Well, here goes…  everything… I guess.

I have posted on my primary blog host a few times about my unhappiness with many of the changes that have been occurring on the site for the last few months.  The reduction of some services, (iTalkr among my favorites) restriction / reduction of widgets and a move for many of these services to accessible to only “supporters.”  That said, overall, I have enjoyed my last 2 1/2 years  blogging on edublogs.org.   I know I have not been the most dedicated blogger on their service (or blogger overall), but I hope that I have made a bit of a difference in at least a few of my readers lives. Every time I happen to look at my cluster map I can’t help but be impressed by the numbers of people who have stopped by to look at my often rambling thoughts.  Looking at it this morning, I still l have that sense of awe. It is humbling when I think it all started with this simple post back in January 2007.

The main goal I have one this educational technology blog is to separate my personal views, ideas, beliefs and interests from direct ties to my school and district.

The views expressed here are entirely my own and do not and should not be implied or directly represent or representative of any organization with which I am affiliated or associated.

Wow! Disclaimer out the way... Let's have some fun discussing leadership, organization, technology, staff development, and of course educational technology!

- Convergence

Gees, this is feeling like a obituary… sorry about that.  While not an obit, this post is signaling an end of sorts… for the past few months I have been exploring other blogging and website hosts.  I have played with Microsoft Spaces, SquareSpace, Wordpress.com, Blogger, Edublogs “supporter services”, TypePad, as well as self-hosted options like Wordpress MU, and Joomla… For good or bad, for one reason or another I am landing on TypePad.  They do not have the most robust storage, but there is a consistence of service as well as support that I appreciate.  Additionally, while I am still in the process of setting up my blog, I found a number of features that I really am liking: Lists (introduced to those on my spaces account, glad to see they are part of TypePad), easy easy inbound RSS setup, social links, and more.  I know some might say all of those features ar in many of those options you looked at and that is true.  I just feel for me TypePad brought them together in a good easy to use package.

So, it is time for me to make the “jump” to a new blog host, my hope is that many or (hopefully all) of you will come with me to my new TypePad blog.  Additionally, one other thing has bothered me for years… my url… it was always too long or complicated (that was a huge knock against Microsoft Spaces, but my 25GB of storage and pulling a bunch of services together (file, photo, blog, social, made it tempting…) and there is a person in Missouri that holds the rights to just about every vanishingpoint domain until2013… so vanishingpoint.com was out… The fact that he is not doing anything with them makes it all the more frustrating… so I needed to land on something I thought would work and still be relatively part of me… nothing better than your name I figure! Say hello to scottweidig.com

You will still be able to find VanishingPoint, however, it will now be at www.scottweidig.com I am working with search engines to get the new url forwarded as quickly as possible and into their search results.

I do want to say thank you to edublogs.org for hosting me and for everything that they have done for educational blogging overall. Parting is not without great hesitancy or forethought.  I will maintain vanishingpoint.edublogs.org for a while to help my readers hopefully make the transition to the new site (at least I hope you will). 

I am hopeful and optimistic about this new chapter for myself and VanishingPoint. I look forward to seeing everyone at www.scottweidig.com

About two weeks ago Snapture was added to the AppStore and I just had to snap (pun intended) it up. Ya see, I am more than enamored with the different applications that work to make the iPhone camera better and more robust. Overall, I really have taken the time (or had the energy) to play with Snapture. That is until tonight. By default, I either use the iPhone camera app, more often use Camera Genius during those must have photo moments. I won't take this time to extoll the virtues of camera Genius in this post as it is Snapture's moment. Honestly, after using Snapture for just a few minutes to compare the pinch to zoom to CG's slider, I found myself taking picture after picture of my son's eating cupcakes... In fact, Snapture is so fast at processing photos that within a minute or two I had 32 photos stores in my internal memory and sitting on the side of my viewer. That's pretty crazy and I was not even using the 3 picture burst mode!


Now it did take about 5 minutes or so to have Snapture save the pictures permanently down to my photo roll but that was a small thing really... I don't think that I could have taken that many photos in the same time with either CG of the native camera app especially zooming in and out...


That said, there is a major drawback to Snapture in comparison to the other two cam apps... Snapture does not allow tap to focus. You have to rely on a simple center focus zoom for your subjects which can leave a bit to be desired when the iPhone chooses the wrong point of focus. Another interesting thing that I noticed (and really didn't like) was that when actually taking the pictures, they look slightly out of focus, however, almost all were much sharper when looking at them in Photo Roll. It does make you question whether you got a good shot in the moment though. It is worse when you are post-moment and it actually is blurry.


Other benefits of Snapture include: full frame camera release (the reason there is not tap to focus), and push and hold then release to take the pic (which is nice for self-pics), easy selection of picture sizes, and a 3-frame burst that is pretty cool. Overall, it is worth the intro cost, but I'd recommend looking hard at Camera Genius once Snapture moves to it's full price of $8.99 or $9.99. Additionally, the major benefit I saw was the speed of exposure, but if that is not a big need on your list, compare the features to those of CG and I think you will lean more toward CG in the end... That said, if Snapture adds a few more features like tap to focus... We have a good head to head competition!


-- Posted from my iPhone

http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/Wgobo-2y19g/this-guys-cellphone-takes-augmented-reality-to-a-whole-new-level Silly but really well done! Sent from my iPhone

Happy 2nd Birthday Noah!

Getting ready for the beginning of another school year is both a daunting and overwhelming task.  There are a thousand things to get done, keep track of, anticipate, plan for, and just outright shoot from

the hip on.  This year for us is no different.  In the past, we have used Microsoft Project to manage the summer, we have used (use) a plethora of Excel spreadsheets, we leverage an Access database for hardware inventory, and thousands and thousands of legal pads, post-it notes, and scrap pieces of paper to have things all come together right before the start of school.

This year really has seen little difference, We are running our hardware locations from an Access database, the hardware moves are being planned on a spreadsheet, our web development is in a Project, and we have used thousands of little pieces of paper and legal pads… However, the platform has changed a bit.  Instead of using Microsoft Products for most of the main applications, this summer we are using the Zoho Suite of applications to work a bit more collaboratively in some areas.  My Internet Assistant and I are sharing a Zoho Projects 2.0 file to plan her development for both our webserver upgrade and the development of our new site leveraging the Joomla content management system.  In addition, most of the work I have done to prepare lists for our hardware moves and re-purposing have been done by leveraging Zoho DB and Reports to create quick pivot tables and then print the underlying data. (I created the filtered multi-level pivot table for our outbound inventory in about 5 minutes in Zoho… as opposed to working for almost an hour in Access to create the same thing…) One other tool from Zoho we are leveraging is Zoho Sheet for the tracking and shared updating of our “Ghosting” (re-imaging) schedule (image above).

Now even though I have used the Zoho Suite for about 3 years, I am still far from digging deep into each of the tools overall, and this years push for Zoho to fully integrate their applications has really increased the ease of use and simplicity for integration into typical business practices.  I would really like to leverage more of their suite into my typical daily practices, but it is hard when the rest of the environment you work in is resistant to change.  In addition, since as a group overall (typical also in many many businesses) we barely scratch the surface of all of the tools and uses for the Microsoft suite of programs as well, so where is the draw to other tools in the average company especially when we/they are paying a good sum of money for Microsoft licensing…

Overall, the biggest benefit that I/we have seen for using the Zoho Suite of tools is the automatic collaborative nature of a “cloud” application.  I love the fact that I can be anywhere with an internet connection and a web browser and I have access to my files.  Depending on platform, (iPhone or computer) I can update those files as well.  It is also exciting that I/we are always using the latest version of a document regardless of who made the latest change AND we are not limited to being on our work network (hoping another person in NOT in the file we want to update at that moment). However, the real excitement is collaborating live and real-time in the applications.  This experience was the genesis for this blog post.

Yesterday we began imaging our entire building to prepare the computers for the beginning of the new school year.  In the past we have tracked this either on paper, or in an Excel spreadsheet (typically in Excel).  While Excel is great for tracking the various stages of imaging (a simple data dump from our inventory database and we are set) it is very limiting for real-time updates or even having more than one person in that file at a time.  So for this year, I opted to NOT do the usual.  As opposed to completing the data dump, (although I could have easily uploaded the information into Zoho Sheet as well) I decided to create a Zoho Sheet and began setting up our “Ghosting Flights” - the rooms to be ghosted at one time. Then I shared this sheet simply by entering my Network Specialist and Network Technicians email addresses and we were off.  While I created the initial structure and entered the initial classroom list, my NS saw that I had some o the flights crossing vLans (crossing vLans does not work well with Symantec's Ghost – it often quadruples the imaging time making a 40 minute image take 5 hours to complete if it does at all…) so he simply modified the flight room assignments to accommodate, and they were off ghosting with my NT always having the latest information as opposed to having saved a previous version and operating off old information. 

I mentioned real-time updates… Here is the experience I had this morning.  For the past week most of my family has been ill and I am at crunch-time at work to get everything ready.  As such, I have been leaving at about 5:30am to get to work an arriving back home between 6-7pm… Needless to say it has been a it stressful in the household for my wife having to hold everything own (figuratively and literally) when I have not been there for support.  So, while Trish slept in this morning, I was giving my sons a bath.  However, two of my staff members were at school working to make a dent in the afore mentioned ghosting of the school classrooms.  Aside from feeling a bit guilty or both my work-life and home-life, I wanted to check in and see how things were going without interrupting the process.  Because we are leveraging Zoho sheet, all I needed to do was to open the shared Ghosting Flights sheet that we are using and viola! I have all the information I needed at my fingertips.  I could never have done this using Microsoft Excel (maybe next year with Office 2010 but that is a future post).  As a side benefit, Zoho Chat has been integrated into most of the Zoho Suite of apps, so I was able to have a quick chat with them for a few minutes to clarify some of the things I was seeing… All in all, PRETTY COOL!