The NTC, a Bike Ride, and a Discovered Website

Everything’s going quite well here at NTEN as we’re of course very busy tying up all the loose ends before the NTC. As far as what's new and exciting in my work, I finally managed to make a breakthrough in using our sometimes unwieldy CMS (netFORUM) to design a searchable member database for our website. That project had been on my plate since the beginning of January (and until yesterday I’d made very little progress), so it was nice to finally make some real headway there - and it should soon be up on our website and ready for use.

Outside of work I’m loving the longer days and beautiful weather out here in the Bay Area. Last weekend I went on a really cool bike ride down in Santa Cruz. Looking at the map beforehand we had thought the route was maybe 7 miles with maybe 600 feet of elevation gain. After the ride though (which at points was quite exhausting), my friend pointed me towards a very cool website that lets you track the actual distance of any path, anywhere in the world, and also creates an elevation map of said path (using the wonderful google maps interface). So after playing around with this, it turned out that instead of our planned 7 mile ride, we actually had gone close to 13 miles with nearly 1,000 feet of elevation gain (here’s the link to see our actual route: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=785895) ... so it was a much more difficult ride than we were planning on, especially after several months of winter inactivity.

Well, that’s about it from here, so I hope everyone else's work is going well and I’ll see many of you in a couple weeks at the NTC,

Wow that is awesome! I am totally going to track my next ride with that tool. Thanks for sharing!

Karl Hedstrom's Recent Field Reports

The NTC, a Bike Ride, and a Discovered Website

Everything’s going quite well here at NTEN as we’re of course very busy tying up all the loose ends before the NTC. As far as what's new and exciting in my work, I finally managed to make a breakthrough in using our sometimes unwieldy CMS (netFORUM) to design a searchable member database for our website. That project had been on my plate since the beginning of January (and until yesterday I’d made very little progress), so it was nice to finally make some real headway there - and it should soon be up on our website and ready for use. …read more

My quick intro blog

My name is Karl Hedstrom and I've been working with NTEN (Nonprofit Technology Network) in San Francisco since Ocotober.  I just missed the previous PSO in September so am just now finally getting properly oriented as a CTC VISTA.. Before joining NTEN and the CTC VISTA Project, I served for 27 months in Niger, West Africa as a Peace Corps Volunteer.  My focus there was on community development, but I also delved into several other fields including AIDS awareness, environmental education and small income generation.  This experience allowed me to see first hand the huge impact of technology in the development industry. …read more

My First Blog!

I'm at PSO and we're leaning how to Blog!  It's very exciting.  However, it's not as excitting as the prospect of candlepin bowling ... which is apparently our outing tonight.  I'm not sure what exaclty Candlepin Bowling is, but if you follow that link you can learn more ... that's where I'm going right now!