Ted, Ted, Ted

Today we strolled around San Marcos quite a bit, just looking at people and things and having a good time. There are a number of very old buildings, and they looked even better in the sharp, brilliant light that you get up here in the mountains.

We spent the day today tramping around a coffee plantation called Finca Niagara. The name seems to come from the beautiful waterfalls that drain the cloud-covered mountains, along the escarpments of which the coffee plants somehow hang on.

The coffee is in prime picking condition right now. Some workers we ran into, taking a break after their shift, reported that each worker can pick a volume about the size of a large duffel bag in a day, for which he gets 30 quetzales, which is about $4. One of them then opened his bag and gave us a couple of pounds to bring home. Paul forced him to take a little money for it.

We’re feeling pretty lucky: we’ve chosen the right time to be here. It gets cold and wet and grim here for about half the year, what the cloud-forest climate and all, but right now it’s just pleasantly cool and dry, just like home.

So here we are in Guatemala. The trip was a little grueling, but it’s great to be here. Hopefully United will manage not to lose our luggage on the way home.

Here’s Paul diving off the 5-meter plank at the local spring-fed swimming place. We spent the morning there and had some home-fried donuts from a vendor.

Here is a game that looks like either a lot of fun or an incredible bore. Somebody try it and tell me how it turns out.

Last weekend a crew from San Francisco State University was on our block shooting a short film by a student named Drew Crocker. It had an angel, Jesus, and assorted pratfalls. I didn’t really get the premise, but we’ll see the finished work soon enough and all will be explained.

Here’s the web site for Starr King school that I put together using Wordpress last month. It’s going public this weekend at the school district enrollment fair. It came to a surprisingly small effort, compared with what it used to take to make a decent-looking web site. Wordpress takes care of a whole lot of the hard work for you, and Dreamhost (which I’m also using for this humble site) does some pretty fine hosting, especially their one-click install script, which puts up some fairly daunting applications (like Wordpress, Subversion, PHP) almost automatically.

When I got back from India, Mary and Laura picked me up at the airport and we hauled ass to the Playmates preschool harvest festival, where Laura and I were booked to do some pickin’ and grinnin’ with our friends Breck and Stanley. We played a few tunes and had a blast, even though I was mostly asleep and in a bit of pain from 24 hours as a sardine. Playmates is on the short list of my favorite places on earth, and it’s always great to be there doing something fun.

This site has an impressively long list of education policy blogs that a person could spend all day looking at. I can’t do that, but I can reprint the list right here for those who are interested:

Andrew Pass
Barnett Berry
Bill Jackson’s Education Blog
Board Buzz
The Chalkboard
Charter Blog
Chris Correa
Cranky Professor
Critical Mass
DC Education Blog
Dave Shearon
D-ED Reckoning
The Education Wonks
Ed Knows Policy
EdPol
edspresso
EdWize (UFT)
Eponymous Educator
The Essential Blog
The Gadfly
Get on the Bus (Dayton Daily News)
The Gradebook
HE & OS
HUNBlog
IALA
In Other News (Ed Week)
Instructivist
Intercepts (Mike Antonucci)
Jenny D.
Joanne Jacobs
John Merrow
Kindling Flames
Matthew Yglesias
Mark Lerner
NCLBlog (AFT)
NYC Educator
Quasi Dictum
School Me
School of Blog
School Zone
Schools Matter
SharpBrains
Sherman Dorn
Small Talk
Special Education Law Blog
The Start of Something
Teach and Learn
Teacher Voices
Teachers’ Lounge
Teaching in the 408
Tim Frederick
VARC Blog
The Wake-up Call
This Week in Education
Whitney Tilson

I’m getting better at catching onto internet hipster buzzwords. At this rate, by 2008 I’ll notice one while it’s actually still in use. Going Bedouin appears to be a term of art for freeloading work space at cafes with free wireless, the way I do most of the week, and look, I’m only about nine months late catching on.

So I’ve been thinking. CollabNet (where I work) is all about tools for distributed development. (Mostly for software, but there are customers in biotech and manufacturing too.) Its main product includes a database component called Project Tracker (PT). The essential concept behind PT is the artifact, which is a generic work item that the user can configure to represent any measurable part of a project, such as an action item, requirement, trouble ticket, test plan, use case, or whatever. The idea is that you can build your own project tracking system out of artifacts that you design to match your very specific needs, while PT handles the back end for you — stuff like change tracking, reporting, and so on. We also provide some basic pre-designed artifacts out of the box, which many customers use until their needs get complex enough to require their own custom artifacts.

What I’m thinking is, what if there were an artifact that represented a DITA topic? This artifact would contain the actual content of the topic, plus the reviewing trail, plus the metadata that would enable you to assemble topics into outputs by running a query. A writer wouldn’t have to know any DITA markup to play in this game — they would just have to fill in fields, such as Shortdesc, Context, Step 1, Step 2, etc., which would be converted to DITA markup using the XML export functionality that PT has in spades. I think there is some precedent for a web-form-based model of topic drafting, although I don’t have any experience with it. This new XDocs thing, for example.
I say “just,” but of course I don’t mean that; there’s still a lot of skill involved, but its exercise is moved back from the text creation and tagging phase to the conceptual phase. Writers could spend most of their time and brainpower designing the document and defining the topics required. Once that’s done, the actual drafting might seem like an afterthought.

Laura’s web site is up and running. It has a comments area, which she invites everyone to use, and will soon have some of her awesome art. This weekend she graduated from MS Paint to Paint Shop Pro and has already been producing some impressive stuff. Stay tuned.

Here’s a place to keep track of gas mileage online. We are temporarily (we hope) the owners of a three-car fleet, so knowing what each car can do becomes even more important than usual.

On my first trip to Chennai, I tried on a sari at Rasi’s, the big silk emporium in the Mylapore neighborhood. I was impressed with its elegance and ease of use, not to mention the glorious fabric, something I’d never had much of an eye for until then. Kevin held onto the picture for months, no doubt to avoid scandalizing the community. Only now does the sordid truth emerge.

In general, I like movies about which I can say, “I’ve never seen anything like that before.” Mary and I sneaked off and saw the Borat movie the other day and it was like that. My ribs still hurt from the laughing — I think the damage was done during the climactic fight scene in the middle of the movie. (Warning, not that you need it: we were kind of glad we didn’t bring the kids.)
In other movie news, I just found out that there is a Bollywood movie house down in San Jose and another one in Fremont. That’s going to be our next movie outing with the kids. I can’t wait to see their reaction.

We thought we were being pretty organized, what with getting Lilly’s lion costume way back in September and all. Of course, the day before Halloween we found out she had grown out of it already. So Carolyn led a pre-Halloween craft marathon, and Lilly came out as a beautiful fairy princess with a glittering tin foil crown. (See all the festivities.)