Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: technology

  • Review: Chariots of The Gods

    Chariots of The Gods by Erich von Däniken My rating: 1 of 5 stars Däniken makes the case that what humanity thought of as gods in the past are actually aliens. We are the result of their breeding programs. Ancient monuments too sophisticated for the peoples of their times were built using the technology of…

  • Slackers and IT

    Go read “Science Fiction Is for Slackers.” As a rule, science fiction may be the laziest of all genres, not because the stories themselves are too facile—they can be just as sophisticated and challenging as those of any other genre—but because they often revel in easy solutions: Why walk when you can warp? Why talk…

  • Athens Tech Blogs

    Our office resides in Athens, GA about an hour from Atlanta. A work news post noting Atlanta tech blogs was strange to me. There is plenty HERE. Why ignore all the great local stuff? And I do not mean my blog. I post too infrequently to really matter and mostly ignore technology of late. Four Athens is a…

  • Organizational Breakdown

    Had a conversation with a restaurant manager when he said he hates computers. His life has gone from 90% working with food to maybe 60%. Naturally he did not get into this kind of work to spend so much time dealing with computers. At first I thought the issue was empowerment. A few decades ago,…

  • Trust in Info-Infrastructure

    James Fallows has an interesting piece in the Atlantic called Why NSA Surveillance Will Be More Damaging Than You Think discussing trust in the US for the info-infrastructure of the Internet is part of why we have Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple. As that trust gets eroded by the behavior of the US government, users may…

  • The Loss of Tech Support

    I found a statement in Twitter is your IT support interesting: For reasons I won’t go in to, I haven’t been able to get [a WordPress install with the FeedWordPress plugin] done at the Open University, despite trying since last July. I’ve spoken to people at others unis and it isn’t isolated to the OU, it…

  • TED Talk: How I beat a patent troll

    Patents are annoying. My field watched the train wreck of lawsuits a few years ago. So it makes me happy to watch a video where someone beat a patent troll. If the below video does not work, then try Drew Curtis: How I beat a patent troll.

  • TED Talk: I Share Therefore I Am

    Human relationships are rich and they are messy and they are demanding and we clean them up with technology. — Sherry Tuckle Technology is the great deceiver. We can use it to craft how we present ourselves to others. Unfortunately, we lose the connections. As a university campus webmaster, I most preferred meeting in person.…

  • Should CS Be Required?

    Each of the nearly 2,000 freshmen entering Georgia Institute of Technology each year must take a computer science course regardless of their major, says Charles Isbell, associate dean for academic affairs at the school’s College of Computing… Similar to traditional general education requirements such as philosophy or world history, the purpose of each courses is to turn out…