Author Archives: Dee

About Dee

I am a working wife, geek, and mother of two with opinions about just about everything which I plan to share here.

Spring Break Update And A Little Mac Tip

It has been an “unbusy” week. Spring Break means no school so we have enjoyed family time. There has also been sleeping-inage which has been great!. We went for a drive up in Arkansas (which is becoming a major luxury considering the ridiculous pride of gas these days) , had a family shopping day and did a little closet cleaning and catching up on housekeeping chores. The firewood has been moved out to the back fence and the back porch has been polished up and we ate supper out there tonight.

I helped the praise band at church set up a blog – they now have a name: “The Damascus Road Experience”. I get to sing a little harmony with them but if they ever get a bus I am relegating myself to “roadie” and resident geek.
I will get back to tips and hints for the Mac and PowerPoint tutorials soon. A short hint for tonight: If you have a Word document and want to open it in Pages just drag the document onto the Pages icon in the dock. It will open in pages. If there is much in the way of formatting you may lose the formatting but you will have the basic document. I have already learned that automatic page numbering in the header does some weird things. You can do the same thing with Excel and Numbers or Keynote and PowerPoint. Again this is only a good idea if there is no fancy formatting going on.

Interesting and Scary Article – Outsourcing Patients

What I’m reading – The Last Book In The Universe by Rodman Philbrick

Best TV show ever? The Big Bang Theory (I’m so glad the writer’s strike is over)

Best movie I’ve seen lately – August Rush (yes it is a little corny and some of it is a bit of a rip off on Oliver Twist but Freddie Highmore has the most enchanting smile I have ever seen and you just feel good at the end of the movie – which is becoming rare.)

Happy Resurrection Day tomorrow everyone!

Just A Few “Little” Mac Tricks

While there are jobs that need a full fledged word processor, there are multiple times during the day when I just need a place to put some text. I don’t want columns or hanging indents or layer upon layer of formatting. I just want to type some words! One of the applications that you will find hiding in your application folder is called TextEdit. Open it and then right-click on the icon in the dock and choose keep in dock. Aside from the fact that it is just a nifty little word processor there is another little trick you can do with it.

This is one of those tiny little Mac things that is not hugely important but it just makes you smile. If you frequently run across snippets of text on the web that you want to save or email someone the Mac has a few ways to make this easy. Just select the text. If you are using Mail.app, you can drag the text onto the icon in the dock and it will open up a message with the text in it – all you have to do is add the addressee and click send.

If you have the TextEdit icon in the dock, you can drag the selected text onto the icon and TextEdit will open with the text already inserted. Now if it a large amount of text and you want a summary there is one more trick. Highlight the text in TextEdit and click on TextEdit in the upper left corner of your screen. Click on services and you will see a list of things that you can do. this list changes depending on what application you are in and what software is installed on your Mac. Right now we are going to choose Summarize. You can choose summarize by sentence or paragraph and you can adjust the size. When you click to close you will have the option to save or discard. Go on – give it a try. These are some of my favorite tips!

Friends and Family and Healing

From Derricks and Diamonds, the philanthropic organization supported by Schlumberger and National Oilwell Varco has an article about a member of Dale’s family (Dale’s check-up went fine by the way!)

Here is the article:

Sage Martin – Update

March 10th, 2008 by Sean McCoy in News | Many of you have read about Sage Martin on our Our Inspiration page. We received an update from his father Gary today.He is still in the Bone Marrow Transplant Unit with the possibility of two more weeks of treatment. While the chemotherapy has caused him to loose his hair he took it in stride with the understanding and calm of a person far exceeding 10 years of age.

He is showing improvement in two vital areas after receiving the bone marrow transplant. His total white blood cell count is at 240 per micro/liter up from the 10 per micro/liter he had when he checked in. The normal white blood cell count is 5000.

His Absolute Neutrophil Count was 0 for 5 days and went to 10 on his 10th birthday (Friday March 7th) but as of today has raised to 170. Normal is 1500 or more and a count of less than 500 is considered severe neutropenia.

The good news is heâ€™s getting better and responding well to the treatment. Gary and the rest of Sageâ€™s family appreciate the kind words, concerns and prayers for them during this time.

_____________________________________________

My good friend is spending time saying goodbye to his family dog of twelve years this weekend. She is going down so quickly and is not able to eat or do much of anything and I know the whole family is hurting.

_____________________________________________

Last night I went to the church where we watched The Passion Of The Christ in the gym. There were just a few of us but that’s okay. I worked on the computer on the PowerPoint for this Sunday evening – not out of disrespect for the subject matter but because I knew there were parts of the movie that I would not watch. I closed my eyes for some of them when I saw the movie at the theater when it first came out.

I guess if the intent was to get people to understand the magnitude of the sacrifice that was made for us then that point was certainly ahem…hammered home. Today in most mainstream churches we tend to shy away from talking about THE BLOOD. We may say it fast as in “thebloodoftheLamb” which takes away the sin of the world. We might sing about it in hymns – “What can make me whole again? Nothing but the blood of Jesus”

I like to hear about grace. I’m not so fond of hearing about how it was bought. Jesus sacrifice was painful, messy, and bloody. But throughout the Old Testament we see that it was blood sacrifice for atonement of sins that cleansed God’s people and made a way for them to come into His presence. I thank God for Jesus sacrifice. I thank God for His healing grace. As much as I like you Mel – I think you stopped the movie at the wrong place.

I’d like to see the movie go on to tell, as Paul Harvey would say – the rest of the story. We leave the movie with images of pain and how horrible we humans can be. If we weren’t vile there would be no need for the sacrifice. There would be no need for a savior. But we have God’s love anyway. The sacrifice Jesus made was not just for “nice” folks. It was for the very people who beat Him, mocked Him, and nailed Him on that cross. If He could do what He did for them – then surely He did it for you and I, and if He did it for us, then surely we can try to forgive and love others as He did. Surely we can believe that there is a resurrection for us too? Good Fridays and Easter Sundays – they come all our lives.
We all go through these seasons of sacrifice and pain and thankfully they are often followed by seasons of healing and grace. I pray that this Easter season is one of healing and grace for you and yours. If it isn’t, then I hope you will take strength and comfort in knowing that it will come. It may not take the form we wish but God WILL bring healing.

“On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand”

Some Mac Nuts And Bolts

If you are new to the Mac you will see that a lot of your programs have icons in the “dock” – that area at the bottom of your screen with all the cool pictures! You can click on those icons to launch programs

You can launch programs from the dock but not everything is there. You can also click on the icon in the upper right hand corner of your screen called “Macintosh HD”.

You will now see several folders listed and you will click on the Applications folder to open it – there are your programs!
Another way to find your programs is to use the finder
The finder also brings up several folders and you can click on the applications folder from here. The Finder could be compared to Windows Explorer.

If you find a program you want to install it is usually as easy as downloading the file and then double

clicking. Let’s use Firefox for an example –

When you install software on a PC you usually use a setup file that has the extension .exe – on a mac you usually download a dmg file.

You click on the dmg file and you may have a file that looks similar to the image on the right – it’s called a disk image.Â After you drag the app file to your applications folder you will ctrl click on this disk image and “eject” it.

In the case of Firefox you will download the dmg file and on the same page you will have great instructions for what to do next. The screenshots below are what you will find on the Firefox page.

Basically you click on the dmg file. You then drag firefox.app file into the applications folder and you are done. When you double click it the Firefox icon it will open and the icon will show in the dock. If you use it all the time you can right-click or command-click and choose leave in dock. It will now stay in the dock even when you close it.

You can also right-click icons in the dock and choose remove from dock. This does not remove the actual application – it is still in the applications folder. You just don’t have the icon sitting in the dock anymore. You can do this with programs you rarely use to clean things us a bit.

Soooo – the Macintosh HD icon is what you click to find the main folders, including the Applications folder where your programs live. If you want to install software you will download a dmg file (sometimes it may be a zip file) that you click to open. Drag the app file to the Applications folder and you have installed your first program on your Mac!

Make Screenshots With Your Mac

Do you want the whole screen?
Command-Shift-3: Take a screenshot of the screen, and save it as a file on the desktop

Do you want just the window you are working in?
Command-Shift-4, then space, then click a window: Take a screenshot of a window and save it as a file on the desktop

Do you want to select a particular part of the screen?
Command-shift-4Â (your cursor will become a cross you can drag across and down to select the area to make a screenshot)

Now if you want to take the screenshot and just save it to the clipboard you will do the same thing only add ctrl.Â For example: Command-Control-Shift-3
The same with the others – just hold down ctrl too.Â Why would you want to do this?Â Instead of having this picture sitting on your desktop you might want to open your email and paste it there and send it to me to show me a problem you are having.Â You might want to paste the picture into a document or a presentation to show a step in a process you are teaching.

If you just got your Mac, youâ€™re operating system version is Leopard and you can also do the following:
Hold down space to lock the size of a selection and move it when the mouse moves.
Hold down shift to resize only one edge of the section
Hold down option to resize selection without the center moving.
(Because I am using Tiger I havenâ€™t had the opportunity to try those last keystrokes out but I have used the other commands often.Â If I have made an error with these last commands I hope someone will let me know!)

Switching To A Mac Part 2

How do I get to the internet using my Mac?

The Mac comes with it’s own internet browser called Safari. Look for the icon that looks like a compass. Things will look very similar to any other time you have gone to the internet. Whether you have used Internet Explorer or Firefox you will see the webpage, a box that contains the URL or web address, and buttons for maneuvering around. Here is a screenshot that is typical of what you will see:

On the left you see the three little round buttons that let you close/minimize, or maximize. Just below them you will see arrows for going backwards or forwards. A button to refresh the page (looks like a circular arrow) and a plus sign which lets you add the current website to your bookmarks (favorites)

Down on the right bottom corner there is a little triangle with lines across it. You will notice that when you click the maximize button in Safari it doesn’t fill the entire screen. You can drag that triangle to make the window even larger.

If you are like me and even the bi-focals are not quite enough anymore there are a couple of key shortcuts that you will love. Command (apple) key and the plus sign makes the text on a webpage bigger. You can press the key combination several times to get things large enough to read. To go back to the normal size just press command (apple) key and the minus or dash sign. If you don’t like keyboard shortcuts you can do the same thing by going to view on the toolbar and clicking make text bigger or smaller.
There is another way to make things easier to see. First practice scrolling by using two fingers on your trackpad. You can drag two fingers towards you or away from you on the trackpad to scroll. If you do this (or use your mouse scroll wheel) while holding down ctrl you will be able to zoom in to particular areas of the screen. Just move the wheel or scroll with two fingers, away from you.
To go back to normal just scroll towards you.

This zooming technique works on everything – not just Safari.

As in everything on the Mac – you can always click help on the toolbar and find answers to your questions there.

There is a box to the right of the URL where you can type words to search for.

If you decide Safari is not your cup of tea you can install Firefox for the Mac. Next time I will talk about how to install an application so you can do just that!

I will be posting on using the Mac for the next few weeks and if you have a question I will be glad to try to find answers for you.

Switching from PC to Mac – Here Are Some Starting Out Hints

1. How do I copy and paste?Apple or Command key (cmd)
this key does a lot of what the control key did on the pc and more
to copy and paste you can use this key with c for copy and v for paste

2. How do I right-click?

The ctrl click is the same as right-click on the pc

3. How do I log off or shut down?

Look in the upper left corner of your screen. Click on the picture of an apple. This menu lets you log off or shut down among other things.

4. What if a program freezes?

you would ctrl-alt-del
On the Mac press Cmd-Alt-Escape

5. How do I close an application or minimize it?

A lot of what was on the right on a pc is on the left on a mac. You will see three buttons on the left top of the application window. From left to right – close, minimize, maximize
You can also you the keys cmd and M to minimize

6. How do I backspace?

pc backspace = mac delete
If you wish to delete left to right like the windows delete key you have to press fn and delete

7. How do I know a program has been shut down?

In Windows, if you are working on a Word document and you close it, then Word is closed too. On the Mac you may close a document, but if you look at the icon in the dock (thatâ€™s that strip of programs at the bottom of your screen) you will see a little black triangle under the open programs. If you were working on a document in Pages and closed to document, you will still need to ctrl click on the icon and close the application.

*sorry – The little black triangles are what you see if you have Tiger, if you have Leopard you may have what looks like a little light under the application.

8. Where are all my applications?

If you click on that icon that looks like a hard drive on your desktop, you will see a folder called applications. That is where all your programs are.

More to come later!

PowerPoint Tip – Create Your Content In Word

You can type the content for your PowerPoint presentation in Microsoft Word. If you highlight a section and choose Heading 1 in the formatting toolbar, that section of text can become a slide title. If you highlight another section and choose Heading 2 in the formatting toolbar, that text will become a bullet point. Header 3 will give you a bullet one level in. Normal text will not show up at all.

When you are finished typing your information, save your text in case you wish to edit or re-use later. Go to File/Send to (click the chevron arrows if necessary to see all the choices) and choose Microsoft PowerPoint.

You now have a basic presentation with all your text already in place. You can now add backgrounds, animations, slide transitions and whatever else you want to dress it up.

This technique makes it easy to see the flow of your presentation and to see where you might want to add notes if you are creating notes pages for yourself. You could type notes into Word as you work on your original text – just leave the notes as normal text. They won’t show on the presentation when you “send” it but once your Slide titles and bullets have been created in PowerPoint you can switch view to notes page and you can easily paste your notes onto the bottom section and you will have a complete presentation package complete with notes for you to use as you present.
If you’ve ever watched students work on a presentation you know that they tend to want to spend the bulk of their time working on the bling. By creating content in Word and then sending it to PowerPoint you know they are starting with the “cake” and then working on the “frosting”.

If you are ever asked to create a PowerPoint for someone else, you can tell them you would be glad to help and if they will type their information in Word and send it to you you will have it done very quickly for them.

Friday Update (Life In General)

I have been really busy at work lately. I had one day where I was able to spend a large chunk of time on some spreadsheets, but I spend more time on interruptions lately than anything else. I have a hard time recapturing a train of thought that’s been derailed – I need a better system. I seem to spend a lot of time starting things and even more trying to get back to them to get them finished. It’s making me crazy and the piles on my desk just keep getting taller.

Dale had his appointment at the transplant clinic today. He drove himself and went to the Whole Foods Market before he came home. He is doing great. The took him off two medications and lowered another one. He will go back in two weeks and if all is still well they will switch him to every four weeks. All good news.

We are going to a debate meet tomorrow. The kids on the debate team that qualified for Nationals (including my son) made the front page of the paper. I bought multiple copies and showed them to everyone I saw. I’m proud of him, he has worked very hard.

JotSpot Has Been Relaunched As Google Sites

I will go play this evening and post about it tomorrow!

Greetings!

We’re contacting everyone who’s expressed interest in learning of
JotSpot registration re-openings on the JotSpot website. And
today, we’re excited to announce that JotSpot is working on Google
infrastructure and has been re-launched as Google Sites.

Google Sites is the latest offering from Google Apps, a suite of
products designed to improve communication and collaboration
amongst employees, students, and groups. Google Sites makes
creating a team web site as easy as editing a document. You can
quickly gather a variety of information in one place — including
videos, calendars, presentations, attachments, and gadgets — and
easily share it for viewing or editing with a small group, their
entire organization, or the world.

To get started with Google Sites, you’ll first need to sign up for
the Google Apps edition that’s right for you (if you’re not
already a Google Apps user). Start the sign-up process at:

http://sites.google.com

Sincerely,

The Google Apps Team
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

Below is an example of a classroom page created in Google sites. You can customize, use their templates, upload up to 10 mb files with 10 gb of storage. Since Google sites is integrated with other google products you can embed slideshows, video, spreadsheets and calendars into you page. One more piece of the Google World Dominance plan!

Ten Things You May Not Know About PowerPoint

You can put single words in separate text boxes and animate them

You can insert an autoshape and then have your text wrap within the shape

You can decide if the animation should start after the preceding action or wait for you to click a mouse or presenter, or set the timing

You can have more than one object animated on a slide

You can add shapes and pictures and move them on top of or under other items like a stack of pictures and words by arranging/send to back or bring to front

After you choose an animation you can click the effect tab and make the text change color, play a sound, appear a word or a letter at a time

the effects tab will also let you group to second level paragraphs to give you more control of how bulleted lists appear (called a build)

have a chart appear on the slide, one element at a time

add buttons or pictures that let you navigate around your slideshow. You decide what gets clicked and where it sends you

Draw comic book type illustrations using the lines in the autoshapes menu and fill shapes with gradients to give the illusion of shading

QuarterLife

I watched Quarterlife on television tonight. I had already seen it on MySpace and the Debut episode was the same as what had already been online. I think I liked it better when it was just online. I could put on my ear buds and work on a blog post while I watched a show online told front he point of view of a blogger.

It really is just a soap opera – same old story, different venue. Young people, angst with blogging thrown in. Yada yada yada. I had hoped for a little more. I’ll watch a few more times and give it a fighting chance

The narrator/blogger claims at first to be honest and driven to blog about what moves her which is really just her self-justification for telling her friends secrets online. She is not as open about herself and at the point in the plot where she makes the decision to put herself out there something happens that makes that piece of film end up in the trash bin.

I have often wanted to blog about something that happened during my day and couldn’t because it might hurt someone or cause problems at my job. I have for some time thought about starting a blog somewhere and being completely anonymous and telling stories that usually only get told in my head. I would disguise names and places.

Do you think it would be freeing? I think so. The things that happen in my life that are interesting or funny or sad, are usually things I can’t tell about here because most of the VERY SMALL group of people who read this blog would know immediately who I was writing about.

I don’t know that I will actually start a new blog but I will enjoy thinking about the personalities. I may try to write the debut post just to see if I can write something worthy of ‘blogging around”.

Computer Applications UIL

I started coaching for the first time this year and this is only the second meet we have competed in. I have two students and one went with me to the last meet. While she didn’t place this time she made a huge improvement from the last time. My other student got her first introduction to the real thing today and I expect she will improve as well.

It has been a learning experience for me as well. This year coaches are required to grade after the meet and I think this is a very good thing. I have learned more during the grading about how to help my students do better than any other time. Both my kids are seniors so I will start over next year, but with more knowledge and confidence. Every meet we attend I learn more and we get a copy of that test to take with us so we will build up a bank of practice material.

I am trying to work through all the tests I have that are from last year. If I can do it, I can explain it. If you are not familiar with this event, the student is given a test that may consist of a Word document, and Access database, and an Excel spreadsheet. You may have to embed a spreadsheet in a memo, or import data into a document to complete a mail merge. There will more than likely be functions involved too.

Computer Applications seems to traditionally be an early event and I was up at 5:30 this morning but we were home by noon so I am now getting ready to turn in.

It’s nice to see progress even if it isn’t a win. At least we are headed in the right direction!

PowerPoint Can Be Artistic? Poetic? Pretty???

Frame 1

Take a look at this site – a teacher wants her class to do a project like this – can we put together some instructions?

Sidebar – whoa this is cool! I am loving this.

Frame 2

A little playing, a little tweaking, some typing and some screenshots and yes we can do this! This is fun and creative and the students will take it and run!

Frame 3

Some explaining – this is how, this is where, be creative – think! not just about the bells and whistles; the bells and whistles have to enhance the symbolism in the text.
Think about the poem, put some words in separate text boxes. Animate them, use color, movement, sound and pictures to SHOW the poem!

Frame 4

Next day student asking will I be there that afternoon – this is confusing. Sure, we talk about the poem (she was stuck – how to animate a poem about sleep)

Frame 5

Student using all the elements – beautiful! Walking around helping, add a few seconds, try this and that. Go sit down – get out of the way. They are the artists!

If you are creating – you are learning. I’m learning, they are teaching me!
They are making a new piece of art!

There will be some tutorials coming up!

TCEA 2008 Letâ€™s Go on a Writing Safari! Paula Alsup and Missi Downs

I didn’t get to attend this presentation – it was one of those time-slots when I needed a few clones to attend several sessions at the same time. Through the magic of technology I can still hear and “see” the presentation! After “attending” online I am very excited about the real event!

If you will go to Mrs. Alsup’s web presence there is a link on the sidebar to 2008 TCEA Presentation which will let you download the entire PowerPoint. You can view the PowerPoint and listen to the presentation at the same time -there is also a Podcast online – just click this link and put on your headphones – the Podcast lasts about 40 minutes. Writing Safari Podcast

Three Words

This post has two purposes. I am trying out a plugin that lets me finally embed youtube videos here. I also want to share this video as a great idea for a class project. It could be themed according to any subject and filmed in pieces at different times and then put together later.

Three Words
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qO0jovLVPA8&feature=related

If you do a YouTube search on Three Words you will find many versions and each as some very creative and powerful segments.

thanks to Mark Ghosh for the embedify plugin that allowed me to finally embed the video!!

T.G.I.F

Today is going to be a journal kind of entry – it has been a long day and I am so very glad it is FRIDAY!

Dale went to his appointment at the transplant center by himself today for the first time and everything went well. Two of his meds have been lessened which is always a wonderful thing and he had gained two pounds. We are two and a half months out from transplant and he has just been maintaining his weight for the last month and a half so this is a great thing. All his levels looked good except they want him to eat more phosphorus (beans, nut, cheese, milk, chocolate) because it is still a bit low, though better than last time.

My day was completely devoured by favors for other people, as was most of yesterday. The worst part is that those favors caused me to ask for help from others. It’s bad enough that I am unable to say no to people but when my inability spills over and becomes problematic for others then I truly start to wonder if I need therapy. There were some things I really needed to get done that were left hanging.
I have personally been guilty of asking for free computer work and I truly like to help people but today and yesterday were just insane and I really don’t know what to do about it. The worst was that someone was just plain rude when I was unable to complete work on a personal computer because I was having complications on work computers. I was angry when I left, got angry again as I thought about it on the way home.

I feel a bit better since I have banished that person from the earth. They now live in another dimension where they cannot be seen or heard except as though they are deep under water. Everything is distorted and difficult to understand which is how I prefer it. I think there were speech bubbles over my head that said what I was thinking (and couldn’t say out loud!) but only my friend could see them.
Maybe after the weekend the banishment can end but maybe not. I wonder if time is different there. Maybe a two day weekend here seems like a thousand years there……(insert immature evil laugh)

I need to work on priorities and saying NO but for now I think I will just enjoy my weekend – after all, it will go by quickly!

Commercial Break – Eating in Austin

I have more TCEA notes to post but thought it would be fun to take a little time out to tell you about some great places to eat in Austin. I’ve been fortunate to travel there with a friend and colleague who lived in Austin and ever meal is an adventure!

Here are some of my favorites!

**** Flip Happy Crepes

Serving delicious hand-made savory crepes, sweet crepes, and Saturday breakfast crepes. To compliment we serve fresh French pressed coffee and other assorted beverages.

Location:
400 Jessie Street
Austin, TX 78704

Hours:
Wed – Fri 10:30am – 2:30pm
Saturday 9am – 3:00

I had roasted chicken, mushrooms, gruyere, carmelized onions and my friend and I shared a dessert that was crepes with Nutella and bananas. They also have veggie crepes if you like.
Flip Happy is a little Airstream trailer where you place your order, retrieve your beverage from a cooler sitting in front, and sit at a picnic table under the trees to eat.

The food is incredible and it is located right next to the trailer park where Matthew Mcconaughey keeps his trailer. Who knows – you might get a peek!

**** If you are “rumbly in your tumbly” there is a wonderful place to satisfy the growlies – freddie’s. There is a playground outside for the kids and dogs are welcome.

I ordered the texitarian portabellas – 2 large portabella mushroom caps handbreaded and deep fried to a golden brown with cream gravy. Add to that garlic smashed potatoes and spinach-artichoke casserole and it was heaven! The portions are huge, the atmosphere definitely South Austin. WWFD (What Would Freddie Do) – whatever his wife tells him to do!

**** Another great place is the Magnolia Cafe. The specialties are omelets and pancakes. There are all kinds – they are all good, the portions are huge and come with cottage fries – yum!

**** After you have filled your tummy with Austin goodness you can stop and have coffee at Mozart’s (and dessert if you have room left) There is a plethora of wonderful desserts to choose from including cheesecakes, cobbler, tiramisu and enough chocolate to make you want to cry.If they are roasting beans when you arrive there the aroma will greet you in parking lot. If the weather is nice you can sit out on the deck with your coffee and enjoy the weather and view of the lake. There is free wireless and often entertainment. Mozart’s is one of my very favorite places in Austin.
3825 Lake Austin Blvd.
Austin TX 78703
512 477 2900