This is the post I created Thursday evening. Greetings, ICC!

All too often, we seem to think of college as a modern invention and mostly for urbanites. Although some of the colleges

have changed names and even locations over the years, you just might be surprised where great-great-grandpa went to college. They might also provide insight into the family’s migration history.

Read the more at …
GenWeekly News & Information Service

And take a look at some alma maters that have changed over the years.

I recall a time when I firmly held the belief that I, who know nearly nothing about Black Hole Theory beyond how to spell it, could post a detailed explanation on the internet that would be cited far and wide as fact just because it was on the internet. That’s probably quite true still.

But there is a lot more quality content out there. There is also a lot of serious fun.

I am fascinated by amazing things humans come up with. I recently watched this really great documentary called A Program About Unusual Buildings and Other Roadside Stuff DVD.

The date on it is 2004. I saw it quite some time ago on this ancient piece of equipment called a television which is now fast following my old eight-track player to the landfill. Most recently I saw it on Netflix. It is one of their Watch Instantly choices.

Now I see that PBS is selling it! It is just so cool that documentaries like this are for sale.

If you haven’t seen this yet, you must! It’s fun and a tribute to the funner side of life. I’m sure I will watch it again and again.

I am curious to see how well this works. I teach ‘07 so I guess I ought to learn how to do it for real even though most people I teach are probably not going to use it.

So far, I have had numerous failures getting this to post. There is pretty decent Blog Help online but…only pretty decent. I’m not seeing how to assign a category to this post.

Judy Rosella Edwards Hey, look at that! Word ‘07 does know how to assign either my name or my initials.

Okay… there is the Category list. It is on the Blog Post tab in the Ribbon. Hey, I’m getting this terminology down, eh?

Eventually I’ll play around with formatting and such.

Here was my issue. I host Wordpress on my own server at http://judyrosellaedwards.com and not on the Wordpress site. The Blog Help was a little vague on that one but I finally figured it out. Your blog account has to identify exactly what directory and on what server your /xmlrpc.php file is residing. The sample is http://<Enter your blog URL here>/xmlrpc.php. My file is actually in a subdirectory at http://judyrosellaedwards.com/blog/xmlrpc.php so I had to type that in.

I still had to identify Wordpress as my blog host even though the blogs reside on my server.

If you are reading this, then the thing worked!

New on my Moodle site, I Can Do This: how to create custom lists in a spreadsheet. I have created three different versions. Take your pick. Free!

• Excel 2003
• Excel 2007
• OpenOffice 2.3 Calc

I realize the high school curriculum is already overloaded, and teachers are overworked. But why don’t they teach us to plan a funeral while we are in high school? Sooner or later, we all need to know how to do it.

My 87 year-old mother passed away last week after months of suffering. She had been under hospice care for some time and her death was not unanticipated. Nevertheless, I was at a loss when it came to the details, even though she had a pre-planned funeral.

I am an only child and my mother had handled my father’s funeral. At least with mom’s funeral, she had already chosen her casket, written her obituary, and selected what songs she wanted played during the service.

Along the way, I discovered a pre-planned funeral does solve many issues. I also learned nursing homes often require residents have a pre-planned funeral before they can be admitted.

What I did not know – and what should be part of our high school education – is all the devilish details. Like who do you tip and how much? Who buys the guestbook for the visitation? Who contacts the newspaper and arranges for the obituary to be printed?

It just added to the stress of all this was trying to make arrangements from 100 miles away. I kept realizing how much I did not know about funeral arrangements.

I found this really practical website with information about how much to tip called What2Tip. The funeral director asked for a recent photo of my mother, so I scanned one and emailed it. In the meantime, they emailed me her obituary which I proofread, corrected, and returned via email. The funeral director submitted the obituary and the photo to two newspapers for me.

I thought things were going too smoothly.

Two local newspaper published the obituary. The obituary also appeared in the online version of one paper without the photo. That would cost another $2.95. Both newspapers spelled my mother’s name wrong in the heading, but they did get it right in the body of the obituary.

Sunday morning, the funeral director called to ask where her gravesite was. The gravedigger had called to say he couldn’t find it – but he had started to dig anyway! Thank goodness for hamlets. Someone knew what church someone from city hall attended and got them out of the service to identify the right gravesite. It turned out, the gravedigger was at the wrong place.

My mother’s pastor was out of town. The pastor who did the service pronounced her name wrong.

On the plus side, my cousin told me he would drive the pall-bearers in his car. At first, I didn’t understand why he cared. Then he told me the funeral home would charge more for the extra limousine. The whole idea of the pre-planned funeral is you pay for it ahead of time and eliminate burial insurance. So there was no money left for extras.

The reason that was important is mom was in a nursing home. If there had been any money left, it would have gone to the nursing home long before we needed the limousine. As it was, there had barely been enough money to pay for her health insurance and medications prior to her death. She didn’t even have money left for a gravestone.

My feet still hurt from standing at the visitation for three hours. It still doesn’t seem like mom is even gone.

But, all in all, things turned out relatively well. Lots of family attended and were incredibly supportive. It certainly made me contemplate my pre-planning my own funeral.

Trying to pull it off when you are in shock from your parent’s death just is not a good idea. Why didn’t anyone teach me how to do all this? Add it to the curriculum!

I am not a member of the Writers’ Guild, but the strike has had a profound effect on my life — and just in time. In the most simplistic terms, the strike was about the impact of the internet on writers. They want and deserve a piece of the very tasty pie being downloaded and shared electronically.

During the strike, my tv watching habits changed drastically. I don’t watch a lot of shows religiously anyway but during the strike I stopped watching scheduled tv.

Netflix (my personal choice among several similar services) replaced my remote control. A remote control really has no control over programming. It just switches from one choice made for us to another choice made for us.

At the same time, the manager of my local PBS station, WTVP in Peoria, Illinois, announced that he forgot to mention to anyone that he was $6 million over budget. Yes, that is the correct number.

Without apology or explanation, he asked for the public to fork over the money to cover the losses he failed to warn anyone was in the offing. I have to wonder why the board, especially the treasurer, didn’t see this impending crisis.

I had been bored with WTVP ever since they stopped showing my favorite show, The Vicar of Dibley. I can get this from Netflix, so who needs WTVP? I don’t hold Netflix accountable for the money I give them. As a public broadcasting station, I do hold WTVP accountable for the hard-earned money people hand them, especially when they play innocent about a $6 million shortage.

Plus, I can get Absolutely Fabulous, Rosemary & Thyme, and numerous documentaries. And Lost, Profit, Eureka (they are real series I am interested in but I couldn’t resist stringing those three together!). And then there is Heroes.

So who needs PBS? Or network tv? Or cable tv? Or the remote control?

One of my favorite shows ever was Bump in the Night. Netflix has The Night of the Living Bread, a special from Bump in the Night.

So the result of the strike was that my husband and I upped our membership from one movie at a time, to two at a time.

And we discovered instant downloads. Netflix lets you watch some movies online for free. Things like Christopher Walken in “Who am I This Time” or Lilli Taylor in “The Weather Underground.”

And how about Conserving America: The Wetlands “…narrated by Burgess Meredith, this PBS documentary profiles Americans working to protect the nation’s wetlands.” Why give WTVP another $6 million to mismanage and HOPE they may show a documentary or two that I might find interesting aside from fund-raising time when I can watch the very same PBS documentary whenever I like?

If the WTVP fiasco had not occurred at the same time as the writers’ strike, I am not sure I would have jumped ship on PBS. But I also find myself skipping network tv to a large extent. I would rather rent an entire series on DVD and watch it when I feel like instead of scheduling my life around the network’s discretionary programming.

Plus, if something pre-empts what I want to watch, like an election debate, I don’t have to wait three months to catch up. As soon as the debate is over, I can go back to my series.

I suppose the WGA envisioned viewers, like me, would eventually convert to such viewing habits. I’m even questioning whether I want to upgrade my tv reception to include HDTV. We have 4 television sets for the two of us. And I just lost interest in spoon-fed programming. I can catch the news on the internet when I feel like watching it, even the local news.

So who needs tv reception?

Whether the WGA meant to push me toward on-demand programming via the internet or whether it was merely a coincidence, it has happened. I don’t mind paying the fees for all programming.

At the moment, I have 161 items in my Netflix queue.

Don’t expect me to go back to a tired old PBS station that mismanages money and then asks for more. Don’t ask me to watch a series 30 or 60 minutes a week. And you can keep your remote control because I can turn the tv on when I put the disc into the DVD player and adjust the sound control along with the room lighting.

Thank you, WGA! I’m glad you’re going to get compensation. It needs to happen sooner….

Copyright 2008@ Judy Rosella Edwards. Do not reprint without written permission.

I signed in to Script Frenzy this morning, and none too soon! It’s time to get geared up. Except I probably won’t actually participate. I probably won’t have time.

At the close of last year’s Script Frenzy, which I did not participate in, the Frenzies posted some “lessons learned” kinda things that look like good advice.

Alliance Library seems to be back online so I have been assaulting the server with interlibrary loan requests for books on scriptwriting. I said in a previous post that I prefer writing to reading — I didn’t say I don’t read! I feel kind of sorry for the local library. I overwhelm them with loan requests and some of the librarians are baffled by such the very concept. But it is a tiny library and I hardly ever find anything there I want aside from old movies, some still on vhs.

I love that I can submit requests online and wait for the phone to ring when they are here. Now, if they would just send the books to my house instead of to the library. Like Netflix for books. BookFlix. NetBooks. SendMeABook. BookByPost.

I guess it sound like I’m going to do Script Frenzy. I’m still not committing to it.

At least it is only 20,000 words. Half what Nano was. I wrote 52,784 words for Nano and could have written more.

I still don’t think I’ll actually do Script Frenzy. Nevertheless, I checked in already. The 2008 forums are up and running even though the contest doesn’t begin until April Fool’s Day. Oh, my god, did they REALIZE that?!?!

It turns out that IF someone were going to do Script Frenzy, they should be looking into it now. It’s not too early to plan.

What is Script Frenzy?

Copyright 2008@ Judy Rosella Edwards. Do not reprint without written permission.

I’d rather write than read. There, I said it.

But when I do read, I prefer to read complex non-fiction, especially histories. The latest book I read was “The Beautiful Cigar Girl.” Like “The Devil in the White City,” it is a book whose title is barely related to the story.

The beautiful cigar girl, who was a real person, lived in New York City in the early 1800’s. She became known for two things: being the beautiful young girl who worked in a cigar shop, and for dying mysteriously.

Her story serves as the framework for the story of another life. The book is actually a story of Edgar Allen Poe’s life. Poe and the cigar girl had several things in common including poverty and dying at an early age.

I have never been a fan of Poe. I don’t dislike his work. I am just not interested. But “The Beautiful Cigar Girl” made Poe fascinating for me in a way I never expected.

I only read “The Beautiful Cigar Girl” because the writing has been compared to the style of “The Devil in the White City,” which is a factual story of the Columbian Exposition – also known as the World’s Fair and the transformation of Chicago from swamp to World’s Fair to its still-famous city museums.

Oh, and a whole lot of crime and intrigue along the way.

Both books are told in a fashion that imitates fiction. Both are told by using extensive research as background while reading like highly-imaginative make-believe.

They are the kind of books that lead us to say, “Fact is stranger than fiction.”

Good reads, both.

Copyright 2008@ Judy Rosella Edwards. Do not reprint without written permission.

From day one, it has been fun to have a computer persona. Creating a cool name and avatar are part of joining in the game.

Over the last year or so I have found myself wanting to shed the mask. I see others doing it too. I predict we are the bravest of the pioneers. We are our true selves for all the world to see.

I don’t know when it really began. It would be an interesting phenomena to research. But gradually endusers are stepping from behind the machine and into the glow of real life.

Dave Winer has been doing it for years. Perhaps it is because he is, in essence, a brand—something he would detest hearing. But, regardless of whether he is promoting Userland or Manilla or philosophisizing, you know who he is and what he looks like.

There is Arianna Huffington with the Huffington Post. But there are plenty of others.

• Holly Lisle http://hollylisle.com/
• Stephen Duros http://stephenduros.com/
• Mark Verheiden http://verheiden.blogspot.com/
• Neil Gaiman http://journal.neilgaiman.com/
• Nikki Andrews http://nikkiandrewsbooks.com/
• Linda Jo Martin http://www.lindajomartin.com/
• Esther Golton http://www.esthergolton.com/

Well, now I’m just procrastinating. But I think I have a new obsession.

Reality.