What sad news to awaken to this morning–the report of the death of Senator Ted Kennedy. I shook Ted Kennedy’s hand once, or rather, he shook mine. Having wandered into the lobby of a Boston hotel in the early eighties, a bit woozy from the dim lighting and libations of the Tiki Lounge, I could tell that something was about to happen and started to get out of the way. Within a heartbeat or two, the doors to the hotel opened and in strode Teddy Kennedy at the head of his entourage. My eyes got as big as saucers as he marched across the lobby, at first in my general direction and then, for the last ten paces, surely, inevitably, inexorably right at me, with a look in his eye like he had just spotted a relative in the crowd and needed to say hi. Which he did. He grabbed my hand, nodded, smiled as I choked out something to the effect of “Give ‘em hell, Teddy,” and then he was gone. I was left with the thought: the energy, the decisiveness, the genuineness, the power. Someone on NPR commented this morning that Ted Kennedy had more impact on his country overall than either of his brothers. And I guess what he said in 1980 has a special meaning today:
For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end.
For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.
For all you Kindlefolk, here is Teddy’s life captured from the up-to-the-minute Wikipedia in pristine mobi-formatting if you want to revisit the scope of the life of this great American: Ted Kennedy from Wikipedia.
Pierre Gorissen has produced a nifty video on how to use the Kindlepedia tool from EduKindle to create reference articles for you Kindle or any other ereader that supports the Mobipocket format.
In addition, Pierre has written a little script that allows you to make a bookmarklet in your browser (works fine in my Firefox) that will automatically send any page you are on at Wikipedia to the Kindlepedia engine and return the article for download, perfectly formatted with a linked table of contents and live links throughout. He demonstrates how to set this up in the video.
I am posting the video here, and you can see more of Pierre’s handiwork at the EduKindle Community site.
I have been working on getting texts properly formatted for the Kindle lately and thought I would experiment with short articles on topics of interest to educators. The first ones are now available on the “Downloads” page. One is a brief overview of the NCLB legislation that was sourced through Wikipedia, and another is the text of a press release about Secretary Margaret Spellings and her final regulations for the implementation of NCLB.
Of interest to Kindle afficionados is the fact that the first article was formatted, with great labor and perseverance, through Amazon’s “free” email formatting service. It was tough to get the HTML just right so that Amazon would accept it, and, as you will see, the formatting is pretty basic at that. I will see about going back and linking the endnotes, for example.
The second file is an “ebook” or Mobipocket file. This one was much easier to produce as the Mobipocket Creator (free download here) converts from a text file pretty easily. A little light HTML coding to get the headers right, and it is ready to go. Looks great on the Kindle, and will work on other ebook readers as well.
A shout out and special thanks for helping me with this process goes to Joshua Tallent at KindleFormatting. Joshua is an ebook formatting veteran, and he can get these files running smooth as silk on the Kindle. I look forward to learning more from Joshua and recomment his formatting service highly.
