Yeah, I haven’t posted in a few months. Not here, anyway, because I’ve been posting pretty regularly at Twitter, and having little lightbulb moments all over the place over there.

I remember hearing about Twitter a few years ago, and watching a colleague’s stream for news of the birth of his first child. It was pretty neat, and I so wished that a year earlier, I’d had the same way to broadcast my own daughter’s arrival, but then I didn’t really look back much. When my university hosted a technology consultant, her biggest piece of advice for me was to get on twitter, and she gave me a handful of names of people to follow, so I did.

Here’s where it gets kind of interesting: I’ve been online since 1994, back in the days where I’d Telnet to a BBS and have interesting conversations with people all over the world. Or, you know, uninteresting conversations. Whatever. (I actually failed out of my first college because of my fascination with the newfound access to the World Wide Web, and remember trying to explain Yahoo! and the internet to my parents, and struggling with words to describe it — which was tough for a creative writing major, and I remember settling on it being like “an astronaut on a spacewalk. Kind of.” There is no missing the irony that what made me a failure as a creative writing student has led me to a career as an instructional technologist, by the way.)

Anyway, the internet connected me with people in different places, different countries, different ways of life, but we were all geeky enough to wonder about all those other places, and enjoyed making those connections. When I first started writing online, it was in 2001, at Diaryland, and again, there was some sort of excitement in the anonymous, but personal, connections the internet forged. I’ve been members of forums for longer, again, connecting with the people Out There, and have met so many people in person, after knowing them online, that I’ve honestly lost count, and some people I have to think to remember if I knew them IRL (in real life) first. All of these social connections are what I used in my graduate seminar course to study the effect of technology on community; I have sent baby presents to people I’ve never met in real life (but have known for years), but only learned the name of the baby across the street about 6 months after he was born, for instance. (It’s a weird conundrum. I know.)

So, when I started with Twitter, it was like that — connecting to people in my field, people from away, people in the Out There and not the Right Here. But then I connected with a few Right Here people — the aforementioned colleague, a former Americorps alum — and started to see the value of Twitter in my local area. From there, I connected to local folks I don’t know, who aren’t really in my field at all, but are in my city. And that’s where the magic is.

For instance, one member of my twitter network owns a Subway franchise, and is a realtor. She does a regular twitter trivia game, to win a sub, and while the free lunch(es) I’ve had as a result are cool, the value is that if I want Subway, I want to drive across town to support my friend’s business. The realtor we used, we loved, and have (and would) recommend again, but I find myself tacking on her name, because I know her now. I haven’t ever met her, not in real life, but that familiarity is there. Another in my twitter network is a reporter for a competing station to the one that feeds my family — and when I just saw some news about a major story, I sent her a tweet for verification, instead of calling the people I know, in real life, at the station that, again, FEEDS MY FAMILY. (Note to said station: twitter isn’t about headlines, it’s about people.) And when the Subway owner wanted to start a blog, well, that wasn’t her area of expertise, business is, but she sent out a tweet, and I helped point her in the right direction, because blogging is one of the areas of my expertise.

When I explain it to people who are new to social networking, I explain that “Facebook connects you to people you know, Twitter connects you to people you should know.”

I love my city, and I love the people in it. Twitter is making those connections for me, helping me bridge the gap between the Out There and the Right Here.  I find my posts to fall into three categories, really, like a 3 ring venn diagram — one ring of technology, one ring of Bangor, and one ring of parenthood — and there’s often crossover. Of the three rings, though, the one that has taken me most by surprise is the Bangor one. I’ve always been online talking about tech and parenting (or, pre-parenting, my personal life in general), but never really talking about Bangor, not til now, not til Twitter.  Seeing the technology impacting my local community, for me, finally, is a great thing.

At the beginning of the year, I started writing a weekly post for my favorite Instructional Technology blog, Instructify. (Seriously, not just sucking up to those I write for — I’ve been subscribed for almost as long as they’ve been up, and it’s the one link I tell all my student teachers they need to remember.) It’s linked on the side, but here are the links to my specific posts:

Simplify by using templates for Google Docs

Prepare for frog dissections online with Froguts

Edit your photos to prevent privacy violations with Picnik

Edmodo: Microblogging (and more) for educators

(And if you search for me by name, you’ll get my posts all on one page.)

And seriously, check out the blog, subscribe to it, I’m just the new contracted poster. The folks at LearnNC have a really cool thing going. I wish we had a LearnME whenever I visit.

This post has very little to do with technology, but I wanted to share my experience with a broader audience.

There’s a new business in Brewer, Maine, that aims to simplify the family dinner.  When my daughter started eating table food at predictable times, around 18 months or so, we instituted family dinner at the table. With two working parents, the priority was that we were all eating at the table, and that was more important than what was on the table. Not that we eat terribly, but convenience is pretty key — frozen tortellini, with frozen meatballs, with frozen sauce (I make my own in bulk every few months and freeze into separate portions –so much better than the jarred stuff!), or frozen stuffed chicken breasts, for instance — and it can get boring eating the same things every week. I’m not a foodie, and not exactly a cook, but cooking a main entree for two adults and one toddler almost always ends up resulting in tossed leftovers at some point. And should I even mention the dishes?

Enter the dinner store. There are franchises that operate on the same concept, like Super Suppers, or Dream Dinners, but the dinner store is locally owned and operated. They offer a variety of meals, many available in a meatless version, and change their menu monthly. The prices are unbelievably reasonable: $3.75/serving, and if you buy 12 or more meals at once, that drops to $3.35/serving. If you want them to prepare it for you, it’s $3.95/serving. That includes a (starchy) side, long grain or brown rice, mashed red potatoes, or rice pilaf, for instance. They’ve been open less than two months, but have recently received some press. WABI did a news story (with video) and the Bangor Daily News recently published an article about the business.

Last night was my maiden voyage. A week ago, I went to their website (www.mainedinnerstore.com) and created a login, signed in, chose a prep time (they offer several 2 hour windows through the week) and picked my meals and sides. Those were added to the cart, and I checked out using Paypal. I’d signed up for a 7-9 slot, and when I arrived, I was the only one prepping that night, but while I was there, several people stopped in to pick up pre-made meals. I was a little early, so the owner offered me a drink (I went for hot cocoa, but they have tea and coffee, too!) and took a seat while they prepared my station.

The prep stations all have a mini-fridge, mixing utensils, spices, and oils, as well as a great, clean work surface and nice overhead lighting. The staff sets up your workstation with the ingredients for the meals you’ve chosen, and gives you a customized binder of recipes. Start at meal 1, and keep on going. The food is fresh, the meat and veggies have already been cut and portioned, and the customer’s job is to add the spices, and do any coatings/stuffings, and package it back up to eat. It’s simple, but it WORKS.

I prepared my seven meals in about an hour. I left the dirty dishes behind, and all of my meals were bagged into large zipper storage bags, labeled, and with the cooking instructions inside. In my freezer, I now have seven dinners that I don’t even have to think about, made with quality meat (beef tenderloin! boneless, skinless chicken breasts!) and fresh veggies. My hour of time & $52.50 have been well spent, and I’m already planning to go back again.

The only con I can think of is the use of plastic bags. If you’re a re-user, this isn’t as big a deal (I will definitely re-use them) but each meal generally uses 2-3 zipper bags, and the outer bag is just to hold the inner bags of ingredients, and the printed cooking instructions, so they are the easiest to reuse. I will also bring my own reusable grocery bag next time, to carry my dinners home. They have boxes available, and I used one, but it would just save a box for another use (and keep it from my own seemingly unending cardboard pile) and make it easier to carry.

The pros:

The spices! They are colorful, and fragrant, and not that odd shade of gray that all of mine have become since receiving them as a wedding gift…. almost six years ago. (I should probably fix that.)

The recipes! The variety of meats, meatless options, and interesting flavors is going to be great to mix up our weeknight dinners.

The prices! No, really, the prices. A commercially produced bag dinner at Hannaford is generally $6 or more, and filled with preservatives and long named ingredients. The two serving meal from the dinner store is $7.50, with ingredients like “paprika” and “beef.” A similar meal from a franchised company is almost twice the cost, and doesn’t offer a side. The minimum order is six, two-serving meals, which comes out to $45. And if you’re wondering “but, how can they make money?” it’s all related to volume, almost like an old-fashioned food co-op, only they are making a profit while I am paying about what I would for the groceries to make the meals (and not throwing away 1/3 of whatever I cook because we don’t have a large family and can never seem to finish a family-sized meal.)

Who is it good for? Well, certainly people like me — small family, two working parents, who want good family meals without sacrificing time with the actual family to make them.  Singles, who could easily get dinner and lunch out of the 2 serving meal.  A gift certificate to the dinner store would also make an unbelievably great gift for new parents, or families struggling with an illness or death in the family. They also offer the option of opening to a private party — what a great idea for a baby shower, or birthday for the person who doesn’t need more things!

I am really excited to see next month’s menu and reserve my next appointment — and next time, I’m bringing friends.

The Dinner Store

Here’s my haul: Orange-Hazelnut Chicken, Jambalaya, Sesame Beef, Meditarranean Chicken, Cranberry-Apple Stuffed Pork Chops, Herb coated Beef Tenderloin, Sweet Potato Burritos — all with sides of rice or potato, for $52.50.

Welcome back!

The new year has found me blogging weekly over at my favorite instructional technology blog, which is very exciting. Instructify comes out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I’ve been subscribed to them for a very long time, so I’m very excited to be able to participate.  If you haven’t subsribed yet, you should now!

Instructify

I’ll still blog here, too. Now that the new year has settled in, it should be more regular.

I love pictures. It makes sense; my father is a photographer, so I had access to cameras from early on, and my current setup is a Nikon D70 and a Canon SD1000. One big, one tiny. I use flickr to store and share my photos, and use shutterfly to print them. I often have prints shipped to me, and then choose the cream of the crop and send them to my grandmother in Texas, or my sister in Colorado. If my house burns down, I will not pine for the photos of my daughter — they are safely stored in two different locations, online.

One of the best things to happen to photography — especially for frugal folks like myself — is the free photo editor found at Picnik.com. You can add text, adjust colors, add special effects, all online, all free. It integrates seamlessly with flickr.com, Facebook, Picasa Albums, and other photo services. It’s great.

This year, when it came time to design our annual New Year’s card, I was unimpressed with the offering at Shutterfly. Other services were very expensive. All I wanted was a nice, simple, 5×7 flat card with our family photo on it. Enter Picnik.

I uploaded the photo to flickr, and went to Picnik to edit it. I adjusted the contrast, added a border, and added my own text. By making each word its own text box, I was able to adjust the size and float it the way I wanted it to look. I saved it back to flickr (being sure to ‘save a new copy,’ as the default is to replace the photo you’ve just edited) and then decided to try flickr’s print services. I ordered a proof to be sent to my local Target (just 1.49, but only available in glossy, which is not my preference), picked it up the same day, and then went home and ordered the rest via flickr’s print services, for just .59 per photo — 40 cents less than Shutterfly, and $1.40 less than the designer cards. Even better — I could order just what I needed, and not be restricted to sets of 25. I’ll have to pick up some envelopes, but I already have some left from last year’s unused cards.

That’s just one way to use Picnik. Have a photo of a class presentation that you’d like to use, but you need to mask out a child that has forbidden photos? Picnik will let you cover him over, easily. Need to resize a photo for an avatar, and you don’t want it squished? Picnik will do that.

And, for just $25 a year, you can access Picnik Premium, which gives you no ads, more options, and additional tools, including curves!

Picnik

A year and a day ago, Amazon released its e-reader with great fanfare. The Kindle was received with mostly rave reviews, and sold out over and over again. Yesterday, I got my hands on a Kindle for myself.

When I first saw screenshots, someone said “it looks like a programmable thermostat,” and I couldn’t agree more. It’s not pretty, especially for someone with a devotion to the Apple aesthetic, but it’s important not to judge a book by it’s cover. Especially an e-book.

The device itself has some interesting angles, tapers and bevels and a distinct wedge shape, all done to make it easier to hold.  The stock case leaves some room for improvement, with only two corners for it to rest in, I feel very conscious about the right side, that does not have any sort of strap to hold it in. A common solution for this is to use some self stick velcro on the back of the Kindle itself, and until I replace the case, I plan on doing just that.

Turning it on is easy, although I wish the on/off switches were on the front of the device, or on the sides, and not between the case and the Kindle. There are two — one for the device, and one for the wireless signal. Using the wireless signal will drain the battery more quickly than not using it, so I’ve been leaving it off unless I need to. The buttons on the front are simple — a QWERTY keyboard, a scroll wheel, and Next Page buttons on either side, a Prev Page button on the left, and a Back button on the right. The Back button works like the Back button on a web browser, and retraces your steps. If you click from your list of books into a specific book, Back takes you back to the list. If you’ve been reading along and want to go to the previous page, Back or Prev will get you there. The scroll wheel has a silver indicator that reminds me of the insides of an Etch a Sketch. Scroll to where you want to go, and click the scroll wheel to get there.

The beauty of the Kindle, and what sets it apart from other e-readers, is its wireless connectivity.  Amazon’s Whispernet is powered by Sprint, and allows you to search for, buy, and download new content to your Kindle wirelessly. I don’t live in an area that has Sprint service, but am able to get a weak to moderate signal from Whispernet. In areas that don’t have any Whispernet access (Montana, and Alaska, for instance) you can still use the Kindle, you just have to download your content to your computer (Mac or PC) and transfer via USB.

The wireless delivery is pretty cool. Because of my limited signal strength, the best way for me to get content, I’ve found, is to browse on Amazon.com on my computer, choose what I want, and then wait for a good signal to get the material into the Kindle. Searching on the Kindle with a weak signal is tedious, but possible. I look forward to trying that service when I’m in a more Kindle-friendly, Sprint-serviced airspace.

Would I buy the Kindle with my own money? For me, right now, I’d say no. I am a pretty voracious reader, but I’m a heavy library user, and while Kindle content is almost universally 9.99 or less (and thus, cheaper than buying the actual book), it’s still not free.  I don’t travel enough, or have a daily commute on public transit, to warrant having a library of e-books in my hand. The device itself retails for $359.00, which is more than I’ve ever paid for any gadget, and puts it out of reach for me. If it were $200, and you could download free content from public libraries, or, if it were $100 and you were buying paid content from Amazon (at the current price structure) I would be an owner, absolutely. That I’ve gotten one for my professional use (and thus, not out of my personal pocket) is fantastic.

That being said, there are some people that should absolutely check out this device. Frequent travelers and metro commuters? This is for you. I don’t travel often, and when I do, any book I take is usually read by the end of the first leg of my trip, and then I’m either carting a finished book around, or leaving it on a bench in the terminal, and, I’m without a book. The next trip I take, I will definitely take the Kindle instead of a paperback. To be able to refresh my reading material without having to seek out a bookstore, or worry about a library book being lost, will be great.

If you, or someone you know, has vision problems that have affected their ability to read, get them a Kindle. The text is adjustable to a very large font, and I dare to say there are more books available for the Kindle than are available in the Large Print format. LP books are always much bigger and heavier in size, often abridged because of that, and not available for every book. The Kindle content is wide and varied, and unabridged. If you’re working with a technophobe family member, you can manage their content for them via Amazon, and the books will automatically appear, thanks to Whispernet. Pretty cool.

The Kindle is $359.00 on Amazon.com.

(And if you want to see a Kindle in person, and live in the area of Bangor, Maine, email me.)

When I was getting my undergraduate degree, I was always looking ahead to a graduate degree. Instructional Technology and Library & Information Science were my two callings, and it would’ve been a much harder choice to make if Maine had an MLIS program. I loved my Instructional Technology program, and am excited to be working in the field and using the degree.

I still love books, though, and I love sharing books with my daughter. That’s why I joined LibraryThing. LibraryThing allows you to index your personal library, and see what others are reading, and get suggestions based on what you already have. I’ve only set it up for the daughter’s books (she owns more than me; I’m more of a borrower than a buyer for adult books) but even she loves to see her library in the covers view. It allows you to tag (I’m still working on that, but have tagged all the books she’s gotten from Maine’s Raising Readers program) and add your own info, and it is accessible by other family members who might be wondering “does she have that book already?” One can also tag books with “wishlist,” and use that to help prevent duplicate gifts. It’s free for the first 200 books, and then you can upgrade — $10 for a yearly membership, and $25 for a lifetime membership. If you have a huge library to catalog, they will also sell you a USB barcode scanner that makes entering books easy, for just $15. An extra pro? LibraryThing is a Maine business.

LibraryThing

Arianna Huffington, of the Huffington Post, says what I’ve been thinking for awhile:

Okay, all the arguments have been made. And I am ready to declare a winner in the 2008 race.

The Internet. (The other winner will have to wait until Tuesday night).

From the way campaigns connect to supporters, to the way those campaigns are covered, to the way voters decide who to vote for, 2008 has delivered the first truly 21st century presidential race. And election night promises to fortify the Internet’s victory.

The post goes on to link to all the usual suspects — FiveThirtyEight, TalkingPointsMemo – as well as the Google Elections page, which has some great information going on there, including an embeddable map for results.

I love my Flickr account. If my house burns down, my daughter’s photos are not my first-concern-after-people, because any photo I’ve deemed good enough to print has been uploaded to Flickr (and to Shutterfly), and I can always get them back. There’s a million good reasons to use Flickr, but that’s my main one.

I also like Facebook — it’s a nice portal to all of the various strands of my life, where I can connect the past and present, and list all of my various projects, as well. It’s a little bit of Twitter, a little bit of MySpace, a little bit of Flickr, and a little bit of Classmates.com. (Remmber them?)

As someone who already uploads photos to two different sites, I don’t want to upload them to Facebook, too, since I figure people should be able to click on my Flickr link in my account, right? But not everyone does, and that doesn’t work with tagging. Enter Flickr2Facebook. It’s a simple app, and only requires a little bookmarklet in your favorites to work. Now I can copy photos from Flickr over to my Facebook albums with great ease. It’s now my favorite Facebook utility app, and you should check it out, too.

Flickr2Facebook

Google is so much more than just search, as many people know, and one of their services that I’ve been playing with recently is Google Forms. There are many uses for setting up a form — you can create a survey or poll, have folks self-populate a contact list, enter all of your travel expenses — and google makes it very easy. The results are stored in a google spreadsheet, accessible from anywhere, and there is even a tool to analyze your answers.

My first public form is set up to survey people about the price of heating oil here in Maine — a concern shared by most everyone I know.  I embedded it into a page to make it easy to find, and easy to fill out. Check it out! (And if you are a Mainer who’s bought oil, fill it out, too! It’ totally anonymous.)

Maine Oil Prices