Author: Liz

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The Clean Up Message and the I Message

Posted on by Liz

I’m reading a school handbook for new Kindergarten students and came across a page on the “I Message”. That, I know what it is. It’s when you go “I FEEL… BLAH… WHEN YOU… BLAH.” That prevents you from blaming the other person and makes you take responsibility for your own feelings. For example, “I feel like you’re being a jerk when you’re acting so jerky.”

Just kidding!

So, I’d never heard of the Clean-Up statement before, but it looks very useful and good.

The Clean-Up
1) I KNOW that I …
2) I APOLOGIZE.
3) What can I do to MAKE IT RIGHT?
4) I will DO MY BEST to…
5) (Optional) Will you FORGIVE me?

I know quite a few grownups who could stand to learn that basic formula! It’s something I’ve learned from listening to meetings and thinking about group dynamics, and from feminist and anti-racist activist stuff.

I should remember it more often myself, and make less explanations & excuses.

I think it’s great that schools are teaching this kind of skill and such a range of emotional vocabulary.

BlogHer in Second Life

Posted on by Liz

The BlogHer Conference is coming up next week! We’ll have tons of people in BlogHer in Second Life where there will be an entire conference track. Take a look at Erin’s outline of the BlogHer Second Life Conference schedule.

Would you like to transcribe one or more of the voice sessions in 2nd Life for the IRC relay? If so, please contact Erin Kotecki Vest aka Queen of Spain, queenofspainblog@yahoo.com.

I am especially happy that the schedule includes Jen and Aleja from GimpGirl, an online community for women with disabilities. I go to their 2nd life meetings (though I attend only in IRC and not in Second Life itself) and there’s been some great presentations and conversations.

Here’s the schedule!

BlogHer in Second Life ’08

DAY ONE, Friday July 18th

9:00-9:15 AM (live from San Francisco, CA)
Welcome to BlogHer ’08 from the Westin St. Francis Ballroom in San Francisco

9:15-10:15 AM
“Speed Dating” for BlogHers in Second Life

10:30-11:45 AM
Second Life Break-Out Session #1: The Intersection of Blogging and Second Life
Led by Cybergrrl Oh (aka Aliza Sherman), and featuring:
Ana Herzog (aka Nancy Hill)
Gidge (aka Bridgette McNeal)

12:45-2:00 PM
Second Life Break-Out Session #2: Second Life and Security
Featuring Padlurowncanoe Dibou, formerly in charge of Hillary Clinton’s in-world HQ

2:30PM-4:30PM
Second Life Activity in Exhibitor Area

4:30PM-8:30PM
SecondLife Open Mic and Party
More details on how to be part of the Second Life Open Mic

DAY TWO, Saturday, July 19th

9:30-10:30 AM (live from San Francisco, CA)
BlogHer ’08 Morning Keynote: Hybrid Media

10:45-12:00 PM
Second Life Break-Out Session #3: SecondLife as Educational/Training Tool
Featuring:
Padlurowncanoe Dibou
In Kenzo (aka Evonne Heyning, Creative Director and Interactive Producer for Amoration)
Fleep Tuque (aka Chris Collins from the University of Cincinnati)
Dannette Veale (from Cisco)

1:45-3:00 PM
Second Life Break-Out Session #4: Using Second Life for Good
Led by Susan Tenby and featuring:
Connie Reece
Jennifer Cole and Aleja Ospina, the women behind GimpGirl.com

3:30PM-5:00PM
Second Life Activity in Exhibitor Area

5:15-6:15 PM (live from San Francisco, CA)
BlogHer ’08 Closing Keynote: Living the Truman Show

http://www.blogher.com/blogher_conference/conf/2/agenda/1



For Global Voices: About wheelchairs and mobility

Posted on by Liz

For everyone I met and spoke with at Global Voices Citizen Media Summit I would like to pass on some information about mobility, disability, and wheelchairs. I got a lot of questions about my wheelchair and a lot of compliments on how well I get around. In a lot of countries, people don’t have access to wheelchairs, or only know about the most common kind of hospital chair. Here are some answers to the questions that people have been asking me at the conference.

My wheelchair is a type called an ultralight rigid frame. It weighs 17 pounds (8 kilos) and though I am not particularly strong, I can pick it up with one hand. The wheels come off just like a quick-release bike wheel. I can take off the wheels in about 10 seconds, fold the chair, and put it into a car or into the trunk of a taxi.

Standard hospital wheelchairs can weight 40 – 60 pounds (18 – 28 kilos). They are often designed to be pushed by an able-bodied walking person. With a lighter weight wheelchair, more people can gain independence.

These chairs are used by wheelchair athletes, but you don’t need to be an athlete to benefit from an lightweight chair.

The major manufacturers of ultralights are :

Quickie (Mine is a Quickie Ti)
http://www.quickie-wheelchairs.com/

Ti-Lite
http://www.tilite.com/store/

Colours
http://www.colourswheelchair.com/

These wheelchairs can be extremely expensive.

Here are two international projects to spread the availability of light weight, durable, low cost wheelchairs:

Whirlwind Wheelchair International is an open source project meant to help people across the world to set up entire factories or shops to produce low cost, very durable & rugged chairs.

http://www.whirlwindwheelchair.org/

Free Wheelchair Mission is a project to ship very, very cheap and maintainable wheelchair kits to every possible country. (Their project is controversial for many reasons; read this article for background.)

http://www.freewheelchairmission.org/thewheelchair.html

Getting the right size of wheelchair is important. But, given a choice between the wrong size in a light weight, and the right size that’s very heavy, I would take the lightweight chair.

Two good sources of information are Wheelchair Junkie forums, and Gimp Girl, a community for women with disabilities.

Playground baseball

One more thing, to answer the other question that you all are asking me:

My hair is dyed with Special Effects Blue Velvet and Punky Color Plum. It’s been that color for about 10 years. About once a month I put a little bit more purple to keep it bright!



Installing Eeebuntu on an Asus Eeepc 900

Posted on by Liz

Last night I installed eeebuntu on my Eeepc 900. You see how I love this little beast!

The instructions and forums on eeebuntu.org were helpful. I realized while I was doing the install that there’s Ubuntu Eee as well and that eeebuntu is basically just this one guy, Steve or “bezdomny”. Since he is super responsive on the forums and people report good experiences with the install, I figured it is a good bet as an OS. Ubuntu Eee also looks good!

I didn’t take good notes but here is my memory of what I had to do. I first tried to create a bootable USB stick from my Mac, but was missing syslinux so I used Oblomovka’s MacBook running Ubuntu to reformat it with parted (set 1 boot on). Then put the eeebuntu iso file on the USB stick with bezdomny’s isostick.sh script.

Then my eeepc booted from the USB stick. I hit “escape” during bootup and got a screen with 4 choices; the 4GB and 16GB drives on the eee, and two partitions on the USB stick. I chose a USB partition at random (wrong one) and then the other, which worked beautifully! It took a few minutes to boot. Wireless didn’t work, but when I plugged an ethernet cable into my Eee, I was on the net within about 15 seconds without having to configure anything.

So, I tried to follow this advice to get wireless working,

http://eeebuntu.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=175&highlight=wireless

But then got a little bit confused because I wasn’t sure where I should install madwifi and if it would work if I rebooted from the USB. At that point I decided I’d just take a chance and install over the totally working, but annoying and ugly and Windows-like, Xandros linux install that came with my eee. (Seriously, look at this, even their web site gives me hives.) It occurred to me that I might keep Xandros on the 4GB drive and install eeebuntu on the 16GB drive, and be able to boot either one. Which, if I couldn’t get wireless working on eeebuntu, would spare me scrambling around trying to re-install Xandros. I went on IRC at irc.freenode.net and asked on #ubuntu-eeepc if anyone knew if that would work. No one answered. I got on #ubuntu-women just to feel braver but didn’t ask anything. After some more poking around forums I decided to hell with it, blow away Xandros and if I have to reinstall it, comprendo bastante este video guía para instalearlo.

So I installed on the 4GB drive. It went completely smoothly, quickly, I rebooted, hey presto magic huzzah, I had working ubuntu on my eeepc. Plugging into ethernet worked smoothly again. I got the madwifi fix with wget and installed it. It didn’t work… I re-read the thread on the forums for the millionth time. They kept saying “turn on the wireless” and finally Oblomovka and I got it that we had to turn on wireless in the BIOS. So, reboot, hit F2, looked at “Advanced” and “Devices” or something like that, it was pretty intuitive, and got a list of stuff enabled and disabled. I enabled wireless and the webcam. Rebooted, and wireless worked SO beautifully. (Not like Xandros which was incredibly clunky and failed to get me onto my own home network half the time.)

More wireless links: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EeePC/Fixes

Next problem to fix. The mousing was crazy. Or, really, the touchpad. I don’t have a mouse, but I still think of it as “mousing”. There was a system preferences panel for mouse and display, but nothing for the touchpad. A bit more reading and I was lost… but then a bit MORE reading and google-fu and I found that going to Applications, then Add/Remove, then searching All Available applications for “touchpad” or “synaptic” would get me the control panel that I needed. That worked but during install I got a warning to change a setting in xorg.conf which I will tell you is in /etc/X11. It’s helpful to look at some examples of xorg.conf options. Then, while in vi putting in the setting, I realized my keyboard is messed up and thinks that the ” key is actually an @ sign. So I’ll have to go figure that out and fix it — I know I chose US keyboard layout — what could it be?

What I need to be able to work off this machine on my trip:

Firefox, Greasemonkey
A good chat client
vim, perl (python would be nice)
the touchpad not to be freaking crazy. Tap-to-click OFF. Who uses that! Omg! Sucks!
Not sure if I will just suck it up with email and go back to Pine, or install Thunderbird and migrate my mailboxes, or use webmail of some stripe (ugh) Currently am favoring Pine because I’m lazy; Thunderbird only if I have time to install it.

Oh also, I’m resolving to document this more formally and contribute docs-writing to eeebuntu.

** further updates later today **



How to create a web form to talk with Google Docs

Posted on by Liz

My friend and co-worker Jenny from Three Kid Circus pointed out a cool feature of Google Docs to me today. I use Google Docs spreadsheets mostly as wiki-like documents for a group of people to edit a web page in table form. In other words I use them for layout of a web page, and maybe for sorting columns, and sharing fairly simple information.

In another conversation I had recently, Elisa Camahort was talking about wanting a simple widget sort of thing for party RSVPs, but that would be more than a link to her email address – it would be a form for people invited to fill out. So, it occurred to me that the form-constructing capability in Google Docs would do all the things she wanted.

As I thought further, I realized it also might be helpful to my friend Squid Rosenberg, who has a son whose educational plan is managed by a fairly large group of people, using Google Docs, tracking his progress and patterns with a daily record. Similar documents could be very useful for anyone tracking health care issues, for a team of caregivers for an elderly person, for example.

Since this is a fairly new and obscure feature, and somewhat of a convoluted process to click around to where you even understand what the feature does, I thought I’d describe how to set it up.

1) Go to Google Docs.

2) Create a spreadsheet and call it “My potluck dinner” or whatever.

3) Make columns for whatever you like — name, email, # of people you’re bringing, what kind of food you will bring to the potluck.

4) Click “share”.

5) Click “invite people to fill out a form”.

6) Click “Start editing your form”.

7) Click the Save button.

8) Click “Choose recipients”. (You don’t have to put in any actual recipients.)

9) Click “Embed”, in the upper left corner.

10) Copy the code and stick it in your blog

Each column in the spreadsheet shows up as a title and text input field in the form! You can also add new fields.

It looks like this:

From there you might have to twiddle the formatting to make it look halfway decent. It is not set up to look nice in a blog sidebar, but it looks just fine in posts or pages in TypePad, and Blogger. It doesn’t work in LiveJournal or WordPress because it uses iframes, though in WordPress you can install a widget to get iframes to work.

The resulting input into the spreadsheet looks like this:


(click image to see it bigger)

Note the timestamp, automatically added!

So, this could be useful for many purposes. My potluck dinner example is frivolous, but anyone who’s suffered through the annoying interface of the spreadsheets on Google Docs, or who uses them for individual or group data entry, could set up extremely easy web forms with this hidden-away feature.

I would like to send a polite nudge to the Docs development team to uncover the forms feature! It would be very nice if it were an option to click directly from the spreadsheet or other document.



Secret texting at the school talent show!

Posted on by Liz

Here’s the video of the 3rd grade dance act in the school talent show! An eighth grade girl choreographed it and coached all the 3rd graders through many practices. They dance to the James Bond theme, Soulja Boy, and then What Is the Sun? by They Might Be Giants.

I giggled a lot during it because it was SO AWESOME. Especially at the bits where the kids are all sneaking around like they’re James Bond spies with finger guns.

The whole show was impressive. A crew of middle school kids organized everything and ran the show, including practices, planning, stage crew, sound and lighting, getting the auditorium, and selling tickets. I enjoyed the piano solos, the many middle school girls doing solo dance routines, the group dances, the heartfelt songs sometimes sung a bit softly & deer-in-the-headlights. My mom friend who shall remain mercifully nameless kept texting me naughtily during the show and together we invented the camera-flask, perfect for all PTA type of school events so you could video your child’s song AND discreetly take a nip of soul-restoring tequila. It went sort of like this, (heavily fictionalized)

6:35 omg need drink
6:36 where iz flask
6:37 flask camera!
6:38 aaaaaagh
6:45 not my fault i do not allow hannah montana in teh house
6:46 bwahaha sucka
6:47 KILL ME
6:48 hahaha killing would be too slow
6:50 you have to admit they are sweet
6:50 no i dont
6:51 cynicism melting halp snif

Meanwhile the little kid next to me was all like “I know breakdancing. Why do you have a wheelchair? Can you do tricks? I think breakdancing is really cool. I know that girl! I know that girl too! I know her brother! Oh I can’t believe they’re going to do this, why, why why!” (said for anything mushy & sentimental) I think for him the show needed more explosions.

I remembered how I used to watch my friends make up dances and create mildly too-sexy outfits for our middle school talent shows. I could not fathom how to keep up with their dance moves and would not even try. They danced one year to “Jukebox Hero” and the next to “Controversy” which I couldn’t believe they got away with.

The other things I gleaned from the talent show experience were fashion-related. I really really really wanted the one guitar duet kid’s outfit with its vest, buttons, baggy pants, and ska-ish tie. Oh wait I have that outfit already, it’s just that I’m not 13 or 6 feet tall, and can’t play the guitar or stand in that sort of guitar player attitude. Oh well! (Their guitar solos were smoking!!!) The other fashion insight was that the 80s have come again in mutated form in a somewhat hideous way. Of course they were all cute as bugs and YET… the mutant halter-top-vest thing, over the long tank top, please god make it stop! But, finally now I understand all the teenage girls’ outfits as described in super bad Harry Potter fanfiction. So, I felt old and detached from things that girls wear in junior high, which is probably a good sign of almost-maturity, or that other thing where I am stuck in my decade, the way certain women in the 70s and 80s were stuck in 1945.

Oh also? Kids are awesome and I get all teary eyed and sentimental at the thought of how much nerve it takes them to get up on stage and sing a rock song or play the flute or dance around with everyone watching. I thought they all were amazingly cool. As a bonus, some of them had massive amounts of performing talent, the ability to connect to the audience and belt out a song — like this girl singing a country and western song with perfect self possession, or these girls dancing:

But the performances were good no matter what the level of ability was. I thought about karaoke bars and Rock Band and how we are more willing these days, maybe, than at some points in recent history, to stand up and perform for the fun of it and as a social activity rather than as perfect experts.

*UPDATE* And now I’m listening to the Langley School Project album. Trust me… go listen to it… at least to Space Oddity and Desperado.

Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do a fandango?

Posted on by Liz

Moomin’s school choir sings Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Ambitious of them!

If I didn’t totally love his choir director already, this would have done it. I’m taking suggestions for what they should put on their repertoire for next year. “Nevermind” would be just perfect.

The kids have worked incredibly hard this year. Every Monday and Friday, they got up and went to school an hour early for choir practice. I’m so impressed even with the difference since Christmas, in their timing and harmony.

Oh and… a sneak preview of next Monday’s talent show. I caught the 3rd grade at their dance practice, with an older kid as their choreographer and coach. They’re doing a dance to Soulja Boy.

Here’s the instructional video if you want to learn the dance. I can’t wait for this show!

Sonnet, twittered

Posted on by Liz

Drum roll… a moment in Twitter history…

twittersonnet

Twittered by allaboutgeorge aka George Kelly, for Sarah Dopp.

The poem is better for having been twittered. I like it backwards, and getting the punchline first and then cycling back through it. The poetics of Twitter force circularity and rereading, disorder and reversal. Which goes perfectly with this poem’s theme!



Free Idea: Use ChaCha's structure for disaster relief

Posted on by Liz

On the drive up to Seattle a few weeks ago, Cindy and Sarah Dopp and I were playing with ChaCha and wondering how they make money. Around here we all go “What’s your business model” right away… and then snicker.

So I think I might just have figured it out. Do it for free for a bit with your VC money and show how it works. Then, sell “Enterprise ChaCha” or something like it, to a big institution. (I was looking at Indiana University‘s page about it.) You’d sell the structure and the setup, and the institution creates its own number (and password or validation system) and pools its own experts. So, sell it to Exxon or something for its corporate librarians and geologists. Or to the military, obviously. Here is the military’s answer to its perpetual search for AI. “Human assisted search”.

Anyway, this could also work for disaster relief, because it’s ideal for situations that change very rapidly. I was looking at Jon’s empty wiki and thinking, well aside from all the problems with the whole idea of that, which I won’t go into, might a Twitter feed be better? I thought of myself on the 2nd floor of the Astrodome after Katrina, gathering and putting out information that was extremely up to date, and how quickly things changed on the ground. Would I want a wiki for it? (I tried. It is hopeless without a core of people already trained to use one and to work together with one.) Maybe I wouldn’t want one. Maybe a feed would be better. Page back through the “2nd floor astrodome” Twitter feed and see what’s up. Combine many different channels of all the people at various stations in the Astrodome and you’d know who says what is true, right in the moment.

But even better — a private setup for a ChaCha-like thing. You get 100 people together to monitor and answer questions and you would have an instant backup, fit for the general of an army. Or fit for a reporter on the ground in a rough situation. I think of how I combed google news all day long for the Back to Iraq guy back in like 2003 and emailed him updates on whatever was going on or being bombed in the area near him. How much better, if he could have called a phone number like ChaCha’s, and tapped into a network of people like me. Someone would have texted him back the information he wanted within minutes. And if there were sort of a combination of Ning and ChaCha, you’d be able to set up your own information broker network and invite people to join it.

The Red Cross should be using this (okay, maybe in 20 years if they can get it together that fast). But, I offer the idea up to whatever nonprofits or disaster relief workers can use it.