Back from Buenos Aires

I am back from a short Spring Break “escapadita” to Buenos Aires. I went with two ladies from my adult Spanish class… ¡Hola Kathy y Donna!… and we had a ball. They were great travel companions. The three of us stayed at my mother’s apartment in Buenos Aires and launched our city tours everyday from there. The weather in March could not have been more beautiful, the sky could not have been bluer and the steaks not tastier.

The trip was a new experience for me as well as I had not seen Buenos Aires from a “Tourist” point of view. It was my first time to go on a city tour bus with other tourist from around the world, spend the day at an estancia or attend a Tango Show/Dinner.

I would suggest to anyone to try to be a tourist for a day or two in your hometown. It was a very odd and experience for me…

For my travel companions this trip was their first time to South America and they were very good in noticing and expressing occurrences, customs, views in language and culture that I was just too used to find anything special or different about them. We were able to realize many cultural differences and amazed that something so ordinary for one would take someone else for such a surprise and have a “how strange” effect.

• Seeing a car parked with an empty bottle on its roof can mean only one thing…right?… It’s FOR SALE of course.
• Making a “ks ks” sound to call someone on the street
• Being able to buy empandas where ever you can buy pizza
• A car receives a license plate when it is “born” with 0 km. It will keep that same license plate, even when it is sold or until it disintegrates

It was interesting to pay attention to language intonations, melodies and perception. When you speak both languages fluently some of those little faux paxs pass by without noticing that they are not right. On the sign below, which we found in the Tango Show restaurant, you can see how Spanish speakers hear the English word “No” pronounced with a “U” at the end.

links for 2007-03-30

• Teach Digital: Curriculum by Wes Fryer / cyberbullying
  Bullying has always been a problem with young people inside and outside of schools, but interactive Internet technologies have provided a digital/virtual forum for these activities and issues. This session explores cyberbullying problems, resources, and p
  (tags: cyberbullying internet_safety wiki)
• Over Two Million Served
  (tags: did_you_know presentation)

Keeping up with all the Information available

Web 2.0 is all about information.

That information is growing exponentially. Mostly everyone is feeling overwhelmed with the task to find the information they are looking for, manage it, being able to find it again when needed (for a report, workshop, speech, discussion) and staying informed and current in the area that interests them.
Keeping in mind that that there is not enough time in the day to read, digest, and keep up with ALL the information here are a few tips on the tools that I use.
Please let me know your secrets and tools on finding and keeping up with your kind of information.

1. BLOGLINES
   RSS feed reader. Here is where I subscribe to all my blog and news feeds. I also started using Bloglines to subscribe to e-mail lists. Like that I do not get my Inbox cluttered and any new post shows up in my Bloglines account.
2. TECHNORATI
   I use technorati so search for special tags, terms and keywords I am interested in. I also create specialized RSS feeds in technorati, that I subscribe to through Bloglines.
3. FEEDWHIP
   Let’s me create an RSS feed from pages, that do not have an RSS feed, like static websites.
4. GOOGLE ALERT
   You can search for any keywords and have any new results in the future be e-mailed to you. Alerting you when someone writes about you, your favorite subject, research or your school, etc.
   
5. DEL.ICIO.US
   Del.icio.us has permanently replaced my favorites/bookmark feature in my browser. I can save, tag and organize websites I find. Most importantly, I can ACCESS them anywhere, anytime on any computer in the world.
6. iTUNES
   iTunes is the tool I use to subscribe and organize all my podcasts, audio and video files. Through content specific playlists, “mark as new” or “mark as not new”, I am able to get my daily dose of podcasts efficiently into my iPod in the morning and still know what files I want to save, delete or leave for later.