by Monica Rysavy on February 10, 2010
It’s still snowing here in Delaware. I’m off from teaching for the third day in a row and I’ve been getting a little antsy.
My new lens, a Canon 50 mm 1.4, arrived yesterday so I’ve had some fun taking pictures with it and processing them using the new set of presets that are out from Totally Rad Actions that are called Totally Rad Lightroom Presets.
The minute I get up from the dining room table, Jasper jumps into my chair. He waits until I warm it up for him.
But the moment we are settled on the couch with our laptops, he makes his way over and climbs up so he can press his face against the heat vent.
It’s tricky to take Jasmine’s picture. She doesn’t stay still very often so I usually have to distract her. Sometimes Peter will make faces at her. That’s a pretty good distraction technique.
This is her favorite corner in the house because she loves to rub her head against the corner. Looks like it hits the spot perfectly.
I do love snow but we are both getting cabin fever.
The Totally Rad Lightroom Presets are really easy to use. I haven’t used very many of them yet, but on these I used: A Beginning:Lite, a mixture of the Auto presets like Exposure, Contrast, Tone, and White Balance, Eddie Would Go, and Vignette: Sloppy Seconds.
Something I like about Lightroom presets versus actions in Photoshop is that you don’t have to think as much about adjusting the opacity and playing with the layers. There are different strengths of many of the presets but you can quickly see in the preview panel in Lightroom how the various presets would look before you apply them or you can simply use it and undo it if you don’t like it.
I just realized I didn’t plan for anything to eat for lunch today so I’m not sure what we are going to put together yet. We ended up having one of the dinner meals, which was a sausage, onion, and cheese breakfast braid for breakfast, which means that we are also short one dinner recipe. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal since we live right next to a grocery store, but there is currently a state of emergency which means we can’t drive over. Technically we could walk over but the roads are most likely pretty bad. I think it’s going to depend on how hungry we get and how badly we don’t want to eat TV dinners.
by Monica Rysavy on February 9, 2010
When I was in high school, I was the student who took notes in multicolor inks and doodled in the margins. These days, I’m still a note taker and I love making lists. But taking notes on Post-its (despite my love of all things paper) is not really practical. Notebooks aren’t either and I have a lot of those. This brings me to another one of my favorite online tools – Evernote.
I first heard of Evernote a couple of years ago when Peter and I attended a Digital Life conference. At the time, I was using Microsoft’s OneNote for lesson plans and notes and wasn’t really looking for anything new. If I am remembering correctly, it was just software at the time and didn’t have an online option (I tried looking this up but they don’t appear to have their history listed on their site.)
Flash forward to now and Evernote has software for your computer (PC or Mac), your phone, and an online version. You can learn more about some of the details behind Evernote here. I mainly use the online and phone versions of Evernote, however I recently installed the software on my work computer as well for a reason I’ll explain in a bit.
I use the online version every day. I keep my lesson plans in it so I’m constantly updating it throughout the day. I have organized mine into several notebooks in an attempt to keep myself organized. Here’s a look at my notebooks:
Remember those lists I mentioned earlier? I’ve starting keeping my lists and notes in Evernote as well. Every week I make my grocery list in the online version of Evernote and then access it from my phone using the mobile version. It is so much more convenient to scroll through the list on my phone instead of digging through my purse for whatever scrap piece of paper I jotted it down on. I usually add our weekly menus to the list as well as because its then available on my phone AND online so I’m ready to tell my hubby what’s for dinner when he asks, and usually this happens right after lunch each day – I guess because he is thinking about food?
Evernote also has a Web Clipper feature which allows you to highlight anything you are interested in saving online – pictures, text, links, etc… –and save it directly into your Evernote. If you install the software, the Web Clipper feature comes with it, otherwise you can install a plug-in into the Firefox browser. This is why I decided to install the software at work. Doing so also installed the clipper option into Outlook so I can right click on email messages and add them to my Evernote software which then links to the online version. I’ve been using this lately with daily emails I receive from educational news websites because I don’t often have time to read them at work.
Finally, there’s another feature of Evernote that I just learned about tonight – Evernote + Twitter. Start following “myen” and soon you will receive a DM (Direct Message) from myen with a link to click which will link your Twitter account to your Evernote account. You can then DM myen with notes to post in your account privately (without showing up on your Twitter) or you can add @myEN to the body of any of your public tweets and then your message will be posted on Twitter and sent to your Evernote account. I just tried it and received the link to set things up in under four minutes.
I do still keep handwritten notes and I still love to make my lists. I also still use OneNote, but Microsoft hasn’t offered a web version, and that’s my favorite part of Evernote. Its an information organizing solution that I’m glad I have incorporated into my every day life.
by Monica Rysavy on February 8, 2010
I first wrote about ordering a new computer here. Then, I mentioned how long I was waiting for it here. I further elaborated on my situation here where I talked about one of the online tools I am using more of these days. Finally, the big day was here and my Envy arrived – you can read that story and see the pictures of it here.
My laptop is nearly perfect. It’s fast (works in Photoshop and Lightroom processing images with amazing speed) and its pretty. But it has a major flaw: something goofy is wrong with the hardware.
From the second day after it arrived, I noticed that the “p” key only sometimes worked. Occasionally it would miss when I was typing and at other times, like now, “qe” or “qerw” comes out instead. Frequently it wouldn’t work at all. Several other keys began to miss soon after and now I have to rely on copying the characters that don’t work into Notepad and using the On Screen Keyboard.
I called the Envy Technical Support line on Friday night. I was feeling extremely frustrated and disappointed that after all of my recent computer troubles, and after waiting for my laptop much longer than was originally promised because of shipping delays, I had received faulty hardware. The person I spoke with was quite nice, but quickly came to the conclusion that I must need a new computer all together because I had faulty hardware (she had me enter a recovery area of the unit which is evidently outside of Windows and since I could not type with the keys in question there she determined that I had faulty hardware, not software). No other suggestion was offered to me at that time (i.e. it was never brought up that I was fully under warranty and had purchased additional 3 year protection that I could use). She then proceeded to transfer me to the HP Home Shopping Store and everything went downhill quickly from there.
I had an incredibly difficult time understanding the sales representative. Long story, filled with terrible customer service from several levels, short, I will be shipping my Envy back for warranty service tomorrow. My warranty contract states that I should receive my computer back within 5 business days and that is much faster than the estimated one plus months I was repeatedly quoted (at least I think that is what they said).
I am feeling frustrated with the entire situation right now. I got a shiny new toy after a terrible computer disaster that I hoped would make everything smooth sailing again, only to have a shiny busted new toy that I have to go through the hassle to ship back and more time to wait. I’m out a significant amount of money which makes the whole thing worse.
by Monica Rysavy on February 7, 2010
I hardly ever print out pictures anymore. I edit them, post them to my blog, Twitter, and Facebook accounts. I share them with my Mom over Skype. Most of the time I don’t think about the fact that I don’t print them, but when my computer was out of commission recently I realized that I had virtually no access to our pictures if I didn’t have internet access and even then I wouldn’t have access to all of them because I haven’t uploaded all of them to one central location (note to self: I need to do this) yet.
I was inspired recently by a project I read on the blog of one of my favorite digital designers, Liz, of Paislee Press. She completed a project that she refers to as Off to Press where she put together an album with 296 pages using templates that she created. I love her designs because they are very minimalist in nature and these templates looked like they would be perfect for my project because they are very simple and have the perfect amount of white space so I can add a few words here and there if I want, or I can leave them as is. Once I learned that Liz had two sets for sale (and if you buy them together there is a discount), I quickly snapped them up.
The templates are designed for use in Photoshop which is what many templates are designed for, however I prefer to design multipage albums using InDesign. I’m much more familiar with Photoshop, but when I designed our wedding album last fall, I learned the basics and discovered that it did some things much faster than Photoshop and that it was easier to work with multiple spreads (in fact I’m not even sure if it’s possible to do that in Photoshop, at least not that I have discovered).
I spent most of last night importing (I learned that this is called “placing”) the Photoshop psd files into InDesign. It would appear that the individual layers no longer work the same way once you get them into InDesign (although I did discover how to see the layers), so most of my time was spent creating frames to place the images into. My favorite part about using InDesign to work with Album layouts is that once you have the album spreads set up with frames the actual album creation process goes pretty fast. I can drag a photo from the folder I’ve stored it in to InDesign, drop it on the frame and fill the frame proportionally with just a few, quick key strokes.
It will be awhile before I’m finished, but here are a few of my initial layouts (any strange lines you might see are called “guides” – they won’t print, they just help me lines things up. And the empty boxes are just placeholders for potential text).
by Monica Rysavy on February 6, 2010
A couple of years ago, Peter and I waited in line at the King of Prussia Mall to get free stuff from Blogger. They were sponsoring some sort of an event (it might have been a blogger meet up?), and we eagerly made the nearly one hour drive in hopes of getting some swag (aka ‘free stuff’). After waiting for about an hour, we got some stickers and a sweatshirt. I remember happily sporting that sweatshirt as we drove around Delaware. It was much too big for me, navy blue, and had the orange Blogger logo. It read –
I’m blogging this.
I remember getting some funny looks from people, who were most likely wondering what the heck blogging was, but I thought I was so cool. In reality, I was such a poser. Peter was the regular blogger of the two of us – I would post a couple of days in a row and neglect my blog(s) for months or sometimes years. But that’s ok, I rocked my sweatshirt anyway.
A little later, back in the fall of 2006, I started using blogs with my students. In those days I taught Business Education instead of Web Design and Marketing and this consisted of Computer Applications, Accounting, and a little Finance. We used Edublogs. I wouldn’t consider this a very successful use of blogging as we only used our classroom blogs a couple of times.
Friday morning, as I was driving into work, I passed the commute by listening to Gary Vaynerchuk’s book Crush It! There are so many ideas in this book that I’m excited about – I’m definitely going to do a review post later on – but more importantly – perhaps most importantly – was that it got me fired up to try something new with my students that day.
I originally intended to spend part of the morning reviewing our current Web Development chapter on the design concepts with my tenth graders. There are lots of ways to review and some work better than others, but I decided to scrap my original plan and go with something different that I thought (hoped) my students would love: Blogging.
This time, instead of using Edublogs, I decided to use the blogging tool that is available in Blackboard now that we are using Blackboard Learn 9. I should mention, however, that I was incredibly impressed with Edublogs’ customer service back when I used it. After sending an e-mail requesting customer support on some minor issue, James Farmer, who happens to be the Founder and CEO wrote me back and answered my question right away! I don’t think I realized who he was until later and I remember being so impressed that the head of the company would take the time to address such a little issue.
I was able to add the blog component to my Blackboard course in under 5 minutes. Here’s how to do it in Blackboard 9.
First, find your control panel. It looks like this:
Then choose Course Tools, this is where you will find the link to set up your blog.
Once you click the Blogs link, you will find yourself at the Create Blogs screen which looks like this. Notice that there is drop down arrow where you can change your views – you can view All Blogs, My Blogs, Course Blogs, or Blogs Permitting Comments.
To create a blog, click Create Blog and you will find yourself at this screen
Enter the name of your blog and any description you’d like to add.
When I was setting up the blog for my students, I chose to make individual student blogs, i.e. each student would get their own blog to post to instead of having one main blog where everyone posts. I took the check mark off that would allow students to post anonymously (thinking that leaving it on encourage goofy comments), and put the checkmark on for “Allow users to edit and delete entries” because I thought it would be a good idea for students to be able to delete posts in case they double posted by accident or needed to edit it for some reason.
And that’s it – click SUMBIT and you’re done. I’ll follow up later this week with my thoughts about how the actual activity went with my students and a reflection on the whole blogging with students experience. If you have any questions about setting up or using a blog in Blackboard, please feel free to contact me by leaving a comment here, or sending me a message on my Twitter or to my e-mail monica AT scatteredbreadcrumbs.com.
Tagged as:
blackboard,
Edublogs
by Monica Rysavy on February 3, 2010
I started scanning photos again this evening with my Epson v500.
I found this one and it stood out to me immediately because of the broad smile on my Poppop’s face. The year was 1959. I’m not sure of any of the other details so I’ve e-mailed my Mom in hopes she might know.
Love how he is sporting a red tie!
by Monica Rysavy on February 2, 2010
When I first saw the condition the shipping box was in, I was very nervous. After waiting all this time for my new laptop to arrive, the last thing I wanted was to open it up and find out that it was scratched or even worse, busted.
This sticker, right next to the gash in the box made me laugh. So…evidently FedEx wasn’t too concerned with transporting my box despite the fact that it could supposed blow up if damaged. Way to be make safety a priority FedEx!
Fortunately, it was packed quite well. The styrofoam sides kept it safely away from the sides of the box so there weren’t any issues at all with it despite the messed up box.
I was rather impressed with the branding that HP has put together for their Envy line. I think it’s simple and modern.
Everything was packed quite neatly inside: the computer, an external CD drive, and the extended battery. Ends up that the memory card actually contained the manual – now that is creative!
Isn’t it pretty? I’m no where near finished discovering all of the different things I can do with it but first impressions are quite good. Windows 7 is gorgeous and everything is running so fast! It would appear that my days of running a batch process and going off to do something while it finishes are over.
Jasper and Jasmine loved the box. I didn’t have the heart to tell Jasper he was simply too fat to fit.
by Monica Rysavy on January 31, 2010
I’ve decided that I want to start sharing more of my photography because I love taking pictures but I realize that not everyone will like posts with lots of images and not a lot to read. So, I’ve decided to start something I’ll call “Sunday Sampling” where I’ll share a bunch of images from a particular place/event/etc… that I’m into right now. Unless otherwise indicated I use Photoshop CS3 – I’ll be switching to CS4 soon – to play with my images. I try not to do too much to them as I’m working extremely hard to get good pictures when I initially take them. Despite this, I love playing with actions. I use Totally Rad Actions and particularly love the following actions: Boutwell Magic Glasses – I use this to on nearly every image with varying degrees of opacity – and A Better Web Sharpen.
While in Prague over winter break, Peter and I had the chance to visit the Prague Zoo with my father-in-law, Pavel. We had talked about making the trip over (it’s technically in Prague but requires a metro ride and a bus to get there), and towards the end of our trip, with a bit of fresh snow on the ground, we did.
A couple of thoughts about the Prague Zoo…
- It’s huge – we were there nearly all day and never ran out of things to do. You can go on an interactive tour here.
- It felt like we could get much closer to the animals than in any Zoo I have visited in the States.
- The Zoo cafeteria was quite tasty – full of Czech food (I know, duh – we were in the Czech Republic after all – but even Peter commented that it was impressively tasty.
- The kid wagons – for the parents to pull the kids around in – have Mercedes Benz logos. How cool is that?
- The animals all looked healthy, well cared for, and happy.
I want to go back in the summer so we can see some of the animals better. As it was quite cold, many animals that are usually outside (Elephants, Giraffes, etc…) had been brought inside for the winter.
This set of images were also processed using an action called Get Faded (winter) and I love how it enhanced the wintery feel. You can learn more about the actions on the Totally Rad Photoshop Actions Blog.
by Monica Rysavy on January 30, 2010
Shortly after 2010 began, my work laptop died. After my minor (ok, it really was rather major) panic attack, I started think about how this was going to impact my daily life. I have an old Dell laptop that I’m working off of at home – mainly for internet surfing and e-mail checking and I’m now using a Dell Desktop in my classroom.
Recently, Dell sent my work laptop back from Depot Service. While it appears to have fixed some of the issues that it had (the fan, power supply, and LCD screen were replaced), the Windows install is messed up. I was about halfway through a repair install of Windows when it died so now it gets stuck there for some reason. I’m at the point where I’m probably just going to wipe the entire thing and start over.
The laptop I ordered for myself, the HP Envy,
still has not arrived. It’s currently in
That is very frustrating for me because I can literally reach out and touch Linwood from Wilmington. Well at least I think I can. I don’t actually know where it is but given how close PA and Delaware are to each other it can’t be that far, right?
Anyway.
Back to how my recent epic failure with my laptop impacted my daily life.
I have a lot of files and resources that I need to access from home AND at work. This wasn’t a big deal prior to the death of my laptop because I took it back and forth. All 17 inches of it. It was quite heavy but this really had been the easiest way for me to deal with everything. I had my e-mail in Outlook, lessons plans in OneNote, pictures in Lightroom, and assorted other resources.
My first priority was getting my e-mail set up again in Outlook 2007. I like to use Outlook for all of my e-mail as I’m not a fan most webmail interfaces. However, if you aren’t set up to use Microsoft Exchange (we aren’t) this means that your e-mail is stuck on one computer if you pull it off of the server. I wanted to find a way to be able to get to the work e-mail I had pulled off the server without taking a laptop back and forth.
Outlook has something called a PST file. If you want to learn more about that go here. Essentially this means that all of your Outlook data – contacts, e-mails, calendar info., etc… is inside this one file. This brings my to an online tool I’m using to help me have access to that content…
I’ve used Mesh for over a year now. With Mesh, you install software that essentially runs in the background of your computer. It looks like a little blue ball and sits in your system tray (the area typically by your clock).
Mesh enables you to synch your files between all of your devices (multiple computers – desktops and/or laptops and phones with web access).
Mesh also enables you to remotely access other computers in your Mesh (assuming they are on of course). By using the Live Mesh Remote Desktop, you can get to all your files and folders on those other computers and even use software that is on those computers but not on the one you are currently using. I haven’t had a chance to try that yet but it sounds super cool.
I have Mesh running on all of my computers and have added my Outlook PST file to my Mesh as well. This means that if I needed to access my Work Outlook content from home all I need to do is open up that PST file and poof! My Outlook at home is then loaded up with all of my Work content. I wish it synched simultaneously but this works for now. I’ve used Mesh to synch my OneNote files quite effectively as well but I’ll talk about that in another post.
by Monica Rysavy on January 29, 2010
Peter loves Cherry Pie.
Fortunately for me, his favorite kind of cherry pie involves boxed pie crust and canned pie filling. 
Sometimes after I pour the cherry pie filling out of the two Lucky Leaf cans, I’m feeling guilty about my lack of culinary skills.
I mean, if it was that easy, then I’m not making a quality dessert, right?
So, I pull out a cookie cutter.
I chose a snowflake since it’s been awfully cold here lately and I’ve been wishing for snow. I use the cookie cutter to decorate the pie. This makes it look more homemade, right?
While it may not look fabulous, Peter swears it tastes great, so that makes me happy.
