Jon Adair's Pseudorandom Blog

More Free WiFi - Barnes and Noble

2009-07-28T18:51:00.000-04:00

Barnes and Noble just added free wifi for many of their stores, including all of the Tampa locations. I'd love to see Borders follow suit, but not very hopeful.

Besides all the local Panera Breads, I know of free wifi at Atlanta Bread, and most Hillsborough County library locations. I think the Tampa Ale House in Carrollwood and Bar Louie at International Plaza still have free wifi as well.

Tools I Use: Readability

2009-07-26T08:24:00.000-04:00

A while ago, I found Readability, an online tool that reformats almost any web page to be more readable. One click of the browser bookmarklet and Readability strips the page down to just the text, in a standard font size, in black on a white background. No more tiny fonts, unreadable color combinations, or annoying blinking sidebar ads.

For example, it takes this:

and turns it into this:

Tools I Use: Dropbox

2009-04-28T18:53:00.000-04:00

I'm becoming a big fan of Dropbox. At first glance, it's an online backup service. But it also synchronizes files between computers, keeps a revision history, shares files/folders between Dropbox users, and shares files/photos online. Plus it's cross-platform (Windows, Mac and Linux). It's like the Google GDrive that has never materialized.

It's practically replaced my USB flash drives. No more digging in my laptop bag, worrying about safely removing the drive, forgetting to take the flash drive with me, or finding a flash drive in the clothes dryer. No more worrying about forgetting to back up all those LOLCats photoshops.

Since I work on several computers during the week, this has saved me a lot of time and trouble. No more having to remember to email myself that document to review. No more wondering if I have the latest copy of the readme file I'm editing. No more wrestling with Windows file sharing at home.

Their 50 gigabyte plan is $9/month, or the 2 gigabyte plan is free. If you use my referral link, we both get an extra 256 megabytes of free storage.

Obama Team and Social Norms

2009-04-07T06:28:00.000-04:00

An interesting article on how the Obama team pulled off a very successful "get out the vote" campaign. Their winner? A simple phrase: "A record turnout is expected".

Wow. That's the same Robert Cialdini and his descriptive social norm I heard about over two years ago.

The basic idea is that "everybody is doing it" is much more powerful than "you ought to do it". We use it every time we ask somebody else if they're going to X's party, if they're contributing to their 401k, if they're tithing, if they're on Facebook, etc.

Robert Cialdini's book is: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials).

Everyone is buying it.

Nintendo DS Game Chamber - No More Missing Games

2009-04-03T21:50:00.003-04:00

I came across this amazing game case for the Nintendo DS in an odd place. David Friedman has a profile and photo shoot with the inventor on his photo blog.

The game case has a unique feature that solves a problem that we've really struggled with. You can only take one game at a time out of the case. To get a new game out, you have to put an old one in. No more empty game cases. No more finding DS games all over the house. No more missing games. (Unless you can't find the case.)

NaNoWriMo 2008

2008-11-01T20:13:00.003-04:00

It's time again for the National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo. One month. Fifty thousand words. Ready?

I tried last year but gave up at just over 6,000 words. I don't think I'm going to try it again this year, but I might. Work is much more intense this year and I've got some homeschooling challenges. But busy is good. It makes you more productive.

If you've ever thought you had a novel sitting around in your head and wanted to try to put it down on paper, this is a good time to start. Fail or succeed, it'll be over in 30 days.

There is also a young writer's program for kids. That's what we're more likely to try this year.

North Georgia Adventure

2008-10-13T07:42:00.000-04:00

Well, as I promised 11 months ago, we haven't been to Disney yet this year. The problem is, we haven't been anywhere else. So this week we're fixing that. We're headed to North Georgia for the week. A week of car-camping, sleeping in a tent, playing in the woods, seeing waterfalls, Oktoberfest in Helen, Georgia, trees that actually change color, fishing, and cooking on backpacking stoves.

It's a full moon this week and isn't supposed to rain while we're there, so the kids will get to see how bright a full moon really is when you're out in the woods. If the bugs cooperate, we might even be sleeping outside of the tent.

Windows Explorer slowdown on video files

2008-09-24T07:45:00.001-04:00

I've been getting some frustrating behavior from (File) Explorer in Windows XP while working on a video project. Selecting an AVI file spikes the CPU and locks the file for 30 seconds or more. If it's a corrupt AVI file, my computer can hang for several minutes. I finally tracked down a way to disable whatever preview or statistics Explorer is building. I'm not sure what else it impacts, but so far it's been great. Now I can move and delete video clips without an aggravating pause.

To remove media preview, run: regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll
To restore media preview, run: regsvr32 shmedia.dll

Frrriendfeed

2008-09-19T19:46:00.002-04:00

Friendfeed changed their logo to honor International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Arrrrsome!

Removed Adsense

2008-09-09T19:37:00.000-04:00

I removed Google Adsense ads from this blog. They didn't perform at all anyways, but Google was usually confused about what this blog is about so I'd get almost random ads.

The ads that put me over the edge were all the Vietnamese "dating" site ads that appeared on my post about Kim Phuc. As funny as it was to see a "Meet hot Vietnamese girls" ad there, it just wasn't right. So I ripped them out.

NOS Energy Drink

2008-09-07T22:04:00.000-04:00

I love the packaging on this energy drink. I don't think I could ever drink it, but it's an awesome brand license. There's supposedly an aluminum bottle package available too but I haven't been able to find it in stores.

For those of you that didn't grow up around classic muscle cars or the whiny little things kids drive today, NOS is Nitrous Oxide Systems. NOS builds nitrous oxide systems for race cars. It's that little red button you see in movies that makes the car suddenly go even faster and blue flames shoot out of the exhaust pipe. NOS built a brand image with their blue bottles and orange logo that's so recognizable that it's now licensed to other products.

Georgia Tech Football Free Streaming Audio

2008-09-06T14:26:00.012-04:00

I tracked down a reasonable radio station (South 107) that streams Georgia Tech football games live. The stream even works on my Sprint Palm Centro so I can listen almost anywhere.

Update 11/1: Some links are still working, but nobody seems to be streaming Georgia Tech-Florida State today. Maybe it's a Georgia law that Georgia Tech can't be on the radio on the day of the Florida-Georgia game.

mms://nick11f.surfernetwork.com/wtsh

Some Georgia Tech apparel.

If that doesn't work, maybe Live 101.9 FM will.
http://live1019.com:8000/live.m3u

WREK may carry the game live too, or you might get a 60 minute set of Chinese drums:
http://slack.wrek.gatech.edu:8000/wrek_live-128kb.m3u

http://webclust1.liquidcompass.cc/sos4stnrd/audio_player.php?id=WQXI
http://www.790thezone.com/multimedia/listenlive.aspx

Mix Tape USB Drive

2008-09-06T13:47:00.001-04:00

This Digital Mix Tape is awesome. It's just a small USB drive wrapped in a cassette tape packaging. The idea is that you put together a MP3 mix for someone just like us really old people used to do on cassette tapes. You could even make your own from old cassettes and all those small USB drives you end up with.

It's also a good piece of marketing. I could easily see someone using this idea for a mailer. (Via RetroThing)

The Story of the Fail Whale

2008-09-01T22:42:00.000-04:00

If you use Twitter at all, you've see the Fail Whale. Recently I came across the story behind the now famous image and an interview with the original artist, Yiying Lu. You can now even order a tshirt or a onesie with the image.

Microsoft Photosynth goes live

2008-08-21T18:58:00.005-04:00

Microsoft Photosynth is now live. Or sort of. It's been in "static mode" most of the day, not allowing anyone to create new synths. Hopefully it'll get back up soon. I've even shot a couple suitable photosets over the past year thinking I'd throw them into Photosynth if it ever came out to play with. Hopefully soon I'll have them up soon and you can see them here.

If you've never seen or heard of it, check out the sample synths they're serving up and go watch Blaise's talk at TED or a deeper dive on Channel 9. It's amazing. Here is a good simple synth someone created today, using just some snapshots around his office.

This is the kind of thing that needs to be on Microsoft commercials, not Jerry Seinfeld or Folgers coffee switch gimmicks.

Free Shipping Over $75 at Calumet Photographic

Amazon Goes Green

2008-08-13T11:40:00.003-04:00

Amazon just launched Amazon Green, their effort to market just products customers selected as the best green products. There are some overpriced things like the $10 five-pack of grocery sacks that are 99 cents each at every store I go into, but I'm sure there are some interesting things.

Baby Bike Ride

2008-08-10T19:06:00.000-04:00

One day this week I almost rear-ended the car in front of me when I glimpsed a woman riding towards me on a bike with her toddler balanced on the handlebars. What kind of idiot would do that? About the time I almost locked up my brakes, I realized it was one of these new "kangaroo" bike child seat things that puts the kid up front. This one's an iBert but there several other manufacturers.

I think this is another one of those products that only get bought for first-born kids.

(Photo courtesy of jinglejammer.)

The Girl in the Window

2008-08-06T07:45:00.000-04:00

If you haven't seen the St. Petersburg Times feature, The Girl in the Window, you're missing what could easily be their best story in years. I will warn you that it's a very emotional story about an extremely neglected little girl.

I'm not even sure what to say or feel after reading it. On the one hand, I want to be angry at her birth mother, like so many others are, but I realize how sick the woman must be. I'm probably most angry at neighbors, authorities, and anyone else that could have intervened sooner.

The adoptive family is in for a heck of a ride. I know with all the attention they're getting now, they'll get some financial assistance. I won't be one bit surprised to see them hit Oprah. That's great ... for them.

But what gets lost in all of this is the fact that there are hundreds of other kids right here in Tampa Bay hoping to find their own adoptive family. These are the kids that nobody wants. People want to adopt babies, not pre-teens or older.

But there are these hero families out there, quietly doing their best to fix broken kids. I'm proud to know several of them. I know one that adopted a girl that was not just neglected, but downright abused in ways that make me so much angrier than this story. She's made tremendous progress. Another family has adopted four children from the Heart Gallery.

What the World Eats

2008-08-03T22:52:00.001-04:00

Earlier this year, we checked out Material World, a book of family profiles from around the world. Each family has a short interview, some stats, and a photo where they moved every belonging in their household outside. There's a stark contrast between many cultures and not just between Americans and the poorest countries.

Peter Menzel has a newer book out, Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, that shows each family's weekly food intake. Time has a number of the photos on their site. I like how the Beijing family has KFC.

Menzel's books make an excellent addition to fill out general social studies in a homeschool curriculum or just to enhance your kid's education. We also have DK's A Life Like Mine, which shows how children live around the world.

This I Believe - Kim Phuc

2008-07-21T09:04:00.005-04:00

A couple weeks ago I heard this story on NPR and it still amazes me on many levels. It's the story of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the Vietnamese girl that was so badly burned by napalm. The photo of her running naked is one of the most famous photos of the war.

The NPR This I Believe segment is the story of her journey, including forgiveness and her acceptance of Christ. That's surprising enough, in a day when whole families split for decades over the pettiest of things.

I was surprised to learn that there was also film of the attack and aftermath. I'd never seen it. I warn you that it's graphic, especially if you think just her clothes got burned and don't realize that she's burned so badly that her skin is already falling off.

Her story also reminds me that Lies My Teacher Told Me reported that out of the history books reviewed, only one book included just a single one of the below five famous photos of the Vietnam war. The other books didn't include a single one. These are the photos I grew up seeing. They're the ones you picture when you even think of the war. They are the photos that caused AP editors and news directors all over the country to make hard decisions about showing nudity and graphic violence. The ones our parents saw in the newspapers and on television at night. The ones that shaped their opinion of that war and any to come. The ones our kids are apparently growing up without ever seeing.

If they're old enough, you should ask your kids if they've ever seen any of these famous photos or the stories behind them. Or heck, maybe you've never even seen them yourself.

The napalming of Phan Thi Kim Phuc and the video
The execution of Nguyen Van Lem, which was also captured on video
The self-immolation of Quang Duc
The My Lai massacre
The evacuation of the Saigon embassy

Diet Coke and Mentos "Failure"

2008-06-22T23:03:00.001-04:00

This year, for Van Dyke's Sports Camp VBS, we're doing a more general "Science Olympiad" instead of just Robotics. Tonight we played with Diet Coke and Mentos. I built a half-dozen nozzle rigs like this. The one in this video has a diagonal slot cut into it. The pressure from the Diet Coke was enough to knock the rig over and the top of the nozzle popped off. Then the bottle took off across the parking lot. It was cool enough that we spent the rest of the time trying to get another bottle to take off horizontally, without much success.

Your Shower Curtain Might Be Bad for You - US News and World Report

2008-06-16T20:53:00.000-04:00

It's kind of amazing that all the news agencies picked up the "Your Shower Curtain Could KILL YOU" story, but nobody seems to be concerned about the outgassing from all the soft PVC toys we give our kids, like inflatable furniture.

Your Shower Curtain Might Be Bad for You - US News and World Report

Moved

2008-06-02T07:05:00.000-04:00

Over the weekend I moved this blog's address to blog.jonadair.com. It's still hosted by Blogger, but it just has a different URL. Now if I could just get going and update my website...

KidsWealth

2008-05-29T19:53:00.000-04:00

One of the things we picked up at this weekend's FPEA home schooling convention is a pair of KidsWealth packages. KidsWealth is sort of like Rich Dad, Poor Dad or Cashflow for Kids, but it works off of the real money of your kids regular allowance. Kids use an envelope system to allocate their monthly pay into different categories, including Wealth, which puts their money to work earning at least savings account interest, and Angel, where they donate to charitable causes.

I'll have to check back in with an update in a few months to see how the kids do with the program. We debated it, but got a kit for each kid, even though our youngest is only 4. But I've even joked that he should start a retirement savings account now.

On a marketing front, the whole package and website are very slickly done. The graphics looked so much like Hot Shot Business from Disney/the Kauffman Foundation that I thought they had a tie-in, but they don't. KidsWealth quite possibly had the best graphic design of the whole show. Their booth had slick graphics too, but there was surprisingly little energy to it. Just two piles of their shrink-wrapped boxes and an open sample or two. It would have been good at a trade show or a business expo, but at a consumer-level event like that, they needed more of a hook to draw in parent educators. Money quizzes and games, especially for kids, would have helped a lot.

Detour Water Night

2008-05-21T23:05:00.003-04:00

Tonight was the last night of Detour. For the third year in a row, we ended with Water Night. Water slides, soapy slip-n-slides, sprinklers, squirt guns, etc. This year we had the addition of a fire engine, thanks to Michael Kelzer and Oldsmar Fire Rescue. He sprayed 2500 gallons of water on the kids. Well, kids and adults. I think between me and Julie, we caught at least 500 gallons. "Did you feel like a big rain cloud was following you all night?" He also sprayed the kids down with foam (baby shampoo).

No major issues. A couple girls that didn't meet the "no two piece suits or bikinis" rule. A couple bumped knees and heads, especially on the slip-n-slide. Someone apparently took the wrong shoes home and lost-n-found gained a half-dozen pairs of shoes, some towels, and some assorted clothing. A few families showed up not expecting Water Night, but we've been promoting it for weeks through almost every channel we had available. Even the little kids seemed to handle the night well. Lots of extra volunteers helped out, which made it run as smoothly as it's ever run.

Thanks to everyone involved. I really need to do at least one wrapup post for the year or the last two years, to review what did and didn't work as we tried different takes on children's ministry workshop rotations.