If you could inhabit the body of any famous person for one week, who would you choose and why?

The intent probably is more to have someone else’s life. However, the way the question is stated, I really would not get to have that person’s life… Just be in that body. I am me. They are they. Their life is based on their responses to their environment. My responses to their environment will be different.  Let’s say I pick a Nobel Laureate. Now I have these completely foreign responsibilities I know nothing about handling. Unless I pick someone with a similar life to mine (no fun), inhabiting anyone else’s body would be a nightmare not a dream. 

Yeah, I am overthinking the question. 

Probably this is because I cannot think of another life I would really like to live other than my own for a week. I like it. It is mine.

1. SMART (Section Migration Archive and Restore Tool) created for us by the Georgia Digital Innovation Group seemed well received. I’m glad. DIG worked tirelessly on it on an absurdly short schedule.
2. Information is strewn about in too many places. There isn’t one place to go for information. Instead between Blackboard, VistaSWAT, and GerogiaVIEW about 29. I amazed I do find information.
3. Blackboard NG 9 is too tempting for some.
4. Vista does DTD valdiation but not very well. We need to XML validation before our XML files are run. As we do not control the source of these files and errors by those creating the files cause problems, we run them in test before running in production. I am thinking of something along the lines of validating the file and finding the errors and reporting to the submitter the problems in the file. Also, it should do XML schema validation so we can ensure the data is as correct as possible before we load it.

A unit of type Institution cannot have a unit of type Campus as a child.

Guess being on vacation last week spaced my neurons. Normally, I ignore Blackboard errors as meaningless. This time I listened to the error and sent myself off in the wrong direction trying to figure out what was wrong with the typevalue element of the XML was wrong. Typevalue defines the level of the context. So while my level was set to 30 in the XML, for some reason it must be ignoring it, right?

Wrong! The problem was really that the relationship.sourcedid.source was set to “DBA IMS IMPORT USG_COL” instead of “DBA SIAPI Import USG_COL”. So it was unable to find the parent object. So the error makes no sense to me now.

Can I have my two hours back?

Why did you do it, Flickr? Why?

Originally uploaded by issuez

Changes to the Flickr home page and Facebook’s overall UI were intended to make them more streamlined.

So why is there a vocal rejection of these UI changes? Well, management is focused on attracting new users. In their minds, the people using the system are hooked and going to stay. Word of mouth is how I see these new users getting added. Upset customers don’t recommend a company to their friends.

tag: photography

Checking me out

Originally uploaded by Ezra F

By this point she realized I wasn’t going to eat her. So she wasn’t trying to scurry away from the lens. Maybe I’ll name her “Liz”.

tag: photography

Our digital footprints both could be part of this legacy or easily lost. I lean toward all this data we spew about the Internet will be lost eventually. I have seen floppy disks and hard drives die, taking with them the only copy of critical data. I have seen companies report their hard drives stolen from their machines in co-location as why customers lost their data. I have seen companies close web sites because they ran out of money. Let’s not forget natural disasters like earthquakes and floods.

So we keep backups.

Who will preserve these backups once we are gone? Are you able to read the data from computers 40 years ago? Maybe we’ll be better about being able to read the data from past when we reach 40 years into the future?

Not likely.

Apparently there are lots of car accidents on Election Day? I’ll hopefully be teleworking that day.

I turned down an offer to work a web site called Real World Painting. The kid doing the web site let it get suspended (back up now). So the owner wanted my advice. He really needs the most help with search engine optimization. He’s interested in reading up on it. Anyone have suggestions? 

A friend has turned up with lymphoma. So I will probably set up a web site to accept donations to help this family with the expenses.

Been talking with Mom about the economy. I did a quick calculation. Add $700 billion to the $10.3 trillion national debt to get $11 trillion. The employed U.S. work force is about 145,255,000. That puts the burden of this debt at 75,728.89 per worker. Add in those on employment or not in the labor force to get 234 million people. We share a $46,936.33 burden. Last I did this calculation it was only around $30 thousand.

That is enough for now.

Provide successful workarounds or bug fixes to the identified issues in a timely manner. A timely manner means within 5 days to the user and 180 days to me. By the end of 5 days, the affected users have given up on ever getting a solution. We know we have lost that user ever giving us the benefit of the doubt about our service again. We only keep the ticket open in hopes of preventing the same issue from happening to another user and losing them as well.

All you other Blackboard customers out there. What did you put here? Or any of the other freeform answers. If you didn’t get to do the survey, then what would you have liked to put there?

Pyyhkala, 36, of Boston, said he has read the book and seen parts of the film. He said his grievances stem from the film’s potential to sway public attitude about blindness. He said the movie exacerbates stereotypes and gives false information to uninformed viewers. [Link] (Since starting this post now requires a login?)

I haven’t seen the film or read the book, but the trailer for the films shows the people being put into quarrantine for a medical epidemic where people go blind. Stories generally portray people as acting incompetent and fearful when they are trapped in an unfamiliar situation. The whole point is to create an environment whereby a person, the hero or heroine, who is the bright light of reason and to whom everyone else appeals can rise to the challenge.

Blindness happens to use people who are blind, most likely because a the author was trying to be creative and use something readers would find new. Jose Saramago: ”Stupidity doesn’t choose between the blind and the non-blind.” [Link]

Chris Danielsen, a national federation spokesman, said while he understands that the film plays on the public’s fear of sudden blindness, the idea that loss of sight is equal to incompetence and immorality is “outrageous” and “vicious.” Everyday tasks like getting dressed and using the bathroom do not become impossible if a person loses their sight, Danielsen said.

Works of fiction do not depict reality. Otherwise… they would not be fiction. Stop giving movies more meaning than they actually have. Otherwise, you give them power they didn’t already have.

The Catholic Church’s opposition to the Golden Compass made me read the book and go see the movie (latter was awful). I wouldn’t have cared otherwise. Denouncing it made me wonder what they had to fear from something so silly as a book and movie. After seeing the trailer, I wasn’t interested in Blindness. After reading about the opposition, I am interested. I don’t have much luck with movies from books lately, so I may go book first.

How are you stimulating your VTA?

You can lead a horse to water, but he will just drown.

Work will often send email to all the employees. A filter sends those to my propaganda folder. I only have 5 for the first three days of September and 11 for the first three days of October. Not a promising start.

Of course, it is election season, so both the DNC and GOP are asking for my vote.

Meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings.

Event invitations from all corners.

Need to hit reset in my brain and boot from ROM.

1. the Blackboard Learning Environment Connector introduced using the hostname and port for applet URLs in Vista 8 Blackboard,
2. Blackboard dropped WebCT’s support for using a different port for an application when behind a load balancer.

And…. it is 1:30am.

Search lijit for it or leave a comment. I’ll do my best to direct you.

The last administrator of [group name] has left the group and you have been made into an administrator. This is because you are the longest serving member of the group. Well done

This is an interesting way of ensuring someone is an administrator of a group. Unfortunately, I have enough groups to administrate (which I don’t do well). So, I just left that one and passed the buck on to another unfortunate soul.

I don’t know how many impossible requests you get, but I do know that frequent impossible requests result in an erosion of respect and a decaying of credibility. And that means when the CEO is standing up in front of the troops asking them to perform magic all they’re thinking is, “This crap again?”

I’ve been there.

The photographers who showed:

• Amy
• Bill
• Dan
• Elizabeth
• Natalie
• Tom

She said entertaining the kids is part of the fine print of the job. Additionally, people have asked employees to take kids to the restroom, watch the kids for an undetermined amount of time, sanitary napkins on clothing, etc. 

In answer to how all these experiences will help her career, she related dealing with all these issues to learning how to deal with unexpected circumstances. 

Is there a job worth doing where we don’t have to think about what is being done? If someone cannot make creative decisions, then isn’t the job better done by technology?