prod & ponder

Ben being his insanely cute self at dinner…

I’m trying out a new video hosting service as an alternative to YouTube, so please let me know if you have trouble viewing the video.

As if to say, “hey, buddy, you really have way too much work to do to justify playing video games” my Xbox 360 coughed up the dreaded 3 rings of death today. Since I purchased the machine the day the 360s were released (shocking, right?), once news of the early consoles’ design flaws spread, I’ve known it was dead-machine-walking. Still, it had made it this long; maybe my box of gaming joy would be different. But, no. Poof.

Microsoft is sending a box to ship it out for repair, and the fix is free, which is nice and all, but if you ask me the customer rep was a bit too self-congratulatory about the company not charging customers to fix Microsoft’s egregious and well-documented screw up.

Supporting a great cause (actually, several of them) and having a great time. Where? Here:

Full Disclosure: I’m on the board of Citizen International.

Show up, enjoy tons of great music at a cool new venue, have fun, and say hi.

Folks, I don’t pass this along because California Tortilla pays me. They don’t. I pass it on because…
1. As a professional in conflict resolution, I want the world to recognize the intrinsic wonderfulness of rock, paper, scissors as a dispute resolution process,
and
2. Because CalTort is delicious. And who doesn’t want to share news about stuff that’s delicious?

So, here’s the news, straight from the CalTort newsletter/mass email/whatever-it’s-called:

Rock, Paper, Scissor (RPS) excitement continues for the next 3 Wednesdays! Buy an entree on any of those Wednesdays, including tomorrow, and you’ll get to play RPS with the spunky cashier. If you win, you get a free chips and queso. If you lose, you get a 50 cents off coupon–it’s the least we can do. (Wouldn’t you rather we did the most we could do?)

Call Jott on your phone, record a reminder to yourself, and Jott takes care of transcribing and sending a text version of it to you via email or SMS message. Very handy when you need to quickly store a reminder to yourself and don’t have a post-it note handy. I’m not sure if the transcription is backended by people or if it’s done electronically, but whatever magic monkeys power it, generally I’ve found it fast and accurate.

Jott has all kinds of fancier features, too. For example, you can make pre-define distributions lists and have Jott transcribe and send your note to everyone on a given list. (e.g. “Hey, team, it’s rock-paper-scissors day at CalTort. Be there, be there, be there!”)

Timelines are nifty ways of recording information. But how do you share them? Dipity makes it easy to produce and share timelines on the web. You can make them public or private, and folks comment on the timelines if you want the timeline to spark ideas and discussions. You can link Dipity with your Flickr account if you want it to automatically generate a timeline of your photos.

(Web-driven timelines are very cool, but I also often need to use Timelines when teaching. My favorite tool for generating high-quality timelines for handouts and overheads is Bee Docs’ Timeline.)

Wordle generates artsy and cool word clouds based on the text you send it. You can tweak how the clouds are created for different effect and then share/embed the graphic in web pages.

Evernote is a tool for collecting, tagging, and searching through scraps of information (web pages, pdf files, images, notes, etc.). There are all sorts of apps that do this, but two features of Evernote set it apart. First, it’s all backed up on the web so that you can access all your notes from multiple computers or web-enabled phone. Second, and most cool, Evernote does optical character recognition on images so that words in images become searchable as well. (Evernote is in private beta right now, but I have some invites to share if you’re curious.)

When I logged into the blog to check for comments that needed moderating, I found that over the weekend there were 601 spam postings. Thankfully, my blog’s spam filter caught the bulk of them. But still… 601? In two days? Yeeesh.

It’s cool. I can admit when I’m wrong. And after this weekend’s trip, I feel it only fair that I admit that the New Jersey shore actually has its merits.

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(The Maryland Humanities Council just funded a community dialogue grant, “Baltimore ‘68, Continuing the Conversation” I was involved in pitching.)

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Christopher Walken