OCSD is the fifth largest Sheriff’s department in the United States with more then 4,000 active personal and over 800 reserves. The department is split into 20 divisions which makes the task of delivering the training content to their offices even harder.

Before the department discovered Podcast Producer it could take them weeks to produce a training video and send it out in variou  formats to all their division. So now with the new software they can have video podcasts produced in matter of hours have and  have new personnel trained in days.

Here I am going to deviate from the norm. Yes, I know what we really haven’t set a norm yet, having only had two posts, but they were both on a theme and I am going to explore a different aspect of that theme. Instead of Will Gets Things Done, this is What Will Got Done.

You may know that I’m in High school. You probably don’t know that I’m taking Journalism as an elective. One of our recent assignments was to write a review, so I decided it was a perfect way to earn some Geek Cred. I chose to review Twitter. So, without further ado, here is my masterpiece…

The main barrier to entry for Twitter is how to explain it: micro-blogging or macro-communication? Twitter advertises itself as a way for family and friends “stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”

Using Twitter is very simple: users create an account at twitter.com, and can customize their profile. They then are presented with the question “What are you doing?” and a box underneath it to blast out answers of 140 characters or less to all their “followers”–people who have chosen to receive their updates. They may also follow others.

Twitter, which was originally designed as a way to simply update a universal status and therefore worthy of the title “Micro-blog,” has now evolved into more of a communication medium. Twitter has its own codes for conversation, which makes it even more situated to this role. Users can reply to a tweet, or individual status update, to let others know their views on the subject being discussed.

Since Twitter was designed to be accessible from anywhere (one of the more notable is text messaging your tweet to 40404 after linking your cell phone number to your account), third-party software developers have been able to create software that lets you view your friends tweets and post your own from your desktop. There are great variety of applications for Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, and several smartphones, including the iPhone and Google Android. Some are more full featured than others, and all have a different user interface, so there is bound to be something for almost everyone.

Twitter has also had some reliability problems as the service grows more popular, but the developers have been working on that problem–and it survived the up to 200% increase in activity during the election. Early Twitter users were used to seeing the “Fail whale,” an oft- graphic of a whale bearing down the Twitter birds that appeared whenever the site was having difficulties. Happily, those days are now over, and the last outage was only partial, on September 17. Twitter does frequently disable and re-enable some advanced features to compensate for problems. This is a good practice, but Twitter seem to have used that excuse to not re-enable some features, namely the ability to post via Instant Message.

Twitter is great when you are feeling depressed and need the support of your friends, or you come across something you want to share with everyone. It is useful for answering your questions and connecting with the community. Twitter is a tool that will be of minimal use to when it first comes into your tool belt, but one you will continue finding more and more uses for until it is nearly indispensable.

Now, wasn’t that wonderful? Since that story another of our topics was an editorial, and I chose to earn some more Geek Cred. I won’t spoil the surprise, because there’s so little extra writing involved that I will probably put it up quite soon if there is a good reaction to this one. Suffice it to say that it is a topic you will all know quite well.

If you were wondering, my writing tool of choice has become, as I suspected, Write Or Die, because I know how to get around Writer.app’s limitations. There’s this little button labeled “Show Apps” that I would really do better without.

You may be hearing from me soon, and yes, I do mean hearing…

(P.S. You’ve been cliffhangered!)

I found a really cool website today! I should probably tell you where I got it, but the problem is that I don’t remember and due to the nature I can’t go look it up now. You’ll see why in a sec. I’ll probably put it in “in post.”

(POST: I got it from MakeUseOf.com, and the blog post title was Cool Websites and Tools (edition #197))

The site is Write Or Die, but the URL is kinda wacky. It’s made by a guy that calls himself Dr. Wicked (and the site can be pretty wicked–again, you’ll see in a sec), so it’s at drwicked.com. It’s part of his lab section, so it’s at lab.drwicked.com. But since it’s a project in it’s own, it’s at lab.drwicked.com/writeordie. Hey, that’s what they invented bookmarks for!

I have always admired Allison Sheridan for her idea that a review should tell you what the problem is that the product solves, and I aim to keep with that tradition. This problem happens to be a big one for me, and it’s this:

Distraction

(I put that on its own line so you couldn’t get distracted.)

Write Or Die minimizes distraction by actually punishing you for it. If you go to the site, it will have a fancy Java/Flash/AJAX/What Do I Know, I’m Not a Web Developer widget where you put in how long you want to write for and how many words you want to write. You can select from different grace periods, and different modes.

After you click the perky Write! button, you are given a page that looks a lot like this:

It has a big field for you to type in, a timer counting down from the time you said you wanted and a word count. There is also a Done button, which you push when you’re done writing, and a pause button you can only use once. You start writing, and if you stop typing in the box several things happen…

After a grace period, which ranges from 10 seconds (forgiving) to one second (evil), the screen starts getting red. That shows you that you better start writing again! If you don’t it gets one shade redder every second, until it’s fire engine red.

Writing area with red background

At that time one of three other things will happen:

• If you chose Gentle Mode, a popup will keep appearing reminding you that you should be writing.
• If you chose Normal Mode, a really annoying sound will play until you start writing again. REALLY annoying. Think tortured cat, idiot with a violin, multiply it by seven, and you start to get the idea.
• If you chose Kamikaze mode, it will start deleting your precious words, so you better start writing again very, very quickly!
• They haven’t implemented the Electric Shock mode yet, presumably because most computers lack the necessary hardware.

That’s the punishment, the stick behind the proverbial bull. Now we come to the carrot:

• A pretty sound
• A pretty badge
• Your finished work

Yes, that’s what you get when you reach your desired word count, or your desired writing time, or just push that pretty Done button. You can hear a triumphant trumpety sound, get a braggy badge to put on your site (like the one below, but I cheated on this one because I didn’t give myself enough time, and I hadn’t figured out you could choose not to have a time). Most importantly, though, that writing piece that was hanging over your head is done with! Finally!

I would also suggest donating to help Dr. Wicked defray his server costs. I would if I could, but I can’t so I won’t. (I love saying that, especially very fast and out loud.) If you have a credit card and use this more than twice, I would strongly suggest donating.

This is a great tool for anyone who, like me, has to write and has a distraction problem. Twitter, anyone? However, if your assignment/task doesn’t envolve a set amount of time or a set word count, don’t provide one. That’s what that done button is for, and not having that hanging over my head has already caused me to go off task twice after my time ran out and then, after I restarted the session, I reached my word count.

This is also a great tool for people participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, but try saying it out loud and you’ll find out why it’s called NaNoWriMo). The author of this webapp is participating, and you can see his progress widget as well as his amazing and surprisingly creepy addition to the story of the Grinch, at his website http://www.drwicked.com/. (Permalink to the Grinch story)

Happy writing, and don’t you dare stop until you’re done!

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions. You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions. You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different. Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here. Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose. In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us. You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat. In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media. Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish. These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts. We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before. Davos, Switzerland. February 8, 1996

So, on a tangentially Mac based note, it seems that Woz and his whatevershewas/is Kathy Griffin never got it on.

I will watch my language because this is a family blog, but Griffin’s quote on the matter is: “we…were dating, but were just friendly. I never (insert expletive here) him or anything!”

Poor Woz!