Poet Ponders the Digital

The Etsy office's community workspace area. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley February 2, 2015 Deadline March 2015 Issue Artisans often spend as much time trying to sell their works as creating them. Traveling throughout the Valley, and beyond, the artists I know set up booths at county fairs, craft shows, farmer’s markets and other events, trying to entice buyers interested in handmade items. A few local galleries and stores offer space to artists, and a handful of artists have spaces of their own. But, many of our creative artists need greater opportunity. For arts and crafts, the leading online marketplace remains Etsy. In less than a decade, Etsy has established itself as the place online shoppers go first, which means artisans should have a presence in the Etsy community. A few competing online marketplaces exist, such as ArtFire and Zibbet , but none rival the popularity of Etsy. Craft fairs have overhead, from booth rental feels to the ...

An Apple II advertisement from the December 1977 issue of Byte magazine, pages 16 and 17. The second page was described the features of the Apple II. The ad originally ran in May 1977 and was updated that December. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley January 5, 2015 Deadline February 2015 Issue BYTE magazine stopped appearing on newsstands in July 1998. The name lived on for a time as an online publication, without many of its best columnists and without its definitive test lab reports. Finally, in 2009, the real BYTE ceased to exist. Other online publishers revived the name, but it was never the same as the legendary print publication. In November 2014, my favorite online technical resource for Apple power users and developers, OS X Hints, went into archive mode. A month later, on December 16, 2014, Dr. Dobb’s Journal followed BYTE into the virtual sunset after 38 years of publication. In fact, they call it “sunsetting” the publication: Dr. Dobb’s wil...

Math Mark (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley December 5, 2014 Deadline January 2015 Issue In 2013, California began phasing out the algebra requirement for eighth grade students. Math and science requirements have been reduced in Texas and several other states that followed California’s lead. This is the wrong path, especially for Central Valley schools that have extreme achievement gaps among socioeconomic groups. In 2013, some social advocates argued that the algebra and science graduation requirements disproportionately penalized poor and minority students. Instead of reducing our standards for middle and high school completion, our schools should have developed better math and science education in our elementary schools. I fear the choices made a year ago will lead to more economic isolation for the Central Valley and similar regions. Cutting math requirements might make graduation easier, but it also limits the future opportunities for our youn...

I have Feedly, Newsify, and NetNewsWire on my various computing devices. Only a couple of years ago, I used RSS readers daily to check headlines on Slashdot, RealClear, MacWorld, and many other websites. Maybe it is me, but I felt there were great stories every few hours — and RSS made keeping up with the news easy and convenient. This week, MacOSXHints went into "archive" mode. Slashdot traffic has fallen dramatically. News sites favor Facebook and Twitter over RSS. Even some apps for news sites don't work well. Tom's Hardware for iOS wasn't updating for nearly a month. Only last week did updates start appearing on my phone and tablet again. Newsreaders and dedicated news apps are collecting virtual dust. The most disappointing failure might be Apple's Newsstand app for iOS, another stale and nearly useless slot for magazines and newspapers. Apple, which effectively killed RSS along with Google, just doesn't seem to value virtual periodicals. ...

NXT Robot (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley November  3, 2014 Deadline December 2014 Issue Robots for Home: Not Yet the Jetsons Rosie the robot maintained the Jetson household more than 50 years ago. To the disappoint of many of us who still enjoy the classic 1960s cartoon, Rosie remains science fiction. The only robots in our houses are round bumper cars that vacuum floors. The iRobot Roomba offers no witty banter and no sighs of exasperation. Growing up, I expected Twiki, the android that followed Buck Rogers about for no apparent reason, to become a reality. After all, Twiki didn’t do anything except carry a much smarter talking computer about his neck. Sadly, Rogers was stuck in the twenty-fifth century. All the good androids and robots seem to be way off in the future or in other galaxies. Although we have no Rosie, robots are on the rise. They build our cars, deliver medications, defuse bombs, explore planets and even perform surgeries. M...

IBM PC XT with green monochrome phosphor screen and 10MB full height 5,25" hard disk drive (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley October 6, 2014 Deadline November 2014 Issue Thankful for Computing Technology Computing technology touches every minute of our lives, and it has made life better for most of us. Though I am thankful for computers in general, some inventions have changed my life in dramatic ways. I am celebrating this Thanksgiving by listing the technologies for which I am most thankful. Home Computers The early Apple, Atari and Commodore computers I used in school and at home during the early 1980s ushered in the personal computer revolution. Costing a fraction of business computers, these devices empowered the young people who would launch the dot-com revolution. We learned to code in machine language, BASIC and Pascal on computers with memory measured in kilobytes, not megabytes or gigabytes. When IBM decided, somewhat half-hearted...

In the last two weeks, several of my students have mentioned that employers expected them to know macro programming for Microsoft Office applications, including Word, Excel, and Access. I've written many times that students should aim for at least intermediate knowledge of Word, including the concept of macros if not coding skills. However, the inclusion of Excel and Access was a little surprising. Maybe it shouldn't be, since what made Lotus 1-2-3 the "killer application" for PCs was its macro abilities. WordPerfect also had exceptional macros back in the DOS days, helping it become dominant for many years. Note: I'm not sure I'd call the VBA code in Access "macro" coding, but it is Visual Basic and often the code used in workplaces exists in snippets. I won't post my gripes with most of what I've seen done in Access, but I have a long list of bad habits I've seen in workplaces. Still, employers use it for small projects and it isn...