Write Technology

PodCamp Ohio Recap

cross-posted from bub.blicio.us

If a Podcamp pops up in your area, I recommend you attend it. Among other reasons, Podcamps are free and you can't argue with free networking and knowledge.

Podcamp Ohio was a total success! I'm not sure of the numbers yet, but I believe they may have surpassed 200 attendees. Not bad for an unconference that ran a basically viral marketing campaign, depending on Twitter and word of mouth.

The sessions were great. I enjoyed the first session I attended - Podcasting in Plain English by David Jackson. It covered all the basics you need for podcasting. Sometimes I think these podcasting experts forget that if you're just experimenting with the idea, you shouldn't go out and buy expensive equipment. Jackson made sure to mention that. Make sure it's something you like and enjoy before investing.

I also attended What Not to Do: Social Media Anti-Tips by Paull Young and Luke Armour. It was probably my favorite session of the day, although I didn't attend too many. In this session they covered all sorts of social media mistakes, particularly pertaining to marketing. They interspersed their presentation with Great Moments in Twitter, which showcased some more embarrassing tweets. Remember folks, Twitter is forever.

My session on Twitter went quite well - or so I've heard. I'm trying to get a full presentation together for some upcoming conferences and this was sort of a practice run for me. I got enough feedback that I've already started "upgrading" my presentation, although many have told me it's fine as is. I had a complicated mix in the room of Twitter skeptics and Twitter diehards. It's hard to gear a presentation to both, but hopefully I carried it off.

For me, the best part of Podcamp was the time I spent networking. Perhaps I'm a bad camper, but I missed about two sessions because I was getting to know people in the cafe and hallway. I particularly enjoyed conversations with Shawn Morton of Profilactic and Doug Petch. In fact, Podcamp drove home a point for me about social networking. In my various speaking engagements, I always try to push the fact that while we're all making friends online, our real goal is face to face networking. For a lot of people, myself included, it's easier to network semi-anonymously online and then meet someone in person. Meeting so many of my Twitter friends "in real life" at Podcamp was fantastic. Meeting Doug Dockery, Julie Niesen, and others, well, it was like meeting old friends.

There were several folks video/audio recording each of the sessions. (I'm camera shy, so I found this unnerving). The sessions should be online sometime soon.

And to the organizers, congratulations on a successful event!

Cheers!
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Find Michelle Lentz here on Write Technology, on Twitter, or on Pownce.

Those Bluetooth Space Aliens

It's been a while since a particular daily strip really took my fancy enough to post it here. Today's Pearls Before Swine, however, really sums up how I feel about people walking around with the bluetooth headset on outside of their cars or offices.

Click to view the full-size image.

Latest Tweets

The latest tweets from the Write Technology Twitter Feed:

• 13:03 Have now sent press release to news organizations & Trivantis. Anyone else interested in Learning 2.0 in Cincinnati? #
• 13:51 Finally! The new GCASTD has launched. Sharepoint has about killed me. www.gcastd.org #

Cheers!
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Find Michelle Lentz here on Write Technology, on Twitter, or on Pownce.

eLearning 2.0: A Revolution in Workplace Learning

If you work in eLearning at all, or you want to learn more about how to integrate new Web 2.0 technologies into your workplace, I've got a seminar for you. Plus, it's amazingly inexpensive.

Dr. Tony Karrer, CEO of TechEmpower, and author of at least two learning-related blogs, is running a seminar on July 15 here in Cincinnati. The seminar is sponsored by the Greater Cincinnati ASTD chapter, but you don't have to be a member to participate.

Attendees of the  workshop will

• Experience new tools including blogs, Wikis, social networks, social book marking, RSS readers
• Learn specific methods you can use to accelerate your own knowledge work and learning
• Define strategies for eLearning 2.0 for your organization
• Make a plan for getting an eLearning 2.0 toolset for yourself and your organization

Tony is an expert on innovative uses of technology that improves human performance. He is a sought after presenter on eLearning 2.0 and it’s implications on workplace learning. He is the author of the award winning eLearning Technology blog and recently founded Work Literacy.

The workshop will be held at the NKU METS Center in Erlanger Kentucky. Breakfast and networking will be from 8am-9am. The workshop begins at 9am.

The cost for the workshop is $129 for GCASTD Members and $179 for Non-Members. The price includes breakfast, lunch and GCASTD membership for Non-Members.

For more information or to register for the event, visit the GCASTD web site.

Cheers!
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Find Michelle Lentz here on Write Technology, on Twitter, or on Pownce.

Latest Tweets

The latest tweets from the Write Technology Twitter Feed:

• 00:33 Am about to enter into the world of Skype. I know, I'm late to the game on this one. #

Cheers!
--
Find Michelle Lentz here on Write Technology, on Twitter, or on Pownce.

Latest Tweets

The latest tweets from the Write Technology Twitter Feed:

• 09:44 Am totally hating Sharepoint. The site is suddenly live (but hidden since I haven't redirected the URL) & I can't create a basic HTML form! #
• 11:09 Great link to Write Technology from Hawkwings, who detailed my adventures with Mail.app is.gd/C9p My thanks! #
• 11:34 Have pounding headache directly related to Sharepoint. #
• 12:55 Interesting article: Social networks good for learning - Subverting the Digital Divide is.gd/Cf4 #
• 13:51 Am really liking CyberDuck for FTP on my Mac. Of course, I also love ducks, so it works nicely on many levels. :-) #
• 16:00 New on Bub.blicio.us: Email & Productivity bub.blicio.us/?p=1017 #

Cheers!
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Find Michelle Lentz here on Write Technology, on Twitter, or on Pownce.

Switching to a Mac, Part 3.5: Parallels Update

Last night I needed to work on a web site that I've been required to put into Sharepoint. Those of you who have worked with Sharepoint know that you need to use IE for it to work well. I realized that because I was only updated to Windows SP2 on my Mac, I couldn't use IE 7 (or preferably 8). What can I say? I'm spoiled by tabbed browsing in Safari and Firefox.

I took a deep breath and downloaded - directly to the Mac, not Windows - SP3 from Microsoft. Then I installed it. What amazed me was that it installed easily! Once that was installed, I restarted the virtual machine and installed IE 8 Beta.

Everything works fine. I worked easily on the Sharepoint site all last night and a bit of today without any performance issues. As far as I can tell, installing SP2 was the main issue in my previous fight with Parallels. I highly recommend, if you're installing a Windows XP virtual machine, that you install a more recent version of XP - perhaps with SP2 already integrated.

Cheers!

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Find Michelle Lentz here at Write Technology, on bub.blicio.us, on Twitter, or Pownce.

Switching to a Mac, Part 3: Mail & iCal

In my original switching to a Mac post, I was leaning more towards Entourage. And I own it. It's sitting here, in its box, with the rest of the Office suite, waiting to be installed. I'm trying to avoid the temptation and force myself to use iWork, iCal, and Mail.app. It's hard. I want the familiarity of the Microsoft products. But it's time to break old habits.

Moving Messages from the PC
On Monday I downloaded Outlook2Mail (O2M) for the PC. This app easily converts your Outlook contacts, calendar, and email messages/files/folders to iCal/Mail formats. That part was easy. They easily slid in to their new homes on the Mac. I ran into some trouble syncing with my iPhone, but that's tomorrow's post.

IMAP v POP
I set up my 6 (yes 6) different email accounts and made them all IMAP. This makes it so much easier for me because I also check mail from my phone. Now I won't be seeing messages twice. Several of my accounts, such as my wine-girl.net account, are run through Google Apps for Your Domain - in essence, Gmail. This is great because it then employs the GMail spam filter. I thought this would be a good time to bring all my accounts into one Inbox, so that I don't have to check different webmail accounts plus my regular email.

My choice to go 100% IMAP affects a lot of what I'm about to tell you. I have to deal with a lot of separate calendars, mailboxes, todo lists, etc, that I bet you don't get when you use strictly POP. Keep that in mind.

Mail is strange. It shows each IMAP mailbox separately. I figured out that if you flip the triangle and collapse them, you can view all of your messages in one single Inbox, but still have access to the separate inboxes if you choose.  I ignore everything but my main Inbox.

Rules
The next thing I did was set up rules to color code my mail. Mail that comes to the writetech.net account is blue, mail that comes to the wine-girl.net account is purple, and so on. I actually couldn't do this in Outlook, so I was thrilled that I could in Mail.

iCal
iCal and I get along okay. I color coded my calendar similar to my email. In iCal, instead of labels or categories, you have separate calendars. I don't really care for this though. In the view menu, I hid the calendar list. Now I can just see the main calendar and my ToDo list panel. Much better. This is similar to collapsing the IMAP inboxes in Mail.

Switching to a Mac, Part 2: Parallels

The Mac arrived two days early, on Monday morning. Not that I'm complaining, but it completely destroyed a well-planned day. And the next well-planned day. I am now playing catch-up.

I think I'm about switched from the PC to the Mac. Not quite - I'll still be poking around, tweaking, but I'm pretty darned close.

It's not as easy as those commercials make it sound. At least, not if you're a power user on your PC. Sure, my mom could seamlessly switch from a PC to the Mac - it wouldn't even cause a speedbump. For me, it was a bit of chaos.

My first problem centered around Parallels, which is the virtual machine software I picked up to run Windows. Until Microsoft develops OneNote for the Mac, I need it. It functions as my own personal wiki and I have two years worth of notes easily organized in OneNote. So I installed Parallels.

And then I installed a copy of Windows XP I happen to own, from circa 2003 I think, or just before SP2 was released. That's when everything started to go downhill.

My whole computer slowed down to molasses. It was awful. Well, I thought, I've got 2 DIMM memory sticks sitting here. So I upgraded the MacBook Pro memory from 2GB to 4GB. That was an experience in itself, and took me three times to get it to work. I don't blame the Mac though - I should never be allowed to modify hardware. I'm accident prone.

With 4GB of memory, I was still running amazingly slow. Not only that, every time I tried to download SP2 from Windows, the virtual machine crashed, followed by the entire machine. Over the course of 3 hours I rebooted the entire Mac more than 6 times. I was really frustrated.

I turned to Twitter for Tech Support and recieved amazing troubleshooting. First off, I installed iStat, which is a nice widget that lets you know what's going on with your CPUs.

That didn't enlighten me though. Next I checked the Parallels web site and found that Leopard users should install a certain build. Why that build isn't in the box, I have no idea, but I re-installed Parallels. Then I downloaded, outside of Windows, the SP2 file from Windows Update. I tried again, but everything still crashed. On the advice of the Twitterati, I deleted the entire virtual machine and started over. I re-installed Windows. Egads! Once Windows was re-installed and Parallels tools were installed, I installed the local version of SP2.

Everything worked. It took 3 hours and tons of Twitter tech support, but everything started to work.

Now I'm actually a little freaked out to open Parallels, as I'm afraid it might crash. I'll need my OneNote notes sooner or later though, so I'll have to get past it.

Tomorrow, my adventures in extending Mail.app so that it's a useful productivity tool and doesn't frustrate me.

Related:
Switching to a Mac, Part 1

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Find Michelle Lentz here at Write Technology, on bub.blicio.us, on Twitter, or Pownce.

Latest Tweets

The latest tweets from the Write Technology Twitter Feed:

• 08:02 Spent last two days slammed by summer cold. Blech. My mind was very cloudy. Today I seem to be coming back. #
• 08:29 About to install Parallels. Am a bit overwhelmed by the documentation. #
• 10:28 There's something insanely cool about running Windows Update on one display and surfing in Safari on an adjoining display. #
• 10:39 Am having major issues trying to update Windows to SP 2 and 3 in Parallels. Keeps slowing everything down and then crashing. #
• 11:33 Sigh. The Mac should make me happy. Instead, I'm ready to toss it out the window with my PC. It's running S-L-O-W with its 4 GB of RAM ... #
• 13:32 I'm trapped in Windows and can't free my mouse to see who is bouncing the chat bubble at me. Sigh. #
• 14:16 It worked! It worked! Just getting SP2 installed on Parallels was the big time-eating issue. Yay! Am now installing only OneNote and Excel. #
• 15:00 Sad. I'm currently running 3 laptops, 3 different operating systems. I'm surrounded. #

Cheers!
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Find Michelle Lentz here on Write Technology, on Twitter, or on Pownce.