UGHHHHH!!!!

Team projects are bad enough. A team project over the internet is even worse. All the emailing of documents and trying to keep up with the most recent revision....Are you confused yet? I sure am. Added to the stress of the project were Thanksgiving visitors who stayed all weekend. I was glad to have the visitors however. It was my little sister Carla and her daughter, (my niece) Kassidee, who I don't get to spend nearly enough time with. I think my sister wanted to come to our house this year for Thanksgiving because it was the first major holiday since she lost her husband in July and she just didn't want to be at home with all the memories of past Thanksgivings so close at hand. It was a somber holiday for all of us with James missing from the table. My niece, who is only seven, seems to be dealing with the loss extremely well. Kids are so resilient it is just amazing. She has her moments when she talks about him and says "Daddy used to do...." this or that. She was her Daddy's girl. Pretty much inseparable. We all miss you James...

Cousin Morgan to the rescue!

Group project = Group Misery? Not Necessarily...

As we begin our group projects this week, I was filled with a bit of dread. Group projects remind me of a three ring circus, all kinds of different things going on in all different directions, and sometimes not in a good way. Luckily my group mates are organized and dedicated. We all seem to mesh and work well together. We all have different strengths and weaknesses so that makes for a nice well rounded team. I actually look forward to helping them pull this whole thing together. 

On another note, tomorrow I will be traveling to Asheville for a North Carolina Division of Veterans Affairs conference. This will be the first conference I have attended and I am really looking forward to it. I really do love my job as a County Veteran Service Officer and I hope to come back with some valuable information for my toolbox. 

I saw this picture on the label of a bottle of wine last weekend. 

I have to admit that I thought it looked like the bear was throwing up at first. 

He had too much wine perhaps..... 

Have a great week everyone!

 

Building in Second Life

I really like to build stuff in real life, so building stuff in Second Life is pretty cool. It is fun to play around with the shapes and textures, but not as satisfying as creating something real that I can touch. This week we were asked to create three original objects and find three objects to decorate our space in Second Life. I was a bit stumped about what to build at first, so I looked through my inventory to get a few ideas. I seemed to have a collection of hats in my inventory so I decided to build a hat rack. It is a pretty basic structure, but it took me awhile to get the parts of it all lined up just right and to link them all together so they could be moved as one unit.

After I got it built to where I could live with it I took the hats from my inventory out and placed them on the rack to display. One of the three required items was complete. After that I started playing with different shapes and trying to grow a tree, but since I don't own the land I couldn't grow a tree the old fashioned way so decided to build a tree. Since it is nearing the holidays (and because I couldn't figure out how to build any other shape of tree) I built a Christmas tree. I didn't decorate it yet however. Maybe my roomies will give me a hand with that. 

I then constructed some decorative candles that really glow to give the room a nice homey atmosphere. 

Have a great week everyone.

  

Touring NIU in SL

This past week a friend and I took a self guided tour of the Second Life campus of Northern Illinois University. The campus was a nice looking place but seemed very small compared to the campus of East Carolina University, which made me wonder if other universities use or still use Second Life as an educational platform in the way ECU does. It turned out that many of the classrooms were located in the sky and so that is why the campus appeared to be small. The campus was mostly deserted except for one person playing in the sand box with a car that they rezzed in. My friend and I also took the opportunity to do some building while we were there. I had gotten a free beach house in a box at the Freebie Galaxy and had wanted to try it out and see what it looked like. It was HUGE! I had to delete it peice by peice before I left the campus. Kind of a neat experience regardless.

Using Second Life....

This past week I had better luck with Second Life than I had the previous week. My sound is working pretty consistently now. I really have no idea what the actual problem was with my sound. I looked at message boards and it seems that I was not alone. Others were looking for the answer to the same problem. I believe that in my case it was some conflict with my machine and the older version of Second Life. I feel this to be the case because as soon as I downloaded the update it worked correctly. I was NOT logged in in basic mode as was suggested by many of the folks trying to help me. Nor was my sound muted or the volume turned down. I have had enough experience with the program to know how to check such issues and the problem seemed to randomly occur. I would log in and the sound would be fine and then after less than 2 or 3 minutes it would just suddenly stop on its own. Anyway the new version seems to be working great. I hope it will continue to do so for the remainder of our class.

Blog Avatar: Laura Macatak

 

Hi, its me again....

As for my avatar, this lady doesn't so much represent me as it is a representation of how I wish I looked these days. We do have similarities however. We are both blonde and have blue eyes. Well that's where the similarities pretty much end I guess. In an imaginary world why not make yourself into the person you wish you were and not the flawed person you actually are? Oh yeah, because it is lying. There is that. I prefer to think of it as embellishment......

Welcoming Flat Stanley

This weekend was another beautiful fall weekend and I got to visit a few places that I hadn't been in awhile. Kassidee, my seven year old niece, sent a surprise to me in the mail.....Flat Stanley! Some of you may remember the children's story of Flat Stanley. Her class is doing the project that goes along with the story by sending a cutout paper doll named Flat Stanley to someone in another state so they can "show him around." My job was to  take Stanley to some local attractions and take pictures of him doing what the locals do. Since we live here at the Marine bases, Camp Lejeune and New River Air Station, Stanley joined the Marine Corps while he was here.

After a hard day on base Staff Sergeant Stanley headed out to Topsail Beach for a little R and R. His "friends" buried him in the sand so he wouldn't blow away. 

That was all of Stanley's adventures this weekend, but next weekend who knows where he will go. I hope m niece and her class enjoy the pictures. 

Have a great week everyone! 

WORDLE.NET image that I created from my facebook info page! That is some pretty cool stuff!!

Looking forward to fall break...

Hi everybody!

What a beautiful weekend! I am loving this fall weather. I got a chance to finally burn my Hurricane Irene debris, so I had a nice fire on Saturday night. My boys and I roasted some weenies and marshmallows for dinner. Today I did some more backyard cleaning by pulling weeds from my flowerbeds, and trimming my trees. My pups are all wore out tonight from getting to play outside in the cool air all day today. I think they love the weekends just as much as I do...

I made some boiled peanuts this weekend as well. A friend of my boss gave our office a huge bag of raw peanuts on Friday so we all divided them up. I put them on to boil Saturday morning and about 4 hours later we were eating deliciously salty boiled peanuts and throwing our shells in the fire. I posted on Facebook that I was eating boiled peanuts.  Boiled peanuts are something completely foreign to my Southern Illinois family members, and the replies I got indicated as much. It is a southern thang!

This week we have been talking about Twitter and Facebook and I'm willing to bet that most of us have used one or both of these sites before. I have had a Facebook account for several years, but I tend to be more of a voyeur than a frequent poster. I have also had a Twitter account for awhile, but I must admit that I NEVER tweet anything. I mostly use it to follow my local newspaper and television station for updates that come to my smartphone.

Flickr and Delicious

This week we were asked to experiment with Delicious and Flickr. I wasn’t that impressed with Delicious because I can do practically the same thing with Google Bookmarks and I am almost always logged on with my Google credentials. I did however like the way Flickr was set up. I like the groups function. I can see my family setting up a group to share photos amongst ourselves. It is uncomplicated enough for my elderly parents who are only slightly computer literate to navigate. This week’s assignments really opened my eyes to this great website.

On another note….

My sister lost her husband in late July. She and my 7 year old niece have been having a very hard time dealing with his loss. Today would have been his 51^st birthday and so I am sure it was yet another very hard day for her to get through. I mention this to ask that you all keep her in your prayers and send some positive strengthening thoughts their way. 

One day at a time…..

Another weekend gone...the good, the bad, & the ugly!

Another weekend has come and nearly gone now. I managed to sneak some things into the two days besides all homework. Saturday was a busy day. My son Morgan had friends sleep over after the football game on Friday night, so we started the morning off with a pancake breakfast. It was a good thing we had a good breakfast because the rest of the day was packed.

Morgan had a soccer game at 2:00 pm so of course we had to be there an hour early for warm ups. In hindsight I should have taken my homework with me to the game so I could work on it before it started. Anyway.... The game was pretty great. His team won 4-0 and he even scored a goal, pretty rare for a defender to get that kind of opportunity, so he was pretty much stoked.

Right after the game I had to head home and get changed over so I could join my husband on Camp Lejeune for a concert given by the USO featuring Gary Sinise and the Lt. Dan Band. They really put on a great show with a little bit of music to suit everyone's tastes. It ranged from Earth, Wind, & Fire hits to the Rascal Flats, to the Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy. It really was a great show.

Today has been back to reality however. I have been working on trying to upload my podcast and have had nothing but frustration. I think its time to walk away for the day and try again tomorrow evening.....

Welcome to my world....

Hi ya'll! Welcome to my blog. I think I will start by telling you a little bit about myself. I am originally from a VERY tiny farming community in southern Illinois. My husband (then my boyfriend) joined the Marine Corps for the education benefits, but then ended up serving 20 years. We got married right out of high school. I do not recommend it and would kill my own kids for doing the same, but I digress... We moved to California where he was stationed at that time. We enjoyed life as a young couple in SoCal, but decided to to try to move closer to home when he was up for orders. We got lucky and moved to St. Louis, Missouri which is less than two hours from our hometown. Being so close to family made us want to start one of our own, and so we did. Our son Wyatt was born. At the end of that three year duty, we then moved to Beaufort, South Carolina. This was one of my favorite places to live. I learned to shrimp, got to do a ton of woodworking, and generally enjoyed being a stay at home mom. Then came baby No. 2. Morgan was born a southern boy and remains one today. By the time he had turned two years old it was time to pack up and move again, this time on a huge family adventure....Iwakuni, Japan here we come. This was an awesome place to live and a great family environment. We really enjoyed the people, culture, the base, and the landscape itself. None of us would have traded that experience for anything. Fast forward to today, living in good 'ol Jacksonville, NC, the husband is now a retired Marine, the oldest son is a high school graduate, and the youngest beginning his high school journey.

Life is a highway.....

Article Summary - Corporate Wikis Go Viral

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2007/tc20070312_476504.htm

This article on Bloomberg Businessweek tells of how two companies began and used wikis within their organizations. One company is Nokia and the other and investment bank, Dresdner Kleinwort. Nokia began the use of the wiki in 2004 as an alternative to using email and collaborative software. Not the company reports that “at least 20% of its 68,000 employees use wiki pages to update schedules and project status, edit files, and so on.”  (Carlin, 2007) Nokia has found that their employees have come up with viable alternatives to software that the company used to have to purchase from an outside source. Dresdner Kleinwort had a similar experience in the creation of its wiki. Once the employees began using the wikis, it took off like wildfire.

Both of these companies herald the use of wikis for giving their employees a place to voice ideas to better the company. In addition to the potential to give employees more of a voice, the tools turned out to have huge time saving benefits. Instead of sending around emails with various documents, the employees use their wikis to post the important information so that they do not have to wade through multitudes of emails with attachments. This author sees more companies using wikis as a platform for productivity in the future.

References:

Carlin, D. (2007, March 12). Corporate wikis go viral. Retrieved September 11, 2011, from Bloomberg Businessweek: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2007/tc20070312_476504.htm

Remembering 9/11

Today is the tenth anniversary of that tragic day in history. As I sit and listen to the reading of the names of those we lost I think of how much pain their families have gone through and the emotional scars carried by those left behind.

Nearly everyone can recall where they were and what they were doing at the time it happened. I was half a world away in Iwakuni, Japan because my husband was an active duty Marine at the time. I was winding down at the end of a long day by watching the Today show as I did each evening. This was one of the few live programs we received in Japan and so I would watch trying to stay in touch with the latest news back in the states so home didn't feel quite so far away. Little did I know that that night I would witness the carnage as it unfolded. I sat and watched dumbfounded and eventually realized how this would affect my husband and all of the other military families.

Fast forward ten years later, our servicemembers are still fighting these terrorists to keep our country safe.