Category: Computers


  • A ticket our Blackboard technical support manager marked as really urgent was picked up by another technical support person who left a note about calling me. Except, the familiar phone number called wasn’t my office number or even my cell number. Nope, it is the office number at my previous job. Yup. I have not…

  • Kentucky’s Bill HB775 would require those operating web sites or blogs or message boards in the state to enforce a policy to collect legal names, postal addresses, and email addresses to use the service. The legal name would, of course, be posted on the web site. Should the poster cross someone else, then the operators…

  • Cross posted from Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric? Babies are fascinated by me. When the two of us are in a room, they often find me the most interesting thing in the room. Usually, it is mutual. So, a mutual friend of a friend, Mojan has a fantastic blog. The past year or so has been…

  • Babies are fascinated by me. When the two of us are in a room, they often find me the most interesting thing in the room. Usually, it is mutual. So, a mutual friend of a friend, Mojan has a fantastic blog. The past year or so has been about being pregnant and most recently figuring…

  • 5 & 10 is a nice place. aya1081 and brittsaqt invited me out for dinner with some others. Good trout and ‘tater pancake and desert. So now I am home and killing time before doing the maintenance for work tonight. At least that will be short. I won’t even get to catch up much on TiVo…

  • File Conversion

    Zamzar came in useful today. Someone sent a WordPerfect document. My Windows XP didn’t know what to do with it, so I found Zamzar off my del.icio.us bookmarks and sent the file for conversion. I was able to open the file no problem. Fantastic! I can see lots of uses for this sort of thing.…

  • Maybe I need to add a “What were they thinking?” category? A student created a Facebook group for chemistry students to ask peers for help. As these students already collaborate face-to-face in a study room and use official tutoring services, this was just replicating this online. The students claim to just be helping each other.…

  • First Metricocracy measured hits. Pictures and other junk on pages inflated the results so Metricocracy decided on either unique visitors or page views. Now, the Metricocracy wants us to measure attention. Attention is engagement, how much time users spend on a page. What do we really want to know? Really it is the potential value…

  • When naming files, I would make a file with today’s time stamp 20080304. My brain was confused for a second when it saw 13012008. There are not thirteen months! Oh…. I have to use ls -latr to get the list in chronological order instead of just ls. Month-day-year I can understand (old habits die hard).…