Tabula Rasa lj

Oven, carpets, blinds, linoleum (interesting history, linoleum - invented in 1860 for a start), tiles, and clean up done at Pagham.

We're a bit surprised they got all the carpets and lino in in less than two days. Gratifying tho, since this leaves only the concrete drive-way frontage, shower stalls, and fences to do. The fences better be going in soon...

Today shall be a day of catching up on stuff.

I'm currently burning some DVDs for a shiny elfy person.  I'm hoping to be in the right headspace later on to do some tarot readings.

I need to do some organising as well.  Mainly of my makeup, which has gotten crazy out of control (mineral makeup does that to you!) as well as my jewelley.  Let's see how far I get into that.

And I'm still cold.  I just had to go and ferret out one of my calorimetries.  It's helping.  Nice to know that I still have zero tolerance for cold.  I need to start knitting again.

It's frickin' freezing Mr Bigglesworth.

http://roberthood.net/blog/index.php/2008/05/17/coming-soon-ret-romanne/

This is by way of an introduction to what comic artist and writer Alan Brooks considers to be his magnum opus, Ret Romanne.

Ret Romanne is a Time Dignitary who lives and works on the Off World “Cloud City’ of Earth - UNtopia. The comic series, both written and Illustrated by Brooks, will be released in August 2008 from Bluewater Productions. It is a time-twisty tale of a “dead” man desperate to work out the mystery of his own very strange fate while engaged in an ongoing struggle to maintain something resembling a life.

Says Brooks, “Ret Romanne has it all — surveillance, time travel and Nazis. Just like real life!”

Stay tuned for exclusive updates as the release date approaches!

After the world failed to end on schedule, Kuznetsov was found trying to commit suicide by hitting his head with a piece of wood.
-- SMH, 'Corpse stench drives cult from cave', 16 May 2008

Kuznetsov's other achievements include starting his own cult, and convincing his followers that barcodes 'are a symbol of the devil'.

http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2008/04/find-out-what-theyre-thinking-easily.html

Shared by Bianca
Interesting

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/gPpowered/~3/290889427/android-developer-challenge-judges-and.html

The Android developer's challenge has release most of the top 50 (a few opted to not be made public for now). A slide deck of the winners is available here. I've gone through some of them and they have been blowing me away. Lists are being put together with the websites for the winners. There is some really exciting work being done.

Even though its the first one on the list, AndroidScan still blows me away. It uses the phone on the camera to take a photo of a bar code, look up the product in a database, and then gets you all the information you would need about that product and where you can buy it right from your phone (amazon, ebay, etc). Do yourself a favor and watch the video.



I'll be going through that slide deck and will be posting some more of my favorites. Anyone else hope the HTC Diamond can run Android out of the box? ;)

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/OfficialGoogleDocsBlog/~3/290464763/embed-your-forms.html

Posted by: Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager

Since we launched spreadsheet forms in January, one of the top user questions has been "How can I embed my form into a website or blog?" Last night, we added this option. You'll see this new feature during form creation, when you're prompted to invite people to fill out your form. Just skip the invitation step and look for "Embed" in the upper right-hand corner of the page. Paste the code provided into your blog or website.


Here's what a form looks like once it's been embedded into a blog.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/OfficialGoogleDocsBlog/~3/289832134/making-across-country-feel-like-across.html

Posted by: Meredith Whittaker, Program Manager

Brian Crosby and Lisa Parisi came to my attention when I stumbled across a video they'd made, showing their students collaborating on short stories using Skype and Google Docs. Over the course of some weeks, we worked together on a post describing the details of their project.

The Harris Burdick Collaborative Writing Project began because the teachers and educational professionals involved have become part of a network through their blogs, Twitter, Skype and other web applications. Brian Crosby in Nevada and Lisa Parisi in New York initially connected through their fifth grade students’ blogs, which are hosted on ClassBlogmeister.

“Our students were communicating through the comments and assignments on their blogs and just seemed a good fit for one another,” Parisi noted.

Crosby added, “Lisa and I ended up connecting further through Twitter and email and a collaborative project just seemed a natural extension of what had already begun.”

The project was simple: the children would use Docs to collaboratively write stories based on the book The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, by Chris van Allsburg. The book is really a set of 14 drawings each of which is inspiration for a different story. Children from one class in New York would be partnered up with children from the other class in Nevada to brainstorm and write a story about one of the pictures. Google docs would allow them to work both synchronously and asynchronously and have text discussions, since updates are almost instantaneous.

While the students worked on the projects individually, “The real collaboration happened when we arranged to have both classes working on them at the same time," Parisi remembered: “Students were sharing ideas about characters and plot as well as the story, and they could see each others’ work as it was being done!”

Because they had experience video-conferencing, Crosby and Parisi added Skype video-conferencing into the mix. They set-up computers with webcams in their respective classrooms and their students could then see and hear each other while at the same time working on their Docs live. “This added another powerful collaborative element,” said Crosby, “Now they knew what each other looked like and it “humanized” their relationship.”

Reported Parisi, “We would give partners 5 minutes or so to video-conference, and usually only when it was necessary to deal with a problem they were having with their story. Each time we worked synchronously we only had 45 minutes or so because of our schedules, with 14 groups that might need to meet there was no time to waste.”

Once the project was planned, Brian and Lisa decided to invite teachers from around the globe into the activity. There are presently 14 classes, ages 9 -12, working on the stories. Each class is paired with another and all are using Docs to communicate and write.

Interestingly, students experienced some of the same issues they would when working with an “onsite” classmate. There were a few disagreements and even some heated discussions between collaborators. One student even erased the work done by their partners.

“Fortunately Google Docs allows you to go back to every version of the document," disclosed a relieved Parisi. “We were able to return to the version that included the erased section, so we were able to restore the lost work."

“This became a teachable moment and we had discussions about appropriate behavior. But this same kind of behavior happens during collaboration between students in the same classroom. This was no different," added Crosby.

Parisi and Crosby are already discussing similar projects for next year.

The final stories will be published in Google docs and linked to a wiki for viewing by all. A VoiceThread will give the students one final opportunity to comment about the various versions of the story or about the project itself.

For those of you who have questions, or related stories of your own, please leave a comment below.

For teachers who'd like to get started using Docs, check our our teachers guide, Using Google Docs in the Classroom. It has all the basics teachers will need to get up and running with Docs.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/OfficialGoogleDocsBlog/~3/288692846/functions-formulas-and-how-you-can.html

Posted by: Regina Dinneen, Docs User Operations (aka Google Docs Guide 2)

If you haven't been following along in the user group, you may have missed the new spreadsheet function documentation that we released a few months ago. Due to frequent requests for help finding and understanding the hundreds of functions available, our own Melissa Louie created Version 1 of the function helper:


We're now working on the next version of the documentation. It'll include a real example of each of the different functions and formulas. From simple to complex, we're going to try to have examples for all.

Please join us in this effort. You can help us by sharing your own function examples by visiting our user group and adding your own examples.

Note: If you're not a member of the user group you'll need to click the sign-in option in the top right-hand corner and join the group. Joining the group will also give you a chance to chat with other users, get some of your questions answered and/or ask a few questions of your own.

Come and check it out - all of your fellow spreadsheet users out there are waiting for help with those complex functions you've mastered. :)

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/OfficialGoogleDocsBlog/~3/284275948/good-things-come-in-multiples-multi.html

Posted by: Andrew Perelson and Jeff Grimes, Google Docs Software Engineers

Embedded presentations now come in multiple sizes (small, medium, and large) to suit all your embedding needs. Small or medium sizes work best in blogs, while large is most suitable for onscreen viewing and reading.

And as a bonus, we've just added another new feature to presentations: you can now select and manipulate multiple objects at once. Drag over the objects you want to select or hold SHIFT while clicking on additional objects.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/OfficialGoogleDocsBlog/~3/275437602/google-docs-makes-being-green-easy.html

Shared by Bianca
This might be useful for the AHWA?

Posted by: Matt Doublestein, teacher and earth-friendly Google Docs user

Recently, we talked to Matt Doublestein, who told us about how Google Docs helped him save huge amounts of paper, and go effortlessly green. We were impressed, and figured that there's no better way to celebrate Earth Day than by sharing his inspiring story.

I am a middle school band director. I teach nearly 300 students each day
and have communication with them and their parents - nearly 1000 people in
all.

With Google Docs, my program has reduced its paper use by as much as 90%.

Instead of using hard copies, thousands of times over, we can now set everything up to work online with documents, forms, and spreadsheets. Previously parents had multiple pieces of paper for certain functions. We can now eliminate these by using separate online forms. Rather than going through so many pieces of paper, parents can now just click the next link.

Most recently we have used spreadsheets forms to collect orders for an annual project, a professionally recorded CD of our students' performances, available for purchase. Our greatest goal is simply to pay for the cost of producing the CD, but we do also hope to raise additional funds to support music activities for families that cannot afford them on their own (instrument rental, equipment purchases, cost of band trips, etc.). Parents can now log onto the band website and enter their orders into the online form which dumps right into the Google Docs spreadsheet.

In the past I would spend hours sitting at the computer entering information from paper forms that kids brought in order to keep proper record of orders and money (as required by the state). Now I only have to match check numbers and amounts to what is already entered in the spreadsheet.

Perhaps the best part is that I can share the document with our treasurer and my team teacher so that we can collaborate and error check. Previously, I would have to print off hard copies of everything and then go through it line by line to proof. Now, since I have my spreadsheet formulas in place to do all the math for me, it is a simple matter of sharing the doc with another person to examine areas of concern.

Google Docs "cuts" both ways -- it cuts many hours off of the time needed to compile this information, and it cuts reams of paper from our materials cost.

Inspired by Matt's story? Tell us how you're celebrating Earth Day, with Google Docs or otherwise, on Google's Earth Day '08 site.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/blogspot/HMLi/~3/290367727/featured-gadget-thesaurus.html

Posted by Kathy Walrath, Technical Writer



Name: Thesaurus
Author: Benjamin Schirmer
Description: Thesaurus lookup for different languages including English, German, Dutch and Spanish.

More information | Download gadget

Each week this blog features a recently added Google Desktop gadget that looks promising. If you'd like to see all new Desktop gadgets as they're published, subscribe to the RSS feed.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/OfficialGmailBlog/~3/289562864/need-for-speed-path-to-faster-loading.html

Posted by Wiltse Carpenter, Tech Lead, Gmail Performance

Great performance has always been an obsession at Google and it's something that we think about and work on everyday. We want Gmail to be really fast, and we keep working on ways to make it faster. Gmail's architecture eliminates many of the delays in reading mail by employing techniques like prefetching, but recently we decided to take a close look at some other key parts of Gmail to see if we could speed things up.

One of the areas we worked on was the initial loading sequence: everything that happens behind the scenes between the time you press the "Sign in" button on the login page and the moment you land in your inbox. While the improvements we made won't resolve every "This is taking longer than usual..." message you might see when loading Gmail over a slow connection, we've seen a real reduction (up to 20%) in overall load time compared to when we started.

First, we listed every transaction between the web browser and Google's servers, starting with the moment the "Sign in" button is pressed. To do this, we used a lot of different web development tools, like Httpwatch, WireShark, and Fiddler, plus our own performance measuring systems. These tools all have useful features, although some are limited to working only with certain browsers. The Httpwatch plug-in for Internet Explorer was one that proved easy to use and provided us with most of the information we needed. It really helps that we can capture and save browser traces with it too.

We spent hours poring over these traces to see exactly what was happening between the browser and Gmail during the sign-in sequence, and we found that there were between fourteen and twenty-four HTTP requests required to load an inbox and display it. To put these numbers in perspective, a popular network news site's home page required about a 180 requests to fully load when I checked it yesterday. But when we examined our requests, we realized that we could do better. We decided to attack the problem from several directions at once: reduce the number of overall requests, make more of the requests cacheable by the browser, and reduce the overhead of each request.

We made good progress on every front. We reduced the weight of each request itself by eliminating or narrowing the scope of some of our cookies. We made sure that all our images were cacheable by the browser, and we consolidated small icon images into single meta-images, a technique known as spriting. We combined several requests into a single combined request and response. The result is that it now takes as few as four requests from the click of the "Sign in" button to the display of your inbox.

We hope that some of you have felt the change, but performance improvements often go unnoticed, and that's okay. We'll keep working to make Gmail faster -- there's a lot we're doing right now -- and we'll give periodic updates as we get improvements out. (And hopefully you'll notice some of them too.)

http://roberthood.net/blog/index.php/2008/05/17/update-flying-saucers-vs-the-earth-2/

Artist Alan Brooks has emailed to tell me that issue #1 of Flying Saucers vs the Earth — which “came out on Wednesday, after delays” — has sold out already.

Well done, Alan!

• Alien image from Alan’s blog
• Previous Backbrain article
• Further info

Also at Pink Tentacle



Now why don't you get expressions like that in Western anatomical texts?

Over at Pink Tentacle

Harikikigaki, a book of medical knowledge written in 1568 by a now-unknown resident of Osaka, introduces 63 of these creepy-crawlies and describes how to fight them with acupuncture and herbal remedies. "



"Doctor, what's wrong with me?"
"I'm sorry, Mr Smith - you've been infected with Pokemon"

Altho the first one they give really does look like a liver fluke...