Goodbye WordPress.com, Hello Freedom!

The time has come – I’m giving up on wordpress.com.

I am on the other side now, where it’s greener. I am finally overcoming my fears, and, although it’s not completely as I wanted it, I am moving to r.ompo.us. Please visit, and to all bloggers who do not already have one – GET A DOMAIN!

You’ll feel oh so much better.

Tip III coming soon, if late, at r.ompo.us.

K12 Online

Now, I haven’t the faintest what’s going on here – but I do know that as an educatee (if that’s a word) I have having a lot of fun speaking to educators all over the world waiting for the keynote of K12 online to load. Some people in the live chat are already posting comments and quotes from David Warlick’s speech. Excuse this for being a very short post, but I’m going to go chat with educators all over the world, from Bangkok to Starbucks in New York – about how they can make my school career better for me and my teachers – before I watch this video (download already!).

And P.S. – Remember when I mentioned that Arthus had given me r.ompo.us? I’ll be switching over there very soon – no matter what it looks like. Just don’t go there now, it’s got posts that are starting to reek they’re so old (they still taste good though!).

Do…. What?!

Ever had a situation where you’re dying for a poll on something and you need your results fast? After asking the parentals and maybe your siblings you have nowhere else to go!

Fear no more! Doxory is here!

Doxory (despite the humble origins of the name, “Do… x? or y?,” Doxory is pronounced DOC-sor-ee) is a new web 2.0 app developed by the creators of Hiveminder, Best Practical. If you have used Hiveminder, you’ll know that Best Practical is an awesome company, catering to the needs of the online public.

Doxory is Twitter for choices. You basically tell people what you’re doing, then let them decide what you should do. If you don’t understand that, let me walk you through it. After signing up for an account, all you need to do is enter a question. My latest question was on “Using doxory”. Afterwards, you enter two choices, the x and the y of the question. My choices were “Use it and be done with it?” or “Get professional help as to why I’m asking the public about problems in my private life?” (the query has been up for a while, grabbing a few votes for both sides, but is still up in the air) As the site itself says, “The best kinds of questions to ask are existential dilemmas. What should I do with the next five years of my life? Go to grad school or Join the circus?” Doxory is also useful for trivial matter you have in your everyday life. Need help deciding what to have for dinner?
ask Doxory!

If you’d like to let your friends run your life, sign up!

Tip II

With no further ado (you’ve waited too long already):

Tip II:

Don’t get behind.

Now, this may just be the most important of all the tips. It’s hard to do, what with remembering everything, from homework to friends to relationships to even blogging, but if you can stay on top of the slowly accumulating mountain of things to remember you will be pretty well off. Even if you don’t get that project done on time at least you remembered it, which brings me to an apology. I have not been blogging. It’s a fact. Also a fact, however, is that I have a lot of stuff to remember and sometimes “superfluous” things like blogging get pushed to the bottom, therefor while trying to keep up with schoolwork lately I have been putting off blogging a lot, sorry.

Back to the point, when you get “under the mountain” (to use a betaphor), it takes a lot to get back on top. This strategy works for pretty much everything in life, when you have a lot to do. All you have to do to succeed is stay organized and things just fall into place.

Other than that, how about a nice surprise? I now have my own domain! Visit r.ompo.us (no, I don’t believe rompous is a word (Firefox spellcheck just confirmed that…) but it’s only a test) for my new testing domain. This is (hopefully) only a step between Betaphor at wordpress and Betaphor at “be.jeez.us”, a domain I have recently developed a longing for. Just betaphor.com would be pretty boring, don’t you think? And besides, I like domain hacks. Any other suggestions? Just comment.

Learning for the Future

In preparing students for the twenty-first century we need to educate them in certain ways. Skills in certain areas will be necessary because of recent advances in technology, for example, the human race will need to accept that computers and robots may do our jobs better than we do. In other words we must learn humility. Other skills will become the norm as well, for example it will be necessary in day-to-day life to have basic programming skills in all the major languages, we will also need to be able to service the hardware side of things too.

I believe this video is the newest version, correct me if I’m wrong. It was originally made by Karl Fisch (see his blog at The Fischbowl) for a presentation on how his high school should be teaching kids. It has been remade so many times it’s not even worth mentioning who else helped.

I’ve always loved this kind of video – words that shock you along with some quiet music. This goes along with someone talking made into animations, such as Alan Watt’s videos. This was actually assigned to be watched, which is progress in our school system, however it was also assigned that we fill out a sheet and analyze the video, which totally ruined all the progress. The writing in the top paragraph is actually one answer of what I’m handing in! Even this is a connection to the video. If the right steps are made soon all classes will be on computers, and, even further along, blogs, which is why I like including my homework into something I consider fun.

This video makes me think. If a laptop available in 2049 will surpass the combined technological power of the human race put together, than what are we left to do? As much as anybody I wouldn’t like an “I, Robot” situation however this may be for the better. I choose to see these advances as an opportunity; with all the “menial” (think open heart surgery) jobs out of the way our kind will have all the time we need to express ourselves in ways we can’t program computers to; such as the arts. Think about it.

Tip II coming soon.

Patchpelt Poetry

Have you ever looked at random words and put them together in a sentence? Have you ever rearranged those sets of fridge magnets to make funny sentences? Well, recently at CVU Summer Camp, I saw the last bit of a poetry class happening and was very interested. Each of the students in the class, Arthus included, had written at least 5 random poetic phrases and drawn them on the white board.

Now, this reminded me of how I write. I am an okay writer but this is only because I memorize phrases I find interesting; for example, in the book I was reading recently, Spare Change, I found a phrase I liked: “…so recently out of law school they smelled like diploma ink.” This phrase is one of many I find interesting, along with many words, such as quagmire (from Eragon), blunderbuss, and Nebakanezer.

The whole point of this: I will be doing some poetry created from random words and phrases I see wherever I go. How this will turn out, I don’t know, but hopefully it will go well.

If you feel like it, comment with some of your favorite words and or phrases.

To be continued…

나는 한국어를 말하지 않는다

Meaning, of course, “I don’t speak Korean.” How could you not know that? Because you don’t have Babelizer!

The reasons for this post:

1. Arthus has recently gone through a phase of “Mind Map Madness” in which he tested some mind-mapping programs (think Inspiration).
2. I have been learning (at HCS, wow!) Spanish for at least 3 years now, and have become very interested in other languages. Of course before you learn any language you want to know how to say one thing: “I do not speak [insert language]” in that language. Recently, I have been trying to learn it in french, and not succeeding.

Thus, I have also narrowed my search down to two candidates, iParrot, and Babelizer. First, some background info.

Babelizer is a small (944 KB), neat (less than 400×900 pixels), and smart (translation in under 2 seconds) application. The simplicity of the program itself is the key, there are only two menu items and only two drop-down menus in the actual application. You choose to and from languages from the menus, type your text in the top field, and watch it come out below. Simple, fast, and efficient. What more could the nerd want?

iParrot, however, is unfortunately, one, not free, not accessible. Even the demo version required the very latest version of iTunes, 8 GB of space on your hard drive, and while this may not be so bad for just an installer, it also requires 60 GB of space on your iPod, and, of course, an iPod.

There are always web apps to do this, but which one has features like Babelizer? Needless to say, especially since I only have about one GB on my iPod at the moment, and tops 4 GB, I chose Babelizer.

Tan si usted desea entender esto, obtiene Babelizer.

Bind Your Ideas

I while ago I had a Spanish project to do, the goal being making a “fotonovela,” a picturebook. I was getting frustrated having to use Appleworks, Word, Google Documents, et cetera… So I found Booksmart. Booksmart is a wonderful little application, for Macs and Windows, which tastefully walks anyone, from the smallest toddler to the oldest grandparent through the process of creating a book. You can make books on anything you could possibly imagine, and then some. There’s a feature in Booksmart that allows you to “slurp” your blog into a book (supports: Blogger, LiveJournal.com, TypePad, and WordPress.com blogs). And on top of it all is a delicious interface. Unfortunately, I found that Booksmart was not right for me, the problem and the one downside of the program being that the project was due in a couple days and the books take time and money to publish, but Booksmart can still help you.

Have you been dancing?

It’s not very surprising that I haven’t blogged recently, most of the time I blog when I have other things to do that I actually want to, and summer is full of things I want to do. However, I seem to have pulled myself together a bit to post a movie I recently saw:

I find it reflects a lot on my view of life; I find it very annoying when I know (to use that metaphor) that I can dance, but am unable to due to everybody around me, for example, my previous school system (HCS) was horrible and failed to meet my needs (a “larger dance floor”).

Keep dancing!

Alan Watts’ videos (yes there are more and they rock!)

8 Random Facts

Thanks for tagging me with a new meme, Arthus! I’ll gladly respond. Firstly, the rules, which will explain to you why I’m even listing them.

• Players start with 8 random facts about themselves.
• Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts.
• Players should tag eight other people and notify them that they have been tagged.

Now for the actual facts:

1. I have four iPods. Technically, one of them belongs to my mother and isn’t really an iPod, and one belongs to my dad’s company and it’s really old, but I myself own a blue 4G mini and a silver 2G nano. In other words, I don’t really have a useful iPod.
2. I like being sick. This is, some would say, an unusual trait, but not so if you look at it. Going to school and learning while almost falling asleep because you are so bored versus staying home, eating popsicles and other sweet, aqueous solutions, watching many hours of TV and countless movies, and almost falling asleep because you are so tired. Which one do you think wins? This comes with a long list of unusual physical traits, one other related one being that I love being tired. You know how you read in fiction many times that a character is too tired to go on? I have never experienced this until I was sick recently, and tried to get off the couch and go upstairs. I couldn’t do it because I was so tired, my muscles were literally not in my control. It was pretty cool to me (and you thought you were weird).
3. I have never read the LOTR series (thought I’ve seen the movies), 1984, Big Wide World (or whatever you said it was, Arthus), Fahrenheit 451, and many other books that Arthus considers good literature, and I consider crap, mainly because he says they’re classics. Correct me if I’m wrong, but books that are supposedly oldies-but-goodies and are a staple of high school education are pretty boring, especially to people at my age. I’ll try them anyway, though.
4. Just like Arthus, “I live in a small, rural town nestled in the foothills of the Green Mountains. My previous school has about 400 students and the one I will be attending has about 1,400 students.” Sorry, had to include that.
5. My computer usage is timed; I’m not even supposed to be writing this. Though I suppose writing is a bit different than gaming, I only get and hour and a half a day. However, as we all know the practice of parental figures limiting something only succeeds in raising an addict, therefor I savor all the time I can get and some that I can’t (or at least am not supposed to). I have gotten in trouble at school many a time for gaming and will many a time in the future, and am proud of it.
6. I am currently running a mass produced eMac with a (*pauses to click “About This Mac”*) 800 MHz PPC processor and 1 GB of ram. Yes, yes, pity me. Do it now! However, I’m not as rich as Arthus, so I plan to get a nice new Macbook at the end of high school.
7. I carry an ongoing belief that one IS prime. I will not believe otherwise (my math grades in certain units are very fine examples of this) until someone gives me one good reason why. If you want to try your hand keyboard at it, go ahead.
8. I am stubborn to a fault. I nearly killed myself one fine summer morning in preschool when I insisted on eating a berry (which was conveniently placed in the playground of a preschool… someone is pretty smart over there) which I thought was a blueberry and my mother later found out was poisonous. I got a good reprimanding and a bad stomachache, even after she made me spit it out.

I don’t know any bloggers, so I’ll have to talk to Arthus about reading some good blogs and getting acquainted. Instead, why don’t you comment if you read this? Then I’ll know who you are, and will gladly tag you.