Google Notebook Firefox Extension Easter Egg

I just got myself a Google Notebook and I think I like it! Taking snippets of text from webpages and archiving it online privately or publicly is pretty cool.

I especially like the simple Firefox Extension. It adds a little ‘open notebook’ to the browser’s status bar, which when clicked pops up a little in-page pop-up where you can type text or capture selected text from the current page. Very nice!

I did find one pretty neat feature that the Google Notebook help pages doesn’t mention. Right click the button in the status bar, and you’ll find an Enable ‘Note This’ button option. Enabling this doesn’t seem to do much straight away, and in fact, it took me a while to figure it out. But when it’s enabled, try selecting some text, and a little [+] button will appear at the end of your selection — click it to add your selection to your currently selected notebook! Neato 😀

So uses for Google Notebook? I could find it useful for keeping a list of things I want to post about, a shopping list, inspirational quotes, or maybe even for some GTD loving. What will you be doing with your Google Notebook?

Exploding ducks interpolate out of my eyebrows

This is some free writing I did in preperation for a theory session on brainstorming and creativity I am teaching tomorrow. I need some root ideas for people to ideate from. Enjoy, or not.

there was a guy walking down the street and he went to the bathroom. he did his business then left for the movies. he bought some popcorn and then he sat down to watch the movie. but there was no movie. it was taking the banana too feelings it had never assumed before. games exploded from the mouth of the ghananise gorilla, while the bassoon played on the piano. my fingernails melted into blobs of golden chocolate. i took my green pepper and used it for a device to prevent hemmeroids in siamese gulls. the squeeze gun then put on a jersey and danced the gigalo. the guy drank a tall glass of tar and profusely vomited onto the floor of the patisserie. the mona lisa took her glasses off and ate the bottle from the water cooler. the colour aqua and the colour red made out. my bananas never stopped. a tv show character never blew a green goal. my wallet was full of bmws. people congregated around an intray. i believe you have my exploding duck’s complete collection of 1930s architectural dives. my head melted into a million shards of atomic cafes. propaganda of the green manilla folder made me a grand total of eighty five cents. a bowel of fruit was collected from the masses and lo, there was no aubergines that were yellow. a matte stapler attacked a child while they were swimming in the jungle’s largest pool of custard-flavoured tar babies while the jello men were sunbathing in the moonlight. my pillow of keymashed kumara licked off it’s eyebrows which were coated in a yellow substance which would shatter under pressure from either david hasslehoff or that guy who does the joy of painting. a loud number coloured blue explained in morbose detail the mating rituals of an enlarged jumbovision with a blue orangutang. my nipples flew out of george costanza and they took out fps doug, boom forehead shot. lol roffle lol i take it back it was really chuck norris. then a pair of macrovision encrypted sunglasses dropped out of the treasure chest and were crushed by the planet golufulava. my parents took out the trash and used a machete to renovate the viper. a snake coaxed out of me my secret location to my snozberry m&ms. my headphones transformed into warren bady. a haircut took my power supply and used it to get a real job, whilst my exploding duck unexploded. it was viewtiful. joe made shortbread and laughed at it’s lack of blueberry muffins. cakes i like the most, except for daniel. moses exploded and left behind a collection of little puce ducks. the ducks were made of marzipan. i ran to the store to buy some icing and i freed morgan freeman from the narration of some 3d game, maybe half-life 2. then prince albert emerged from his tupperware and i mixed us up a storm with my thumbprints on a lp record made from fudge. we danced but it wasn’t the best. i decided that we should take the exploding munters and use them for table tennis. i later regretted that i used a passionfruit to scrape the kiwi birds from under my nostrils. my wrists were relaxed from all the grabbing of explainitory signage i discovered in my armpits. my brain frazzled and decided that was long enough.

I, Course Co-ordinator

Natcoll have hired me full time to cover for my boss as he goes on leave for three months. So I’m now Acting Course Co-ordinator.

My first big task as CC was to sign all the diplomas which were only just made available to sign the day I assumed the role.

This was a big deal for me. The diploma document is a symbol of proficiency in a skill; a talisman representative of knowledge and ability, if you will. Identifying myself with these student’s time was kinda scary but in an exciting way. It felt important, and I didn’t feel like I should be the one signing them: I wasn’t the course co-ordinator while they were studying. But seeing as the regular CC was on leave, it fell to me. Proudly, I rose to the occasion.

My existing signature isn’t particularly appealing nor can I consistantly reproduce it, so I spent like a good 15 minutes re-creating and practicing my signature. I like it much better than my old chicken scrawl splat of a signature I had.

And so, armed with a sufficently better signature, I signed the diplomas for the students graduating this Friday. Congratulations to all of them. There are a lot of classes there that had finished before I began at Natcoll, and there are classes there I had a lot to do with, especially last year’s 07s who finished earlier this year.

Today at work, we were visited by someone from The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand‘s Adult Education and Training department. Apparently, I can become a qualified teacher and get a “National Certificate in Adult Education and Training” through a correspondence course, and Natcoll will pay for it. Woot! And it turns out I can cross credit some of my unit standards from my Electronic Multimedia course I finished in 2000. 😀

I’m actually pretty excited about learning more about teaching. I read this article yesterday which quoted Raph Koster’s definition of fun:

Fun is learning in a safe-environment.

The reverse “learning in a safe-environment is fun” isn’t always true, but taking risks to practice something new and exciting and not having to pay huge consequences is fun.

Not to mention getting paid to get a qualification — that’s pretty sweet.

Natcoll and the land of PSP

After an incredibly short interview process I’m now employed as a tutor at Natcoll Wellington until the end of the year. They have me taking practical labs in Macromedia Director 4 days a week and a theory class once a week. The work is pretty fun, and the class I’m taking are neat. My fellow tutors are good value, and seem to be really switched on with their specialties, and enjoy a lot of the random internet entertainment I do.

Everyone in my department (apart from the course co-ordinator) owns a PSP. So I figured I should make the most of it and bite the bullet myself. Mind you, it wasn’t cheap :/ Anyway, I got the PSP value pack, a USB cable, a 1GB Memory Stick Duo and the game Mercury, and I have GTA Liberty City Stories preordered.

I also bought a UMD Movie of Steamboy, which is a great anime film — you should see it if you get the chance. But I don’t think that the PSP is a great delivery platform for a two-hour movie, unless you’re stuck on a plane and are sick of playing video games.

Also, hooray for Homebrew! After upgrading from 1.52 to 2.0 and then downgrading to 1.50, I got a Genesis/Megadrive emulator running on there!

And OMG PHEAR LUMINES. That game, once you get into it, is intense. You go into it all relaxed and you come out of it all tense and powered up. I love that game.