Sunday, December 19, 2010

My First Earthquake

I've been studying faults and earthquakes for over a year now, but it was not until just now that I felt my first trembler. I'm currently visiting my fiancé's family in Los Altos, CA. We were all sitting around the breakfast table when all the sudden the plates all started rattling. It was very brief, only a couple seconds long, but it was definitely an earthquake.

The USGS has it initially sized at a magnitude (local magnitude, ML) of 3.1

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsus/Quakes/nc71498795.html

Donate to charity simply by browsing the web

Google Chrome is now offering an extension that tracks the number of tabs you browse in a day. Google will donate an as-yet-unspecified amount of money per tab viewed, up to 250 tabs a day per user, up to 1 million dollars. The effort started Wednesday and stops today, but I just now learned of it now. Grab it while you can and spend the day helping charities as you browse the web.

http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/p/cause/#tnc

Thursday, December 2, 2010

CCOM/JHC seminars now offered as webinars!

The CCOM/JHC seminar series, that occurs each fall and spring semester, and pulls in some fantastic speakers, is now offered as a webinar so anyone, anywhere can join in.

Each week, generally by Wednesday (and certainly by Thursday), you will see a headline on CCOM's homepage of their website advertising the coming Friday's seminar, along with a link that allows you to register for the webinar. The webinars will play in almost any browser on a Mac or PC. For a full list of requirements, view here and click on "attending a webinar."

If you attended our very first attempt at this, Friday, Nov. 19th, you know we had some "technical difficulties." Our speaker was using Keynote on her Mac, and we did not realize that by default Keynote is set to not allow screen sharing. As a result, our webinar had audio, but not video. We now have all the kinks worked out and tomorrow's webinar so hopefully go off without a hitch, video, audio, and all. You'll even be able to text in questions!

Tomorrow's seminar: Multi-Source Geospatial Information Integration and Analysis for Coastal Management and Decision Making by Ron Li, Director of the Mapping and GIS Laboratory at Ohio State University. Just click the title to register.

BTW, if you want to know how to make Keynote and GoToWebinar play nicely (in case you're ever giving a webinar), check out the super quick solution here, you just have to change one preference.