Have you all heard about the new shortcuts in Gmail? There are a few new things in their recent code roll-out, but the ] and [ shortcut keys one is one I’m finding myself using ALL THE TIME. My Gmail workflow generally has me starting at the bottom (looking at oldest emails first) and working my way to the top. Now, all I have to do is start at the bottom, press the “n” key to get to the next email in the thread, then press the “]” key to go up to the next oldest email in my inbox (and the “[” key goes down to the next youngest email). I can’t tell you how much quicker my email processing is now!

ClearContext has come out with version 4 of the IMS (Information Management System, I think – too lazy to look it up right now) just in time to revitalize my personal implementation of the GTD system. I needed it, too! I’ve managed to get my electronic clutter taken care of – zero inbox clutter in either work or Gmail accounts, yeah me! – but my physical clutter is still sitting on my desk, waiting for attention… Anyway, the point behind this post is not to brag about the fact that I have NO waiting-for-action emails in my inbox any more (ohhh – can I say that one more time – I’m email free right now!!) but to point you all to the newest edition of this product. It ain’t cheap – $90 for the software, $25 or so to upgrade from version 3, but it’s pretty sweet!
The new feature that prompted me to shell out $25 more dollars on it is the new dashboard. It presents messages, appointments and tasks/actions all in one place, filterable by topic (project) or category (context) or both. This is pretty handy – before I go talk to my boss now (Hi, Bill!) I can filter by my “boss” context, read through recent emails or tasks that I’ve associated with him and have all the information I need. Theoretically. If I manage to keep it up. But it’s too new for me to be thinking so negatively! I’m going to keep on top of my various inboxes and keep everything running this time – not least because playing with the dashboard of this product is so much fun…

Link: The Which Spice Are You Test written by jodiesattva on OkCupid

I really don’t know how to feel about that…

I’ve been running across the concept of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) recently in various blog posts, so when I noticed that Webjunction would be offering a PLE-focused webinar, I signed up! I didn’t get in right away, due to a glitch in the login, but I came in just as the meat of the presentation got going.
Notes
“PLE’s provide tools to allow users to take control of and manage their own learning”
3 principles of PLE

• Interaction
• Usability
• Relevance

Why? “provide physical evidence of your self-taught skills” – great reasoning!!
Time? a few hours on setup plus brief, frequent visits with weeklyish review of information
Tools? Ajax start page (iGoogle, NetVibes, Protopage, Pageflakes etc.) recommended
Protopage offers mash-up of feeds – one feed box with all feeds included. Nice!
Topic searching services – del.icio.us, CiteULike, Technorati, Google Blog Search, SlideShare & Twitter Tracking – they all provide RSS results that you can pull into your PLE
“use what other people have already done”
www.pageflakes.com/mlx/14579658 – her “starter” PLE page, examples and information about PLEs
Review – Discussion – Evaluation
Her blog

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The first slide I actually saw was a survey – how do you keep your learning stuff organized? The options were journaling, bookmarking, post-its, lists and something else I’ve already forgotten. I chose journaling because, as any long-time reader can attest – I do a lot of my learning and, perhaps more importantly, my thinking through what I’m learning, right here in the pages of this blog (posts of this blog? whichever…). Add an Ajax start page (and I already use iGoogle) with a focus on each of the topics I’d like to know more about with a way for me to easily post my thoughts about my learning here and I’ll have a darn near workable PLE of my own!

Update The archived Webinar that I attended is here

From the User Experience People at UIE comes a case study of usable, attractive web forms – http://www.uie.com/articles/forms-fairmont-hotel/share/. One of the things I need to do for the MRRL site is to determine the best kind and format of contact forms for us to use. This article series came at *exactly* the right time for me! The first in the series has 8 design “tips” that the Fairmont Hotel form the author used failed miserably on. The second in the series – linked to from the bottom of the first post – gives 6 more design tips using 2 other sites’ forms that failed as well. Of all of the tips, I think 7 (Always give people a way to easily recover from errors), 13 (Illuminate a clear path to form completion) and 14 (Remove secondary actions whenever possible) are the three most likely to help with user understanding of the form – and user completion of the form. I like the way the author took 3 forms, tore them apart and used the wreckage to deliver a nice, concise message about how to deal with forms on your site.

In computer frustrations, a point is made about the use of Public Lab computers at the library for the 2.0 programs that are going on. This is interesting for me, specifically, because we will be inviting the public to work along with our Library Learning 2.1 program that will be starting up in January. Some of those people will possibly be using the public computers we offer to follow along. Now, we won’t be requiring users to post to their own blogs, but we will ask them to comment on our blog – which is in Blogger. And, yes, we too are still on IE 6, so we may find that this is a problem. I’ll spend some time on Monday trying to figure out if the program will work properly on our public computers – something that wouldn’t have occurred to me until too late, probably, without this post!

I’ve recreated and updated my Presentations and Publications page. I know I’ve missed some past presentations, and some of the upcoming ones are still in the “talking” phase, so I’m keeping them out of this page until they are finalized, but I thought I’d go ahead and make the page public anyway. Enjoy!

The afternoon sessions of the symposium were conducted by real people (not that vendor representatives aren’t real, but you know what I mean) and were far more helpful than the morning sessions (the keynote being the exception). First, I went to MORENet’s presentation on securing IIS 6 and Windows 2003. Steve Massman (a former co-worker of mine) ran through the basic steps to secure and maintain a Web server on Windows 2003. The logging information – tools and techniques to get logs out of the “standard” paths and into your email so that you actually look at them occasionally – was particularly helpful.
I missed the next session because I was deep into conversation with a gentleman getting ready to switch to Exchange. He was watching me check my work email via the web browser on my phone and had LOTS of questions about what all was included in the Exchange Server package.
The last session of the day was amazing. The session was titled Security Awareness, a subject that has been coming up repeatedly for me in the last few weeks and one I definitely wanted to attend. The session began with a discussion of why we should be stressing security awareness (and the recent publicity around Megan Meier’s death was brought up and used as an example here and throughout the session) at the earliest age possible. Our job, as Internet Citizens, is to make sure that young people are aware of everything from traditional malware (viruses, spam, etc.) to digital stranger danger to porn to cyber-bullies and how to combat/stay-away-from each of them. To help us do our jobs, the session included LOTS of resources for security awareness (look for them in an upcoming Security Awareness post) and a CD of even more resources.
After that session, my brain hurt, so I said goodbye to a few people and left for home, ready to curl up in my recliner, play WoW and not think for a good few hours…

The morning sessions of the security symposium were pretty vendor heavy. I did get to see a pretty cool demo of Cisco’s video surveillance product, but other than that, it was all vendors, all morning. The keynote, which came during lunch, however, was absolutely wonderful. Lawrence Baldwin talked about his work with myNetWatchman and the products he’s making available to the security world, namely secCheck (there were others, but this one particularly caught my eye). I’ve used secCheck before, but not really in a formal way, so hearing about how he developed it, uses the information garnered from it and helps catch criminals with it was pretty darn cool. He also discussed his home set up, using a custom designed, multi-drive system he calls the TeraTivo. That was wild! He then segued into some of the work he’s done, giving examples of a church’s computer that got infected with a keylogger so that everyone who called in a donation (and skipped the scary, insecure internet donation button) got their information stolen anyway and how criminals use a sort-of proxy (2 layers deep) to keep law enforcement from finding them easily. That got him talking about the issues with cybercrime laws and how they are weak enough to discourage prosecution, strong enough to falsely convict the innocent and can easily become another tool for criminals.
Finally, he said that the weakest link in any security system is the millions of poorly secured systems in homes and small offices around the world. The infrastructure can be secured and core computing resources hardened, but as long as there are people out there who still don’t realize that clicking on links you don’t trust (and even some that you do) can be dangerous, the Internet will never be secure.

Last night, I attended MORENet’s Security Symposium opening reception in Columbia, MO. Besides the good food and preview of the vendor’s information, I also got to chat with some of my peers from around the state. I found (and latched onto) the only other library representative from MO – the Hannibal library district – and formally met some of the MORENet folks who sign those very important security emails. I also managed to be sitting at the table that the keynote speaker, Lawrence Baldwin from MyNetWatchman, sat down at. MyNetWatchman is Internet security software that does more things than I can possibly mention in this post. The idea behind the software and service is interesting, though:

The primary issue in internet security is not that hackers troll the Internet, but rather that the Internet is chock full of insecure systems which are easily compromised, providing means for hackers to perform untraceable, indirect attacks. The only profound way to improve Internet security is to reduce the number compromised systems and minimize the amount of time that a system remains in a compromised state.

While doing the social chatting thing (I was telling him about my son’s love for WoW – without mentioning my own…) we began talking about MySpace security. Apparently, many MySpace users (make that many, many, many MySpace users) use a predictable pattern to their passwords that make them pretty easy to guess. I would guess that this extends to pretty much any password-driven site, not just MySpace. We also talked about computer users and their security awareness. While most (even hard-core geeks) don’t really understand safe Internet usage, more training in this area can’t hurt. Even casual computer users should understand the basic guidelines to surfing the ‘net and – more importantly – know when to ask someone if the email/site/IM message they are reading/surfing is legit.

Today is more of the security symposium – I’ll write about all the fun things I’m learning during the sessions later!