Booking thru Thursday - unique sorting

Browsing through my blog, I found a link to this post about the "Sorted Book Project." Go read it. I’ll wait.

The idea is to take a few books and physically sort them in such a way that the titles make some kind of sense … something that I’ve never quite gotten around to doing and photographing, but which fascinates me.

What title/combinations can you come up with? (Bonus points if you actually assemble the books and photograph them, like in the original post.)

This was just too much fun not to try. Though I get my books from the library I do have a stack of books waiting to come home with me (patience, Baila). So I did two stacks of sorted books. The first is titled professions:

In case you can't read the titles they're: The Poet, The Cellist of Sarajevo, The Piano Tuner, and The Sportswriter.

My second stack could not be more appropriate for a day that saw the deaths of both Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson.

This picture unfortunately didn't come out as clearly so here are the titles of the books:

Die Trying

Everything Changes

Gone, Baby, Gone

Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral

Long Way Down

How to Talk to a Widower

Plan B

If you'd like to participate in Booking thru Thursday, post your sorted books on your blog and leave a comment on the BTT Web site.

And ye shall count…seven weeks…

Yes, I know Shavuot is over and no, it’s not exactly seven weeks but the final countdown has begun (not to mention the shopping spree). On July 26th Maor and I fly to New York  and on August 5th we head home to Israel. For good. As usually happens in life, things haven’t turned out exactly like we thought. I haven’t graduated yet since I bit off more than I could chew last semester and I still have my final project to complete. I’m a little more than halfway done and it’s not a problem to finish up online. I’m actually trying to work on it through the summer while I still have access to the library but I am highly unmotivated. I’m also trying to finish up a tutorial that I’m working on from my internship.

The biggest news is that Arthur will be staying in San Jose for another year while Maor and I return to Zufim. It is purely work related – he doesn’t have a job in Israel and he does in the U.S. We’ve been advised that the matzav being what it is, if you have a job, it’s a good idea to hold onto it. So for now we’ll return to our roots and have a long distance relationship, though this time the distance is a little bit further.

Maor will be graduating from elementary school, South Peninsula Hebrew Day School, on June 17th so if you’re in the area, feel free to come and witness this miraculous joyous event. I have to admit that I will be happy to not pay Jewish day school tuition anymore.

I’m hoping this won’t be my final post from California. I’m trying not to get overwhelmed by all there is to do (do I really have to sort and pack AGAIN?!) and to actually get started on doing some of it. So for now, signing off.

 

 

Blog post bingo wrap up

 

Well I didn’t manage to do all 10 posts that Kim listed in her blog improvement project  but I had fun trying. I learned that I agonize over what I’m going to write whether it’s a blog post or a school paper, 200 words aren’t very many and 700 words are.

Here is a list of the posts I did complete for the project:

• A link post: But I just joined Facebook

A list post: 10 things not to say to a bereaved parent

An opinion post: What not to say

A question post: Kindle – necessity, luxury, or hype

A how to post: How to edit and share photos with just a few clicks

A review post: Wicked

Free space: Twittering the day away… or not

And another one that doesn’t really fit the categories – since I couldn’t get to over 700 words or keep any of them under 200: Vint Cerf – father of the internet

It made me realize that it’s tough to blog regularly, but it is a great way to avoid schoolwork. I’ll see if I can post on a more regular basis. Thanks for this fun challenge!

Twittering the day away… or not

So by now you know that I’m a bit of a tech geek and heavily addicted to the internet in general and Facebook in particular. But one thing I just cannot get is Twitter. If you’re not familiar with Twitter (ie. you live under a rock) it’s a micro-blogging tool that lets you send short updates (140 characters) to your friends and family that basically answers the question “what are you doing?”

Here’s a short video by Sachi and Lee LeFever of Commoncraft explaining Twitter in plain English:

 

Twitter has become this insane phenomenon and I definitely feel like I’m on the outside looking in. According to Read Write Web, Twitter has just raised another $35 million, bringing their total to $55 million. The Pew Internet and American life project just released a report stating that 11% of online American adults use a service like Twitter. And it seems like everybody is tweeting. These twitter guides list the top twitter users though I don’t know how up to date or accurate they are. The  top 150 Twitterers includes Barack Obama (#1), Wil Wheaton (#6 – he played Weslely Crusher on Star Trek: The next generation), Darth Vader (#13), and Bill Clinton (#67 – I know what you’re thinking) while Twitterholic lists Barack Obama, Britney Spears, Lance Armstrong,  and Al Gore in their top 10.

While the Twitter sensation is astounding what’s even more amazing are all the Twitter applications which are being developed to post to Twitter and follow others. In the various tech blogs that I follow not a day goes by without Twitter being mentioned repeatedly.

What can I say? Even though I’ve read Twitter: Why So Many People Don’t Get It I’m still not convinced and not a convert. Though if I ever do jump on the bandwagon I’ll definitely  need this article : HOW TO: Live Inside Twitter and Still Stay Productive.

If anyone wants to weigh in on this, I’d love to hear from you.

Kindle – necessity, luxury, or hype?

Ever since I first heard about Amazon’s e-book reader (or wireless reading device, as they call it), I’ve wanted one. Then I decided I would wait for them to come out with a new model so some of the kinks would be worked out. After all, with the hefty $359 price tag, I want something I’ll be happy with. This week  Amazon debuted the Kindle 2 which will be released on February 24 and the web has been aflutter with reviews, blog posts, feature wish lists, and of course, controversies.

The big appeal of the Kindle for me is that I am a voracious reader and English books are hard to come by in Israel. And they are expensive. You can download a book for the Kindle for $9.99 which is comparable to what I pay for the newer books in my favorite second hand bookstore in Netanya. The biggest drawback for me is that you can’t use a Kindle on Shabbat. I personally think I should get a heter – it’s definitely pikuach nefesh if I don’t have what to read on Shabbat.

But as I read the various posts and articles online I wonder if maybe I should wait a little longer. The NY Times Gadgetwise has four suggestions of what we need on a Kindle and 64 reader comments weighing in with what they think the Kindle is still missing. Some valid ideas are the ability to read PDFs, borrow e-books from the library, Wi-Fi, and backlighting.

One of the big complaints about the Kindle is that Amazon has chosen to be “the Apple of eBooks, not the Google” (Blankenhorn, 2009). Currently Kindle books can be downloaded and read only on a Kindle, and Kindle books cannot be read on other devices. Books whose copyright has expired and are freely available in the public domain from sites such as Project Gutenberg or e-books that can be downloaded from your public library cannot be read on a Kindle. Blankenhorn says that the money is not in the hardware (the readers) but in the books themselves. Ironically, Amazon sells music without copyright protection (as opposed to iTunes) so you why not copy that model to their book?

A new feature of the Kindle 2 is the Text-to-Speech feature, which allows the Kindle to read your book to you. Though the quality is not comparable to having an actor perform a book as an audiobook, it is supposedly passable. This feature is generating controversy as the Authors Guild feels that this might cut into the publishing industry’s audiobook sales, which was more than one billion dollars in 2007. The guild’s executive director, Paul Aiken, is quoted in the Wall Street Journal saying,  “They don't have the right to read a book out loud. That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law."

What do you think? Is the Kindle just an overpriced gadget that nobody really needs? Or is it the wave of the future and you just have to have one?

How to edit and share photos with just a few clicks

Congratulations! You just got a new digital camera and you can’t wait to share your photos with friends and family. Too many people just download the photos to their computer and send them off via e-mail or upload them to their Facebook page without giving any thought to what happens when the recipient tries to see the pictures. Huge photos that take ages to download and make Uncle Bob scroll to see Junior’s smiling face will not endear you to anyone.

If you don’t mind parting with your money, you can try one of Adobe’s Photoshop products. I have Photoshop elements and I’ve been happy with it though I don’t think it’s that intuitive or user friendly. Recently, I found Picnik, a great online tool for photo editing and sharing that makes it inexcusable for anyone to send unedited photos. If you do nothing else, please, reduce the size of your photos!

Picnik allows you to upload photos from your computer’s hard drive or from several sites including Facebook, Flickr, Myspace, Picasa web albums, and Photobucket. You can upload 5 photos at a time with Picnik’s free account while a premium account for $24.95 a year allows you to upload 100 pictures at a time and gives you some advanced effects.

Once you’ve uploaded a photo you’ll see 5 tabs: Home, Library, Edit, Create, and Save & Share. The edit tab allows you to autofix, rotate, crop and resize your photo, as well as fix red-eye quite easily. 

Good sizes for sharing pictures or for posting online are 640 x 480 or 800 x 600. You really don’t want to go larger than 800 x 600.

Picnik’s Create tab lets you add all sorts of cool effects to your pictures, as well as text, stickers, and a variety of frames.

Finally, the Save & Share tab allows you to save the edited photo to your computer, e-mail it directly from Picnik, or upload it directly to a social networking site such as Facebook, Flickr, Myspace, Photobucket, or Picasa web albums. This is a great function that cuts out the step of first saving it to your hard drive before sharing it either by e-mail or uploading it to a Web site.

With a few clicks and a short amount of time, you’ll be sharing photos like a pro. Give it a try!

Vint Cerf - “Father of the Internet”

Tuesday night I went to hear Vint Cerf speak at Temple Emanu-El in San Jose. I heard about this great opportunity from the Jewish Federation of Silicon Valley whose updates I get via e-mail. I was thrilled to share the experience with my SJSU SLIS instructor, Debbie Faires, who has definitely helped foster the geek in me. It was great to actually meet in person as opposed to in Google talk, Meebo, Second Life or Elluminate.

Vint Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google, is considered one of the fathers of the internet. He spoke about the past,  present, and future of the internet and while much of what he said went over my head, it was an incredible experience to hear him. In the 1970’s Vint Cerf co-designed TCP/IP with Robert Kahn. He talked about those early days of discovering that they could successfully move packets between 3 networks and watching that network expand and explode into today’s internet.

Dr. Cerf spoke about how the nature of the internet will continue to evolve as the population of internet users expands in Asia. Currently, there are about 1.5 billion internet users with the largest percentage (73.6%) being from North America which represents 248.2 million users. 15.3% of the internet users are from Asia but this translates to 578.5 million people. Dr. Cerf said that as the number of users from Asia approaches 70% the nature of the internet will be more heavily influenced by these users and will change. One change is the possibility of internationalized domain names using non Latin characters, though there are still issues that need to be addressed. Dr. Cerf said that mobile phones will continue to shape the internet as more applications are written to allow users to fully access the internet’s powers, particularly the geographic capabilities and possibilities.

Another change coming to the internet is IPv6, the next generation of IP protocol needed because we will run out of addresses sometime in 2010 according to Dr. Cerf. He takes full responsibility for this and says it was his fault as when he had to give a number of addresses they would need, TCP/IP was basically an experiment that they weren’t sure would work and he thought  2³² addresses would be enough. He further said that IPv6 will provide enough addresses to last through his lifetime and then it’ll be someone else’s problem.

Dr. Cerf finished his talk by talking about interplanetary networks, which I can’t really explain but has to do with developing a protocol that allows communication in space and he explained how the Mars rovers transmit data back to Earth.

Dr. Cerf told amusing anecdotes (and a corny joke) and it was amazing to listen to him discuss both the beginnings of the internet and where he sees it going in the future. He could probably rest on his laurels quite happily but is involved in all these cool projects. You don’t get the chance to hear a legend every day. It was aweome!