I signed up this morning when the tickets went on sale. I’m glad I did, because by late this afternoon they were sold out! Hopefully it will be as good as DrupalCamp has been. At least I won’t be the eternal novice at WordCamp.

WordCamp OC

1. Publish a Restricted Exchange Calendar
   You can publish your calendar to the Internet in a restricted manner. Only people you share the link with will be able to see your calendar’s data.
2. Send the link to people who want to see your calendar. They can subscribe to the Exchange Calendar in Apple’s Calendar app. 
   The people who want to see your calendar can subscribe to the published calendar using the link you created in step 1.  They only need to do this once. Updates to your calendar will be auto-updated in their view.

Publish a Restricted Exchange Calendar

If you have an Apple computer, you already have a handy tool to help you not only take a screenshot but also annotate it for greater clarity.

Taking a Screenshot

If you don’t have a tool like Snapz Pro, you can still take a screenshot using keystrokes.

• Command-Shift-3 – will take a capture of then entire screen.
• Command-Shift-4 – will give you cross-hairs to select a portion of your screen.
• Esc – will let you exit either command

Annotating Your Screenshot

Once you have captured the area of your screen you want to share, you can use Preview (available in Applications) to annotate the image for greater clarity.

1. Open your image in Preview
2. Click the Annotate button in the toolbar
   
3. You will now have a new row of buttons allowing you to add things like circles, squares, arrows, lines, text, speech bubbles or thought bubbles.
   
4. Annotate your image and Save.

Here are a few examples of recent screen shots I have annotated.

I recently started looking at StudioPress’s Genesis framework. It’s a commercial theme, but quite reasonable in price. I also like that you can use it as many times as you need and updates are free. Considering we want to use this on our multi-site installation and budgets are tight, this was a big plus.

Genesis is the actually just a theme, albeit a very plain one with many options. The intent is that you will build your own child-themes on top of it. StudioPress also has many child themes for sale, as do other developers. There are even a few free ones.

I ended up going with Genesis with the Legacy Child Theme. Here are the features that fit what I was looking for:

• 7 color styles
  The blue color matches well with UCI. The style sheet allows for further customization to match UCI’s colors exactly if needed.
• 6 layout options
  You can choose the layout on a site-wide basis and also on a post or page option. This flexibility will be important when used as a CMS.
• Custom header
  This will allow uploading UCI’s web banners
• Responsive design
  It will work well on mobile devices out of the box. A big win.
• Breadcrumbs
  The option of including dynamic breadcrumbs on different types of content.
• Secondary navigation
  The option of having a second row of navigation that can be set on a page or post basis.
• Granular Comment Options
  WordPress by default only allows you to turn comments on or off on a site basis. Genesis allows you to choose between Post and Pages. You may want comments on Posts, but not Pages.
• Custom home page
  Legacy builds the home page with several widgetized areas. You can opt for a static home page, but this has some nice features that work well for Sites@UCI including the ability to do a Featured Sites slideshow.

We plan to roll this out to make it available to all sites soon.

The decision to move to Microsoft’s Exchange was done in part because it was already in wide use on campus, including our Medical Center. This week we finally made the switch from Oracle Calendar to Exchange with all of our prior calendar data migrated to the new service.

I have to say, it went very well. So kudos to the OIT Windows Server Group and Help Desk for making what could have been a painful experience go smoothly.

iCal

I’ve been an Apple iCal user for some time for both my personal calendar and my professional. I had a clunky workaround using a SyncML app on my iPhone to synchronize my Oracle Calendar data to iCal and my mobile devices. It worked, but required manual synchronization every day. If something went wrong in the sync, sometimes I would get duplicate data. For this reason, I only synced 2 weeks at a time so that it was easier to fix problems when they arose.

With Exchange, I finally can use iCal natively. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to do most things natively in the app without having to go to Outlook Web App (OWA) or launch Office 2011′s Outlook.

What I like

• Syncs automatically and quickly.
• Meeting invitations come through in an in-tray allowing me to accept or decline in the app. (This also works on iOS devices.)
• Can invite people and see if they are free at the proposed meeting time. There is also a “Next Available Time” button to search for a time when you are both free.
• If your colleague has shared his or her calendar you can add them in the Preferences > Accounts > Exchange settings under the Delegation tab. This way you can actually view his or her calendar as a layer within your own.
• You can also grant people access from the same Delegation area.

What I would like to see improved

• If you change a meeting, you only have the option to confirm and send an email to attendees. This is probably an Exchange feature, but we’re getting a lot of email from the system. Oracle Calendar had the option of suppressing email either as a universal setting or on a case-by-case basis.
• All day events have to set to “Free” unless you want your whole day blocked as busy. We use this a note to let others know when we’ll be away. We have to remember to set this to “Free” or everyone invited to the all day event will also be shown as being busy. However, this is also an Exchange feature, so it’s not an iCal issue.

Twenty Eleven Showcase Template

I’ve been the dutiful pupil this time and have been doing my exercises daily, which I have to say is helping a lot. It has put me in what is called a “virtuous cycle” in that doing something healthy makes me feel good, so I keep doing it.

The one problem I had, was keeping track of my ever growing sheets of paper. As the list grew, it was hard to keep track of each exercise to make sure I was doing them correctly. I had a bright idea to make flash cards. I scanned each individual exercise with my physical therapist’s notes and made cards that I could flip through.

This works very well, however, it took a bit of time and when I got new exercises I had to scan the new ones, print them out, etc. I thought that an electronic version might work better and looked up physiotherapy apps and flashcard apps. And then I had my Eureka moment. Why not just take photos with my iPhone and swipe through each exercise? Worked like a charm!

DIY iPhone Physical Therapy Flash Cards

1. With your iPhone, take a photo of each exercise you have been assigned.
2. Open your Photos App on your iPhone
3. Tap on Albums
4. Tap Edit
5. Tap Add to add a new Album
6. Title it (I titled mine Physical Therapy)
7. Go to your new album
8. Tap the Share icon at the top right (Looks like a square with an arrow coming out of it.)
9. Tap the Add button at the bottom
10. Choose Camera Roll and tap each photo of the exercise you want to add. A blue check will appear in the lower left of the photo thumbnail.
11. Tap Done
12. All of the selected photos will now be in your Physical Therapy album.
13. You can now use this album and swipe through each exercise daily to make sure you have done them all. Add more as needed.

If you need to re-order the photos, just click the Share button to edit the album and hold down your finger on the photo you want to move. It will become moveable allowing you to re-order as needed.

Sample Physical Therapy Album