But an interesting item was mentioned by friends posting on his facebook page. This turned out to be an installation, by the UCLA hospital, of CarePages. This creates a microsite and basically facilitates an ad hoc, community of interest, around a patient. It’s apparently a SAAS owned by the health content firm Everyday Health.

This is a good thing. This isn’t radically new, but it is an excellent application of the technology. I rather like it that it isn’t a facebook app but who owns this content? If I post a message and mention advil, would an adsense type of placement happen? Would I generate revenue from painkillers? Ah, “it’s pointless to speculate but fun to try”.

Should I move to the Ipod side of the universe? It must be a mighty compelling platform. But I just can’t shake that rebel urge. And my love of L.A. FM radio in the form of KCRW, KPFK and KXLU (listener supported).

When is the Ipod going to support FM?

So, anyway, this is what I’m thinking today:
Great user interface, nice sized screen, FM tuner, good sound, great price ( for the storage).

ZEN ZEN4GBBK – MP3 Players – Credit card-sized media player

This is a subject near and dear to my frontal lobe because I abhor remembering things that do not bring me joy and well being. For a vague example, what did we decide to set as the discount for customer’s of type X? Or, what was the conclusion of our research into market Y?

And so, as in most corporations, I will email the AHSME (ad hoc subject matter expert) and act on the reply, and possibly file it into an email folder (albeit a different one from the last time I needed that data). [This cycle makes me feel dumb and it costs my company money.]

In this article from 2006, now perhaps out of date, Mr. Carr weights his discussion on people’s behavior. And rightfully so. As so aptly put by one of the comments on the post “You can’t run a library without librarians.” But his article, as is the best of le Web deuxieme, is actually a review of an article by Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business School.

And in a follow up to Carr’s review, McAfee writes of business leaders, “If they can convince their organizations that using and contributing to
the internal collabosphere is part of the fabric, identity, and life of
the company, some interesting things will happen.”

Like what exactly? I suspect that the 24-30 year-olds will be ROTFL about the Sr. VP’s exhortation that “We’re hip! We blog!” You can’t legislate the organic!

But you can try this… (free and unsolicited advice coming up)

• Ban Microsoft Office from the desktop! – Reports are done in blog, plans are done in wiki or other collaboration (e.g., Sharepoint) space.
• Ban internal email – Back to collaboration space (where I query a colleague within a product, project or customer context)
• Add Librarians – Hey India, Brasil, Kenya great opportunity for outsourced taxonomy admins now developing.
• Abolish the IT department – Create an Agile Productivity Coaching team that roams and helps you create or update your dashboard and perhaps brings a camera to capture your (report, plan, idea, demo, training module)

Disclaimer: I am not a Knowledge Worker… but I play one on the Internet.

The phone has some *issues*:
If you move to a different router, it doesn’t very gracefully update its Dynamic DHCP settings. I actually had to force it by setting it as static to my new router and then switching it back to Dynamic. (DUMB BELKIN. VERY DUMB.)

And also, at one point it just died. Not while I was using it but I noticed it was black and didn’t light up when I touched a button. I moved the power to a different strip and it has been fine now for a day. Maybe they should figure out how to draw power from the Ethernet cable…

This device is, however, exactly what I need. I work from home, don’t like paying monthly fees for fixed lines, and need a general “voicemail” line as well as a system for international calling. This is the thing!

It should be priced at more in the $50 range (you know, like a Belkin, not a Cisco). It has about $5 worth of phone parts, and maybe $10 worth of networking parts.

I bought this phone because sometimes I just need that old fashioned, phone feeling (speakerphone, big keypad). The networking is a big selling point (it better be as the plastic is cheap). If this had been yet another USB thing, it would have gotten tossed in a drawer (like the cheap Philips skype phone laying around here somewhere).

SO… You will have to search the web for tips on how to set up and customize your store but here’s how I made it look nice in my K2 powered blog over at Kulcha.

First thing, I got the inline frame code for my store and it looked horrible… about 2 inches wide and scrollbars everywhere!

Next, I created a template in my theme which would elminate the sidebar:

• Take page.php & add template php code to the top e.g., <?php/*Template Name: No Sidebar*/?>
• Remove the <? php get_sidebar(); ?> from near the end of it
• Save this as pagenosidebar.php and upload to theme directory
• Create a css class to increase the width of your primary div (I put it in the css of my custom K2 style)

After that, I had to edit the css of my aStore. (That sounds dirty huh?)
I just trimmed the margin of the body div from 24px to a lovely 5px.

The latest version (basically a release candidate 3/4 for version 2) boasts an amazing Ajax sidebar manager. There are also very fast live, search features and an Ajax comments engine which posts comments without reloading the page. Sweet?

Searching through themes can be a bit overwhelming… I’ll be looking for function and get distracted by form. Or I’ll be looking for something cool but then remember that I want it to be supported by the latest version of WordPress. K2 is, for now, taking care of all that for me. I’ve got other fish to fry so… I’m using it a lot. Isn’t that what its for?

Oh yeah, you can get it here. And there’s forums where you can post your nubile questions… or heck, ask me?

I know that I still have much to learn but dang I like this software!

Coolest New Features in no particular order:

• Convert categories to tags
• Improved plugin management

Then I just call my php function and pass it that variable as an argument.
But…
I have to use PHP to echo back the value.
myJscriptFunction('<?php echo $myVar; ?>');

Nowadays Microsoft Outlook can almost walk the dog! The day it can do that will be the day that it supports custom forms on portable devices. If you don’t know what custom forms are, then you have been bound by the design into a mode of productivity as decided by a Microsoft employee. Download rap music|Download Mp3 All Genres|Download Leona Lewis Mp3
Well, be bound no more! In my next article… no, hey, I’ll start it now. Here. In Outlook, click on Tools, Forms, Design a Form. The Design Form dialog is displayed and is looking in the Standard Forms Library. (See the little Look In: thing?) This a list of the underlying forms for Outlooks Mail, Contact, Task, Calendar and other items. You can open then and create CUSTOM versions! But first, click the drop down list and Look In: the Personal Forms Library. If that list is empty, then you have nothing custom and yes, you’re trapped.

Now, we’re assuming that you are NOT using the Corporate Exchange Server version. That’s a different bushel of corn altogether. M’kay? So, return to the drop down of your Design Form dialog and up to the Standard Forms Library. Double click on the Contact form and up pops a scary vision! A naked Outlook Contact form! Well, it’s not really naked but it is very vulnerable. Because you can move its naughty bits around! Check this out… you see the wobbly, little circle that I’ve drawn there in my graphic?

In that circle are buttons for, from left to right, the Field Chooser, the Control Toolbox, Properties List and the View Code window. What you are looking at, in toto, is a Design Environment for the easiest programming known to mankind! It’s easier than your TiVo! Now you are almost a programmer! Come back next week… when we’ll talk about making Outlook your bitch! As always click on our sponsors and buy stuff…

My installation of WordPress is in a folder below my root directory. Therefore all of my WordPress folders and files are below www.soulcode.net in a folder named blog. Of course I didn’t want visitors to www.soulcode.net to be presented with a different look and feel and so I followed the WordPress codex about giving WordPress in its own directory while leaving the WordPress index.php at the root of my site. And so in the world of WordPress 2.0, using the sem_static_front plugin and the /* Short and sweet */ index.php, I was whistling dixe, bob’s your uncle, a-ok, rockin’ like dokken… in other words I had a static front page and my blog postings lived beneath www.soulcode.net/blog. Whew, all this typing’s making me thirsty… How about we sell some Carlsberg beer or something right about here…

And so, I merrily upgraded to WordPress 2.1 with illusions that it would be as easy as the upgrade from WordPress 2.02 to 2.05 and boy did I cry. In WordPress 2.1 Options/Reading the first section is titled Front Page and looks a bit like this:

Well I had selected Home to be my Home page and another page that I called Blog to be the index of my blog and it wouldn’t work. The root address of my site kept returning the latest posts, i.e., the blog index page.

By the way, I had followed the WordPress Codex in regard to these settings in the Options/General of my WordPress address (URL) and Blog address (URL). And so, WTF?

I tested on a different site, doing a fresh install of WordPress 2.1 and using the Options/Reading/Front Page settings and they worked like a charm. I searched the WordPress support forums but found no definitive answers… until I came across this very confusing document. It is written reasonably clearly, however, the authors provide too many options, and like a witch doctor in a drugstore I was overwhelmed. And so I took off my shirt, smeared my chest with chicken grease and downloaded the Filosofo Home-Page Control. I uploaded it to the /wp-content/plugins/ folder and activated it in the Plugins Dashboard section and it ‘just worked’. I left its Home-Page Page option set at WordPress Default and its Blog directory option blank. This is rather strange behavior from code, essentially I’ve activated a plugin which is telling WordPress to do what it is already configured to do that is, use a certain page as the index of my site and another “page” as the index of my blog.