User:Robby

Here I am, writing from "the road," exploring the cutest little green computer on the planet.

Secret identity

"Robby" is the "inner child" of Bob, a former mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper... Other shades of green, here:

• http://stepno.com -- my Home page includes this authentic Robby picture, which marks the beginning of my interest in news reporting, assisted by my grandmother, and documented photographically by Robert S. Stepno, my dad.
• http://boblog.blogspot.com -- a periodically dormant weblog now being used for XO-related testing
• http://couranteer -- my "other journalism" blog

XOlogy and biography

Now a journalism and media studies professor at Radford University in southwest Virginia... Along with writing and editing for newspapers, magazines and websites, I've stumbled in and out of anthropology, ethnomusicology and the computer industry... along the way discovered "hypertext" and online communities in the 1980s, before the Web began... and, in the process, developed a fascination for new technologies for writing and communication -- from my first 26-pound "portable" OsborneI computer in 1982 to this XO almost exactly 25 years later!

My XO arrived well before Christmas. Since then, I've been watching the online docs,[1] wikis and forums[2] develop... while I traveled with the XO from Virginia to New York City, Connecticut, Rhode Island, back to Virginia and as far south and west as Knoxville, Nashville and Memphis... making extensive use of T-Mobile at Starbucks along the interstate highway named for Al Gore's dad.

Discoveries

1. An early version of the keyboard-shortcuts wiki page was wrong: alt-tab, not ctrl-tab, cycles among running programs (activities, in XO speak)
2. Related SAD discovery, two weeks later: My alt-key sticks at times, creating much randomness. See my symptoms and the official bug track discussion and RMA verdict.

Contributing to the community

I belatedly discovered a familiar face involved with OLPC and he pointed me to the Report project as a place I might be able to contribute.

I also suggested that the XO's library incorporate some journalism tutorials originally written for the MIT Media Lab's Silver Stringers project. Either my friend took my advice or I had missed the fact that they are already here: Learning_activities/Journalism

I've started a discussion of how they might be adapted for youngsters using the XO.

Humor?

XObservation: Was someone from MIT making an inside joke when they called xo programs "activities," including the UNIX terminal... which makes working directly in unix the "terminal activity"? It's actually the area where I'm learning the most from the XO, exploring its Linux understory to copy files and fix small problems like the system date.

Robby 16:45, 8 January 2008 (EST)