Category: Computers


  • Is the Internet really a bad invention? According to Doris Lessing, yes. We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing,…

  • New Theme

    Using a new theme. I’m too lazy to make of my own. 🙂 Blue Zinfandel is a 2 or 3-column Widget-ready theme, made especially for online newspapers or magazines. Blue Zinfandel WordPress Theme

  • Last year, we three DBAs submitted three proposals thinking one might be accepted. All three were. Its daunting to think of something because we are behind the times. We run Vista 3.0.7 while almost everyone else is at least on 4.1.x or higher. Also, we ended up changing our presentations last year because we were…

  • Back in mid August I switched to Pidgin as my IM client. I even found plugins like Guifications and Encryption to add back functionality. Starting now, I am going back to Trillian. The painful behavior I cannot stand is Pidgin removing my accounts without any visual notice. What is the use of an IM client…

  • I’ve terminated the daily posting of links from my Del.icio.us account. If you liked those links, then I suggest updating your RSS to the Feedburner RSS feed for Rants (this site). Feel free to comment, email, or IM should you need a recommendation for a reading RSS.

  • Blogs in Plain English

    YouTube Video tag: culture, blogs, youtube

  • What is the worst possible outcome of an event from an admin’s perspective? You lose everything. Next worst is lose a large portion of the data. Losing days worth of data, as Utah did, is huge. This is the biggest news since the merger of Blackboard and WebCT, I think. To Utah’s credit, they have…

  • Social Marketing

    Normally, I consider John Dvorak a crotchety old-timer who doesn’t get human-computer interaction due to his myopic self-centered view. (His use isn’t usually my use, so he gripes seem inapplicable.) Finally, he got one right… almost. In his most recent blog post… er… opinion article, he described people using social networks as “marketing” themselves. Actually,…

  • PLEs reflect the needs of a student information gatherer. VLEs (aka LMSs) reflect the classroom and institution online. (PLEs vs VLEs) Blackboard Vista is a VLE. Its competitors are all VLEs. Vista is the worst VLE of them all as its designed to host multiple institutions in one site. The GeorgiaVIEW project takes the VLE…