I started with Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean, a book a friend of mine gave me after he finished it.  I really enjoy the Florida keys so this book appealed to me, and once I started it was hard to put down.  First, I had no idea that Henry Flagler had such a close affiliation with J.D. Rockefeller.  Most people know the Rockefeller name, but few people know Flagler despite also having similar wealth and public prominence.  I wonder if Rockefeller would even have had such wealth had it not been for Flagler’s shrewd dealings.  It also was interesting to learn that Flagler’s wealth and ambitions had an enormous impact on much of the state of Florida.  I learned that Key West was already a bustling island long before Flagler, but his quest to build a railroad from the mainland of Florida through the Keys along with plush hotels changed the area forever.  And doing this was so amazingly difficult…I don’t think anyone today would even consider such an undertaking.

Reading this, I couldn’t help but think that there was such opportunity in the late 1800′s into the early 1900′s for a person to start their own business and have the potential to grow it into a small empire.  I would love to be an entrepreneur and start something from the ground up, but it seems so very difficult now.  At times it seems like every good idea has been thought of, and every great product already developed.  And in my profession, it is ridiculously difficult to even find an original domain name for some new web-business.

If you like history or if you’ve ever driven down the keys and wanted to learn more about the railroad bridges that still stand near US 1 you would find this book a great read.  I will have to get back to the Keys to do a bit more first hand observation soon!

Next, I read One Man’s Widerness, An Alaskan Odyssey, a book that has been on my “to-read” list ever since watching a PBS documentary about Richard Proenneke.  The book and the documentary have a lot of overlap since they both are based on photos, footage taken by Proenneke, and entries in his journal but the book goes into a bit more detail.  This was another “against all odds” type story which details Proenneke’s departure from a “normal” life and his decision to move to Alaska’s extreme wilderness where he built his own log cabin and lived by himself for over a year.  He died in 2003 but spent much of his life at that cabin.  As he got older he opted to fly out before the extreme winters took hold of the area.

Proenneke struck me as half survivalist and half environmentalist, with real creativity, ingenuity, and passion for nature.  Aside from designing and building his own cabin with little more than what was available to him from nature and a collection of hand-tools, he had to make plans months in advance to survive all that nature would throw at him.  From bear attacks, to -40 degree days in the winter, to a water source covered by 48 inches of ice the journal entries cover the ups and downs of his endeavor.

Like Flagler, he set out to do what some people would call crazy and/or impossible, but it made total sense to him and his journal entries and photos are enough to convince anyone else to attempt the same thing.  Towards the end of the book the author touches on Proenneke’s thoughts on a man’s sense of accomplishment; Proenneke thought it did a person good to see a project through from start to finish by one’s self, completed by their own hands.

I’d love to do something like this in my lifetime, but I think I’ll settle for an alternative that involves weekends in some remote wilderness followed by a grounding return to society during the week.  I haven’t built my own cabin yet, but I’ve started with building houses for birds…which does give me a nice sense of accomplishment when done.

So…the take-away from these books is that I need to find some business idea that revolves me building my own house way out in the middle of no where.  Now I just need to sell Holly on this idea!

There are many, many objects more comfortable to sit on than the chairs in the Cincinnati Hilton Netherland Plaza conference rooms. A few that come to mind include a wood plank, a rock, or an upside-down 5-gallon bucket.

A high energy presenter like Robin Smail (@Robin2Go) is the best way to start a conference. She didn’t even let the fact that she was presenting a topic (Google Wave) that would be obsolete in two months phase her. After listening to the group’s thoughts on the extent to which Google should be trusted I learned that I am not the only paranoid higher ed techie out there. And seriously…an official title of “Disruptive Technologist” is just cool.

Video production and live event streaming seems to be an elusive topic for many campuses. The mix of technical skills, Audio/Video software & hardware skills, and access to equipment make it challenging for any one department to oversee.

Higher Ed Web Professionals are really social people…except in the elevator. Seriously, twitter backchannel was abuzz, but step in the elevator and no one talked to one another in person. Social events in the evenings are a different story…I can honestly say that I learned as much in the bars, restaurants, excursions than I did during the sessions.

Mobile apps are here to stay despite web browsers on devices making a native app’s less necessary. People must really like having an icon to click!

Mark Greenfield (@markgr) has great taste in pre-session music and a unique outlook for the future of web and education. I came away with an amazon shopping cart full of must-read books after listening to him for a couple hours.

Despite hating keynote sessions himself, Steve Krug (@skrug) gives an an exciting and entertaining keynote on usability! Watching a live mini-usability test makes me want to do these more regularly, and for more pages than our institutional homepage.

Dylan Wilbanks (@dylanw) gives an eloquent presentation on lessons learned after 10 years in our field. I think all new higher ed web professionals should see this presentation as part of their new-hire orientation! If nothing else, it gave me hope that the challenges I’ve seen in the same time aren’t unique and can have a happy ending.

Campus facebook pages come with ups and downs (especially during big snow storms!). If you build it, and if students come to it, then you have to be prepared to manage a really powerful communication tool.

+++

This was my first experience with the Higher Ed Web Conference and I’m impressed, and hooked! Can’t wait for next year’s event in Austin, Texas.

Things have been crazy the past couple months as Holly and I ran in 10 different directions trying to decide where we were going to live in the coming months/years.  We considered building our new “dream house” but suffered from a case of sticker shock, then thought about buying a house but suffered from thoughts of “that’s all we get for that price?,” while all along fixing up our house with the intention of selling.  That was until we heard what the Realtor thought it would sell for.  So, I think the plan at this point, as of today, is to live in our house for a little bit longer while making a plan to build soonish.  We’ll also likely take advantage of the crazy-low mortgage rates to refinance into a 15 year mortgage in order to pay down the principal faster; believe it or not the low rates make this less than $100 more than our current payment.  Now…if you ask again tomorrow and you might get a different answer.

Somewhere during the process of looking for money under various rocks I decided to sell my old Polaris snowmobile.  It gave me years of hassle-free use but it was getting to the age where I just felt a big problem wasn’t too far off…so I decided it would be better in another person’s garage.  When I got nearly as much as I paid for it years ago I immediately started looking for more stuff to throw on craigslist.  If it isn’t nailed down it might be for sale soon!

Onto the dog…it seems like a couple months can’t go by without a trip to the Vet for Bailey.  This time was a bit more concerning though as Holly found blood in his “stool.”  The diagnosis this time is Colitis – swelling (inflammation) of the large intestine (colon).  This was better than other things we thought it might be and should be controllable with food more suitable for a dog his age.  It seems that his old food just isn’t bland enough for his aging digestive system, but with his lack of teeth soft food probably isn’t that far off!

As a general public service announcement: don’t ever try to make a “sparkler bomb!” Sure it looks fun in the youtube videos but playing with something that sounds and acts like a stick of dynamite really isn’t a good idea.  Some minor property damage and a close call with some flying “material” left my brother and I in a state of shock, and me with a solid resolve to never put one of these together again….seriously; never.

Finally…I bought a used Howard Miller mantle clock (pictured above) today from someone at GVSU today.  You might not think that is very cool or exciting but I was pretty thrilled to find such a treasure at such a reasonable cost.  My dad must have passed his odd desire to collect clocks and pocket watches onto me, but there is just something about winding an old clock and hearing real chimes and gongs every 15 minutes.  After hearing this even Holly agreed that she’d like to get a full-sized grandfather clock whenever we do end up in a new house!

If you didn’t catch it you should try to make some time to watch it here:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38382773/ns/dateline_nbc-america_now

Let me first say that I am a big fan of Ann Curry…I watch the Today show almost every morning while getting ready for work and I think she brings a lot to that show.  I liked her so much I was rooting for her to replace Katie Couric, and most mornings while watching Meredith Vieira, I wish that she had.  That being said, I thought Ann was too nice, or simply chose not to ask hard questions while covering this story.

The story started with a local food bank that is supporting a growing number of people who rely on assistance to feed their families while operating on a shoestring budget.  It was really sad seeing the many people who probably couldn’t feed their families without this food bank.  The depiction of poverty in this rural area was surprising and Holly and I decided that we’d like to send a donation to the Friends & Neighbors Food Pantry.

While feeling very bad for the people covered in this story, I kept getting frustrated that more questions weren’t asked about what the individuals were doing to help get themselves out of poverty. Had these individuals considered moving to another area? Have they looked for ways to make themselves more employable? Have they contacted state agencies to take full advantage of programs setup to assist them? Do they think they’re making it possible for their children to rise out of poverty? I know these are easy questions to ask from my vantage point and there are countless hurdles for poor families to overcome to change their situations, but I felt the story glossed over everything that might involve the families helping themselves.

I tried to focus on the bigger picture, but it was hard watching a woman get upset about not being able to feed her children while smoking a cigarette…this after explaining that she pinches pennies to buy the cheapest groceries because even the pennies saved counted.  Even if you smoke the cheap brands, I’m sure that the money spent would equate to a couple more cans of food for the kids.

A similar moment came when Ann was interviewing a young mother of 3 who had lived in her van with the kids during the times that she couldn’t stay with her grandparents after fighting with them.  Ann questioned whether this woman had ever learned about birth control…she said that she had, but retorted: “accidents happen.”  There were no other follow up questions despite so many opportunities to go into more detail; instead they moved onto talking about the woman participating in a singing contest to win 50 dollars.  After dropping out of school when she had the second child before she would have graduated I had to ask myself at what point she thought a 3rd child was a good idea.

Judging by the comments left on the dateline page I saw that many others experienced the same frustrations.

Somewhere in the middle of all this the governor of Ohio was interviewed and stated that at some point “it became stylish to be selfish. It’s almost acceptable to be prejudiced against poor people.” I then wondered if my frustrations were just my prejudice and selfishness coming out.  I’m still thinking about that, but I think a little more in depth coverage was still warranted…

As an aside…throughout the story I was reminded of Jeannette Wall’s book, “The Glass Castle.”  I imagined that the people being interviewed were somewhat like Wall’s parents, and wondered if the kids had some of the same feelings/experiences that she had as a kid.  If you haven’t read that book I’d recommend that too!

The project started with 1 55 gallon drum, 1 30 gallon drum, PVC plumbing parts (for a drain), and 4 cubic feet of two-part expanding foam. Someday I’ll try to post a complete how to, but for now here are some pics of where I am currently.

Next I’ll be adding the tap and running hoses for the keg coupler and CO2 tank.

Desired output:

Have you ran into a situation where you want to combine several rows of data from a sub query in a concatenated string while querying another table? It seems to come up for me a lot, but I’ve historically addressed it in code while using Oracle.  I found a way using Oracle functions to do this fairly easily and thought I would share.  If you’re running Oracle 11g release 2 I’ve been told there is a LISTAGG function that would replace what I have done here, but this will work for the rest of us.

First, you have to create a function for the sub query:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION "GET_COLORS" (ITEM_ID VARCHAR2)
RETURN VARCHAR2
IS
color_string VARCHAR2(2500) := NULL;
BEGIN
FOR cur_rec IN (SELECT C.COLORNAME FROM COLOR C, ITEMCOLOR IC WHERE C.COLORID = IC.COLORID AND IC.ITEMID = ITEM_ID) LOOP
color_string := color_string || ', ' || cur_rec.COLORNAME;
END LOOP;
RETURN LTRIM(color_string, ',');
END;


Once the function is created, compliled, and execute permissions granted, etc. you’ll be able to call the function like so :

SELECT ITEMNAME, GET_COLORS(ITEMNAME.ITEMID) AS COLORSOFFERED FROM ITEM


That’s it… Granted this could be tedious if you needed to do this often, but it is a fast solution

here is a quick snapshot of what we’re looking for:

To apply, or to find more information visit: http://bit.ly/9Qsp5R

Really Good Soft Pretzels

Ingredients:

• 1 tablespoon yeast
• 1 table spoon sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 3 tablespoons butter
• 1 cup warm water
• 2 3/4 cups flour
• 4 cups water, boiling (for water bath)
• 4 teaspoons baking soda (for water bath)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 475 degrees
2. Mix butter, yeast, sugar, salt, hot water, and 1 cup of flour until smooth & bubbles form
3. Gradually mix in remaining flour until dough is no longer sticky, add additional flour if necessary.
4. Cover dough and allow to rise until it doubles in size (and hour or 2)
5. Once dough has risen knead for 1-2 minutes, adding a bit of flour to make dough less sticky if need be
6. Divide dough and roll out pieces of dough until strips are 1/2″ in diameter and long enough to form your pretzel shapes
7. Let shaped pretzels sit for 2-3 minutes
8. Drop pretzels into boiling water bath (4 cups of water and 4 teaspoons of baking soda, boiling) and let float for 1 minutes on each side
9. Let pretzels drip dry on a wire rack and then transfer to a greased cookie sheet
10. Cook for 13-15 minutes, or until pretzels reach desired brown-ness.

Once you start cutting the dough and shaping the pretzels it is helpful to have two people to keep the process going.  The pretzels will start to accumulate on greased cookie sheets after the water bath and then you’ll just have to wait for everything to bake.  To speed things up I usually skip the shaping step and just cut into 2 inch chunks which are great for dipping in something like a spicy or honey mustard sauce.  Enjoy!

For sale: One well used old farm house on 4.3 acres with a stocked pond, a dozen or so fruit trees, blueberry bushes, horse pastures, a little barn complete with a couple horse stalls and a big garden ready for planting.  Inside the house there are 5 bedrooms, two bathrooms, and two basements (the Michigan basement consists of fieldstone and logs with the bark still on them supporting the house!)  The second basement is the foundation for the addition that was added when I was in Junior High (I think) that doubled the size of the original house.  The original house is very old and  the neighbor’s house was one of the original school houses in the area.  Down the road is the old Holloway railroad station…

How could you pass this up:

My mom is finally selling the house that me and my siblings grew up in.  She hasn’t lived there in over a year as she has been busy with travel nursing assignments, and the place wasn’t getting the attention an old house needs to stay intact.  I spent the past couple days in Tecumseh trying to get everything organized, meeting with Realtors, carpet installers, and doing all sorts of general remodeling.  I was shocked how much better the house looked after updating all the light fixtures, updating one bathroom and replacing a lot of wall paper with more modern paint colors.  I hope a new family enjoys all the hard work, and I hope it means the house sells a lot faster.

And then there was the barn…  My dad was a collector of everything it seems; after he passed away a couple years ago we went through the barn and cleaned and organized the best we could.  This time around I had to have a dumpster dropped off to finally purge a lot of the stuff that wouldn’t be wanted/needed by anyone else.  The items he accumulated over the years ranged from flat out junk to the nicest antiques, including set after set of wrenches and ratchets, more hand saws than any one person could ever use, box after box of mismatched nuts and bolts, and random pieces of scrap metal that doesn’t seem to have any real purpose.  After cleaning and purging I think I finally have the barn ready for the county’s biggest yard sale/flea market.

If you live in southeast Michigan and are looking for a great place to live let me know and I’ll gladly give you more info!

If I wanted to grab the left portion of some data in SQL Server I would do the following:
select LEFT(theField,10) from theTable

If I wanted to grab the left portion of the data that preceded some character like the ‘@’ in an email address I would do something like the following:
select LEFT(theField,charIndex(theField,’@')-1)

For reference, here are the Oracle Equivalents:

To grab the left 10 characters:
select SUBSTR(theField,1,10)

To grab the right 10 characters:
select SUBSTR(theField,-10)

To grab the characters to the left of the ‘@’ sign like above:
select SUBSTR(theField,1,instr(theField,’@')-1)

Bailey at about 8 weeks old:
(the banana toy was about 6″ long)

Bailey around 4 years old:

Bailey about 4 or 5 years old:

Bailey tonight:

Picture “Video Killed the Radio Star” playing in the background…  I am hardly a star but it is what I thought of yesterday while hearing people discuss Twitter at the AIMWest Social Media Confab yesterday at the Grand Rapids JW Marriott.

In my case, it seems increased usage of Twitter has led to decreased blogging and the trend seems to have spread to others in my office.  Maybe I’ve had less to blog about, less time to blog in general, or perhaps less interest…but in any case it usually comes down to the redundancy between what I might blog about and what I am talking about on Twitter.  The “What I’m Doing” widget on the right captures just about everything I am up to via a Twitter feed so is it at all helpful or interesting to summarize or rephrase it here?

The other issue of late has been my desire/need to separate work and personal life.  I equate this to taking two distinctly different groups of friends out to the bar and then watching the awkwardness that ensues.  You know some old friend is going to tell the most embarrassing story or pick the most inappropriate youthful indiscretion to relive…

As my professional contacts grow on my previous largely personal social media outlets I find myself censoring or at least very carefully considering what I post for general consumption.  For instance, my trip to Key West, FL during Fantasy Fest was an amazingly fun time with a group of friends that I’ve known since college, but most of the photos I took “documenting the madness” are hardly safe for work. As I’ve told people, the most popular Halloween costume was just plain nude with a little body paint.  (Don’t worry, me and my group of friends remained clothed at all times) I tweeted about it, but I resisted all temptation to “twitpic” the events. Maybe a year ago I would have posted pics on flickr, blogged about the craziness and shared more realtime with Twitter.  It’s not like I have a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde dichotomy going on between my work and personal/social life…its just easier not starting meetings with Deans or the President with a conversation about something crazy I see/say/retweet outside of work.

I’d be interested to hear others’ thoughts on this, any solutions, insight, best practices would be appreciated! I know from conversation yesterday others are in this boat as well!