Thursday, April 26, 2007

Car Shopping and Online Yoga Tips. They suprisingly go together!

So I had a nasty accident a couple weeks back and totalled my car. It's been stressful dealing with insurance, the rental car company that closed the location I rented from without telling me, and shopping for a new car. Actually, my insurance company has been great, it's just tedious dealing with forms and phone calls. I still managed to return my Civic Hybrid rental to Hertz before I started racking up charges.

As for dealing with car dealers...oy vay. That was horrible. First off, Carfax is your friend. Just buy the $25 unlimited membership so you can run every vehicle number you're interested in. I found Autotrader to be the biggest waste of time ever because every time I found a good car, it was sold already. The ones that weren't were being sold by guys trying to pass off salvaged cars as NOT salvaged titles. I don't know what people are trying to pull anymore. All I know is that you have to constantly guard against getting screwed over. Welcome to the 21st century.

If you're shopping for a used car, Carfax will be your saving grace.



I now get my yoga online. And quite well at that.

So with all the stress, I've turned to yoga once more. Not that I have ever really quit doing yoga, I just get busy and my yoga practice goes to the back burner. I can't really work out now because my neck and jaw are suffering after the accident. I did about six minutes on the treadmill over the weekend before my head started pounding. That was just walking, by the way. So I need something much more gentle.

So I've been getting my yoga fix online. I've been a longtime fan of the Yogamazing podcast. I have a few favorite editions I like to do, but I was hoping to find something for my neck. With Yogamazing, you can e-mail the podcast's teacher, Chaz, with a question. So I figured maybe I'd send him a question about yoga for whiplash, or at least the neck. To my surprise, he had already done a podcast focusing on the neck and shoulders, so I did that one the other night.

I download some longer podcasts, but what I love about Yogamazing is how they're all about 20 minutes long. So I can sneak a yoga session into any corner of my busy day.

Try it for yourself:



(You can also search for it on iTunes).

Now that I've found the right car and have enjoyed numerous chiropractor sessions, I'm starting up my yoga practice again. Slowly. Surely.

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Wednesday, April 25, 2007

How I Twitter

So Twitter is the hot thing now and I have succumbed... Here's what I'm using it for now. I've added it to my writing website and then making every entry about work-related stuff. So I post a link to something I just published online like a story or a podcast in yet another way I hope to drive traffic to my sites.

WriterHeather.com

My Twitter Page, you know, if you want to follow.

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Sunday, April 15, 2007

Why I Won't Have a Webcam Until October

I found a sweet webcam I want to buy really bad. I'd do it tomorrow if I could. It's Mac compatible and therefore will work with my g5 powerbook that came out two years ago, as you know that was before they started selling the powerbooks with cams installed and also back when they were selling iSights for $150. They sell for even more now on eBay. I want an iSight, but I'm not paying $150. Screw that. See the posts below about how I'm a college student, as in struggling college student.

I was overjoyed to find the ecamm webcam for $60. But I gotta have at least OS 10.4.blah.blah.blah. I have 10.3.9 on my powerbook. I haven't upgraded since the 'book is just a babe. I want Leopard. Leopard isn't out until October now. October! So I can buy Leopard and the webcam all at once in October. But I want both NOW. Now, dammit!

Dear Apple,
I'd part with my wad today if you'd just release Leopard a little sooner. Bastards. Love you!
-Heather

Saturday, April 14, 2007

Website du jour: Maria Taylor on MySpace

I love this song "A Good Start." Listen to it here:

Myspace.com/mariataylor

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Group Work Is a Failure With Online College

Group work simply doesn't work with online college and in fact defeats the purpose of going to school online. How do you do effective group work without interacting face to face? You don't. Remember how you got assigned group work in high school and the one smart honors kid did the bulk of the project while the slackers cut class to smoke joints out by the creek? Human nature doesn't change with age or online college. Remember how one person thinks their work is just fabulous and no one else does? Or half the people hate the way the project turns out? None of this changes with an online group project at Boston University.

But what is different is the medium for delivering the project. My group was assigned to argue the pro gay marriage side in a class called "The Moral Self." We were told this was to be done by a Power Point presentation. We were given no choice in the matter. I have never, in a 9-year radio career, ever had to use Power Point. Not once in my professional or academic life have I been forced to use Power Point, or needed to use it. There may have been five minutes of it in CIS-105 back at my community college here in Phoenix, but I can't remember.

So I was probably stupid to volunteer to do the narration in Power Point, but I am an old radio jock. I know audio. Correction -- I know how to do professional audio projects. Power Point is designed as Audio For Dummies. Yet I still needed the help of the Village to get it done. I had to get help from classmates outside my group to figure it out. I wasted my entire day learning Power Point narration.

To add insult to injury, my audio narration took the formerly easily transferable Power Point file to the lengths of MB Hell. That puppy ended up being 113.8 MB. The B.U. server only accepts uploads of 5MB max. E-mail accounts like my .Mac and Yahoo only accept 10MB. So I decide to try to upload it to my iDisk. Don't try this at home, kids, until you zip it. Even after zipping it, it was still 86MB and took 45 minutes to upload to the iDisk.

I had a mental breakdown before noon (eastern) and wrote a nasty post to my entire class about what a waste this class was. I'll spare you, but the class was not just a group work waste, it was an academic waste as well.

At least I'm almost done with this wasteland. (By wasteland, I am referring to my current course. I have 14 more classes to complete to get my B.S.) Perhaps Power Point is the true devil? Or the aspect of group work? I don't know. I'm not looking forward to any other classes with group work. If you've seen traditional brick-and-mortar students come unglued about it, just imagine online students and how we absolutely shit ourselves. We plotz. It's not pretty.

Friday, April 6, 2007

I'm digging online live classroom sessions

It's part chat room, part conference call, and very classroom-like. We have a whiteboard to look at where someone posts notes. It's either the instructor or facilitator who does it. We can "raise our hands" to talk and actually hear each other's voices. But it's not a conference call. It's Internet telephony so we can be online having our classroom session for an hour and it doesn't hurt our phone bills. It's also nice to have a discussion with as many classmates together at once as possible.

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Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

Group work for your Boston University class.

Sounds easy enough, right? Well, I'm in the EUDCP program online. (That's Executive Undergrad Degree Completion Program). So my group has a group project to do for class and we're all spread out over different time zones with different schedules. We're to turn in a Power Point presentation we are collaborating on creating right now. We're to use Impatica to zip up the file for sending to our facilitator. We'll be collaborating online in our B.U. virtual "classroom" which gives us a discussion forum where we can share ideas and upload attachments. So I really don't need to try out stuff like Helipad (which I use all the time) and NoteCentric, which seems like something that will work in a more traditional classroom setting. I have shared my SkypeIn number with my classmates so we can call one another and maybe I can conference us together. But again, we all have different schedules.

This is my first group project in online college. I'll let you know how it goes. I've never done a group project that didn't involve face-to-face meetings but some of my classmates have done this before. I, however, am only on my second class. I haven't even taken an online test yet. I'm still a newbie at this and I'm enjoying this.

If we can do group projects in college courses taken online with all the technology available today, what's to stop us from doing everything else this way too? I really do think telecommuting is where it's at. I use less gas, I sit in less traffic, and I'm not spending money and time on parking like my local friends who attend ASU. Same thing when I work at home for the Peak, where we also have a parking problem at our tiny little downtown building. I have to park a block away from the station!

I'm polluting the environment a little less and saving money on gas. I'm one less person on the roads to piss off all the road ragers in Phoenix. Not to mention the "Bring Back Blue" campaign going on in the City this year to try and raise awareness of how we can get rid of the famous brown cloud that hangs daily over Phoenix.

The time I save from not driving to work in traffic is 1-2 hours a day -- that's 1-2 hours I can spend doing more productive things like B.U. coursework, cooking a healthy meal, working out, doing yoga, or sending out freelance article queries. Or it's just extra time with my significant other. The more I work at home and the less time I spend as a traditional worker, the more I wish I could walk everywhere for what I need. I live in Phoenix, so this will never happen. But it makes me more aware of lifestyle choices I can make not only for myself but for the greater good of my community as well.