Over the last few months I’ve been migrating a massive amount of courses from WebCT 3.7 to Blackboard CE6. This involves a lot of setting up of processes, and then a lot of waiting for those processes to finish. I usually multi-task when doing these, either answering any technical support calls or doing systems maintenance. As it’s getting towards the end of the week, I’m watching the progress bar and thinking odd thoughts… such as this one, which I emailed to my husband:

Chris,

What would be the energy usage comparison if say, a person is halfway through typing a word, then realises they’ve made a typo. How much energy (computational, power, human, atmospheric) is used to delete the word and type it again, as opposed to mousing around to the mistake, fixing the typo, then mousing to the end of the word to continue typing, or using the spellchecker?

Just wondering, as you do :)

Kate

I expected him to just tell me I was an idiot (in a nice way of course!) but I received a surprisingly detailed response, prompting me to want to blog this weird exchange:

OK, standard definitions are that a word is 5 characters (secretarial).

To realise half way, delete then retype, that’s 2.5 characters typed, 2.5 backspace, 5 typed for a total of 10 key strokes using pretty small muscles which would consume very little energy. There might be a slight increase in CO2 emissions due to the sigh, depending on how many errors have been made (usually dependent on keyboard quality).

To mouse around, fix the type and mouse to end, well, that’s now only 2 more characters, so 7 typed, but I’d suggest that the muscles used to move the heavy arm are vastly more energy consuming than the fingers. Overall, more movement is made, and it is probably slower, during which time the power supply has consumed another 50-200 Watts of energy over the extra second or two (which makes the muscle movements seem irrelevant). Of course, this depends entirely on the speed of keyboard vs mouse for a particular user. The key output is how many seconds pass for each method.

As for the spellchecker, that is just as bad as number 2 plus you’re now making the disk spin and perform indexical lookups. Disk access consumes a lot of energy and you have to think about the suggested changes. Overall, that’s going to make the footprint of the two actions above seem insignificant. In addition, there is additional CO2 output due to the grunts of the user as it applies american spelling to everything even though the document is in Australian English and screws the pagination, which requires more time, effort and energy. This can’t be accurately measured….

So if you want to save the planet one word at a time, don’t use the spellchecker and don’t take your keys off the keyboard…

Satisfied ?

Chris

So there you go folks, how to measure our Carbon Fingerprints and as Chris says, “save the planet one word at a time”.

:)

[Edit: Chris says:

And I made a typo . . Don’t take your keys off the keyboard . . Hands that should be ! :-)

]

I’m coming out of hibernation, just quickly, to ask for some help with my family genealogy. We’re trying to solve a mystery around the man in this photo (husband’s grandfather) and we want to know what Church he is standing in front of. I thought I would post here as I previously had quite a few readers in England who may, by chance, recognise the Church.

It was taken in England, and dated 1950. We expect it to be around South East London (Plumstead, Woolwich), possibly the Essex region or around Brighton.

If anyone can help maybe identify where it may be, that would be so much help!

As a wise person may have once said, “If you don’t have anything original to blog, why blog at all”.

With over 120,000 new blogs being created per day, it is easy to see how each individual is just a drop in the vast ocean called the Blogosphere, and I regularly asking myself what, and if, I can produce anything unique.

I started waxlyrical.net in December 2004, moving over from a personal Livejournal which I had kept since 2001 (since deleted), with a dual purpose: write about topics of greater interest, and to keep up my practice as a writer. While the topics covered are from a broad spectrum, it can be summed up - as my tagline suggests - as elearning, culture and technology.

Educational technology is the day job I am passionate about. Nothing excites and inspires me more than discovering new technologies and helping teachers use them. I strongly believe in empowering people through technology and giving them the confidence to use computers and the internet. While I am not based in a classroom, I like to draw on my experience as a student teacher (I studied towards a GradDipEd but have only practiced as a community / adult learning facilitator) and asking questions of teachers, to inform myself of what is happening in the real-world classroom so that I can try to use this undertstanding to influence descisions at an administrative (systems) level. One thing that has always bothered me about technology in education is that the technologists are far removed from the educators, and too often the technologists dictate what should be happening in the classroom. In many cases, and until recently this happened in most cases, institutions are using expensive corporate systems to deliver elearning but teachers want to use open tools. Not only do these walled gardens close content to selected viewers they are most often unusable and a cause of great frustration for already over worked teachers. Outside of the walled garden, the flowers of Web 2.0 are flourishing with the likes of blogs, social networking, open communities, virtual environments and so much more. When the corporate products catch up to this, even newer technologies will be blossoming. As a system administrator of one of these closed applications, I am very disenchanted with the constant attempts to add features which mirror the real world - where the mirror is more like those Carnival Funhouse Mirrors distorting the reality - while their product still has major usability issues. I have reached a point where I can’t offer my thoughts on a solution, and where I am tired of frustrating work arounds.

I have also reached a point where I do not feel I can contribute anything original on the topics of internet culture or technology - there’s lots of people doing it and it’s difficult enough to find the gold from the dirt. There are many many things that I would like to write about, but - I have realised that, at present, I don’t offer anything new and have to ask myself “Well, why blog at all?”.

Therefore, I have come to the conclusion to end this blog.

I have plans for the future and for my concurrent projects. Over the last five months my husband and I have changed our diet and our lifestyle to be more healthy and sustainable. I recently read that David Suzuki has said to Think Locally, Act Locally and I firmly believe in this. You can read more about our personal journey at In The Raw.

And for too long I have been an observer - as described above in my role as a technical administrator rather than someone driving technological implementation (such as teachers). Despite being conversational and chatty, I am quite shy - hiding behind the identity of this blog, hiding behind my physical weight, hiding as an researcher. It is time for me to be active and immersed.

I will be archiving waxlyrical.net and will reference it from future projects that I want to base around personal branding, and which I anticipate will take several months to come to fruition. In the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter or keep in touch through Facebook.

Thanks to those who have commented on and linked to this site, and to those - especially the 31 Days Blogging Challenge participants - who have included me into the WA/Oz/Edu blogging communities.

So now I bid adieu.

Just a catch up post to see where things are at…

I bought the new iPod Touch, and will do a proper review of it soon. I’m seriously disappointed that it lacks Notes - there goes all my self study iWriter activities, and I don’t understand why they would remove the calendar entry functions. I just hope that Apple come to their senses and enable these functions. Despite that, I love it. The interface has great responsiveness and is very beautiful. I’ll put a full review of it here later.

Tomorrow, Chris, Joe (and here) and I will be heading up to New Norcia and surrounds photographing wildflowers. It should be quite lovely, and even if we don’t find fields of flowers we’ll at least have the stunning monastery to photograph. It’s beginning to feel more like summer here in Perth, and tomorrow is supposed to be a warm day - warmer still north of the city.
But I don’t like the heat so I’m not really looking forward to summer!

There’s lots more things happening, like Podcamp, concerts (Kristen Hersh) & other things. I’ll be irregularly updating as there’s so much on I’m barely in front of the computer during my free time.

I just read this in The West, and I’m absolutely appaled! Having lived around the beaches, I know how isolated they can be and that it is a long walk through dunes to the car parks, and would have been alot worse when injured.  I hope they find this bastard and hang him by his balls! Yes, I’m that disgusted!

A Secret Harbour woman has told of her nightmare ordeal when she feared for her life while desperately trying to save her beloved pet from being mauled to death in a frenzied dog attack at the weekend.

Ann-Marie Stockley, 64, was walking her 15-year-old Jack Russell cross, Samba, on a Port Kennedy beach on Saturday about 5pm when two brown dogs, possibly dobermans, came bounding up to her, knocking her and her dog into the surf.

…

The owner of the attacking dogs witnessed the attack from a nearby sand dune and drove to the scene, put all three dogs into his car and drove off, refusing to help Mrs Stockley who was in the water bleeding.

The man, who drove away with a boy aged eight to 10 and a woman, told Mrs Stockley he was taking her dog to a vet, but checks with surrounding clinics failed to find any sign of Samba.

…

It took Mrs Stockley, who was losing a lot of blood, 20 minutes to walk back to her car and raise the alarm.

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Ok ok, I know I said the iPod Touch was disappointing, but after playing with one at Digilife on Sunday and chatting to a workmate who has one, I’ve been sucked in but still excited to say I’ll be getting an iPod Touch tomorrow! Stay tuned for more..!

I’m a bit disappointed to hear that it doesn’t support Notes or Calendar Entry like the iPhone or previous iPods do, as that means cool tools like iWriter wouldn’t be compatible. Hopefully Apple will sort this out in a patch, otherwise I’ll just have to convince hubby to get me an iPhone and adopt the iTouch down the track… :)

A few weeks ago, Chris came home from shopping with no groceries - instead he had bought a Wii! A friend’s son has one and we played it all of Christmas day last year, and I had been coveting one since - so I was really ecstatic at Chris’ spontaneous shopping! Ah groceries, who needs ‘em.

We’ve just been playing a few rounds of bowling tonight, and I remembered a video I had seen a few months ago for Wii Fit. On that thought, I searched for “using the wii to get fit” and found this fellow who started a Wii Sports Experiment to see if and how his fitness changed by playing the Wii every day for 30 minutes. It turns out that he had alot of improvement, including losing 9 pounds.

This is a time lapse of his “workout” every day:

Through this, I’ve also found a cool kinda-social-networking fitness and weight goal tool called Traineo. Basically, you sign up and then elect 4 friends to receive regular updates about your progress. These people act to motivate you to reach your goals. Pretty neat, eh! I can be a web and game geek, and get fit too!

I’m really looking forward to the WiiFit coming out, see photos of Nintendo’s E3 presentation of it here.

Here’s the WiiFit promo video:

And I can’t forget the parody video too: