So here is one more, how I long shoot tweet in the air got me technical info I needed.

The NMC web site runs in drupal (no snark today). We use the TinyMCE module to give our users, and our office staff who create a lot of the content, a visual text editor. But I have had this nibbling problem which will likely seem nothing to a drupal-ista. I have our CSS styles include classes for hyperlinks, so that adding something like class="pdf" to an href tag will insert a small file type icon:

It is as simple as

(See the
<a href="/pdf/virtual-learning-prize-PR.pdf"
    class="pdf">press release</a>.)

I have a few classes for quicktime links, word docs, rss feeds, they all look something like:

.pdf {
	background: url('images/pdf.gif') no-repeat;
	padding-left: 14px;
}

But the problem was I would edit these in the drupal plain text editor, since I love seeing the HTML code, but if someone else in our office went to edit the content (like to fix one of my typos), when they went into the TinyMCE text editor and then saved their work, the damn class would be stripped from the source.

So I spend a lot of time re-editing our pages to get the damn icons back. I knew there was some place in the pile of the drupal module files to fix it, but never quite found it. So yesterday, in a total shot in the dark, I heaved a Twitter Hail Mary pass:

which is pretty damned obscure.

And then, in my email box this morning was an email from Michael Harris- who pointed out the part of the drupal.module code to add this, changing:

$init['extended_valid_elements'] =
   array(’a[href|target|name|title|onclick]‘);

to read:

$init['extended_valid_elements'] =
   array(’a[href|class|target|name|title|onclick]‘);

and it works! For the NMC staff accounts, I add a list of extra CSS classes to their TinyMCE profile:

and when they edit a hyperlink in the visual editor, they have a nice drop down of CSS classes they can apply:

So now they can link and edit away and not eat my classes!

So thanks twitter, thanks Michael Harris (I’d send you a foamee if I knew your twitter account).

This is by no means a unique story anymore, but it still thrills me to death when It Just Works.

But as a closing lesson, it is not just twitter that makes this possible. If I created a twitter account, and started tossing my questions, needs out into the wind, I’d be the tree falling in the woods with no one around. Twitter is the vehicle- it is that I have been here more than a year growing, following, and cultivating my network, that people hear the messages. So the network is crucial here, and we need to be talking more about the ways newbies can go about building their useful network. And a lot of it is just being in that network, participating, giving back.

Yes, I fall back on the Churchill quote:

Look at the happy people (well they were chatting away madly as the opening slide show was running with Paul Simon singing in the background):

I do this one sans presentation files, all from pre-loaded Firefox tabs, which sort of works well for jumping around, but I think I overly tax it when I load the 14 or so demos, a few borked in demo mode, but oh well, it happens, right?

I have this one audio recorded as well
50 Web 2.0 Ways (33.6 Mb MP3, 48:52)

Since I heard the screens were hard to hear in ustream, when I ran this one, I left it in camera mode, and hoped my aim of the laptop camera was okay (note the stream was started early, so there may be about 10 minutes of chatter and noise before it starts- or maybe my presentation cannot be differentiated form chatter and noise).

This was a lot of fun, as always, and people just love the craziest things, like Blabberize.

And wow, did this jam packed day go fast! That was the end of the conference, and it was time to go for ppost conference drinks.

Thanks to all my former colleagues at Maricopa for the warm welcome, it was great to be back for a day

Mike Wesch was an amazing speaker, and beyond his YouTube fame are some amazing projects he is doing with students generating learning content (check out the world culture sim) in all the good Web 2.0 ways (love his use of netvibes). We got interviewed by Veronica Diaz for a podcast that should appear somewhere on the maricopa conference site.

Mike’s morning keynote was a great leadoff for my Being There presentation, the first of two I did yesterday.

This was a 3td generation version of the one first done last year for Faculty Academy and then last October in Australia. I must admit to managing the time as well, because I ended up about 14 slides short of the finish line. But I was having too much fun.

I did a number of things to try and capture the presentation- I had set up my Edirol audio recorder so I have the audio now synced to the slides, posted to Slideshare (and tried to make the notes liberally commented and linked):

| View | Upload your own

And have the audio as well:
Being There @ Maricopa (35.4 Mb MP3, 51:29)

I maintain this is about the best way to capture a presentation, but its some effort to do the recording and sync, And OMG, the “um” filter was not working at all.

Also for te novelty of it, and to see if I could pull it off, while presenting, I was running a live ustream.tv broadcast, partly to show the audience that this was possible, and the use of twitter as a “call out” to people to join the ustream. I had barely enough time to test (once they got me a wired connection which was much more robust than the wireless). I find that the laptop camera option is not always optimal, and ince you are in presentation mode, you are not able to monitor the stream at all.

For this one I tried an experiment- I had the camera on only at the beginning as I was getting set up, and then I switched the video source to CamTwist, an utterly amazing tool (free, Mac OS X) that turns your desktop into a video source. So I was streaming (I thought) the presentation.

The video was likely not optimal as it is small, and I had forgotten I had dropped the video quality settings in ustream, as typically I like to hedge my quality to audio. Sorry folks out there trying to remotely read pixelated slides. But here is the recorded archive:

I still find myself in sheer amazement that this is even possible, for free. Never in all my dreams.

I was so sorry I did not get to the Amazing Flower story or my bit on Nuggets vs Fishing. Maybe I’ll just have to sit down and record the whole thing the way it ought to … ah right, like that will never happen!

Among the neat sidelights was meeting Sean, who is at ASU and is one of the people in the flickr 366 photos group

And then, in the next post, the details on the 50 ways presentation.

Hello,
We have a client in the e-learning sector who is interested in advertising on your blog. We find it relevant to our client and your blog to be of high quality. We are interested in buying links site-wide, homepage links, link within articles, or having you write about our client and linking to them. If you are open to doing so, we can also provide the content Please write back to me with your advertising rates and how much it will cost to sponsor a blog post on your site. Also, if you run other blogs, please send those to me too. We will be able to Paypal you immediately for these link placements.

… I decided to put a number out there:

My fee is $1,000,000 cash.

If I dont post ever again, you will know they went for the sucker bet.

Last week I was down in Phoenix using the new UM150 USB modem they sent me. It worked fine for the first stop. Then, I had 5 disconnects in less than 2 hours, from 2 different locations. I left a message for Rick, the Executive Customer Relation Specialist who was following through - it was brief, “Hi Rick, this is Alan Levine, the guy with the new wireless modem. It worked for 2 hours and now I hve 5 disconnects in 2 hours. I want out of my contract”.

In the meantime I looked at my network settings and saw a bunch of unused connection types for the card. So I deleted them. And the thing worked for 2 hours.

So right on cue, Monday morning, Rick called, and said he talked to his supervisor and said for all my trouble, they’d let me out of my contract with no charge.

I was there.

I won.

But I hesitated since the thing was working. So i said I wanted to see if it was consistent with this week’s travel. After all, once out of my contract, I have to go to another carrier and start over. Maybe they are all crooks.

So tonight I came down to Phoenix. While waiting for my pizza I tried to connect. It tool 4 tries. I was disconnected twice after 5 seconds. Then I was in. Back in my hotel room, it took 3 tries to ger a connection. Then I was one for an hour. I was writing captions for flickr photos I was uploading. I went to upload and BOOM! Nothing. The damn thing had disconnected with no warning, and my photo captioning, tagging was lost.

Here’s a snapshot of my log- the pink lines are all “disconnected by peer” meaning they dropped me:

So I am ready to use the get out of jail card. I have had enough. I want to show that you can get companies to knuckle under. But it is utterly amazing the amount of effort it took to get to this point. Anytime you call the support, you will get a ceiling of support and no one there will acknowledge that it is even possible to escape. So they key is to persist until you hit this magic layer of “Executive Customer Relations” Those are the people to ask for.

I shall be free, than find another pirate ship that I will indenture myself to.

But I will revel in freeing myself from the Allhel Pirates

And I am looking forward to seeing former colleagues, many of whom are sure I moved to Austin, or some who did not know I was gone

Anyhow, I am doing an early warning here because I am going to see if I can stretch the audience to do live broadcasts of my presentations via ustream.tv- of course, this is all hinging on the local network (I requested wired connection but am not counting). To solve the issue of the poor viewing angle from a laptop camera- who needs to see my talking head anyhow– I intend to start the stream with the camera as people enter the room, and then switch the video source to my desktop, using CamTwist. There will be the usual shout outs to twitter as well.

As a backup, I intend to record audio on my Edirol R-09, if I can remember to click the Big Dumb Red Blinking Button.

Hopefully, the streams will start 10 minutes before the scheduled times from http://ustream.tv/cogdog; with all the things to attend to, I most likely will not see much of the chat and am relying on my connected colleagues in the audience to keep me posted. So the showlist for Tuesday, lucky May 13, 2008, includes:

• 10:30am PDT (check local time) Being There.. in that Unevenly Distributed Future - yes it is a reprise of the first one last May at Faculty Academy and then a few times in Australia, but I’ve pruned some less essential pieces, added many new examples, and tossed a few new surprises in the mix.. including a mullet. Go figure. And in the most unlikely occurrence ever, I’ve posted the presentation early, so there will not be late night tinkering. What the heck, the presentation file is not the presentation, I’ve heard. If I get good audio, I may turn that into a SlideCasr.
• 2:00pm PDT (check local time) 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story. I love doing this presentation, of which there is no presentation being me having about 50 Firefox tabs lined up based on the workshop/presentation first done in Hobart Australia, October 2007. I am sure I will be still trying to ride this horse long after its time, so someone please tell me when to Stick a Fork in It. I’ve recently added a few more to the mix, including Jaycut (a multi track web-based video editor) and Vuvox Collage (a stunning rich media presenter, unlike any other tool, still in private beta)… so if anyone is counting, I have pegged it at 57, the magic Heinz number, and a few more in the wings that may top it at 60 soon.

I’ll be presenitng humbly in the shadows of keynoter Michael Wesch.

And what is fun to watch is the official conference site, and even I see a few of the registration tools I built there, and the unofficial 2.0ish one full of blgggy taggy utterzy twittery bling. Wow, what a cool template on the blog, where did they get it? So I am curious to see what happens when the 2 cross paths tomorrow.

I am quite excited about all of this, and to add to the craziness, the weather forecast I just heard is predicting an “outbreak of weather” for Phoenix- rain? and I might miss snow down to 6000 feet? Amazing.

So tangentially, it reminds my of my colleague Klaus from graduate school, who would relay that his working class Dad would occasionally ask him when he was going to “get some honest work.” What could be more honest than Klaus, a grad student, chasing adventures on Mexican volcanoes?

But this is a positive story about my “little” sister, Harriet. That is in quotes because she is 6 years older than me, but she is shorter, yet has enough goods on me from growing up. But over the last year it has been fun as she had started reading my blog in October to follow my travels in Australia, but then in our conversation and email she was reading all the posts. Then, she got hooked on flickr, created an account, and started commenting on my photos.

That is kind of cool, like maybe she even takes what I do seriously

So we are talking this weekend, Harriet from her sailboat on the Chesapeake, me at Home Depot in Payson, AZ, and she’s talking about being influenced by my rant on presentations. She has a rather high level government job, and works in computer systems, but she said she attends these meetings full of deadly dull Powerpoint, the typical monotone reading of 8pt text slides. So for her recent presentation, she researched a bunch of the presentation related sites I referenced, and made hers nearly all visual… and she relayed that it caught everyone’s attention and garnered a pile of positive feedback.

So my silly blogging influenced my sister’s work, thats pretty cool by me. Now maybe she will be twittering soon, blogging, popping those snazzy presentations on Slideshare….

And being Mothers Day, I should note my mom asked me on my last visit to see “that blog thing.” So I went to her computer, and made sure it was favorited in her Internet Explorer (I do rue the day my sister got her a PC before I could get her a mac). I was actually already there… and boy did it load slowly on her dial up internet! Mom pretty much only does email, and says she “never goes on that web” and forgot how to get to my blog — which is all ironic as she reads her email (NetZero) in a web browser. But no sense being picky.

But who knows, one day, Mom may find her way here and leave a comment.

So does your Mom read your blog?

And them, out of the blue something goes “technically wrong”.

Or as more often happens, you are paging through your tweets and the Older button at the bottom disappears.

WTF?

In this short, highly low production, “just hit record before I finished coffee” screencast I show you how to seize control back from twitter when it takes your button - Take Control of Your Twitter (7 Mb Quicktime).

My battle to escape jail of my wireless internet provider seems in vain, but they did send me, for free, a newer USB mode, that actually has software for the Mac and promises to be a stronger connection (time shall tell).

Still it tooka call to tech support as they had not updated my account. But the thing works so far, am getting about 800 kbps download and am actually able to tun Second Life.

So I call this a partial victory. My new device seems to be providing good connectivity (in 2 locations so far in Arizona), and since it has the software now running on my Mac (and is a device that clearly is compatible with OS X), I guess I am in business.

I got the new device, a UM150 USB wireless thingie, on Tuesday. I installed software, tweaked preferences, and was unable to connect. I called “Rick”, the Alltel Executive Customer Rep who called my in Austin and arranged delivery of th enew device, but got his voicemail. I had to wait a day until I knew I had a couple of hours free in case I had to wade through the Seven Layers of Customer Support Hell, but actually, it took about 15 minutes, as the advanced tech person had to activate my device in the system.

This morning I got an early call from Rick, who had said he went and called tech support and asked them to make sure I was connected. This is the kind fo service everyone who calls Alltel should get, not just the headcases who make a big deal on the internet.

So while I lost the war to break free of my contract (which seems utterly hopeless anyhow), I consider this a partial win, as the ruckus Devon, Phil, Larry and others made online seemed to have an effect.

Or at least I think so.

My hunch is that you can have happy customer stories or horror tales with all carriers, so its a matter of just keeping the pressure on your jailer.

That is just plain stupid. WTF is “venti”? “Tall” is “small”? C’mon, speak English will ya? So my new silly travel game is to try and make Starbucks Speak English.

It goes like this. Order your drink, using real descriptive terms, “Small”, “medium”, “Large”. When they respond, “Venti?”, respond with, “no ‘Large’. If you can get them to say the real size, then you win! And we subvert StarbuckSpeak one franchise at a time. So if you are successful, or heck, just of you try, then add a coffee cup pin to this Google Map at http://tinyurl.com/49z88p (if it is set up right, it is open for others to edit)

View Larger Map

Let’s light up the map at establishments where proper human language terms are used. Go out there and use your charms to make ‘em speak in words people understand, not snobspeak.