Doing School all over again?

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How would I do School all over again? What would I do? I might study formal arguments or study database design and web architecture. I might even do some pre-med classes (or maybe wilderness medicine with NOLS). But I really wish someone had told me about a degree in outdoor sports and a degree in some other part of the world. Like a minor in Spanish, study in Argentina and then also do a NOLS semester in Patagonia, or a semester with GVI.

For the last 2 years I have been enrolled in the linguistics M.A. Program at UND. It has been a blast. I love linguistics. I love learning. But through this time I have been talking with people who have come to know me and my passion for doing things right organizationally and for seeing things from the "big picture" perspective. These conversations have resulted in people recommending me to look at degrees like an M.B.A. or International Management degree.

As I drive around in the Dallas area I have heard a lot of advertisements from the community college. So investigated it. They have some really cool classes for $41 a credit hour... nice.
I looked up what type of Associates degrees they offer and there are some nice options:

What do I want to do? I want to be able to build the tools I need in linguistics. Some of this involves GIS data, some language data, some linguistics.

And then I would also think about finishing my Aviation Studies to at least have my privat pilots license.

Running and using MySQL On OSX

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Installing
The best tutorial for running MySQL on OS X is actually found on the MySQL website.

However, there is a really cool System Preference pane that turns on or off the MySQL server/service. This either only works in OSX 10.5 or in 32-bit mode on OSX 10.6.

I downloaded mysql-5.1.42-osx10.5-x86_64.dmg from MySQL.com and the included preference pane works on OSX 10.6.2. (Even though it says it is for OSX 10.5.)

I just installed it without uninstalling a previous version of MySQL. I was brought over to a New MBP from an older MBP running OSX 10.5 (via Apple Genius at the Apple store), which was running MySQL. So I don’t know if the older version is still there somewhere or if the /local/ folder was not brought over in the transfer.

It seems that I have avoided the issues mentioned here:

Using
As far as editing the MySQL databases there used to be an app called CocoaMySQL. But as the link says the project has been abandoned. I heard it rumored on O’Reilley that it was because the app didn’t keep up with changes mad in MySQL past MySQL version 4.0. So CocoaMySQL can still be used on OSX 10.6 with a MySQL version 4 Database, but not with MySQL version 5.

However, there is an new app called Sequel Pro. It is available on Google Code and boast to work on OSX 10.5 with MySQL version 3-5. (I am about to test it on OS X 10.6, though the application was last updated in Dec. ’09, so it should work on 10.6.)

Of course there is always PhpMyAdmin.

Making a recipe blog

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My wife, Becky likes to cook. I like her to cook. She recently started to blog. So I talked her through the MySQL database set up and the installation of her own copy of WordPress on our Dreamhost account. (I must admit that it was a happy day.) One of the things she is doing is writing about what she cooks, with pictures of how it turns out.
“Cool”, says I. But how does one keep track of all the recipes? So I asked her why she was blogging. And she said that one of the reasons was that if she had a fixin’ to use a certain ingredient she would have a place to search to see if she had cooked with that ingredient before and how it turned out.

So I am on the hunt for a recipe plugin or recipe management CMS for her.

So far I have come across OpenEats.
And for Using WordPress itself there is hRecipe.

Javascript Charts…

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These are some really cool looking Javascript Charts from Highcharts.

Highcharts Javascript charts

Another opinion on Highcharts.

They run off of JQuery, which is already used by WordPress and K2. It would be nice if someone could wrap this into a WordPress Plugin with a cool way to add / manage data from the WP admin panel. Let me see if someone did….

For WordPress there is WP-Table by alex.rabe. This project was handed over to another developer, Tobias Bäthge and retitled WP-Table Reloaded.
Tobias says

[one] can have both wp-Table and WP-Table Reloaded installed in your WordPress! They will not interfere (as they are not using anything together). They are completely independent from each other. If WP-Table Reloaded finds the wp-Table database tables, it can import the found tables into it’s own format, so that you can completely upgrade from wp-Table to WP-Table Reloaded.

There are some updated instructions for version 1.5, which didin’t seem to make to the WP plugin repository.

There is another jQuery plugin, called Visualize, that takes data from an HTML table and displays it as a chart. Cool. I wonder which, Visualize or Highcharts is better and why?

After we graph these data, is it possible to also make the data drive a SIMILE chart/timeline?

It looks like one can add data sets to be graphed with the WP-SIMILE plugin. Why not pull these directly from the current display table? or make SIMILE / TIMEPLOT graph time depth change. i.e. if the data displayed in the HTML table is propagated from a MySQL table then why not have several entries in the MySQL database with a time code to change? in a way tracking momentum. That is over time how much have these data changed? i.e. Display the same data set from 1945, from 1950, and 1955.

Why should we still use HTML tables instead of CSS?

ASIDE: My next question is: How do I keep track of all the jQuery plugins I use?
Is there an efficient way to do that?

FYI: There are several other Charting options currently available for WordPress. Most of these involve managing your data somewhere else and then using an API to bring that data to your WP install. The truth of the matter is that it is most likely that you are going to manage your data somewhere else anyway. However, I do not use Google docs to manage my data so I can not pull data from that source directly into my my WP install.
However, there is a plugin Easy Chart Builder. This plugin does not have “nice” admin section for creating the charts but does create an image from a data set inserted with a short code.

PS
Some solutions when using google apps to present data, but if Data Ownership is an issue. Then why use google apps?
http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/html-tables-and-the-data-web/
http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/blogarchive/014014.html
http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2008/10/14/data-scraping-wikipedia-with-google-spreadsheets/

Multi-WordPress Blog Management

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I run several WordPress Blogs.

I would like to:

  • Write content for different blogs from the same admin section.
  • Allow users to on various blogs access to my other blogs with a single sign on.

http://techblog.touchbasic.com/html/single-unified-login-for-multiple-wordpress-2-8-installs-in-subdirectories-using-cookies/

Will this plugin help?

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/root-cookie/

How about this one?

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/kish-multi/

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/164758

Update: 2012… WP 3.5. It seems that for what I am doing that a WP Multi-site is the way to go.

Radiant a CMS developed in Ruby

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I was browsing – cause that is what I do. – And I came across this very flexible, yet young CMS. :: http://radiantcms.org/

One of the cool things that I liked off the bat:

  • Update the data on display from an XML feed.

I immediately thought of a site I consulted for : scriptureearth.org that this could be a solution for that. (The site is in production but I am not sure how easy it is to update the data it displays. The connivence of a XML feed is that the site would be able to be updated from an app based in the workflow of the publisher.)

CSS Alert Messages

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I found this great css messages code here (read about it for a fuller explanation):

/* CSS messages */

.alert { background: #fff6bf url('exclamation.png') 15px 50% no-repeat; padding: 5px 20px 5px 45px; border-top: 2px solid #ffd324; border-bottom: 2px solid #ffd324; }
.info { background: #f8fafc url('information.png') 15px 50% no-repeat; padding: 5px 20px 5px 45px; border-top: 2px solid #b5d4fe; border-bottom: 2px solid #b5d4fe; }
.download { background: #cfc url('download.png') 15px 50% no-repeat; padding: 5px 20px 5px 45px; border-top: 2px solid #3C6; border-bottom: 2px solid #3C6; }
.german { background: transparent url('de.png') 15px 50% no-repeat; padding: 5px 20px 5px 45px; }
.english { background: transparent url('gb.png') 15px 50% no-repeat; padding: 5px 20px 5px 45px; }

Or more Explicitly here:

http://www.bioneural.net/wp-content/themes/k2bn/styles/bioneural/bioneural.css

Mastering Missions Marketing

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Last time it was Missions Masters Marriage… but that didn’t work out as planned. It turned out to be Missions Marriage Masters.

When we think of the term Marketing we might think of a logo, a brand name or some gimmick to make me want something I don’t need. In some circles, especially the non-profit arena Marketing may have a negative connotation. In the context I am talking about here I am going define marketing as intentional effective communication. Effective communication can have some very positive outcomes and covers a wide variety of communication issues and strategies.

    Effective communication implies:

  • Something is being communicated
  • More than one party is involved
  • Meaning is being conveyed
  • An image is being conjured in the mind of the receiver
  • The image being conjured in the mind of the receiver is affirmed or agreed to by the transmitter

As a business professional I need to realize that effective communication can happen. But, if I am not intentional about it, it is not going to happen as often as I want it to happen. This may result in adverse consequences for my business. The point though is that even in non-profit work like missions, to have effective communication one also needs to be intentional about their communication. This intentionalism is strategy.

So what is your communication strategy? Lets ask some of the basic W’s.

  • Who are we trying to communicate to?
  • What are we communicating?
  • How are we going to get them to listen, think and respond to us?

Who
In the non-profit world we have several kinds of people we want to communicate with:

  • the people we want to benefit
  • the people who help us benefit these people; donors, volunteers, employees, colleagues
  • the people watching us, wanting to know what we are doing and why we do it.

We need to be aware of each kind of person and talk to them. But, not just talk to them; engage them.

What
So the What which are we going to tell them might change, but what we are about never changes. So even though we might use different stories, reports, figures, pictures, etc. in communication they should all point to the part of us that never changes. This part of a communication strategy requires a bit of introspection. A core of knowledge of who we are and what we are about, and why we are doing it. It is from this knowledge we get our passion to do what we are doing, and challenge others to become part of what we are doing.

How
How are we going to get them to respond to us? We have to know where they are and how to talk to them. What they are paying attention too, reading watching, listening to, replying to. You can’t engage a person you can’t communicate to. This is were marketing comes in. How am I going to engage people? When I have an answer to How, I will have a communication strategy. The last question I have to answer is: does my strategy achieve the results I want it to achieve? or to put it another way is it an effective strategy? If it doesn’t achieve what I want to achieve,

  • it may be the result of not having a good, well thought through strategy,
  • or it might be the result of not having the right strategy for this group of people (or market).

At the end of the day though, if something is not achieving the desired results; I need to know:

  • What the desired results are
  • What results my strategy is producing
  • Why my strategy is not working

and then I need to make some adjustments to the strategy and apply the new revised strategy.

Windsurfing in FL

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So I have been wanting to try windsurfing for some time.
So we are going to try it while we are here in FL.
http://www.nbwindsurfing.com/rentals/index.html

map to windsurfing location

map to windsurfing location

We did look at the competition, http://www.watersportswest.com/

SCUBA was another option:

As it turned out we didn’t do either of these… Sad.

Becky and I outside our hotel in St. Petersburg FL.

Becky and I outside our hotel in St. Petersburg FL.

OpenSource MicroBlogging

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I have been given a book to read about Social Media and one called Twitter Power. I am beginning to think that Twitter is not something I can ignore any more.
I am not yet convinced that I need an account but I think I should be informed about how it works and how the system of communication can be used.

I was wondering today what our office communication might look like if we were to use a twitter like tool to announce office news or meetings and tasks completed. So I took a look at OpenSource options. Because in an office environment we already have the community created but we don’t want the world to follow our office “tweets”. Here is what I found:

Automattic Came up with a solution for their office in 2008 and released it as a theme for wordpress. They call it P2. http://p2theme.com/

The only other thing I could find in the OpenSource community was http://status.net/. I have not looked into either of theses to see how they work or compare with twitter.