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Making it look easy

I have a ukulele now. And I take piano lessons. Add in the drum set in the basement and the guitar in the closet and there are a lot of musical opportunities in the house these days. Right now, the uke is the winner…it sits out by my desk and I pick it up about every day. Can’t say I practice any of the rest of the instruments that much. Of course, I am only playing the one song I know right now (I’m Yours by Jason Mraz) but the more I play it, the easier it gets. Practice makes… Read More »Making it look easy

How we pay tribute others

I guess I am at that age where many of the famous people who were influential on my growing-up are starting to die. I noticed that several of my recent posts have been about recent deaths. Yesterday, we lost Mary Travers (the Mary of Peter, Paul and Mary). While Michael Jackson certainly was a huge part of my adolescence, the trio of PPM were also very much in the mix as I listened to a lot of their music when I was young and then continued the love affair with many hours sitting around a campfire singing their songs with… Read More »How we pay tribute others

RIP – Michael Jackson

I am so saddened to lose on of my truly major icons yesterday. I am not sure icon is the right word but hero is not right either. I didn’t want to be Michael Jackson but I did want to marry him at one point. When I was about 12. Then, after reading the biography of the Jackson 5 that I got in the Scholastic Book Club, I did the math on his birthdate and realized that he, being well over 3 years older than me, was WAY too old for me to marry and it would never work out.… Read More »RIP – Michael Jackson

A Magic Number – Schoolhouse Rock

I was at an ed tech conference this past week. At lunch, they had “edutainment” speakers, which is a great idea since everybody is usually eating and so on so a “serious” speaker is often not the best idea. The speakers were the producers and original composers of Schoolhouse Rock. When they took the stage, I was happy. When, they started singing some of the old tunes, well, I suddenly was shot back to Saturday morning sitting in my pajamas, eating Capt’n Crunch and watching some Sid and Marty Krofft show (probably Land of the Lost) as well as learning… Read More »A Magic Number – Schoolhouse Rock

Meditating on a Powertool

I got to spend about two hours last night helping friends open their pool. Most of my time was spent with a power washer. As I moved slowly through cleaning chairs, tables, poolsides, diving board and more, it turned into a nice meditation. I truly enjoyed being in the moment and it was easy to stay there because of the constant feedback of something actually happening! You can tell where you have been with the washer. You can see the dirt, leaves, moss and other debris instantly “disappear” as the water goes by. You can also tell where you missed… Read More »Meditating on a Powertool

Do you hug your technology?

Driving home yesterday, I heard a story on NPR about the last mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. This mission is the last repair mission (and the first one in seven year, it seems) and the story told a bit about the repairs and how it will help the mighty instrument be even more “mightier”. But what struck me the most was the part of the story about the astronauts also taking the feelings of the engineers and scientists with them on this last visit. The science team with Hubble have been working on it for decades. This last mission… Read More »Do you hug your technology?

Ada Lovelace Day: Honoring my Tweeps!

Today is Ada Lovelace Day and bloggers all over are posting about their favorite women in technology. I pledged to do the same. First, who is Ada Lovelace, you ask? She wrote the world’s first computer programs. How cool is that? If you want to know more, I won’t deny you! So, we are charged with writing about tech heroines. I have been thinking about that for a while now as I planned this post. Growing up, the technology side of my techy-feely self definitely came from my father. In college, first as an engineering major and later as a… Read More »Ada Lovelace Day: Honoring my Tweeps!

CamClickr: Some Techy Feely Citizen Science

Leave it to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to come up with another cool way to engage us in their research. I have always enjoyed their backyard bird studies that allow folks from all over the world to gather data from their own world and share it with the scientists at Cornell. Now, they have CamClickr (missing a vowel, of course,so it must be cool!) which is done entirely online. This is a game-like environment that helps analyze their catalog of nest cameras. From the site: Now we are enhancing this learning experience by introducing, CamClickr, a year-round citizen science… Read More »CamClickr: Some Techy Feely Citizen Science