Month: March 2013

Collected Quotes Jan-Mar 2013

My main page on quotes is Quotes to Make You Think. Additional ones can be found under the Quotes tag.

The opposite of good is not evil. It’s indifference. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

He wrapped himself in quotations – as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors. — Rudyard Kipling

Crowns do queer things to the heads beneath them. — George R.R. Martin

Digiphrenia – how technology lets us be in more than one place – and self – at the same time. Drone pilots suffer more burnout than real-world pilots, as they attempt to live in two worlds – home and battlefield – simultaneously. We all become overwhelmed until we learn to distinguish between data flows (like Twitter) that can only be dipped into, and data storage (like books and emails) that can be fully consumed. — Douglas Rushkoff – Present Shock

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination – stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one – million – year – old light. A vast pattern – of which I am a part… What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?. — Richard Feynman

While he lives, he must think; while he thinks, he must dream. — Isaac Asimov

Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it. ― Mark Twain

We must be the change we want to see. ― Mahatma Gandhi

Thanks to friends who posted quotes. Geoff, Janice, Luther. Also, Goodreads has a quote of the day email which are linked there as a reference.

LMS Brackets

I don’t really follow basketball. So, it is odd that I even registered this tweet from Dennis Kavelman, @dkavelman:

Dennis Kavelman  Team D2L has 4 schools in sweet sixteen! Go #marquette, #arizona, #msu, #osu! @desire2learn

He is excited because four universities who are clients of his company are in the major NCAA basketball championship contest. If only four are Deseire2Learn customers, then that means the other twelve are not. That made me wonder what are the Learning Management Systems used by these sixteen schools?

    1. Louisville : Blackboard
    2. Oregon : Blackboard
    3. Michigan State : D2L
    4. Duke : Sakai
    5. Wichita State : Blackboard
    6. La Salle : Blackboard
    7. Arizona : D2L
    8. Ohio State : D2L
    9. Kansas : Blackboard
    10. Michigan : Sakai
    11. Florida : Sakai
    12. Florida Gulf Coast : Angel (Blackboard) and Canvas in 39 days
    13. Indiana : Sakai
    14. Syracuse : Blackboard
    15. Marquette : D2L
    16. Miami (FL) : Blackboard

Looks like the breakdown is:

Blackboard 8
Desire2Learn: 4
Sakai: 4

This is an interesting grouping. I kind of knew Sakai tended to be the product of choice for well off schools with the money to spend on customization. So, schools with strong athletics probably are more likely to have something like Sakai. Of course, I expect Canvas to be better represented too as it is hot of late. While Moodle tends to be favored by really small schools without a budget, I still figured it would have some representation (really just FGCU).

Which LMSes will be involved with those in the Final Four?

Disqus

I am trying out the Disqus comment system for this blog through the WordPress plug-in. I’ve had an account through them for years for my Tumblr. Not sure why I did not bite this bullet years ago. More and more sites I visit use it. It lets commenters authenticate through Disqus, Facebook, Twitter, or Google. The WordPress native comments are spam ridden even with Akismet. Plus the Disqus WordPress plugin is much more user and administrator friendly than Facebook Comments for WordPress.

Well Read? Five Years Later

My reading list To the right is a photo of my to-read stack of books at the time. I noticed the March 19, 2008 date, and thought it would be interesting to see how many of them I have read in the years since.

I count 80 visible books.

I think I have read 47 of them. Of course, that is almost a year’s worth of reading for me.

Boy do I suck at this reading thing. Maybe I should pick out some of these and push to get half the remaining 33 done this year.

It might make me feel more productive.

Really I need to stop buy books for a couple (four) years.

hahahahahahahaha

Yeah, right.

Great Wave

The Great Wave off KanagawaI think I first saw The Great Wave of Kanagawa at a museum in New York in 1992, which I guess would have been the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wikipedia says a copy resides there. At the time I was disappointed in there not being more Sesshū Tōyō. (I have a nominal connection to Sesshū.) And I recall the Great Wave being the only Japanese painting I recognized.

Interesting, though, that I have been to the British Museum who has a copy, but I did not get to see it there.

Hokusai is a wonderful painter. The dark blue of the water is my favorite. And the foam reminds me of hands reaching out to drown the fishermen.