The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
After months of saying I was going to do it, I finally started a weblog of my own a few weeks ago. I had really considered it back in August and decided then that I just didn't have the time. I still don't have the time, but I decided I probably never will so I just better do it. As I've mentioned before, I love to read blogs and they are becoming the major portion of my surfing. But now it seems different. I posted two things the first day, and the next morning I had an email from a lady who teaches in an inner city middle school in London, England commenting on something I had written. Interesting. And since then, it has only grown more so. I have quickly become part of a community of educators who post, comment, and write about our lives and about our thoughts on education. Once again, even from here, the small town in the middle of nowhere, technology has drawn me into the centre of an expanded community. I'm not here to promote my thoughts or site, so I'm not going to give the address, but if you are interested, just email me and I'll send you the URL. I was out of town for most of last week, so with no small children underfoot, I had time to surf each morning as I sat at the Perkins in Regina on Victoria Avenue and took advantage of their high-speed wireless service. A few interesting things popped up on my radar. A lot of people spend way too much time with their instant messaging service. I've never been into it myself, but ICQ, MSN Messenger, AOL, etc. seem to have a lock on a lot of people. The trouble with these services is that they have always only been able to talk to other computers running the same software. Two relatively new pieces of IM software have now worked through this problem. Trillian and Proteus have the ability to talk to other people no matter what software they are using. ICQ, MSN Messenger, Novell, AOL, etc. are all covered. The range of software they each deal with is different, so check into them before downloading. The next thing I found was a store that can only exist online. Woot.com sells only one item each day. That's all. Go there each day and you will never know what you will find. A remote control car, a home stereo system, a collection of kitchen gadgets, you never know what will be on sale. Very simple, very cool concept, and only possible on the Internet. Www.melonride.com/wunder/curios.html is another neat site. What this entire site is about is the strange little goodies that you have sitting on top of your desk or filing cabinet. Everybody has something cool and this site is a collection of pictures of all of the strange stuff that people have sitting in their personal spaces. A home nuclear survival kit from the '50s, a collection of Lego warriors, the strangest photo frames you can imagine, and on and on. People keep some strange things around, and this site is a neat collection. Finally, www.thecircularlife.it takes awhile to download, but is worth it. Coming out of Italy, the photographer who designed this site set up a camera in a single space such as on the edge of a canal in Venice, a city park, and a busy intersection among a few other places and then simply recorded through time lapse photography what happened at that place over a 24-hour period. A simple circular interface allows users to control the site, watching people, gondolas, trucks, whatever, come and go as the day advances, heads into evening, and then night. I know, I need to get out more. ([email protected])
