Jackelopette

and, o’ course, Talk Like A Pirate Day…

we be aimin’ to pillage Chateau Ste. Michelle for the tourin’ o’ their lands and the drinkin’ o’ their grog.

Yarrr.

It’s pretty cool, actually.

Google Voice Info

For me, remaining Stateside, it’s been a breeze to set up and configure, using both my browser and my personal cell phone.

Some of the perks:

• Permanent forwarding phone number for as long as Google Voice exists… (chances are good that you’re reading this via Facebook and can get my number there, or I’ve already given it to you)
• Can ring multiple phones according to a schedule I set. This is important later.
• Free SMS/texting from Google Voice to any phone, can receive and store free texts. So, now that David has an account, I can text him with my thoughts of the day and get a response whenever he logs in.
• Voicemail transcripts texted and/or emailed to your phone (depending on your settings)… though if you’re not careful, saying “Google Voice Account” can become “Good Boy Scout” in the transcript! Voicemails can also be forwarded or downloaded. Transcripts also have a “thumbs up/down” rating system, which helps train the transcribing program.
• Free US calling, cheap international calling.
• Routing phone calls based on who’s calling and which phone you want to have ring… so I don’t *HAVE* to be notified when an ex or the dentist calls!
• Screen or block calls based on caller, and change the voicemail greeting for whomever it is… so David gets his own greeting if he ever bothers to use this number. I’m still recording others for my friends and family.
• Conference calling, recording, and phone switching… so if one phone’s battery starts to die I can switch to another without losing the call.
• All the additional perks of Google contacts, email, etc… linked to your Voice account. Think calendars and conversations. Win.

All in all, it’s been a fantastic service and I need to make more people use my Google phone number rather than my established personal phone number.

I had to wait a month or two on the waiting list to get my account, but they’re moving rapidly through the list and giving priority to anyone with a .mil email address. Which brings me to my next point…

Google Voice for Service Members

As I said above, gVoice requires a physical phone to forward calls. Here’s the catch for my poor deployed David … he disabled his T-Mobile account for the duration, although he did get reception in Kuwait before his account expired. So he’s without a physical phone/number right now, and gVoice won’t let you complete the setup process until you’ve entered a phone number that it can call to confirm the account. >.<

I was able to game the system by using my Crackberry to activate his account. I then tried to remove the Crackberry from his account but was told that I had to have at least one actual phone on the account – and to add an alternate phone requires the call-to-confirm step. So I can’t untether the Crackberry from the account until gVoice lifts that requirement or David adds another phone-that-works.

Fortunately, I can tell gVoice never to call the Crackberry on “weekends or weekdays” and can place a “do not disturb” on that phone from David’s account. So it’s not a dealbreaker, but I imagine that several military users are facing greater challenges with the requirement. If Google responds to my tech support email on this topic, I’ll post any helpful info they give me here.

In short, I give it a 9.5/10 for my personal account (the transcripts and mobile interface need some work, and I’m sure they can find a way to work around the smartphone app blocks through a better mobile page) and an 8/10 for David’s account, ’cause of the deployed military setup issues.

Go forth, enjoy. And let me know your account number, if you get one.

According to the Interwubs Meme Generator, and unconfirmed by BBC.co.uk … the BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total and put it in the title.

I added a (-) to the ones I would not willingly read again. Sometimes once is more than enough.

I believe Villanova’s English department is responsible for perpetrating a good half of my list onto my poor, pathetic mind.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (X)
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (X+)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte (X)
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (X+)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (X)
6 The Bible (X)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (X)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell (X)
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (X+)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (X-)
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott (X)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy ( )
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller (*)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (* and a partial X+ … I’m slowly working on it!)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier (X)
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien (X)
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk ( )
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger (X)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger (X+)
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot ( )
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell (X)
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald (X+)
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens (-)
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (*)
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (X+)
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh (*)
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (X)
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck (X)
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll (X+ , especially the all-in-one Annotated copy from my dad)
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame (X)
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (*)
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens (-)
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis (X+)
34 Emma – Jane Austen (X)
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen (X)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (X … I cry duplicate to #33!)
37. Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini (*)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres (*)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden (X+)
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne (X)
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell (X)
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (X-)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (*)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving ( )
45 The Woman in White – (*)
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery (X+ … plus the series)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy ( )
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood (*)
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding (X)
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan (X -)
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel (X+)
52 Dune – Frank Herbert (X)
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons ( )
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen (X)
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth ( )
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon ( )
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens (X-)
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley (*)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon ( *)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (X)
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck (X)
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov ( )
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt ( )
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold (*)
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas (X -)
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac (*)
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy ( )
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding (X – … upon further reading)
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie ( )
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville (*)
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens (X)
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker (X)
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett (X)
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson ( )
75 Ulysses – James Joyce (X)
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath (*)
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome ( )
78 Germinal – Emile Zola ( )
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray (*)
80 Possession – AS Byatt (X)
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens (X)
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell ( )
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker (*)
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro ( )
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert (X -)
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry ( )
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White (X)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom ( )
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (partial X)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton ( )
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (X -)
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (X+)
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks ( )
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams (X+)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Toole (X -)
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas (X -)
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare (X+ … though I call duplicate to #14!)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl (X)
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo (X)

OK, OK, so I’m an incorrigible geek with a penchant for literary self-punishment. Shaddup.

Put your MP3 player on shuffle, and write down the first line of the first twenty songs. Post the poem that results. The first line of the twenty-first is the title.

I Remember When

You hold the answer deep within your own mind
The moon shook and curled up like gentle fire
Deck the halls with boughs of holly
Feel it break your bones Mr. Jones

Your cell phone, your wallet, your time, your ideas
Tale as old as time
I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together
In a forest of stone underneath the corporate canopy

Crocodile on my feet
I was afraid you’d hit me if I’d spoken up
Bye bye, love.

Pale September, I wore the time like a dress that year
For all those girls, who speak contradiction
And it came to pass, all that seemed wrong
was now right
In the white room with black curtains near the station.

Just got back from Paris, France
Well, I know, I miss more than hit
Cupid hath pulled back his sweethearts bow
A starry destination is where we we’re going
Let me know that I’ve done wrong.

If you haven’t yet noticed, the link to the left will take you to Flickr and my photo albums there.

Enjoy.

Understanding art for geeks

Yes, someone did this. No, I can’t promise that all of them are work-safe. Don’t blame me for your heavy bandwidth use…

Figaro! Figaro! Training the Multitasking Brain

I always wondered how Jeffrey and Mrs. J managed it.

Brain Surgery Lets Woman Listen to Music

I wonder what the link between Sean Paul’s music and the epileptic trigger could have been…

I realize I haven’t been talking about the nature of my work lately.

Just assume that 4-H at the national level owns over 100 domains. Many of them redirect to each other, but it’s still a gigantic headache. This dates back to the days when every new initiative or corporate partnership or idea or whatever automatically deserved its own domain name.

Insert web-wide confusion here.

I can’t really talk about the fun things we’re designing and playing with, and really, it’s not us doing the coding. We’re just the buyers. And, as the customers, we’re right. Right?

ACCESS 4-H

We’ve been exploring all the many tools for online collaboration, social networking, statistics-tracking, and web-based learning we can. The goal is to incorporate ALL of these in a single, unified national 4-H web presence. If even half the things in the works go live, this project should significantly change the way 4-H does its magic – for staff, volunteers, and youth.

Here’s what I hate. I hate not being able to talk about it, because it’s seriously interesting stuff. I hate not being able to pick the brains of my friends for specific ideas, because that’s what I love doing.

It’s looking likelier and likelier that I’ll get to do that soon, though.

Beta approacheth.

One of my little projects (that I *am* allowed to mention in public) has been the navigation fixing and general format changing of Clover Corner News. Expect my fix to go live in 2 weeks – January 1, baby.

Cryptic, I know, but believe me, I’m having fun with it.

I’m also learning a lot along the way. Allison and Greg may remember the failed attempt to teach me CSS. Playing with Movable Type templates and whatnot has made me, while certainly not fluent in CSS or PHP by any means, definitely able to tweak my way to satisfaction.

To sum up…

I am getting paid to geek out on the internet. Seriously. This is kind of awesome.

W00t.