Gmap Pedometer

This may not qualify as a Web 2.0 site, but it is one that I use all the time and since I was showing a student how it worked, it seemed like the perfect blog subject.

Using Gmap Pedometer you enter a zip code to select any location and zoom in on the streets. About a 15 or 16 works well, but if you make a lot of turns the balloons get in the way at 15, but you can zoom in further without losing the route you have started if necessary.

Find the starting point for your walk or run or whatever and click the "Start Recording" button to the left of the map. Double click on the starting point and at each turning point on your walk. You can see how far each leg of your walk is as you click and at the end of the route you will see the total miles walked.

If you walk the same route each day, you can save the map and refer back to it, like this. Since I tend to walk different routes each day, I use this site on a regular basis.

Ready for Spring

Saturday was such a beautiful day that I planted peas in the raised bed I made last year. I hauled two garbage cans of composted silage from the old silo which accounts for the black soil on top. That's one advantage to living on an old dairy, there is a lot of compost available for gardening.

I used scraps of lumber still piled up and built a cold frame on the south side of the house to plant lettuce and spinach and start broccoli, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts. I'm sure my kids won't eat the Brussels sprouts, but I can hope. I may try to round up another window and build a second one beside this to start more seeds.

Where the concrete and tar are will eventually be creek stone. There are a lot of projects I still haven't finished on the house. The hardest part of laying the stone is actually going out and picking it up and hauling it back home. There aren't any creeks close enough and I don't have a truck.

Two New Baskets

My youngest daughter spent the first part of this week very sick with the flu, so I took several sick days to take care of her and take her to the doctor. While she slept or read, I make a couple baskets.

Debbie had asked me to make a basket for the Midwest Archives Council Silent Auction planned for the April meeting in Louisville. I wanted something classy that said Kentucky. I actually had a different basket picked out, but getting the handle with the horse head cut into it was going to be a problem. In the meantime I ordered a new basketry book from Amazon. Hey, I only needed six dollars to get free shipping.

This book included a pattern for the 2000 Anne Coleman Derby Basket. I had seen this one, but had never made it. Everything I needed was in the loft, so I decided this would work for MAC. It was woven on a 5x10 wooden base with a combination of 1/2" ff reed in the back and 1/4" fo reed in the front. It was woven continuously with 3mm cane on the bottom and the folded over lapel and 4mm cane for the over 2, under 2 twill that makes up most of the basket. The lapel was woven back and forth so that it gradually tapered to a rounded front. After cutting and tucking the spokes the front was soaked well and rolled over. This part was easier said than done. Even when finished I wasn't completely happy with the way the weaving bunched up after it was rolled. Before I send it off for the auction I need to find a horse shaped pin to put on the lapel.

The next basket was a simple laundry basket woven with 3/4" ff reed for the stakes and 5/8" reed for the weavers. For the design in the middle rows I picked up a braid that was in the new book and wove that in 1/4" fo reed. In my typical style I tried to jump ahead without reading the directions exactly, so it took several tries to master the braid, but once I figured it out it was very easy to do. To make the handle and rim stronger, I tucked the stakes to the outside and inside and used 5/8 fo with #6 round filler and 1/4" fo lashing. I had some small pieces of leather left over from the top basket and earlier baskets that I used for handles with Chicago screws to secure the ends. This basket has already been delivered to Toni's new house.

Pretty productive for a couple sick days. Fortunately, my kids do stay pretty healthy most of the time.

Trying out Email Posting

This is a test run to see how an email post will turn out.

Web 2.0 vs. Web pages or Technology Frustration!

When we first started Learning 2.0 at work, I immediately loved it. This weekend it hit home just why I love it so much.

I used to design web pages in my spare time and really enjoyed it, but somehow I drifted away from it and haven't done more than make updates to the pages at work for several years. A few months ago, a friend found out that I know how to 'do web pages' and recruited me to update a site for him. All I had to do was go through and make corrections to the existing site. It was only 8 pages, so I said 'no problem, I can do that easily.'

Using Notepad, I made all the changes, added menus to all the subpages, so you didn't have to click back home to see the rest of the site, simplified some of the file names (40 character file names really aren't necessary for buttons, are they), saved all the changes to my flash drive and made arrangements to meet Ike in his office to upload the new pages.

That's when things started going wrong. They use FrontPage to ftp files to the server. Maybe I just don't know how to use FrontPage (I've never used it before then), but every time I tried to upload something, FP recreated the folder that I used to hold the files. When I finally did get a page to upload, none of the links worked, and all the images were gone. Yikes!

Since it took about 1 1/2 hours to get that far, I promised Ike that I would work on it over the weekend (I had all the software I needed at home) and would have a working page by Monday morning. Easier said than done. Remember I mentioned that I hadn't designed web pages in several years. Well Dreamweaver, Photoshop and WSFtp were all on a computer that hadn't been touched for a couple years. In fact it was in pieces.

I hauled cpu and all associated parts to the loft and proceeded to put it back together, started it up and sat back to see what happened. It sounded like it was dying, but it did start and actually worked. I opened all the software I needed and started creating. (Did I mention that I waited till the last minute to do this project? About 7:00 Sunday evening.) I redesigned a menu bar, resized a bunch of new photos to add to the page and proceeded to recreate each page from scratch, so I knew they would work when uploaded. That was the easy part. After the first page, I had the basic layout that I could cut and paste, and Dreamweaver had started feeling like an old friend. Life was good.

About midnight I finished saving all the pages and had them ready to upload. This is where it got fun again. This computer doesn't have a modem; it got fried years ago. It doesn't have a CD writer, only a reader. It does have a floppy drive, but I got rid of all my floppy disks when I moved and was glad to see them go. It does have a USB port, but it has Windows 98, so it wouldn't recognize my flash drive which didn't come with software. I grabbed my daughter's new mp3 player with the CD. No. It wouldn't work with Windows 98. Next step was the external zip drive I used to use; I found it and hooked it up, but it wouldn't work.

Now it was almost 12:30 and I was running out of options. I really needed to get those files to a computer that had internet access. My other daughter had just bought a really cheap mp3 player (I've never seen one for $18) and it had a software CD. Maybe it would work. I sneaked in her room to look for it. She immediately jumped up out of bed and demanded to know what I was doing in her room. She looked at her clock and said "It's 12:30, get out of my room and go to bed right now!" I took a chance on my life and asked her where her player and software were, since she was already wide awake.

She gave it to me, amazingly enough, and believe it or not it worked. I transferred the files and took them to the new computer, downloaded WSFtp home edition and had the site uploaded and working in a few minutes. If I had thought about it, I probably could have downloaded drivers for my flash drive, but I wasn't thinking clearly by this time.

Learning 2.0 is so simple. No downloading. No ftp. No special software. I love it!

Three Gifts Challenge

Lately it seems like all you hear in the news is global warming and carbon footprint, but these issues are so important to the health of the world that they can't be ignored. This weekend my kids and I had a discussion about how much one person (me) can effectively do to help global warming.

Today I found the Three Gifts Challenge through another blog that I read occasionally and thought the idea was great. (It looks like another blog to add. I knew this blog and RSS thing would get out of hand, and it is getting that way quickly. Thank goodness for Google Reader offline)

Information from her blog post that I found interesting were that the US uses 380 billion plastic grocery bags each year, and that the five most environmentally damaging personal waste items are polystyrene foam, AA batteries, cooking oil, disposable diapers, and cigarette butts. See the link above for more details.

Her challenge is to give up or modify three things that damage the environment. So here are my three things to give up.

1. Plastic grocery bags. If I don't take my shopping basket or tote bags, I don't stop at the grocery.
2. Batteries. I do use rechargables, but I also buy batteries pretty regularly if I forget to recharge. From now on no books on tape without rechargables.
3. Plastic water bottles. I don't buy these very often and when I do I recycle. Quitting Pepsi has also cut my use of plastic bottles, but from now on my family (the 'family' part makes it a challenge) will not buy water or soft drinks in plastic bottles.

Now, I'm challenging anyone who reads this to come up with their own challenges. Everyone working together can make a difference.

Public Libraries

Someone asked me last week why I go to the public library when I work in a library and it threw me for a few seconds. My first thought was 'it's an excuse to take a walk at lunch', but that's not all. So here are reasons to use your local, public library.

• The top reason for me is Kentucky Libraries Unbound. This service through the public library lets me download free audiobooks that I can listen to on the computer or on my mp3 player. It has apparently gotten really popular, because many of the books have a waiting list to listen to them. But, you can add them to your account, and they will email when it's available.
• Next is the Popular Author's Club. Do you have an author that you read every book they write? If you're like me you probably have more than one or two or ten. Sign up for the Popular Author's Club and the library will add your name to the waiting list for the book and call you when it's available. Now if you just can't wait to read that next Harry Potter book, this is not the place to be, because it can take a while for the book to get around to you.
• Last but not least is the events. They organize movies, entertainers, discussion groups, monthly blood drives, games, the Nifty Needlers and more.

So visit your local, public library, get a free library card and start enjoying all they have to offer.