This Spring I had the good fortune to have the opportunity to go to Word Camp Victoria and both listen to a few of the presentations/workshops as well as lead one of the workshops about plugins for Wordpress.

I had the good fortune to sit in on a workshop with Tim Ayres as he gave the masses a little of his hard fought wisdom being a blogger/real estate agent in Sooke and looking for ways to be effective as a blogger for business. It was an interesting discussion, as he told basically how much time and effort he put into creating an interesting blog. It was a great reminder how you can build a name for yourself, a following and some online presence by simply putting your head down and writing. I'm not in a position reight now where daily blogging is possible but I can say that it is something I would like to work toward.

Next I sat in with Paul Holmes as he expounded on the world of blog aggregators, their strengths and weeknesses. He pointed out the BC bloggers network. That was a new one for me. Which reminded me that it would be fun to setup a planet for Victoria. I feel like Victoria wide would be local enough to keep the contents interesting. I do enjoy reading planet.debian.org would I enjoy reading a planet.victoria.org. Hard to say

Next was me! I talked about in plugins for Wordpress, it's a huge topic and in spite of the fact that I prepped a presentation, I pretty much abandoned it immediately in favor of simply taking questions and doing my best to put together some answers from the expertise in the crowd. That was my plan help everybody help one another. If you were expecting me to be the fountain on knowledge... well... you would have been disappointed. But I thought we did pretty well to address a few issues that people were having with forms, caching, signups, etc.

Finally, I sat in on Raul's talk about having a blog for personal/life and a second blog for professional purposes. This was great to hear his take on it. I've though about this tons. Especially with relationship to different topics. He did a good job of drawing things back to your goals for your audience and first defining those and then letting everything flow naturally from that starting point. Maintaining two blogs is obviously more work, but if you really are trying to reach separate audiences, it just makes sense.

That was it! It was a great afternoon at Wordcamp! I enjoyed having the chance to lead a workshop and hope that the folks in the workshop were able to learn a thing or two!

For the uninitiated CMC BC = Canadian Management Consultants of BC! CMC BC held their first conference in Richmond at the River Rock Casino two weeks ago. Through Terry Rawchalski I had the opportunity to present on what I feel were the salient points in creating a valuable and rock solid web presence.

You can see my slides below

I tried focus not on the technical parts but on the aspects of that are readily accessible to anyone aiming to develop an effective educational tool/lead generator/etc. that is invincible to search engine algorithm changes (isn't that the definition of the stormy sea for a website). For your enlightenment, the 30 second version of what I said 40 minutes to say at the conference is this:

The search engines are getting smarter, closer and closer to being as smart at knowing what we want as we are ourselves (a bit creepy) so let's focus on creating the creating the really awesome, compelling, interesting and helpful stuff that would like to find on the Internet. Put this kind of content onto your site and the search engines are going to reward you with strong search rankings. Because... We the collective people who use the Internet, love great information and tools. I did also touch on how to give the search engines signals that you've got some great stuff, via keyword planning/alignment, linking, more linking and patience. But those details, while very helpful and important are never going to make up for a lack of great content. Show me a site that ranks without content and I'll show you a short lived win. Show me a site that has great content, and I'll show you a great opportunity.

I really appreciated the audience participation, it's a pleasure to present where people are involved in taking in what is being said and dishing out meaningful questions.

As is becoming usual, there turned out to be far too many slides and the last portion of my talked had similarities to an inkblot test. I flash a slide on the screen and say one sentence that describes what feels like the most important aspect of that slide. An exercise in brevity.

Thanks to Terry and Chris Burdge for their parts in what turned out to be a great and well-rounded introduction to creating an effective web presence.

This post has been written over the past six months...

The Gift of Organic Food

After much asking around (Thanks to Sue, Sara and Amit who all offered their opinions), if this gift idea was WAY to far out to be considered a REAL gift, I decided that yes, indeed giving Joanna a weekly subscription to a Share Organics local organic food bin was going to be a part of her birthday (Dec 28th) present. And today (this was way back in January) the first bin of goods arrived.

We started out with a weekly delivery, which while it seemed completely reasonably at first (at $35/week it was a bit expensive for veggies, but I figured that if it meant that we could eat more organic veggies it would be worth it.  But truth be told, we just couldn't keep up.  Too many veggies.  On top of too many veggies. This was likely because we went with the local only box, meaning that the produce had to be from geographically close locations. The types of veggies that we're used to weren't regulars in our boxes. So we quickly figured out that one every two weeks was more reasonable for us.

Flash forward six months.

We kept up getting our bins into April. We had sunchokes galore, leeks a plenty, bags of blueberries, an interesting number of sprouted bean/seed mixes and some delicious greens. Then we decided that we were ready to move on. There's a few reasons:

1. Growing season was starting and I was keen to plant a garden and enjoy both the activity of a garden and the fruit of my labour
2. $35 for a box like the one above seemed a bit pricey, (I know, I know you don't do this sort of thing for economy) but even though it was delivered and even through the food was very good (and interesting) it still seemed a bit pricey
3. We're still regularly going to the grocery store so the delivery aspect of the service isn't really making life easier. Buying organic veggies while you're at the grocery store isn't any harder than regular veggies.

Would I recommend getting organic deliveries?

As an experiment? Definitely. Share Organics themselves were very easy to get started with, they were on time and the food generally arrived in good shape. The experience really helped me begin to get over the idea that bottom dollar pricing is the most important aspect of food. Buying organic seems like a good idea to me, and this experience helped me get in the psychological mindset to want to continue to buy organic, by making it dead easy to have organic food around.

Previously the organic food aisle was generally just more expensive, but having gone through this experience, it seems that the additional monthly expense is really quite small. I don't think I'll be restarting our subscription with Share Organics (or any other providers) when my garden gets tired. Simple plan going forward, remain a frequent visitor to the organic aisle.

Simple problem. I have a bluetooth keyboard, I want to use it at work (Thinkpad T61) and home (eeePC 1001P), both machines running Debian (hardware and OS details). I want to find a good way to get this keyboard connected and running full time. Here goes.

Bluetooth Doesn't Seem To Be Working At All!

First I install blueman. Start it up, most everything is disabled (greyed out). Ok, why is that?

hmm... maybe hcitool will tell me something different $ hcitool scan Device is not available: No such device

ok... I guess that means there is no device available, check the startup via $ dmesg | grep Blue lots of Bluetooth entries there.

next check the bluetooth kernel module is loaded $ lsmod | grep blue bluetooth 41795 6 sco,bnep,rfcomm,l2cap rfkill 13012 4 bluetooth,cfg80211

Looks like the module is loaded. Time to Google my error message http://forum.soft32.com/linux/Bluetooth-ftopict440233.html Provides a hint that I need to install the userspace package, in Debian this means $ sudo aptitude install bluetooth that installed a bunch of packages. Trying my tests again $ hcitool scan (same result) Blueman (same result)

$ /etc/init.d/bluetooth restart (maybe it'll help... nope) Hmmm.. sort of feels like the bluetooth adaptor is turned off. The 1001P doesn't really have a hardware switch that I can see for turning bluetooth on.

Further Googling is talking making me feel like I should really have an entry in the output of lsusb that says something pretty clear about bluetooth, and I'm not seeing that. This really makes me think it isn't on.

I know I shouldn't have to... but I''ll try a reboot to get a fresh dmesg to look at and this laptop has been in and out of suspend a lot, I see that has fouled others up in that past. Nope that didn't help.

eeePC Gotcha: Bluetooth is Controlled in the BIOS

Okay, Got a tip from a site that bluetooth on the 1001P can only be controlled via the bios (are you serious!?!) So I boot into the bios and sure enough under Advanced -> Onboard Settings (I think) there is Onboard Bluetooth and it is disabled. Enable that, save and exit. Reboot.

$ lsusb now has an extra line in it... promising. Bus 005 Device 002: ID 0b05:1788 ASUSTek Computer, Inc.

Bluetooth is Working, Now for the Keyboard

Straight for the throat, starting blueman, YES we have an adapater. Double checking with hcitool. $ hcitool scan Scanning.... alright!!

Now just to get the keyboard working. Put the keyboard into discovery mode. Into Blueman, and searching for the device. It shows up! Good sign. Attempt to pair with the device. My secret code is requested. I enter it. "1111" (the usual) and I go to the keyboard type "1111" Enter. Looks like we're paired. Uh oh it looks like it disconnected. Hmm... reconnect, which works, and then click on the trust icon. Still connected good, good. Start typing, it's working!! (I'm sure this could all be done from the command line with hcitool as well, I'm not exactly sure how.)

Awesome.

Testing, The Use Cases

Now the two remaining tests. At work I'm doing some frustrating hack using hidd --connect MAC ADDRES GOES HERE and if I leave the computer for 10-20 minutes the keyboard dies. It totally sucks. Secondarily, if I restart the computer the keyboard isn't connected. Both of these things didn't weren't a problem in the past, but they are now. So let's see if the problem is the same here.

1. Coming back the next morning and it is still working!!
2. Suspending and restoring and it is still working.
3. And it even works (with a minor delay after a reboot) in the gdm screen.

Hurray!! Complete Success.

Bonus: killing the Blueman applet doesn't kill the connection, I suspected this would be true but just wanted to confirm.

Bluetooth Files

I previously had attempted to edit a bunch of files in the /etc/bluetooth/ and /etc/default/bluetooth, but none of those files appear changed in this case and the keyboard is working fine. Being curious I snooped around and found that the specific device information related to the connection with my keyboard can be found in /var/lib/bluetooth/ but looking at a few of the files. I can see that they are definitely not meant to be editted by hand. AKA leave it to the tools in this case blueman. I'm sure hcitool also refers to and edits these files although I have not confirmed that.

Hardware and Operating System Details

• Keyboard : Microsoft Wireless Entertainment Keyboard 7000
• Debian squeeze (pre stable release)
• Linux Kernel Linux 2.6.32-3-amd64
• And of course my eeePc 1001P

Now to see if I can get it working on my work computer! Thinkpad T61.