Best Life Rewards

End Of Year Evaluation Meeting

Today I am having my meeting with my supervisor for my end of the year evaluation. My Professional Improvement Plan was to explore the use of the Tablet PC in education, which I have been doing over the course of the school year. For the purposes of this meeting I am posting below an abbreviated link to the "My Life In Motion" thread on the Tablet PC Buzz site.

http://tinyurl.com/gv3ln

New Domain

Today I registered a new domain at http://terrischurter.com

Basically, for now the site is not much more than a placeholder. I currently have a domain http://www.terriblue.com . The terriblue web site has been registered and active since 1997. But it has been much neglected in the past few years. It is a Go web site devoted to what was my biggest passion at the time, the Asian board game of Go. Did you see A Beautiful Mind? If you did you saw Russell Crowe playing Go on a bench with his rival in the movie at Princeton University. As I recall his analysis was, "The game is flawed." Anyone who has played the game knows that that this simply is not true. But I digress...

I am planning to let my terriblue domain registration expire. It is too strongly associated with my life as a Goddess of Go. Now I am much more involved with the Tablet PC community than I am with the Go community, at least as far as my web activities are involved.

Some day I may decide to blog via my domain, but for now I am happy with Blogger.

SOS - Shortcuts On Screen

Have you ever missed your favorite keyboard shortcuts when you were in tablet mode? SOS to the rescue.

Download this free onscreen keyboard program in zip format from this site:

http://www.dannyburbol.com/SOS/

Danny Burbol has put together a great onscreen keyboard which you can easily customize to suit your needs by editing a text file which comes with the program.

Once you you unzip the file you will have the SOS executable file and the text file which provides the profiles that make up the many keyboards which come with SOS. I recommend that you download the video which shows you how to customize SOS. The video is packaged in a zip file so you can't stream it from the site to watch it, but it is worth the effort to unpack it and watch it. Danny takes you step by step through the process of creating a profile and points out that there is a full onscreen keyboard which you can use to cut and paste any keys you might want to add to your own profiles.

You'll find the SOS forum at the bottom of Danny's Forums Page:

http://www.dannyburbol.com/forums/

Danny has a Photoshop Profile posted in the forum. As of this date there is little posted in the SOS forums, but that may change once tablet users discover this great little program.

One of the chief concerns about using a tablet with tradition photo editing software is the inability to use keyboard shortcuts. Now you can create your own keypads to provide you with just the shortcuts you need.

I'll Do This Just For Me

Based on the many comments to my posting "To Blog or Not to Blog" I think I have to face the fact that if I am going to do this I will be doing it for myself, and I had better not expect anyone to be paying attention. I would not have expected anyone to have stumbled on this blog on their own, given that I had made a piddling number of posts in the past year, but I was hoping that someone might have found their way over here from the Tablet PC Buzz web site. That doesn't appear to be the case.

Now I'll stop whining and check out some other blogs.

To Blog or Not to Blog

Today I have a snow day, so I have time for reflection. I have been reading my rss feeds. I keep up with a few blogs through My Yahoo. One of my feeds is my own blog. The feed sits there day after day with nothing new posted. My blog has been in existence for more than a year, and up until today there were only three posts in it. I still post occasionally to my thread on the tabletpcbuzz.com. That thread is more of a blog than this one, and I started it to document my use of the tablet pc in a forum where people were actually likely to see my posts. And although I don't get many comments people occasionally chime in with a comment, or simply to say that they are reading.

http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=21618

I started this blog, on the other hand, primarily to experience setting one up. I didn't expect anyone to be interested in following it and I was afraid that I would not keep up with it. I felt that I would look foolish if I didn't keep up with it, or that I would disappoint people in some way by not keeping up with it. I had a vision of a blog as something that makes an important contribution on a continuing basis. Somehow letting a thread on a big website die out wouldn't seem to be such a public failing.

But now that I understand how rss works I realize that it is easy to keep up with a number of blogs without having to navigate to each one every day to check for content. I also see that bloggers don't necessarily post every day.

There was also the issue of visibility. I wanted to be visible to the people who cared about my topic, but did I want to be visible to the nearly 100 high school students I teach?

And now I have another motive. I have this inkling feeling that I just might be capable of making a large enough contribution to the community to be recognized as a tablet MVP. But if I do that through a thread on someone else's web site is anyone likely to notice? Don't mind me... I've always had delusions of grandeur.

So if anyone is reading I would like your opinion. Should I stop the thread on the buzz and put my energies into the blog? When I have time over the summer should I root out the most interesting posts from the buzz thread and retroactively post them to provide a concise history of my tablet usage? Let me know what you think. I will be posting a link to this entry in my buzz thread.

RSS Feed - Who knew?

I just discovered that I could access blogs from my My Yahoo web page through an RSS feed. I thought that the author of the blog had to go to the trouble to set up the RSS feed, so I was surprised to learn when I navigated to my pathetically neglected blog that there was a button on my toolbar to add a feed for my own blog. So I added my own blog to my My Yahoo page.

This is the first post in ages. I am considering back dating some content from my "My Life in Motion" thread from the tabletpcbuzz.

Uploading An Image

This is a picture of my self that I am uploading to my blog using Picasa. I just bought a book about Picasa and am experimenting with it.