Archive for January, 2008
BibleTech08: Day 1 – Session 01, Communities, Content, and Syndication…
Posted by palmsolo in BibleTech08, Blog, Christian on January 25, 2008
…in a Consumer-Driven Digital and Print-On-Demand Environment. I think this session wins for having the longest title of the conference. BTW, each session is 45 minutes in length and there are two separate tracts/choices available for each session. Most of the sessions in room 1 are very technical in nature and are focused on the development and inner workings of Bible study tools. The sessions in room 2 deal more with the end user and discuss applying the tools for biblical studies or other Christian life issues.
This session was led by Todd Tillinghast from Snowfall Software. He had some very detailed slides discuss the different forms of content (professional and consumer) and where we are today. Todd said that the integration of professional and consumer content is what is missing today and is an area that should be addressed. One of the methods to bring in syndicated content and share that with people is through a community site. He demonstrated an example of 7 Porches and how that can serve as a community experience.
Todd also spent some time on printing options and had some printed samples of content created or shared online. He also talked a bit about standardizing using something like OSIS. This was actually the first time I have heard of this initiative. OSIS stands for Open Scriptural Information Standard and its purpose is to research, identify, and develop organizational processes and technical basis that will produce markup standards for biblical and related texts. It will enable encoding of Bibles and text in XML format.
Technorati Tags: BibleTech08
BibleTech08: Intros and mobile clients
Posted by palmsolo in Blog, Christian, Gadgets, Nokia, Pocket PC, s60, Smartphone, Windows Mobile on January 25, 2008
We started off with a general introduction and welcome by a Logos Software rep There are about 80 to 90 people at the event, by my rough count. It is nice to see that Laridian, Pocket eSword, and Olive Tree people are here with talks coming from them later. BTW, I took the photo with my N95, then Bluetoothed it to the N800 and pulled it into Wordpy.
Check out the full list of speakers for a summary of the topics that are planned for discussion over the next two days.
Technorati Tags: BibleTech08
BibleTech08: checked in and ready to go
Posted by palmsolo in BibleTech08, Blog, Christian on January 25, 2008
I checked and mapped out what sessions I plan to attend the next couple of days here at the Hilton. There are no tables, only chairs, so the N810 with thumb keyboard would be much more useful for me now than the N800 and BT keyboard.
Technorati Tags: BibleTech08
Is gadget lust a struggle for you?
Antoine posted a good link to start off this week about Addressing Gadget Envy that you should take a look at. He links to a very good post at Get Rich Slowly on How to Cope with Gadget Envy. It was a nice read that helps you to refocus on priorities in your life and whether or not you really need that latest gadget. Thankfully, there was nothing at MacWorld that is calling for my money this year so I am safe from Apple for now.
If you read my ZDNet blog you will see I use a lot of different mobile phones, but thankfully most of them are loaners or review units that eventually get sent back to public relations companies or manufacturers. The shine usually wears off after the review period, but there are those devices that I do find essential that I purchase. In the last year, I have purchased an Apple iPhone, T-Mobile Shadow and Nokia N95-3. There are probably 8 or so other mobile phones in my review drawer right now that are review/evaluation units. Even though the Lord has blessed me with a great “day job” and a fun hobby career, writing for ZDNet, I do pretty well in keeping my credit card in my wallet and avoiding buying all the latest and greatest. I would love to pick up an ultra-portable PC, but there is no need for it no matter how much justifying I try to come up with.
I think you will see me exhibiting even more self-control in 2008 as I am trying very hard to spend more daily time with the Lord. My daughters are getting older and I want them to have a strong foundation in the Lord as they go through the teenage and college years where a strong foundation is needed with all the added peer pressure and negative influences of society. I am actually extremely close to canceling cable TV too since it seems like such a waste of money and is an influence I don’t want in my house anymore.
Do you struggle with gadget lust?
New WordPress software and theme
I backed up this blog and upgraded the WordPress software on my server. As you can see I also found a very nice 3-column theme to use and updated my theme. The final step is to add some of my own images in the banners.
You may also notice I no longer have any Google or Chitika ads on this personal blog. I am doing fine with my ZDNet blog so I have no need to get a few bucks to try to pay for hosting this blog so decided to take off all the ads I had (there were only a few anyways).
Please let me know if there is anything else you would like to see and thanks for visiting my ZDNet Mobile Gadgeteer blog. Look for some changes there in the next couple of months as well.
UPDATE: For some reason my blog keeps going back to the basic WordPress theme and won’t keep my selected 3-column theme. Trying to figure this out now and also figure out why mobile version doesn’t seem to be working.
UPDATE 2: OK, it seems that the mobile plug-in kept resetting my theme back to the default theme when I tried accessing my site on a mobile device. I removed the default theme from my server and then a blank page popped up. I then deactivated the mobile plug-in and will continue to work on this issue.
FINAL UPDATE: Solved the issue. It seems I didn’t read the README.TXT file (who reads these) and did not have the mobile part I needed loaded into the Themes folder. See this page for details on the issue that is easily solved.
I'm going to BibleTech:2008 next week
Posted by palmsolo in Christian, Smartphone on January 17, 2008
I just received an email from Laridian and learned about the BibleTech:2008 conference being held right here in the Seattle area so I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to attend. My plan is to upgrade my WordPress blog software this weekend and tweak my site a bit more (update it) and then blog about the conference here on my personal blog. I also plan to make a post on my ZDNet blog because many of the sessions I plan to attend are mobile focused.
I am quite excited that such an event that fits so perfectly into my passions is right here in my backyard and can’t wait to tell you all about it.
