Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Month: November 2010

  • Special Characters Are Meaningful Too

    Dear Google, When you treat special characters such as underscores, colons, and hyphens as a space, you corrupt my search for a single term into multiple terms, aka not what I sought, so I get too many useless results. Function names, class names, or file  names ought to be treated as a single word not…

  • Communication

    A while ago, there was some kind of difficulty understanding why we (the DBAs) and another group were unable to read the same words yet not draw the same conclusion. The words in bold are what I wrote on my white board explaining why there was a difficulty. Communication Vocabulary Standards: Words have agreed upon…

  • LMS Non-Negotiables

    I listened in on the first town hall meeting for our USG LMS Transition Task Force on Thursday. There are 3 more town halls this week and a final one December 9th. It sounds like the task force is looking for what items are non-negotiable, extremely important, nice to have. Here are the non-negotiable items…

  • Teeshirt Roundup

    Recently, Patrick asked how many geeky teeshirts do I have? I have 17 unique shirts. (Bought multiples of a few.) Bruce asked how many have a picture on Facebook? He had posted many of the pictures of me and most of those involve a geeky teeshirt. Thinkgeek Shirts got root? /Everyone stand back/ I know…

  • Things We Can Live Without

    We have a tendency to over-exaggerate what will make us either happy or sad. That gadget, clothing, car, etc. probably will not turn the world into a Utopia. So I found this Profhacker post, “Things We Can Live Without” interesting. I don’t mean annoying things we could do without, like complaints about grades or being stuck in…

  • Library Netflix Model

    I tend to buy books. As Heather pointed out on Flickr, I could save lots of money by checking books out from the library. I don’t for one big reason. I am lazy. Most of my purchases fall within a sweet spot of wanting to read more about something because I heard about it on…

  • Community

    Are people in the United States more insular? Is technology getting in the way of us being able to communicate? Why is technology breaking up marriages according to NPR? The line which stood out to me is: But opportunity is a key predictor of infidelity, and social media have increased opportunity exponentially. Just 10 minutes…

  • Hawthorne Effect

    At work we are being asked to enter the amount of time we spend on certain activities into an online form. This is ostensibly so some people can get a handle on where people at my level (the bottom) can get better a sense of where we are putting our efforts. Yet, we are not…

  • Unsupported=Supported?

    The answer to the differences between the wiki and browserchecker.xml according to Blackboard? It is very much intentional to leave unsupported browsers in the browserchecker.xml just in case those unsupported browsers do still work. Also in the answer was that in general only the two most recent stable browsers will be kept as supported. Since…

  • Changing Education Paradigms

    Sir Ken Robinson, who has the great TED talk on how education kills creativity, Schools Kill Creativity, has a new one. A key concept is divergent thinking, an essential capacity of creativity, is the ability to see multiple answers or approaches. Education appears to kill off divergent thinking. Creativity is important to problem solving. I had…