Will's blog

purpose: Will Kahn-Greene's blog of Python, Linux, random content, PyBlosxom, Miro, and other projects mixed in there ad hoc, half-baked, and with a twist of lemon

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Fri, 16 Jul 2010

Ferry Beach: 07/16/2010 - social media workshop day 5 and 6

We were running out of time to cover all the material, so I made the decision to survey the material, mention resources, and hope the participants would pick up enough that they could continue their learning on their own.

After looking at the evaluations, three things are clear:

the workshop covered a ton of stuff and everyone got something out of it
this is a tough workshop if the spectrum of experience ranges from beginner to experienced--it's probably better to have all the participants be beginners or all of them be experienced
there's a lot of material missing regarding structuring policies that cover privacy, data availability, confidentiality, child safety, and other things like that--it's not enough to cover tools and how they can be useful, it's imperative to cover the policy context in which they can be reponsibly used

One thing that surprised me is that no one is really that interested in blogging. Blogging is such a rich form of communication and the interconnectedness of blogs creates a network of knowledge and experience--I must not have effectively communicated that.

Anyhow, the workshop is over. I'm glad I did it--I had a great time and it was a learning experience for me as well. Feel free to email me for a link to the workshop materials.

[ tags: socialmedia, vacation, workshop | category: /content | Permalink | 0 comments ]

Wed, 14 Jul 2010

Ferry Beach: 07/14/2010 - social media workshop day 3 and 4

I was pretty tired yesterday and had to spend some time working on the workshop materials, so I didn't end up blogging about it at all.

Yesterday went really well. We covered communication tools and the kinds of things you can do with them. It was a gorgeous day, S's mom came up, and we spent a few hours sitting on the beach and playing in the surf. Between hanging out with S's mom, playing at the beach, working on the workshop, and feeling really tired, I didn't get around to blogging the day at all.

Today we covered collaboration tools in the workshop. It was a cold and rainy day. Additionally, it's sort of the middle of a really high-energy week and everyone was pretty tired.

Afterwards, I noticed I missed a call on my cell phone. I checked my messages to discover my little sister L had a baby at 3am this morning. It's the first baby for my siblings, so I'm a new uncle.

I spent much of the rest of today thinking about what kind of uncle I will be.

[ tags: socialmedia, vacation, workshop | category: /content | Permalink | 0 comments ]

Mon, 12 Jul 2010

Ferry Beach: 07/12/2010 - social media workshop day 1

Shelby from the UUA talked about using social media for outreach, Facebook, Facebook pages vs. groups, Twitter, child safety issues, and a variety of other important things. She also covered what resources the UUA has for churches and RE programs.

It was a really great session.

After it, I decided to retool the rest of the workshop to follow Shelby's flow. I think it really reached the participants plus I think it's the best model for maximizing the usefulness of the workshop for everyone involved.

I also decided to stop using social media presentation tools. I find them pretty lame looking and the interfaces are kind of irritating. I want to type a bunch of text and put the text in specific places. I don't want to fiddle with my presentation as if it were a page layout problem. Ugh. Anyhow, I'm now using s5 which I love because it's easy to use and portable.

[ tags: socialmedia, vacation, workshop | category: /content | Permalink | 0 comments ]

Sun, 11 Jul 2010

Ferry Beach: 07/11/2010 - social media workshop day 0

Today was the introduction to the workshop. We had a hell of a time with the Internet connection, though, so that caused the activity not to work so well and was pretty frustrating.

I talked to Dan about it afterwards and we devised some alternatives for the rest of the week--it's hard to do a workshop on using social media if the Internet connection isn't reliable.

Fail snail:

I spent the rest of the day talking to people and working on the workshop.

[ tags: socialmedia, vacation, workshop | category: /content | Permalink | 0 comments ]

Sat, 10 Jul 2010

Ferry Beach: 07/10/2010 - social media workshop day -1

S and I are taking a "working vacation" this week. We're both at Ferry Beach in Maine and teaching workshops. Her workshop is one of the UU RE Renaissance modules--one on worship. My workshop is on using social media tools to run a RE program.

The UUA has a bunch of resources on using social media, but it's primarily focused on marketing, public relations, and announcements. That's great stuff, but the bigger impact for social media tools on RE programs is their ability to help people communicate, coordinate, and collaborate with communities of volunteers. I've never run an RE program, but I am involved in and run FLOSS communities--there's a lot of overlap between these two domains.

As such, I'm writing my own workshop. I spent most of last week banging out the material based on six months or so of notes and research. It's really coming together, but I still have a lot of work to do. I have full confidence that I can pull this off, though. At worst, I'll wing a few of the sections and codify them into workshop materials after the fact possibly with the help of my participants.

I checked in today and went to the Gardiner porch where I'm running the workshop to test out the Internet connection. It was awful about an hour ago (latency > 700ms); seems a bit better now. I'm hoping it's working well for the workshop hours since I've lined up a bunch of demos and activities.

After I'm done the workshop, I plan to post the materials online licensed under a Creative Commons license. This is going to be an awesome workshop. I dare to say that the information in this workshop will make a huge difference running an RE program and making sense of the crazy landscape of social media.

[ tags: socialmedia, vacation, workshop | category: /content | Permalink | 0 comments ]

Mon, 31 May 2010

I quit Facebook

I decided that having a Facebook account primarily for extending the marketing/publicity for the work that I'm doing wasn't worth it. I disagree with Facebook's "public by default" policy and the way they roll out changes to their Terms of Service and privacy settings. I think their recent change to make the ui for privacy settings easier to use (and not require a phd) is a good one, but not good enough for me to feel comfortable giving my data (or that of my friends and family) to them.

I'm also in the process of signing the copyright assignment statement to join the GNU Social project to build a federated system that gives people full control over their data. I'll be looking into building these features into PyBlosxom, as well.

[ tags: dev, floss, world | category: /content | Permalink | 0 comments ]

Thu, 03 Dec 2009

Team Dragon: The Book

Between the end of 2003 and mid-2007, I played in a D&D campaign that was really fantastic. The campaign ran its course and our stalwart crew of awesomeness saved the world and then we went our separate ways.

During that period of time, I kept copious notes in a MoinMoin wiki of our adventures. It was always a hope that I'd take these notes and do something with them.

I played in another campaign in 2007 and used InkScape to do a comic of the first session or two of that campaign in the style of Order of the Stick. It was a lot of fun, but took forever to do each panel. I decided it'd take me a long time to do 4 years worth of sessions in comic form.

So I started a book version. I wrote a Python script (which I've since lost) that converted MoinMoin format into restructured text. Then I threw the whole thing together with Sphinx. This allowed me to edit in restructured text, compile a LaTeX document, and then generate a PDF from that. Plus I got to spend some quality time with Sphinx to see how well it generates manuals.

That worked really well except for some minor issues.

First, I needed to set the paper size in the resulting PDF. To do that, I set the latex_preamble in the conf.py file to:

latex_preamble = '\\usepackage[papersize={6in,9in}]{geometry}\n' \
                 '\\setcounter{tocdepth}{1}'

That creates the PDF in the size I needed: 6in x 9in.

Second, I needed to fix some images so they were in a table with text. I ended up writing the LaTeX for that by hand.

Third, I didn't think the chapter headings really fit with what I wanted to build, so I changed the fncychap style to Lenny.

While I was editing the LaTeX directly, I ended up changing some of the front matter and removed the index (didn't need an index to a novel).

It took me a year to put the book together. It's around 240 pages or so. Today I finished it up, created a Lulu project for the book and had a bunch of copies printed for the others in the group. Feels good to have that done. I'm looking forward to getting a copy in the mail.

[ tags: fun, life, python | category: /content | Permalink | 1 comments ]

Tue, 03 Nov 2009

bought new glasses

I had an eye doctor appointment a few weeks ago and discovered my prescription had changed. It wasn't a huge big change like last time (I was in grad school), but it was big enough to warrant new glasses. Not to mention that my current glasses were really scratched up and "well-used".

I have a very limited budget these days. A couple of years ago I read Adventures in $40 eyeglasses. I decided to try buying a pair online this time around.

I bought my pair from 39dollarglasses.com. I got the Polermo frames ($39) and figured I might as well get the anti-reflective coating ($24). Add on shipping ($5 or something) and an extra charge because my prescription is screwy ($20) and the whole thing was around $90. I had paid $310 for my previous pair. I think $90 is a good step in the right direction. Next time, I'll probably wait for a special which would have reduced the cost further.

I got them in the mail today. They fit great, they're just as strong and feel as good as the previous $310 glasses and I had completely forgotten I was wearing new glasses a couple of hours after slipping them on.

[ tags: life, money | category: /content | Permalink | 0 comments ]

Tue, 01 Sep 2009

Settling in to the new digs

The work we were having done to the new house is done, we moved in, and we're settling down now. S wanted a couple of rooms painted, so I and a handful of awesome people did that over the weekend. The living room is set up (we can finally sit on the couches) and I've started bootstrapping the office. That means I can finally get some serious work done.

We're up in Chelmsford, MA, USA now. If you're in the area and want to hang out, I'm definitely game. I haven't done any research to see what groups are in the area yet, so if you know Linux, Python, Miro, FSF, or other kinds of groups, I'd be interested.

[ tags: life | category: /content | Permalink | 0 comments ]

Thu, 13 Aug 2009

Moving

I'm moving this week. That's why I haven't been online much or doing any work on Miro, PyBlosxom or other things I usually work on.

It gets better! After I'm done moving, I'm heading up to my parents' place while we have work done on the house. I'll be there for a couple of weeks. I'll have Internet access and will be working, but my cell phone doesn't get reception up there, so I'll be out of touch in a different way.

Assuming all goes well, I'll be back home and everything will be totally groovy in September.

[ tags: life | category: /content | Permalink | 0 comments ]

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