Alien probe alert!

Does this really work?

I'm attempting to use Word 2007 to write and post this blog entry. I'm a bit skeptical, in part because it feels a bit blasphemous. I've been a big fan of using Flock for this task, but now that I've got a moment to try it out I have to admit I'm a little excited to see how it does.

E-Tools that have me hexed, and some that don't.

This is more of a feedback entry than introducing anything new, and for that I apologize. There are a number of my regular tools whose usage has changed and their operation (or lack of) should be noted.

Where to begin... Twitter has been all over the place, functionally speaking. I've recommended it's use to a number of people, both as an organizational aide and for fun, and for about half of those instances there has been something bad going on over at Twitter. I'm happy to say that overall, they seem to have gotten it together, but it hasn't been without some loss of functionality elsewhere. One of those losses has been my twitter sidebar gadget (formerly on the right). Since the gadget doesn't work at the moment, and I don't seem to be able to capture the RSS feed, I decided to remove it for now. I'm keeping it on my mobile blog, if only for the link it still provides.

I have been a little "mixed bag" about Flock's most recent beta (you know, probably because it is a beta!). One of it's downfalls for me has been the (hopefully temporary) loss of keystroke access to the blog editor. The new security features inherited from Firefox have been a pain to deal with, but I can see their necessity.

One good note is that where I had previously been unable to use Flock's blog editor without trouble from the Flock Blog Plus add-on, I'm not having that problem any more.

Google's Send to Phone add-on for Firefox has been retired. I've come up with a substitute of sorts, by borrowing from the clues left by Flock when sharing a link via webmail. I now have a bookmark to open Gmail's Compose Message page, with the To: address filled in with my phone's SMS address. This works almost as good, as Send to Phone did.

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In my last big post, discussing event organizing, somebody left a comment saying how great their product was. I thought I'd try it out. After reading up on it a little, I made an account for myself and attempted to login, but it didn't work. To make matters worse, there was no password recovery/reset tool either. So much for being able to recommend it.

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Really. What the heck IS happening here?

I've been very busy elsewhere this last month, so one might be asking just that question.  It hasn't been for lack of topics to write about.  My lack of correspondence may be partially related to the staggering number of things upon which I wanted to air my opinions, but things have been busy as well.  The most Headline-able event was that Allison's hard work at the keyboard has taken a big leap toward her (dare I say?) dreams.  She was just recently notified of her selection to have a piece of her's included in a compilation of short stories to be published soon!  I am so very proud of her, and consider myself lucky to discuss her work with her during the fun stages (before she has to actually make a story out of it).

I am going to try to make a better effort to keep my own content updated on a more regular basis, even if it is only for the fact that this is rather theraputic.

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Organizing Events

Four years ago, my dad's side of the family started having a week-long reunion every two years.  This week is the third installation of the series.  In each of the previous reunions, we had a rather ragged and hard to follow series of emails blasted out to most (but usually not all) of the concerned parties.  This would often keep some important details from making it to a few people, which I had made an effort to remember later on so that we might avoid this problem in the future.

Dad started asking for suggestions (as it was his turn to organize) for events during this last Winter, and I was hit with a moment of realization. We could make our own common interest "Group" using the resources of our favorite web portal (MSN, Yahoo!, Google, etc.) to keep track of conversations, schedules, and anything else we might need.  Most denizens of the web have become members at sites like these, usually looking for advise concerning life experience of some sort.  I had been using Google Groups as a repository for our Vonage voicemail, until Vonage got better at distribution of voicemail alerts and Gmail started expanding their storage capabilities.  Administering the Google Group, exposed me to a lot of features that I grew to love about Google's brand of group. 

With this in mind, I suggested the idea to Dad, who fell in line with it right away.  I set about making it all happen.  I quickly realized some drawbacks to going Google.  In order to become a member of a Google Group, one has to have a Google/Gmail account.  This was no problem for me, but might not work so well for some of my relatives.  Another bad part was that there wasn't any integration between Google Groups and Google Calendar (another favorite of mine that requires a Google account).  With these two problems in mind, I set about finding the next best thing.  That ended up being Yahoo! Groups.  Yahoo has some very flexible posting and summary option, keeps things simple, and includes a calendar.  Did I mention that you don't need to be a card-carrying Yahoo! Mail user either?

The only thing I didn't find acceptable about the Yahoo! solution was notification and presentation of the Calendaring resources.  I decided to stick to it anyway, and construct a solution for myself to get the scheduling available on my phone in time for the week of fun in the Summer.

Well, the Yahoo! Group was a big hit, and my aunt started a companion group for sharing information and organizing events for a much larger chunk of family to meet up on occaision.  Dad started laying out the weeks activities, filling in details when he could.  We had plenty of discussions about it all, and it was very easy to use.  There was no more worrying if we were sending all our email to the right addresses or not.

My personal desire for access to the calendar from my cell phone drove me to sample options for importing and exporting the group calendar to other applications.  From Yahoo! Mail, one can view group calendars alongside your own personal calendar, but you can't actually do anything with them until you bring them into your own calendar.  After that, I was able to export the calendar to a CSV file, which could be imported into a Google Calendar I had set up for the same purpose.  This went fairly smoothly, except for one event that didn't make it across by itself.

This was the point where I became glad to have stuck with Google for myself.  I had attempted to print the week's agenda from Yahoo before this, and it just looked horrible.  I tried out the same trick with Google's version, and not only did it come out very polished looking and informative-like, but I was given the option of saving it in PDF format.  So I did that too, then uploaded it to the Yahoo! Group.  I think that was the most useful thing I did for the whole event.

I just finished checking some of the pictures from the big picnic, and I can't wait to see these folks again.

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This is a test...

This is a test blog post using my favorite browser, Flock. For some time now, the insertion of tags has not worked. I will be inserting the following tags: self-depriciationisticism, portable mushroom milkers, finaglisms, and fontopian scratches.

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