What do people really want to hear about – 9 things

1. Aspirations and beliefs
2. David vs Goliath
3. Avalanche about to roll
4. Contrasting perspective
5. Anxieties
6. Personalities and personal stories
7. How to stories and advice
8. Glitz and glam
9. Seasonal/event related

Lois Kelly is the author of Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Just joking

Did you know that the ability to understand a joke is one of the signs of being human.

This is why humor, in a way, is a sort of Turing test for humans. One of the surest ways to figure out that someone comes from a totally different background, culture, generation, whatever, is to make a joke … and then realize they’re staring at you with a completely blank expression.

The article talked about the difficulty programmers have making a computer understand humour. One group have developed an AI program that understands knock knock jokes. But, these are the simplest jokes there are. And even that sounded like a mammoth project.

So perhaps to redefine Descartes,

“I laugh, therefore I am human.”

Linux flavours

I was just thinking about the different operating systems that I am using at the moment.

• I have a friends laptop at the moment that I have installed Knoppix 5.1. I used this because Ubuntu needed too much RAM. This laptop has only 256 meg of RAM. I found that Knoppix has given new life to this computer. It did have Windows XP installed but it was so slow that it was unuseable. The only problem I have had is in getting the wireless working with the WPA security. But I believe it is solveable.
• The kids computer has Fedora 7 installed. I used this distro because I had problems installing Ubuntu because of driver issues. I am using the Gnome desktop so it has a familiar feel. My wife also uses this computer and she is a complete newbie who really doesn't get technology. Yet she is using this for web browsing and email very competently.
• I have an old Compaq laptop that is running Gentoo. This is using a KDE desktop. It works. This laptop is about 8 years old and can still do most of the functions that I need it to do. I think it is running a Pentium 4.
• I have a server set up that is using Ubuntu. Again it works well doesn't need the latest processor or a huge amount of RAM to operate. It is functioning very well in its new role and I have plans to use it as a web server in the near future.

Linux is great. For most of the basic functions it does everything very competently. And, once you get the hang of it it is easy to add stuff that you need as you go along. It is also a great conserver of resources. Want to get a bit more life out of that old computer then linux may be the answer for you.

Free language learning

I never ceased to be amazed at the resources that are available on the web. I just came across this one. How to learn a foreign language.

Mango is a great too to be able to pick up some of the basics of a foreign language. Remember those tapes that you could buy years ago. They were very expensive. I was going to learn Japanese. I think my 7 year old daughter has surpassed me now.

An update on Hoopaa

A quick update on my use of Hoopaa.

During the first few days of use I couldn’t work out what was going wrong. I registered, downloaded but kept getting an error about a mismatched password. So I uninstalled, deleted my account and tried again. Still the same error. I checked again my password, tried to reset it but still kept getting an error message.

I sent an email to their support centre. Evidently it wasn’t just me that was having problems. Hoopaa had been overwhelmed with new users and as a result their servers had crashed.

Then a couple of days later I got an email saying that the problem had been corrected.

Ever since then it has been working perfectly. Every day I get an email report of where my kids have been on the internet. I can choose to rate the site. At this stage of life they are perfectly happy for me to set up the sites that they visit. But I am sure there will come a day when I don’t have as much say in what they do but I will still want to keep an eye on them.

Even though Hoopaa says that they only track Internet Explorer browsers it seems to be working when we use Firefox.

I had to laugh the other day when my 5 year old son Toby googled his name. He came up with hundreds of images. He called his mother over and told her to look at all the pages that were written about him

.

Manual – Nokia E65

This is just in case I am wondering where it is. The other day my phone went flat and I couldn’t work out how to turn it back on. The usual Nokia process didn’t work and I spent a desperate half an hour or so pressing and holding various keys on the phone. Nothing worked. I couldn’t find the manual so I had to go online to find one.

I went online and found one. If I lose it again I know where to go to straight away.

Nokia E65 manual

And also here for a live manual from Panasonic for my cordless home phone

Thanks

I spend a lot of my time working at a computer. Most of the time I really enjoy it. I was just thinking about the many tools that I use that enable me to get my work done and I thought I should acknowledge some of them.

• Moodle- open source educational content management software. It is very hard to beat when it comes to finding something that is able to provide so many resources and remain open source.  I am putting together more and more online courses and Moodle is a great too.
• WordPress – where would we be without it. I am using it as a CMS for one of my other sites (FortressEquip)  and find that for a smaller site it is hard to beat. Joomla is also an excellent product but for many purposes WordPress is a more than sufficient CMS.
• Gimp – Great for editing photos. A little complicated at first but once you get the hang of it it is fine. I am only very basic in what I want to do to images anyway so Gimp is fine.
• OpenOffice – Is fine for most office applications. It talks to Microsoft applications so you are still able to communicate to others.
• WordPress plugins – there are so many of them that I won’t try to mention them all now. But they make using WordPress that much easier. There are also many theme developers out there as well who enable smaller organisations to be able to produce a far more professional quality site because of their giving.
• Firefox – A great browser. Why would anyone want to use Explorer. And I feel much safer with my information using Firefox.

All of these contribute to what I do online and they do it for free. Because they have a belief that life is about contributing to others. The more that I use the web the more that I see the extent of this commitment and the benefits they bring to other people.

I was sitting here thinking and just wanted to say a quick thank you.

Capture your screen freeware

• Do you sometimes want to show someone what is happening with your computer because words are not enough?
• OR do you want to add something to your blog presentation

and do you want to get it for free……….

Then this is a great program for you.

The old way of using PrScr and then pasting into an editor is too slow. To meet this need there is a great range of screen capture software out there. You can do it online or you can download a number of programs.

This one is working for me. It is the Gadwin PrintScreen. I like it because of the hotkey function that allows you to select an area of the screen by pressing a hotkey and then capturing that area. You can then adjust the picture to the size that you want using a simple interface and there you have it. A very simple solution to a common need that I have in my computer use.

• It works.
• Its simple to use
• And it costs nothing.

Great value all round in my opinion.

How to use WordPress as a CMS

I have been using WordPress for quite a while for blogging. But more recently at another site I wanted a simple Content Management System this site. There are lots of options out there such as Joomla, Drupal and so on. But WordPress was more than enough to meet my needs to provide a simple publishing platform. Here is the simplest way that I have found and the procedure that I used:

Step One: Download the static front page plugin from here (http://www.semiologic.com/software/publishing/static-front/). And then upload it into your plugins directory.

Step Two: Create two pages. (Not posts). Called Home and Blog.

Step Three: Activate your plugin in your wordpress dashboard.

And its all done.

What happens now is that the “Home” page is the permanent front page and you will have another link to your blog that will display you blog posts as normal in reverse chronological order.

A couple of things that I went on to do:

Create a new home template. I did this because the one used from my blog posts still contained a date marker. I didn’t want this on my front page. I deleted the scripts that fetched the features that I didn’t want and then uploaded that into the theme directory.

I copied the blog template and then pasted it into notebook, (any text editor will do) and once I had changed it i saved it as home.php.

This is also a place that you can add the features that you want to your front page as well.

Do yourself a favour – Get the age of conversation

The Age of Conversation

If ideas are the currency of our times then this is, undoubtedly, the Age of Conversation, for without the art of dialog, the cut and thrust of debate and discussion, then the economy of ideas would implode under its own heavy weight. Instead, the reverse is true. Far from seeing an implosion, we are living in a time of proliferation  ideas build upon ideas, discussion grows from seeds of thought and single headlines give rise to a thousand medusa-like simulations echoing words whispered somewhere on the other side of the planet. All this in an instant. In what began as a half dare, the editors, Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan challenged bloggers around the world to contribute one page  400 words  on the topic of œconversation. The resulting book, The Age of Conversation, brings together over 100 of the worlds leading marketers, writers, thinkers and creative innovators in a ground-breaking and unusual publication.

All proceeds from sales of the book will be donated to Variety, the Children’s Charity. The proceeds will be earmarked to help children in the authors home countries.

The Age of Conversation

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