Friday ramblings

Hi. My goal is to be mostly scheduliberated. I can do this.

Let's see. Today is Friday and as of 5:36 this morning I have no appointments, just a loose commitment to Rocky for breakfast in Ashland City. There is no time set for that but it'll likely be early, in the 7 to 8 o'clock range. According to my iWatch it's only 61 degrees out there so an early walk with Watson, my "Australian Healer," is also likely. I primed a few rescued pieces of scrap lumber for painting yeseterday, and I have the image of the eerie cinder block wall mystery exterior door up on both monitors for reference, just waiting for a paintbrush to touch the wood for the first time. One "canvas", 10 1/2" by 5 1/2",  awaits on the tabletop easel I treated myself to last week. I will continue my online mandolin class with Sierra and that's at least an hour, maybe two. I doctored the hot tub chemical balances yesterday but I will check with a test strip today and do that again if needed today, though that's improbable. I may need to go get new kitchen flowers today since the yellow roses I bought and set out three days ago seem to be choking already. None of them has necked but it's in the near future according to their sad look. If the wind remains still out, I plan to finally pull out my drone and get it airborne again. Lots to do.

That's my report for the morning. I will check back here and assess my day in late afternoon. My plan is to make sure I am living healthy, practicing self care, making/creating, and doing just fine without a schedule. My goal is to be mostly scheduliberated. I can do this.

Good? Good.

LATER

Hi again. Immediately after typing the above I went down a rabbit hole at about.me, revising my info to reflect my new status as retired. Contacted Rocky and verified 9am at Cody's. Now I'm off to walk with my best canine friend.

MUCH LATER

Saturday morning. Up late, like right around 7:30, and spent some time at my desk cruising Instagram and posted a pic from the work finished to date on a new painting. I fleshed it out yesterday and added to it today, Just pencil on primed pine 2x6 lumber around 10 or 11 inches wide. Here's the pic:

I'll wash and sponge paint and who knows what all with this one. I love that the lumber piece is flawed/scraped along the top. And I will likely carry the image along the sides and bottom like I did for the goingdown Rocky's driveway painting. I think I'm on to something. At any rate, it's fun, and it's a new body of creative work for me. Ya.

I met Rocky's at Cody's right at  did not do 9. We had eggs over easy, bacon, grits, and biscuits and gravy. A heavy breakfast but it served as lunch as well. I did not do my mandolin class. Instead, I decided to change my strings on my damaged A-5 Gibson mandolin and my father-in-law's Framus classical guitar. That took, friends and neighbors, around 2 1/2 hours to do right. Then it took maybe 45 minutes to play it into keeping a tuning, as strings kept sliding and thankfully finally tightened up. I had to google how to tie classical guitar strings at the bridge. I don't think the beautiful guitar had been restrung in 3 decades or more--my father-in-law had it hanging on his wall and to my knowledge never played it. It all worked, and I then noodled on the thing, improvisationally, for another 45 minutes. Time flies when you're having fun. 

I did treat the hot tub. I did not go buy flowers, though I did toss the old ones out and get the dishwasher run and the kitchen parred up to neatness. Nor did I drone. But look at how many good things I have to choose from tomorrow, and the next day! Today, Lee Ann's home and we're planning a Saturday together. That, I love. 

So, that's a one-shot window into my retirement plan. I will not be doing this sort of blog post often. My retirement plan is: do something creative every day, spend good time walking my old pup, fish when I can, exercise and eat well, be with friends or enjoy my own company as often as I can, and spend time with my lovely love whenever I can. Music. Art. Writing. Gardening. Being. Exploring.

More later.

Podcamp Nashville 2012 was a BLAST!

Well it was a hoot. Woot. I was so glad that my dear colleague Mike Terry made the jump into geekland with me and attended this annual free "unconference" down at Tequila Cowboy, a Lower Broadway Nashville bar that was formerly called Cadillac Ranch.

This seems a perfect venue for the event, and I'm putting Podcamp 2013 on my to-do list for next year. It was very very very very much the learning experience. I'm going to jot down a few observations here, but a quick scan of the sessions descriptions should whet your own appetite for next year. I would estimate the venue could handle roughly double the numbers attending yesterday and next year, your presence should count toward that total!

I was there right after the doors opened at 8am and quickly moved through the sidewalk registration table, strolled inside, picked up my lanyard and name tag and my little obligatory conference canvas bag (how many canvases had to die to create those, I wonder?). Inside were a program, a mini-Frisbee from magazines.com, a highlighter from metalmarketer.com, and a single flyer from ampadvocate marketing & printing. Yes, the main theme of this social media conference was, and will be forevermore, Marketing. The "M" word dominated most conversations, and I even twisted my own social media "wikiprezi" (I'll explain in a bit) to speak to that interest, though it was to become clear that the overriding theme behind both of my presentations was not-so-subtly the "E" word: Education.

Which brings me to a thought: maybe this fabulous event could be bolstered by the addition of Strands next year, eh? Education/Training being one of them, Marketing another, Social-social media another, Entrepreneurship another, and on and on to a total of 5 or 6. Fill in the blanks. Broadening the scope a bit might cross-pollinate both the audience and the presentation schedule toward enlarging the event? Just a thought.

I was gonna get all review-y in this post but I'm sensing it's long enough for today. Still, here are a few of my personal highlights.

I  hit the session I registered for, Dave Delaney's SNIRL "Social Networking In Real Life." Since I was very late to the only 35 minute session, I have no idea what SNIRL means, but I'll note that his Tequila Lounge (I think the largest venue room) presentation was being finished in comfortable, bullet-point-backed style to a packed room, maybe a hundred or so? Dave's the author of http://www.davemadethat.com and I had met him at last year's Podcamp and all I've got to say is what a nice, genuine, real guy. His session served as a sort of a plea for folks to get out of their shells (a valid and valuable bit of advice to this crowd--all of us probably overcompensating for natively introvert personalities with all this social media fol-de-rol.) and talk to strangers at the unconference. Dave's the guy. I was honored and flatttered that he attended not only my scheduled session but the impromptu one Mike and I put up during the "Impromptu Sessions" 10:30 block.

I flitted from Memphisean (?) Dave Barger's enticingly entitled "NeuroMarketing: Consciously Grabbing your Subconscious" to Ross Jones's" predictably packed "How I Got Google to Pay Me $150,000" and enjoyed what I caught of both of those. I was anticipating the next session, though, so my focus was on that.

The third block of presentations had been left unscheduled and a cork board with 4x5 cards in the main bar set up for "Impromptu Sessions" with the understanding that anyone with a passion for something could sign up and present. I was, true to form, the first signup. Mike hadn't arrived but I had called him for buy-in before scrawling on the note: "MNPS Virtual School: High School? Online? Really?" When he arrived he added the by-line "Yes. This DOES exist!" and we were scheduled.

We'd had a very successful open house (which we offer monthly) at our school this past Thursday, and I suggested we just run from there. I'd scoped out the room earlier and reported a problem--the projector, out in the little room (capacity maybe 60) off the stage (drums set still on there, lol) had a VGA cable of about 3 feet in length. That meant that the presenter could not be onstage where 4 microphones on stands were mounted on tables and still run his/her presentation. That hadn't gotten fixed by the time we were on, so Mike set up his laptop and stood by the projector while I stood on stage. We displayed the http://vlearn.mnps.org website, talked about our passion for the project we dedicate all our waking hours to, shared how the course actually works, discussed challenges and successes, and all in all had a wonderful discussion with the 25 or so folks in attendance. This was a first step in what I know will be a long process, and it was well-taken, I opine. I tweeted at some point that Mike is our secret weapon and I mean it. He openly admits that "I will talk about this topic anytime," and that attitude will be absolutely valuable as we strive to overcome a fog of misinformation and flat-out obliviousness about the building of online learning options that work for our nearly 80,000 students here in Middle Tennessee. We're actually doing it. Stay tuned.

I chilled for the next block, adding some things to my wikiprezi and frantically attempting to will Second Life's Vivox voice issues (documented online that morning) to rectify themselves. I texted all 6 inworld panelists to work up notecards they could pop into text chat in case we had to fall back on that.

Lunch was a smallish chicken salad croissant, a bag of chips, a dollop of yogurt with a tablespoon of fruit, and a quarter coin sized cake-ish. Sustenance. I ate it thankfully, knowing my 15 dollars would help support the conference and also get me two drinks later.

I spent some minutes in a session called "The Singularity: Why the Future is Closer Than You Think" but it was kinda like three guys talking about change and I never really got the point, excepting change is faster today and good things are coming but might be brought about by very bad things. I would've loved to hear more about the concept's primary advocate, Ray Kurzweil. He's a wild genius, likely delusional but inarguably fascinating.

At the end of that session, I went back out and hit a recharge station to check on voice in SL and preload my wiki pages for fast display. I'm not sure where this concept came from, but weeks ago when I began looking for content for my session, I had decided to grab a few concepts in virtual worlds that might appeal to the marketing nature of the conference and I populate a wiki with them. Just a couple days ago I felt I had the content, but I intuited that me leafing through wiki pages was going to be a yawner for the audience. So I hit on the idea of a Prezi to use for driving the experience. It really really worked. I had logged into SL, checked voice and found it working, and discovered that two (and only two) of my six scheduled Panelists had arrived at ISTE SIGVE and were ready to go. That was really fine, actually, since we never would have had time for any in-depth share from all six, and I know that the ones who didn't show either 1) screwed up the time--a consistent problem when you're working across time zones; 2) had intervening family/IRL (In Real Life) issues; or 3) just plain forgot. I still love them all and as I shared with my audience, the attendees can learn about all of them from checking out the wiki in depth on their own time ticket. I made sure to populate that with all kinds of resources. 35 minutes? Are you kidding? All good.

The two avatar/friends who did show up for the Panel each did beautiful, brief, and effective descriptions of their own work in Virtual Worlds. Spiff Whitfield/Andy Wheelock, my best bud in ISTE SIGVE, shared his fun and engaging Virtual Pioneers and his impressive work with the ReactionGrid Opesimulator build of Anne Frank's house for students and more at Islands of Enlightenment, as well as a couple new projects that have his attention, and Pecos Kidd; came in to sub for Gentle Heron, describing their invaluable contribution in the creation and ongoing service that Virtual Ability, Inc. brings to those of disability, enabling hundreds of community members to speak, dance, and even fly no matter what physical conditions life has dealt them. Nice, nice, nice work.

I'm done here, since after my "Virtual Worlds: What's in Them for YOU?" session I caught just about half of the packed (again, predicably) "Are You Pinsane? Pinning for Purpose & Profit on Pinterest" (who knew that the demographic shows only 13% male pinners?) panel, led by the enjoyably personable Janet Wallace and hurried home to be with my own family IRL. I want to thank the sponsors and the facilitators and the attendees of Podcamp Nashville 2012 and leave you with my fairly cool new concept, the "wikiprezi!" Peace.

Virtual Worlds: What's in them for YOU? on Prezi