The final podcast episode for this morning — the third of three. In this episode, I talk about the wild and wooly process of learning what I could eat, and why anything that I might actually want to eat would kill me in short order. This was the part that, had I not already been scared out of my wits, would have terrified me. It’s become much easier to deal with as the panic has subsided, but this is still one of the areas that many folks trip over. It’s a biggie.

If you want to subscribe to the podcast, you can do so on iTunes or directly from Feedburner, or feel free to listen using the embedded player below.

Music in this episode is by High Places / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

[podcast]http://www.cf2group.com/podcasts/heart/CF_LA_Heart_4.mp3[/podcast]

Categories: Grad School, podcast
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The second podcast episode for this morning — the second of three. In this episode, I talk about the process of learning about cardiac rehab. I knew that I enjoyed walking, but I never dreamed how important it would become in getting me through this process. I also talk a bit about the mental and emotional sides of rehab — they’re far more important than many people think.

If you want to subscribe to the podcast, you can do so on iTunes or directly from Feedburner, or feel free to listen using the embedded player below.

Music in this episode is by High Places / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

[podcast]http://www.cf2group.com/podcasts/heart/CF_LA_Heart_3.mp3[/podcast]

Categories: Grad School, podcast
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A new podcast for this morning — the first of three. In this episode, I talk about the process of learning about my medications, and the importance of doing my own research.

If you want to subscribe to the podcast, you can do so on iTunes or directly from Feedburner, or feel free to listen using the embedded player below.

Music in this episode is by High Places / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

[podcast]http://www.cf2group.com/podcasts/heart/CF_LA_Heart_2.mp3[/podcast]

Categories: Grad School, podcast
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This morning you’re going to see three quick posts with brand new podcast episodes. Why three in one morning? Deadlines, friends, deadlines. I’ll have more from the world of Interop later this week, plus other news and (I hope) a dose of bloggy goodness.

If you want to subscribe to the podcast, you can do so on iTunes or directly from Feedburner.

More in a few minutes…

Categories: Grad School, Housekeeping, podcast
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I’ve been spending a fair amount of time ramping up blogging activities. Not here, obviously, but over at the Inside Interop blog. This week, I’ve had posts on cloud computing, data center air-conditioning, print servers, as well as the popular weekend wrap-up post. In addition, I’ve been working on the Interop LinkedIn group, the Interop FaceBook page, and the interop_events Twitter feed. There’s also a major new social networking development that I’ll be able to talk about next week.

So what’s next? More of the same, plus at least three more episodes of the new podcast, a new video (or three, or four…), plus some feature writing (and, oh yeah, I’ve got to finish up my course work for the Spring term). Aside from that, it’s just sitting around watching races on TV for me…

More later…

Categories: Grad School, Housekeeping, Publications
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I’m starting a new podcast project today, and I’m not sure how many episodes it will have. In the episodes I’ll talk about how I’ve learned about my heart — and what I’ve learned. The project is part of a great class I’ve had this term, Designing On-Line Curriculum, at the University of Florida. You can download the podcast episode here, or listen with the embedded player below.

Let me know what you think — more episodes will be coming later this week.

Music in this episode is by High Places / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

[podcast]http://www.cf2group.com/podcasts/heart/CF_LA_Heart_1.mp3[/podcast]

Categories: Entertainment, Grad School, podcast
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I’ve been busy blogging over at the Inside Interop site, and there’s a lot more activity to come. We’re working on various social networking approaches to building the Interop community, and I’ll be writing about those here very soon.

I’ll also be starting a new podcast series here — the subject is how I’ve learned about working with cardiac issues. The impetus behind the series is simple — it’s for a class at UF — but I hope that folks will enjoy the way the series goes together. I’m using it as an opportunity to try some new blog capabilities, so it should be an adventure all around.

While we’re waiting for those, feel free to head over to Inside Interop to check out my posts on network infrastructure, keynote addresses, and cloud computing. There’s more to come, soon…

Categories: Enterprise, Grad School, Media, Publications
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You’ve seen the cartoon: a snowball starts at the top of the mountain and speeds down a slope, picking up speed, small farm animals, and our hapless hero along the way. That’s how the months from now until Christmas look right now. I think I’m about three steps in front of the snowball, humping along for all I’m worth.

Part of that is keeping up another blog for my Journalists’ Toolkit class. I have a new entry on photojournalism editing and ethics.It’s an interesting topic for me: I’ve always been interested in photojournalism, and I’ve taken some photos for magazine articles, but I would never consider myself a photojournalist. In the new world of multiple media publishing, though, the walls are tumbling down.

I’m building up to another couple of posts in the next day, and please feel free to head over to The Gainesville Sun to check out my latest column.

Man, that snowball’s getting close…

Categories: Grad School, Media
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OK, so I know that I can’t be trusted to regularly update this blog, but I’ve started another blog as part of a class I’m taking at the University of Florida. It has the fairly obvious title of Mid-Career Grad Student, but that’s about as creative as I can be just now. Feel free to check it out–I’ll look forward to your comments, either here or there.

A couple of folks have asked about my first assignment for my class in on-line journalism tools. It’s very short, but you’re welcomed to listen to a brief interview I conducted with a fellow student. As always, comments are welcomed.

Now, all I have to do is find that order form for the 28-hour day…

Categories: Grad School
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First, sorry that this is the first post of the week. For a “short week,” it’s been jam-packed with action. Where to start? How about this…

My second column appeared in the Gainesville Sun. This one revolved around  on-line collaboration tools for small businesses, families, and students. The longer I do the things I do, the more I’m a fan of on-line collaboration tools. I remember what an effort it was to keep track of chapters when I co-wrote two books–now, we’ll just set up a project on a collaboration system and be in Fat City.

I had a first, this week, as well: I wrote a small feature article for the Sun, on the new AT&T usage filters for cell phones. After more than twenty years as a journalist, this was my first feature for a newspaper. Not much of what I’ve done could count as straight-forward reportage–it was nice seeing that I can do the job when I need to.

OK, so I love trying new things: After talking about my excitement over ZuluPad,  I think I may have already found something I like better–at least for keeping notes for grad school. Debrief is a feature-packed application for taking and organizing academic and research notes. It’s not so free-form as ZuluPad, but it has great facilities for keeping track of references, setting up assignment reminders, and organizing class and research notes into usable groups. There are three versions: one is always free, and the other two are free for a 30-day trial, after which you can pay for them. I’m trying the Professional version, and I can feel a payment coming on in twenty days or so.

Speaking of school, first assignments are due tomorrow. Today was an incredible day–multiple articles to edit and file at InfoWorld, multiple assignments due for classes, a conference call to talk about changes to a production system, a newsletter deadline, and an evening stint playing the piano for a high-school drama audition. You know what? On the whole, I love it. The moments of panic are good for the circulatory system, and staying busy is good for me. About 15% percent less busy than today would be fine, but, hey, you shouldn’t ask for too much. All of this is a long-winded way of saying that I’ll be posting links to some of my homework assignments (because I’ve been asked to do so, not because I have such a huge ego), but I don’t think this first assignment will be one of those. If you really want to hear it, let me know and I’ll send you the link.

Next time, news about an exciting discovery (or two) that are making my life ever so much better…

Categories: Consumer, Grad School, Media
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We’ve got the first assignment in the Journalist’s Toolkit class, and it’s all about audio. We broke up into teams of two or three and recorded interviews with one another using an Olympus recorder. Now, we must edit it down to a 60-90 second recording using Audacity. The hardest part, oddly enough, was getting the files converted from WMA to WAV format. It’s interesting–there are scores of programs out there that will happily move files from one graphics format to another, but a much smaller number that will deal gracefully with audio.

We’re going to be turning our assignments in using web space provided by UF–I’ll put links here so you can watch/listen and let me know what you think.

I’ve found another interesting note-taking tool…more on that next time.

Categories: Grad School, Software
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Since this is my first stint in journalism school, I don’t have any basis for figuring out whether things have changed in the last decade. I know that the practice of journalism has changed (at least in my little corner of the journalistic world) as we’ve moved from ink on paper as our only story-telling medium to ink/bits/pixels/handshakes/soundwaves on whatever will deliver them to the audience. I don’t think it’s a bad thing, though as I remember back to BYTE and Circuit Cellar INK our lives were somewhat calmer. Oh, well.

I started thinking about this when I was pointed at this article on the changes at Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. (Thanks to Mitch Wagner for the pointer.) As I read the article, a big part of me was asking, “What’s the big deal?” In my world, telling stories in a bunch of different ways is just part of the job, and there’s no shame in knowing who your audience is and what they need from your publication. I’ve been on the staff of publications that required editors to make regular reader calls–going down the list of subscribers and calling, say, 20 readers a month to find out how their lives were going, what they needed to know, and what their big concerns and issues were. I have trouble seeing this kind of knowledge as a bad thing.

Of course, some folks see the move to know the audience and think about different ways of telling stories as a short, slippery slope that leads directly to this kind of foolishness. What’s wrong with the Naples class? It’s hard to know where to start. How about here: I’m not that far removed from being the parent of a high-school student. In programs like band, each student was responsible for part of the cost of the program, but there were lots of opportunities to raise the money. I’m not thrilled about telling students they must do one particular fund-raising activity–I’m even less thrilled about tying it to a grade. Next comes the confusion of roles between journalists and sales folks in publishing. Now, if the class was simply called “The Newspaper”, and everyone did a bit of everything, then a strong case could be made for sales being a part of the mix–but that is, apparently, not the case. If you’re not part of the industry, here’s the deal: Salesmen don’t write stories, and journalists don’t sell ads. It’s a good system that keeps everyone honest and most people fairly happy. Finally, though, is the sheer cluelessness of the teacher who thought this would get no notice and no criticism.  That may be the most disturbing piece of the puzzle.

My goals don’t include teaching high school anything, but the discussions about how journalism should be taught are interesting, because they speak to what different people think journalism should be–and that’s a worthy (and changing) topic for discussion pretty much any time.

Categories: Grad School, Media
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One of the skills I need to improve is my photography. I do get some decent shots, but the ratio of good to bad isn’t as great as I’d like. I found a link to the Nikon Digital Learning Center, and found what looks like a very helpful group of folks. I’m looking forward to getting some help and learning to take better photos–who knows, the improvement might be enough to help me get higher grades on my photo projects.

Categories: Consumer Technology, Grad School, Media
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As I’ve been putting together the list of things I use to keep up with various topics, I realized that I haven’t mentioned one of the tools I use most often–a notebook system. Levenger sells it, calling it Circa, and I’ve bought all mine from them. They don’t make it, though–the manufacturer calls it Rollabind, and sells it for a bit less money than Levenger. The biggest difference between the two company’s offering is, I think, the paper they use to fill the notebook: Levenger sells very nice paper.

I like the fact that I can put letter-sized paper, junior-sized paper, 3 x 5 cards, and pretty much anything else in the notebook. I have the paper punches to put handouts or other reference pages in the notebooks along with the filler paper, and find the system makes it much easier for me to keep everything together.

What I haven’t figured out, yet, is whether I’m going to ultimately take notes in long-hand and transfer them to a computer file, or just keep typing in class. Once upon a time, transcribing my notes into typed form (yeah, that tells you how long ago this was) formed an important part of fixing information in my head. I don’t know whether that’s still the case, or not. More when I find out…

Categories: Grad School
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Out of the scores of degree programs offered at the University of Florida, why did I decide to spend my time studying journalism? It wasn’t a slam-dunk: I considered degrees centered on ecology or natural resources. In the end, though, journalism was the best combination of past and future, with enough flexibility to let me explore some new things.

Another significant consideration is my belief that journalism is important. There are a lot of stories that need to be told, and journalists say that we have the commitment and skills to tell them. Right now, of course, there are plenty of folks who say that journalism has no real future. I think they’re wrong. Articles like this one make me feel a bit more confident in my opinion.  I’m old enough to remember many things that aren’t part of journalism today–galley proofs, finding the art department by following the aroma of beeswax, and wire-service machines with their long rolls of bad paper among them. I know journalism is changing, but I think the change can be a good thing and I want to be part of the world of good journalism to come.

There will be much more later, but thanks for reading–I hope I can keep the journey interesting for you. I know it’s going to be most interesting for me…

Categories: Grad School
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