Ian’s blogomatic

Some of my students put this together over the holidays, and couldn't wait to see it on the data projector.You can't move here for Ripstiks and I have been being an ogre about riding them in the school. Looking at how confident they are, I would have to ask myself if they are really in more danger on them than off.

(image sesame letterpress)

I was drawn to Posterous because it was so simple, but as I settle in and make it my permanent home I start to want more stuff. Yesterday I gave the URL to my sister so she could follow what the family is doing on the weekends. Her comment was "looks like a blog for computer nerds".

The easy solution to this is to tag the posts. I guess I would end up with FAMILY TECH TEACHING and something like INTERNETCULTURE for the cool stuff I find and can't help meme-ing. The founders are working on this, and I am looking forward to it since the next easiest thing to do is to have more blogs which is too much like hard work.

In my previous life as a software developer I was often faced with these decisions. The easiest thing to do is just to keep adding the features the users and marketers are asking for. The hard and best thing to do is to try and drill down and understand why they want it and then dream up something so intuitive that the real need is met without anyone really noticing it.

But Gary, seriously, need tags.

I can't post to Delicious from inside det.wa.gov.au today. The error message says "you've been temporarily blocked for accessing Delicious too rapidly". All WA school activity would show up as the proxy IP address, so I'm wondering if that's the cause, although it hasn't been a problem in the past.

I reported it to Yahoo (the owners) so we'll see what happens. I'm not even able to view my del.icio.us links - this sucks because I use it extensively to make quick collections of links for my students on a topic. Luckily I also have a Diggo account so I guess I can use that. I prefer Delicious since the students are not exposed to advertising on the links page.

William was just asking where our book for doing the cube is.

I actually could do this in school, but now I can only get two layers and the corners out without the book. I did find these instructions to do the cube in six seconds on Gizmodo though.

The book we have on solving the cube was written in the seventies by a very cute, blonde, smug looking ten year old English genius boy who I would like to slap every time I see the book.

Drove out to the breakaway today (photos). The story here is that water has eroded a section down to the granite bedrock so you can see a nice cross section of the top layers. The kaolin is a very soft, very white powder that William was soon covered in. The pinkish grey you can see scattered below it are smallish (1-3mm diam) pieces of quartz that are embedded in the clay where it has not been weathered yet.

This very white clay is pretty common in this part of the wheatbelt as you can see driving around if you look at the dam banks. I'm pretty sure it is the type of clay used for china/ceramics such as basins and toilet bowls. There was talk of a commercial mine near Wickepin a few years ago - I don't know if anything came of it

<evil laugh> take that kids! For parents: If you find you kids are whipping you at video games, you need to get a Wii.

Also further news from the Chrome experiment - had to do this post in Firefox. When I tried to drag the image into the post, Chrome thought I wanted to replace the whole tab with the image instead of dropping it into the rich text editor. The problem must be in the drop rather than the drag, since I dragged it from Chrome and dropped it into this post in FireFox.

Took Google Chrome out for a run this morning. Shiny. Bumped into a couple of rendering bugs but it seems pretty complete for an initial release. I didn't particularly notice the huge javascript speed increases, I suspect this is because on my satellite connection the major delay is the lag to fetch every piece of data.

So the things I missed most from Firefox:

• the right click "Open in new tab" is not in the exact same place
• my addons - GTDInbox, Twitterfox , expecially twitterfox. Seriously, if I think of something witty I need to share it straight away or it’s lost forever.
• popup blocking behaviour was to put little window bars down the bottom, which I kept accidentally opening to see what they were. I guess I would learn. 

The install did a great job of picking up my passwords from Firefox, which worries me. Note to self: don’t let browser remember passwords for important stuff.

Other lauded features:

• The window/tab dragging thing was cute. 
• Having the most visited pages from the history show up as options in the new tab was sort of cool, although I would possibly want to customise this.
• The combined address bar / search bar was quickly adapted to.

It seems good enough to persevere with, just need those add-ons guys.

This is a cool idea - the song words hav been changed to match the daggy 80's clip. Something for English teachers about narrative? Also, just really funny.

Via my current crush, the very cool Bloggess

Just like David Duchovny. This is old, but cracks me up. If you didn't watch Sesame Street in the 1970's don't watch this, you're too young. That means you Elizabeth.

One of my very first computer programs (circa 1980) looked like this:

10 PRINT "IAN "
20 GOTO 10

For whatever reason, kids love to customise stuff to make it their own. I see this every day my students use the computers in the lab. The server is set up so that any modifications made to the Windows desktop (fonts, wallpaper etc) are lost as soon as they are logged out. The temporary nature of this doesn't stop some of the kids, unless I have provided something more interesting to do they will spend ages changing the desktop to reflect their personalities - favourite sports teams, the Aboriginal flag, sports cars, graffiti versions of their names. I suspect this was the reason for the success of the early MySpace rather than the social aspect. You could make MySpace how you wanted, add your pictures, your name, your choice of star glitter colour.

Elizabeth tells me a big thing at school at the moment is changing the Google logo to your name, then saving it as the home page. There are several approaches to this. If you use Google for your email/calendar etc you could just use the iGoogle service they provide which allows you to set up a personalise portal. A more sophisticated system, for geeks only, is to use the Firefox Greasemonkey addon to run a script to  change the logo on the actual page.

The simplest way is to use one of the customisation pages. PimpMySearch, GoogleMyWay and FunnyLogo are the good ones, with FunnyLogo perhaps providing the most authentic version.