Evan P. Mills

Because There's No Way I'm Going To Remember All This

Fraser Spiers on Skills Our Children Need

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I’ve been looking for some new podcasts for my commute to and from work. I ran across the Mac Power Users podcast. David Sparks and Katie Floyd present some pretty cool stuff on Macs and OS/X.

Episode #93: Education Workflows with Fraser Speirs really drew me in. Mr. Spiers is a very engaging speaker and his views on education impressive. He’s implemented a one-student-one-iPad program at Cedars School of Excellence in his native Scotland.

One thing he said really grabbed me (paraphrasing):

Word processing is becoming a skill for secretaries while creating
presentations that persuade an audience is becoming a skill for CEOs.

So, I used this as a teaching moment for my son who often asks

When will I ever use THAT in the real world?

Well, next time you’re working on a PowerPoint presentation for school, ask yourself, “wouldn’t you rather be paid a CEO’s salary?”

Reset Again

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Trying once again to reset my blog, this time with Octopress.

After some initial search for ways to convert my old WordPress blog data, I ended up writing my own conversion script using MySQL and Node.JS. In hindsight, I probably should have used thomasf’s exitwp script but I didn’t discover it in time.

But because I’d dedicated some time to my script, wp2octopress, I decided to put it up on github so I would at least have a record of my efforts and, if it helps someone else, all the merrier.

In any case, this blog now contains the bulk of my posts from the past. I didn’t post the old comments from WordPress but there’s some good information and questions from some nice folks, so I may look at porting them over in the future.

Thanks!

Toto and Disqus

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Since I’ve moved from a dynamic blog using WordPress to a static one using toto, I’ve had to outsource my commenting system and have decided to try Disqus.

I use Webbynode for my hosting (love them) and they have a great guide to setting up and deploying toto.

The first step I took was creating an account with Disqus and registering epmills.com with them. After you register your site, Disqus provides you with two Javascript scripts to add to your site. You also need to add a div as a placeholder where Disqus will insert any comments for the page along with a text area to enter a new comment.

I cloned Dorothy to initially set up my blank website.

Reboot!

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Well, Wordpress, it’s been a good ride. But after a recent attempt at upgrading left my Admin page blank, I’ve decided to pursue greener pastures.

Being a geek at heart, I’m scoping out blogging software that’s both simple and configurable.

Sweetheart Of The Day: toto.

Humble beginnings to a reboot of my blog, but it’s time to get my hands a bit dirty anyway.

Stay tuned…

LG Env Touch + Mac - Contacts

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Stumbled upon a really simple but effective way to copy your contacts from your OS/X Address Book onto an LG Env Touch “LG Env Touch on Wikipedia”). The beauty is in how seamlessly the bluetooth operates between the Mac and the phone.

The tool is an AppleScript called SendContacts. You simply create a group in Address Book named ”SendContacts”, drag the addresses you’d like to copy to the phone into this group and then execute the script. The script opens Address Book if it’s not already open and copies the addresses in the special group. My phone is setup to query me if an upload is requested so I unlocked my phone, confirmed the upload and away the script runs. It took only a few seconds to copy around 70 contacts.

Nice.

Since a phone is used to, umm, make calls, I created my “SendContacts” group as a Smart Group defining only those contacts for whom a phone number is available:

Using a Smart Group to Define Contacts to Send

Kudos to Apple, LG, and the Bluetooth Consortium for making this all so easy and to C+C Software Factory for creating such a nice utility!