I have been using Firefox 3 for some time now. I went through all of the betas and really liked how fast it is and the new features. I knew there would be some issues with existing plugins, but I thought it would be a matter of time before new versions were released. I used Google’s Browser Sync plugin to sync my bookmarks on the computers I use. I was saddened by the news that Google had dropped development of Browser Sync. Now, I had to find an alternative.

First, I looked at Foxmarks. But, all it does it sync the bookmarks. I wanted it to sync cookies, form data and history, as Browser Sync did. Then, I stumbled upon Mozilla Weave. I installed the plugin on all of the computers I use everything worked as publicized.

Things began to change a few weeks ago. I noticed that I could no longer sign into Weave. A dialog box kept popping up asking for my password. I entered my password and the box popped up again. I ended up disabling the plugin for a few days. In the past week, there have been a couple updates. I will say it is working much better, even though there was an outage a few days ago. I believe it could be growing pains for Mozilla. A lot of people are moving to Firefox 3, so their servers are being bombarded. Google has dropped Browser Sync, so more people are looking for alternatives, such as Weave.

My only negative comment about Weave is the amount of time it takes to sync after you close Weave. A box pops up showing the progress of the sync. In my opinion, the sync should be occurring while the browser is open. When I close Firefox, I usually close the lid on my laptop. If I did this, the sync would stall. Now, I have to leave my screen up in order for the sync to complete.

Some may ask why I need a browser syncing program, since there are sites like Delicious. I use Delicious everyday and have a lot of people in my network. If you would like to see my links, click here. There are times, when you just want to your bookmarks and click on a link. Also, I use Quicksilver on my MacBook and Launchy on my Dell and I can use it to begin typing a bookmark I have on my computer and it will come up after typing a few letters.

Download Weave and give it a go for a week. I think you will like what it has to offer, even with the annoying sync after you close the browser.

My apologies for not posting for a while. It has been tough sitting down to write, since I have not been working much this summer.

Tomorrow is the big day for Mozilla. Please help them set a new download record by downloading Firefox 3. Even if you do not install it, go ahead and download it. Stick it in your downloads folder and install it when you have time.

I have been using the betas and release candidates for some time now. I will admit I had some issues with the betas, but stability increased with the release of RC1. RC2 was even more stable, even though there were some issues that prompted a release of RC3. I was alternating between the use of Firefox 2 and 3 until a week ago. RC3 seemed stable enough for me, so I removed version 2. I held onto version 2 because there were some add-ons I used that were not compatible. However, new versions of Delicious Bookmarks and Scribefire were released which prompted me to use version 3 more often. I used Google’s Browser Sync add-on and I have been looking for updates. It has not been updated for quite some time, leading me to believe that Google has abandoned it. So, I began looking for alternatives. I read about Foxmarks and Mozilla’s Weave project. I settled on Weave for two reasons.

One reason I chose Weave is that Foxmarks only synchronizes bookmarks. I wanted passwords, browsing history and form information to be synchronized as well. The other reason is I assumed that since Weave was a Mozilla project, it would be stable. I was correct…until now. Over the weekend, I noticed that I was getting an error logging into the Weave servers. I remoted into my computer at work and had the same issue, so I knew it was not a problem with my ISP or my computer. I looked on the Mozilla forums and noticed that a lot of people were having the same issues. I hope they get the problems worked out soon. I did hear that they were “Slashdotted” and “Dugg”, which may have contributed to their outage.

Put a reminder in your calendar and download Firefox 3 tomorrow. If you want to keep version 2, install version 3 in a different directory. Or, if you are on a Mac, install it to the desktop, rename firefox to firefox3 and move it to your applications folder. Give it a week and I bet you will switch. It is much faster and more stable than version 2 in my opinion.

What are your thoughts? Leave some feedback in the comments.

Technorati Tags: firefox, mozilla, browser, delicious, google, foxmarks

This is an attempt to get link #4 on Google. I did not know you could use Typepad Blogit with Wordpress. This post was written on an iPod Touch.

Last Friday, I had the distinct pleasure of taking the Logan Elm Tech Team to Washington Elementary for a wiring project in a sixth grade classroom. The teacher wanted to add more computers, but due to fire code, we had to locate the computers on the opposite side of the room from the network drop. The solution we came up with was to run one drop through the ceiling to the opposite side of the room and add an 8-port switch. The reason we chose this instead of running two drops is expandability. The teacher may want more computers next year, which all we would need to do is plug in more patch cables into the switch.

I bought some new supplies for running wire and this was the first job we had to try them out. We used a set of “Roy Rods” to push the wire through the ceiling. They are fiberglass rods that snap together to a length of 36 feet. We ran 72 feet of cable across the room. They crimped the ends on the wire and used a Fluke Networks Nettool Inline Network tester to verify the wire. Then, they put a switch on the other end and connected the computers.

They discovered there were some wires that were not labeled and we could not determine where they went. The Tech Team decided to trace them out and label all of the wires. They used the tester to find out the lengths of the cables which helped us guess where the wires were going. We determined that there were a few drops that were abandoned. The reason the drops were abandoned is due to the fact they were near electric panels. The computers must have blocked access to the electric panels, which is a violation of the Ohio Fire Code. They removed three drops and labeled the remaining wires with a Brother P-Touch 1650 Label Maker.

The last part of the project was cleaning up the wiring mess. There was conduit on the walls, but for some reason, the wires were not inside. The Tech Team put the wires inside and used wire ties and cable staples where needed. Then, we packed all of the equipment back in the bags and stowed the equipment in my vehicle. The teacher for the Tech Team, Todd Tomlinson, arrived when we were finishing the project. We didn’t hire a sub, so he needed to cover his classes.

The project and the rest of the day was a time to celebrate their two years of work and dedication to the Logan Elm School District. We left Washington Elementary and headed to a local Chinese restaurant to enjoy their lunch buffet. During lunch, I presented the Tech Team members with USB flash drives commemorating the time they have spent with the Tech Team. Two of the students, Phil and Mark, were two-year members while the other two students, Matt and Jeremy served one year. The flash drives were engraved with “Logan Elm Tech Team” and the years they served with the Tech Team.

Over the past two years, they have closed hundreds of helpdesk tickets and have ran a lot of cable. They even ran wire for the “phone guy”. If we were to pay outside contractors $20 an hour for the work they accomplished, we would have spent over $50,000. The 2008-2009 Tech Team will have some big shoes to fill. The current Tech Team has set the bar for future Tech Teams.

Good Luck to the Tech Team and the Class of 2008.

Click here for pictures of the Tech Team wiring installation at Washington Elementary (links to Flickr).

Technorati Tags: wiring, tech, network

Do you need to send a large file to someone? Some email providers do not allow attachments larger than 2MB. If you don’t have your own server, you will need to find a place to host the file. Drop.io allows you to upload a 100MB file. To use the service, you pick a name for your drop. Then, you locate the file you would like to upload. Next, you can password-protect the file, choose a time for the drop to be deleted and set the permission level. The final step is to click the Drop it button.

There are more features of Drop.io I have not used. For instance, you can send and receive faxes. I have not had the opportunity to use that feature, so I cannot say how well it works. I can say the drop service works very well. Technorati Tags: file sharing, drop.io, web 2.0

I know I have not posted since April 23rd. I think it must be that time of the year. I have noticed that other blogs I subscribe to have not had very many posts lately. I think it is that time of the year where tech coords are working to complete some projects before the school year end and are planning new projects.

I don’t usually blog during work hours. I like to do as much as I can at work and spend time at home catching up on email, RSS feeds and podcasts. Right now, I am writing this post while I am changing tapes, verifying backups and imaging some computers. I am not multi-tasking. I am just doing something while waiting on other things to finish. Did I mention I am drinking coffee and eating a Fruit & Grain bar?

My absence from posting has not been from a lack of topics. In fact, I have 18 topics or sites for future posts in my queue. I just have not made the time to write. During the past two weeks, I have installed wire shelving, with the help of the Tech Team and my SCOCA Tech. I want to clean up the shelves a little and I will post some pictures on Flickr soon. I am still working on organizing the shelves and deciding where to put things. I have been busy imaging some computers to be deployed soon.

With the weather getting warmer, I have not had much time at home to blog. My daughter plays on the Berne Union Softball Team. Click here for pictures that I have taken. It seems like we are going to a game every night. When I am not at a game, I have been mowing or working in the garage.

Another reason for not blogging is my hosting provider. For the past few weeks, I have not been able to access my blog and HelpDesk on a consistent basis. There are times when they load fine, but most of the time, they will time out. The problem is the shared hosting server where our sites are located. I have asked to be moved to a new server. They do not see a problem on their end and close the tickets. I put in a ticket on Friday and they finally agreed to move our sites to another server. Even though the sites may be down for 24-48 hours, it will end weeks of frustration on my part. If you have not been able to access this blog, please leave a comment. My hosting provider still doesn’t think there is a problem, but doesn’t want to lose a customer with 6 domains.

Okay…this post may turn into a rant!

Let me setup the scenario. I get an email from a coworker letting me know my blog was down. I received the email on my Blackberry and hopped on the computer to check. Sure enough, he was right. It was down. Also, our HelpDesk was down as well. I noticed that the website was loading very slowly as well. The funny thing is, our high school site was not affected, even though it is hosted by the same company. Later in the evening before I went to bed, I checked the site and it was loading faster. I checked my blog and it was working. In fact, I had received a comment on the previous post. I went to bed, thinking everything was fine.

I arrived at work on Monday morning. I followed my normal daily routine which involves turning on the lights, ejecting the tapes from the servers, making coffee and logging into my computer. Once the coffee is ready, I sit down and begin checking everything. I look at my office phone and make sure it is on. If it isn’t, I would have to go to the phone closet. Next, I fire up my browser and check our ITC’s site where I can verify that our circuits are up. Then, I check the switches and servers. Once everything passes inspection, then I check our websites. This is where my routine came to a screeching halt. I clicked on the link to the district webpage from my start page (a Protopage I setup) and it loaded very slowly. Then, I clicked on the link to our HelpDesk. I waited and waited as Firefox kept looking for it. But, it was nowhere to be found. In the end, I received an “error loading database” message.

Now, I knew there was a problem. I got on the phone and called our webhosting provider. A soft-spoken woman answered the phone and I proceeded to tell her what I was experiencing. She apologized and said there was nothing she could do. She could enter a ticket in their system and it would show up in my control panel. I would have to wait for them to act on the ticket. I completed some tasks I remembered I had to do and checked the control panel an hour later. NO TICKET! So, I entered 3 tickets. One for the slow-loading sites, one for the mysql database errors and one to the billing department for a service credit.

I didn’t receive any updated throughout the day. I checked the sites on Monday night and nothing had changed. When I arrived at work on Tuesday, everything was working. I checked on the tickets and they were updated at 4am. I know that nobody was in the data center at 4am. They have a support center in Eastern Europe and the name on the ticket was Russian. His answer to my ticket was that there isn’t a problem. Everything is working. He closed the ticket. I reopened the ticket and explained to him that there was a problem on Monday and I wanted to know. The mysql ticket was closed with the same answer. I reopened that ticket as well. I thought about calling a friend of mine that speaks Russian. I wanted to use a few “choice” words. But, I thought I would have problems typing them, so I used some “choice” American words. You could tell my frustration at this point.

Tuesday evening, I received another update to the tickets. The replies were from another Russian tech support person. I explained in my replies that I was an IT professional and to feel free to use “tech jargon”. He explained everything thoroughly and offered their solution. Since we are on a shared server, they are looking into moving some sites to other servers. There was too much traffic to that server and it basically gave up. They took the server offline for a while and put it back online on Monday night. As for the mysql issue, there was a server that went down that hosted my databases. They restored service to that server and it is in normal running order.

My question is, why couldn’t they tell me this from the start? I hate it when someone places blame on someone or something else or doesn’t admit there is a problem. I had a server crash a few years ago. I take the blame for it. I was not verifying backups. I did not look at the logs. I have had my share of mistakes. I can admit when I have made mistakes or when there is an equipment failure. Hardware will fail. Software will fail. I am human. I will make mistakes.

I admit there are times when I dread going to work. Monday was one of those days. We had a six day week with school being in session on Saturday. On Sunday, I recharged my batteries a little, but did not get away from computer repairs. I worked on my brother-in-law’s computer because it was making a whirring noise. Taking the computer outside with a can of compressed air solved the problem.

There is one thing that helps me get up in the morning. Just knowing that at some point in the day, I could help someone with a problem with they are having or show them how to do something they had been having trouble getting accomplished. Today, that moment was when a teacher was having trouble with a laser printer. I cleaned the inside of the printer and printed a couple test prints. It was still printing lines in the paper. I replaced the toner cartridge with a new one and it printed a crystal clear test print. He was so elated, that he smacked me on the back. He apologized for hitting me, but I didn’t have a problem with it.

I was just doing my job by providing positive customer service. I hope our high school tech team gets the same response from teachers everyday. They provide fantastic customer service to our high school and junior high teachers everyday. This year, the four seniors that comprise the tech team will graduate. Some of them have served on the tech team for two years. They will have completed hundreds of repairs. They started a wiki a couple months ago. Sometimes, they take the time to document their repairs. I imagine a lot are not documented due to the time completing the repair being less than documenting it. They have learned a lot. They do software and hardware support, networking, cabling (phone and network) and professional development. I will admit I have learned a lot. You have to trust that the students will do the right thing a be professional. They have never let me or the tech team teacher down.

Good luck to the Tech Team Seniors. Your future employers will be very pleased. And if you need a reference, you know where to find me.

Our schools were in session today for the second of two Saturday makeup days. The remaining three makeup days were added to the end of the school calendar. I did not find out our attendance numbers, but I do know the attendance at one of the elementary schools I worked at today had a good percentage of students. Most of the classrooms I worked in had all or most of the chairs full.

I will say there is one positive aspect of having school on Saturday. Bandwidth! We were the only school district in session as far as I know and I heard a few comments from staff members about how fast the Internet was today. The elementary school I worked in today has a T1 and I think I was the only one using it. Most classrooms I was in today had other activities for the students. I saw a few students on Study Island, but other than that, I had access to all of the computers in the classrooms.

Today was a good day to go from room to room and see that everything is working. I did find some monitors that need to be replaced. I can’t do that remotely. I asked the teachers if they noticed the monitors were dark. The answers I received were, “No..I didn’t notice it was dark” or “I know you are busy and didn’t want to bother you”. I told them it is no bother. It is my job to make sure everything works. I updated the inventory as I went from room to room and took a label maker with me to put new labels on computers, especially if the label and machine name did not match.

It was a good day to talk with the principal as well. We talked a little about plans for next year and asked what the teachers would like to have in their classrooms. We talked a little about how our superintendent search is progressing. During the second interviews, we get to ask the candidates a question, so we asked each other if we knew what we were going to ask. I told him I had an idea, but don’t have it in writing yet. We have to email it to our treasurer by next Wednesday. My question is going to go something like this…

How do you use technology in your daily operations and in what ways can we use technology to communicate more effectively with our employees, students and parents? What do you think of this question? I know I asked a two-part question. I could have asked one question in 37 parts like Paxton Whitehead asked Rodney Dangerfield in the movie “Back to School”. However, I didn’t want to spend all day and night at work!

Please leave some feedback on the question I intend to ask during the interviews on Wednesday. I am not concerned if a candidate reads this blog and finds out the question I intend to ask. In fact, if they did read this, I would hope they would answer the question in the comments. We may get a little threaded discussion from the response!

The photo used in this post is from AriCee.

Technorati Tags: k-12, school, superintendent

A picture is worth a thousand words. I could send out an email with very detailed instructions and some users will still have problems. Is it their problem? No. It’s mine. My delivery method did not meet their needs. Some people are able to follow directions without issues. Some need a visual cue to help them understand. There are some that are better with audible instruction. What about visual and sound? Or pictures with text?

If you ever ask a technology coordinator what projects they are working on, I bet you will get a long list. One project I was able (with the help of the high school tech team) to complete today is install a computer and 3 nComputing boxes. We are testing it in our high school library and if the test goes well, we will implement them throughout the district. However, one project that is in progress and will continue as a work in progress is working on technology documentation. One tool I am using to help with this project is the Jing Project. With this tool, you can grab a picture from anything or record a video of your screen. Once you have the media you want to use, you can share it online by uploading to Screencast.com, emailing it or saving it to your computer.

This is my ninth year as tech coordinator for the Logan Elm Schools. Everything that we own, I have installed and maintained. I know the quirks and issues with our equipment. I can look at the wiring closet and know where everything goes. If someone went into the closet and unplugged a wire, I would be able to figure out the problem within a minute. I don’t remember where I heard it, but the issue was brought up that if I were gone, would someone be able to step in and take over? Would they know that server A needs to be restarted every 12 days? Would they know that the laptop in room 1 is the teacher’s personal laptop and not the school’s? Would they know there are spools of CAT5 in the penthouse of the junior high and know that you have to go to the custodian’s office, climb the ladder on the wall, walk on the roof to the penthouse with the master key and go to the right side and look underneath the levy signs? Actually, I used up all of the CAT5 that was up there, so don’t look there copper thieves!

I realized I needed to get away from keeping everything stored in file cabinets and my memory. Right now, I am in the collecting stages. I am taking pictures of wiring closets and what I consider our core services (switches, routers, wiring, servers). As the school year winds down, I will be completing a visual inventory of the computers in our district. Along with this, we are working on screen captures of various technology support issues. For instance, there are times when our login script does not work. It is not predictable, but it is a nuisance. The script maps the user’s home folder, public share folder and apps folder. Most users do not know how to map the drives manually. The high school tech teacher made a video which illustrates how to map the drives manually.

The Jing Project is available for Windows and Mac OS X. I know that OS X has the Apple Shift 3 or Apple Shift 4 to capture images. I use it from time to time. And, I know that Windows Vista has the Snipping Tool. I have used it as well. Where these tools lack is in the ability to capture video. Jing is a project by TechSmith, the same company that makes SnagIt and Camtasia Studio. So, why use Jing when they already have other tools available? One reason is the Jing Project is FREE!

Technorati Tags: jing, screencast, screen capture, camtasia, snagit, techsmith

A year ago today, I posted my first blog post on this blog. I had a blog on Blogspot earlier, however, the only thing I used it for was to write about the repairs I completed that day. I didn’t have a helpdesk, so it was my way of keeping track of what I did. It wasn’t a very good solution and I dumped it after I installed a helpdesk app. I wanted to start a blog that targeted teachers, students and anyone who was interested in computers and technology.

I have learned a lot over the past year. The best thing I have learned is the sharing of ideas and information with colleagues and other technology professionals. I feel like I am part of a community…a global community of people who share a love for education and technology. During the past year, I hit a few bumps in the road and there were times were I was not updating. I guess you could say I had writer’s block. I didn’t want to write about the same thing others were blogging about. Now, I realize it is ok to blog about the same idea, website or device. I may not have the same opinion. I may agree that it is the “best thing since sliced bread.”

If you have been reading this blog, please leave a comment. If you have a blog, please put the URL in the comment. I would love to add it to my feeds and blogroll. If your blog is already in my feeds and blogroll, keep blogging! I love reading about technology and how it is used in the classroom. I sent an email out to our staff last week about visiting classrooms and witnessing the use of technology in the classroom. I plan on taking pictures and talking with the teachers and students about the use of technology. Of course, when that happens, you will read about it here.