11 directing!!

Please come and visit next week and we’ll have another great show – Fridays at 6:30pm.

What do all the Doodads Do?

Depending on how much your loved ones spent on you this Christmas, chances are you have a new electronic thingamajig that does some nifty trick.  I want to take a moment to ponder doodads – why are they so much fun, can/should one doodad do everything, and are we getting too dependent?

 First, a Gizmo Review:

Cellphone – be reachable by phone again; as well as receive text messages, oh yeah, and it’s a camera too, because your cellphone, unlike your digital camera, will automatically adhere to whatever you take with you all the time 

mp3/mp4 player – the Apple iPod or the Creative Zen, welcome to gigs of storage for music, photos, movies, and stuff, this is an entertainment center – think solitaire on steroids

flash drive – use this as backup for your computer or as an extra drive, and then take your files with you to another computer

Bluetooth – this headset syncs up compatible devices when it comes within range, so whichever computer you’re at knows who you are

 PDAs – no longer public displays of affection, this acronym has been co-opted for personal digital assistant – Blackberry, Treo, Palm Pilot are a few – send your e-mail, access the internet and combine functions of the above devices in one handy device

The funny thing about these doodads is that once you start using them, you start to wonder how you ever functioned without them.  So that brings up my next question – are we Inspector Gadget, with the preparedness of the Boy Scout saving the day with our gear – or are we the Borg, giving up autonomy for the sake of being in sync through our implants?  I would say it depends on why we use these devices.  I don’t worry about my work reaching me on my cellphone because I’m not on call when I’m not at work.  My boss however is on call, and he groans about having to answer e-mail on his handheld device when he’s out of the office.  I don’t like competing with someone’s iPod if I’m trying to speak to him/her, but then again I do like walking to the work to a beat.  Then there’s the question of whether these doodads are user-friendly.  I’ve heard plenty of people complain about texting because of the pain of getting the right letters.  I tried Bluetooth and had to return it to the store because I didn’t get the whole press and hold the button thing.  I can see why you’d want to access your e-mail all of the time, but then do you really want to be accessible by e-mail all the time?

The whole tricorder-aspect of the portable device appeals to me.  I like the idea of having flexibility about how I communicate.  And as the flight attendants so wisely tell us, their switches do have an “off” position.

Is the Graphic Designer a Geek?

How geeky is a graphic designer?  Can’t code, probably doesn’t know half the acronyms your first year newbie does, and uses a lot of ’short-cuts’ to generating web pages – Photoshop and Dreamweaver, to name the most likely tools in the toolbox.

Some would say a graphic designer does the ’soft core’ web development – asks questions like how exactly should that image be placed in relation to the text, how can we achieve drop-shadow, or which font is most effective in which circumstance.  The fundamental question behind graphic design is does form follow function – is the purpose of the website being conveyed clearly by its visual elements?  As long as this is the question a graphic designer is asking, then yes it is a useful and vital task in web development.

So is a graphic designer a geek?  I would say a thorough to the point of obsessive competence in anything, especially something computer related, makes one a geek in that area.  Sure a graphic designer can be a geek – a very specific type of geek, whose expertise has great relevance to the work of the ‘hard core’ back-end coding geeks.

Geeky Bloopers

So part of the learning experience, as I as a newbie grow to learn more about coding and web development, is the collection of silly things I mistakenly do as I am trying to accomplish a task.  Rather than feel embarrassed about them, I want to learn from them and even have a good chuckle over them.  Once I do solve the problem, that is – it’s not as much fun when you still haven’t figured out where you made the mistake.

So here goes, some good geeky bloopers – and I welcome readers to submit their own in comments (preferably mistakes you made because you were inexperienced and that were easily fixed, once you found out how):

•  php-ini – if anyone has had to install PHP on their machine, you will know what I’m talking about.  My problem was I would call up the php info document and it told me I was running a previous version than the one I had installed.  Took forever but we finally figured out I had a single outdated php.ini left over in my Apache folder which the web server was reading – I should have put the php.ini in my PHP folder, not my Apache folder.  Oops.
• Capital letters – capital letters screw me up sometimes.  I had a jpeg image with the file extension in all caps, so the server couldn’t find the image.  I kept re-checking the spelling and finally it dawned on me the server was case-sensitive.  You don’t need to learn that one twice!
• Uploading via FTP – had to figure out that the port number really does matter when I first started uploading files to my website via FTP

Then there are bloopers using software – way easier to think of these because they affect how I interact with others:

• Operator 11 – spent 20 minutes talking to myself thinking I was live on the air because I didn’t realize I had to press the Netcast button
• WordPress – sent out e-mails to a bunch of people to read a post I had written but had forgotten to publish – they kept getting Not Found errors trying to access the link I posted to the page
• Skype – tried to host a video conference call with multiple people, it was kind of a disaster because I kept inadvertently putting people on hold, not realizing that Skype doesn’t allow multi-user video conference calls

These are just the few I can think of off the top of my head, but I’m sure there have been many more.  All part of the newbie experience

Geek Speak: Newbie Hurdle #1

Consider this Dilbert cartoon:

Now this actual chat transcript from  http://operator11.com/shows/4992/episodes/28677 

(05:18) Geek #1 Thinking about trying a Mac out – is a Mac Mini good enough for web video, or do I need to spring for an iMac?
…
(09:11) Geek #2 I wish the mini came with a 7200 rpm drive
…
(09:41) Newbie #1 theres a mac mini??
…no Geek response…
(09:44) Geek #3  When i got my new pc i spent 2 days getting vista off it and finding all the missing drivers i needed for xp
… and Newbie #1 has left the studio

So let’s talk about that barrier to entry for newbies, geek speak.  In the tech profession there’s jargon that the techies use that the newbies don’t get.  The sheer number of names for things is intimidating enough, and then on top of that there are all the ways of categorizing the names that just don’t make sense to newbies. 

Is this inevitable?  Is there any way to make it easier?  Where should a newbie start?  This issue was a problem for me when I first started.  I worked through it by sitting with my mentor at geeky gatherings and just writing on a notepad all the nouns I didn’t know.  I remember listing things like “WYSIWYG”, “Ajax”, “CMS”, “Framework”, to name a few.  And what exactly was the difference between Javascript and Java?  What did PHP stand for?  How were you supposed to pronounce SQL?  As geeks reading this might be able to guess, I was sitting in a meetup having to do with developing the back end of web sites.  Once the meetup was over, I took my extensive list of whats-its to my mentor and we went over the terms and concepts one by one.  Over the next few months, I grew much more familiar with the language of web design.  I still hadn’t worked very much with the various tools, but I could understand what geeks meant when they referred to them.

The problem is that when geeks get together, they start talking geek and leave the newbies behind.  To this day, I don’t understand everything they say, but I’m not as intimidated to ask because I do understand a majority of it.  What’s annoying to geeks is having to stop every other sentence (or in mid-sentence) and explain the basic concepts behind what they’re discussing.  What I like about my method of writing the terms down was that I didn’t interrupt the flow of the conversation or demand an immediate explanation.  I wouldn’t be able to ‘get’ the conversation like the geeks did, but at least they would provide a way for me to learn so maybe I would ‘get’ the next one.

Seven Things I’m Thankful For

I’m writing this because Adam Darowski, charitable man that he is, listed my name on his blog as one of the people tagged to write what they’re thankful for.

 So here goes:

1. My cat – a little feline loving goes a long way
2. Superman – Chris Reeve rocks, and Tom Welling is hot as hell
3. Creed – can’t listen enough to their CD Greatest Hits
4. The Internet / E-mail / Computers – all that communication, the challenges of programming, I actually enjoy it
5. Cell phone – I can be reached by phone – yippee!
6. Friends – having people to do fun activities with is the coolest thing ever
7. Family – sisters, parents, extended family, nephew – need I say more?

And here comes the part where I tag people, hmm, who do I know that has absolutely no time to do anything and for that very reason should be thinking about what they’re grateful for:

1.  Andrew Shearer
2. Jack Templin
3. CheriE Summer
4. Meghan Schaub
5. Tiffani Allen
6. Ray Dillon
7. Joshua Martin

Have fun!