Monthly Archives: August 2007

Good Health News

After three weeks of escalating worry about my health I think we may be out of the woods. Medication seems to be the key and we just need to hear about the biopsies but the doc seemed to think everything would be okay.

Everything has been on hold for me but not because I was scared for myself. Funny – I can put myself in the Lord’s hands but I have some issues about trusting Him with my family. Maybe it’s a lesson I need to learn. There’s is a line in a Bill Engvall skit where he says there is one thing the Lord needs to know – he’s a C student. I seem to fit in that category as well.

I am grateful and relieved, and exhausted and as Scarlett would say “I’ll think about that tomorrow”. Thanks to all for prayers and thoughts.

Well Yes I’m a Nerd But… What Kind?

Okay Denise, as if we didn’t knownerdquiz.jpg

By the way I copied and pasted the code and the formatting didn’t show up for me so I did a screenshot. Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend! I passed my 200th post this weekend. My kids said I was getting old but wow! I don’t know about everyone else but this is the first week of school with students for us so say a prayer watch the traffic, eat healthly, get plenty of rest, drink fluids – oh wait that’s the flu! Do whatever it is you need to have a great week and a great year!

Matching Classes With Real World Experts

I stumbled across a wiki called FieldFindr. The wiki is a mock-up of a website that would help match a class or class project with a real world expert in the related field.
The wiki was created by blogger David Truss after he posted on his blog about the idea.

“Fieldfindr: A space where teachers can meet global citizens who have skills that they are willing to contribute to a class.”

Some of the comments on his post were concerns about how to validate the person’s credentials and how to protect the students. I hope someone can address those issues and run with this. The blog article was posted back in February so no one has jumped in but I can see a lot of value in this. We already do some of this within our community and maybe this is a project that would be best tied to a community portal. It would be easier to monitor and because of geographical proximity allow for the person to actually visit the class.

Apologies For Duplicate Posting And a Recipe to Make Up For It!

I have been distracted and posted the del.icio.us tips twice so I’m apologizing and I’m going to give you a recipe as a gift. I have decided that I will be posting a recipe here once a week since we ALL eat and I want to take care of the whole person – body, soul and brain!

This is a recipe for Corn Salsa that is actually pretty carb friendly and great for dialysis patients not to mention just plain delicious! (there’s that word again!)
Corn Salsa

Ingredients
1 cup fresh white or yellow corn
1/4 cup cilantro
1 cup chopped green onions
1 small fresh tomato diced
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/4 tsp ground cumin
1/8 teaspoon chili powder
Cut kernels off the cob and put them into a medium sized bowl or use frozwn corn kernels. Add remaining ingredients and mix well Adjust seasoning to taste and serve chilled or at room temperature.

Nutrient Analysis per serving (1/4 cup)
Calories 28
Carbohydrate 7g
Protein 12g
Fat 0.5g
Sodium 6mg
Potassium 86mg
Phosphorus 25mg
I use frozen corn kernels and it tastes great. It is better if you make it the day before and let it chill over night so the flavors can meld.

Good to pack in your lunchbox for a quick snack!

My Favorite Ways To Use Del.icio.us

This is a cross post from my school blog but it really is one of my favorite tools so I wanted to share it here too.
While teaching a blogging class the other day I was explaining about feed readers and I showed some teachers Del.icio.us and how you could actually have feeds set up to work for you. An example would be to type in a URL like this: http://del.icio.us/tag/scotland then look at the bottom of the page for the orange RSS button. If you right click on it and go to properties you can copy the link into your news aggregator (feed reader) and as people add links to their del.icio.us accounts tagged scotland, you will see those links as a feed. You can also do the same thing but add another criteria to the search http://del.icio.us/tag/scotland+history you can narrow down the search to items tagged scotland and history.If I wanted to keep up with what sites are popular on a particular subject I could type http://del.icio.us/rss/popular/scotland and this would generate the most popular links tagged on del.icio.us for scotland.

You can do the same thing with people instead of tags. If you have someone who is in your “circle of learning” you can subscribe to their tags (unless they have designated them private).

These and other tips can be found at Likehack.org if you would like to read more.

Technology Integration Day

My feet hurt – they are propped up and will stay that way until I go to bed. Tomorrow will be busy as everyone will be working in their rooms and they will be looking for me to solve all the minor glitches with their computers.

Today was Technology Integration Day and I did my Web 2.0 Presentation. I think it went well even though I threw a lot at them in a short time. I managed to cover everything I wanted to though I had hoped that there would be time for them to play online a bit. We finished right on time and despite my not being 100% physically and being totally distracted lately I’m reasonable satisfied with the whole thing. I had planned on WOW rather than reasonably satisfied but maybe I can build on this and work my way up to WOW!

I woke up last night from a dream where I found myself in front of a room full of people waiting for me to present and I opened my mouth and completely forgot why I was there. At least it wasn’t that bad!

A Woman To Admire

I’m going to take my commentor Carolyn’s advice and do a little therapeutic writing. I opened my bloglines reader this morning and clicked on my “interesting” folder. The folder mostly contains personal blogs that I read just for pure fun. I may accidentally learn something while I’m there which is my favorite way to learn. There is something delicious about starting out reading some random article that contains one little gem that catches your eye and leads you on a trail of treasures you didn’t even know existed!

That is how I found Confessions of a Pioneer Woman to begin with. The writer’s name is Ree and she is a self-confessed ” spoiled city girl” who made the transition to “domestic country wife”. She has four kids and calls her husband the Marlboro Man as she blogs and photo-journals life through her eyes. I have laughed every time I have visited her blog and for those of you with a culinary interest she also maintains a cooking blog where she chronicles the recipes with step by step photos of the country dishes she has learned to cook.

This blog is NOT for sissies – the real ranch stuff happens here so visit because it’s worth it but don’t say I didn’t warn you! There are cows, kids, and laughter!

Update 08/17/07

This blog keeps staring – sticking pieces of guilt on me like lint on an old sweater.  I want to write but I’m having some health issues that are knocking most rational thought out of my head,  I am scheduled for tests on the 28th of this month and if I can survive til then without going completely bonkers then I will have an update.  If I can shut out the worry noise I will try to post on something coherent but in the meantime keep a good thought and maybe a prayer or two for me.

I’m Still Here – Really (And Some Del.icio.us Hints)

I am working on learning to create a WordPress theme and I am making progress but slowly! I have gotten to the part where I have to verify my code and I have managed to get down to four errors from eighteen so I’m getting there. I evidently have a few things open that need to be closed but my eyes are crossed and I can’t seem to find them tonight.

Part of me wants to go ahead and move on to the fun part but I know I need to get this part right or I will have problems later. I have typed the entire thing twice just to makes sure there were no typos and I think it was good for me because it is making a little more sense. I still can’t always follow the flow and I feel like that is what I need to understand so I can tell where these tags need to close.

Sometimes if I just put something like this aside for a bit and let it percolate I can come back with a fresh eye and do better so I’m going to shift gears for a bit.

While teaching a blogging class the other day I was explaining about feed readers and I showed some teachers Del.icio.us and how you could actually have feeds set up to work for you. An example would be to type in a URL like this: http://del.icio.us/tag/scotland then look at the bottom of the page for the orange RSS button. If you right click on it and go to properties you can copy the link into your news aggregator (feed reader) and as people add links to their del.icio.us accounts tagged scotland, you will see those links as a feed. You can also do the same thing but add another criteria to the search http://del.icio.us/tag/scotland+history you can narrow down the search to items tagged scotland and history.

If I wanted to keep up with what sites are popular on a particular subject I could type http://del.icio.us/rss/popular/scotland and this would generate the most popular links tagged on del.icio.us for scotland.

You can do the same thing with people instead of tags. If you have someone who is in your “circle of learning” you can subscribe to their tags (unless they have designated them private).

These and other tips can be found at Likehack.org if you would like to read more.

Great Educational Science Video Site

SciTalks is a video site for science videos.  Registration is free but you do have to set up an account if you want to be able to add videos to your favorites list.  You can see the videos in one huge list or break it down into different disciplines like astrophysics or biochemistry.  There is some wonderful material here and did I mention it is free??