Tag: status


  • The email was an innocuous “Ooh, shiney!” message. RSS feeds are now available for a status site. However, one thing concerned me…. RSS is a relatively new and easy way to distribute content and information via the Internet. I personally have been aware of RSS since 2002. However, as I am a relatively late adopter…

  • Would you believe United States employees cost their employers $650 billion in productivity costs in the seconds it takes for them to return attention back to the task at hand? The time spans lost are the same amount of time required to interpret a CAPTCHA. E-mail, instant messaging, Twitter, etc. are all distractions from getting…

  • Blackboard implemented a ranking system to determine the priority of support tickets. This effort uses criteria like the age and recency of updates to ensure the attention of Technical Support Managers. Certainly this initiative is due to continuing customer complaints about languishing tickets. Last spring we saw a similar push to fix support. We have…

  • More on concerns with editAssignmentSubmission.dowebct on Blackboard Vista nodes. Found an error in the exceptions logs tied to one of the transactions: Error occurred maintaining selective release status-Learning Object Id It gets better…. The assignment in question? Not using selective release. Yeah. There is an error for an assessment. Hopefully it is just the assignments…

  • Earlier it was said I have a Type A Personality. Riiiight. [T]he Type A personality, also known as the Type A Behavior Pattern, is a set of characteristics that includes being impatient, excessively time-conscious, insecure about one’s status, highly competitive, hostile and aggressive, and incapable of relaxation. [Ref: Wikipedia] I will concede I am very…

  • 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,…

  • Melungeon

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    Mom dropped me a note last night. She ran across the word melungeon while doing some genealogy research. It describes someone who is of European, African, and Native American descent. It was popular in the Appalachian Mountains and similar in use to Mulatto in being a negative term. I haven’t talked about this much on…

  • VM(Night)Mare

    So, I need to install software on a couple servers which don’t exist. They are virtual: VMWare ESX. I can see and login to the web site. However, its frustrating to consistently get a working console. I get a partial page with “Error on page.” Going to the error reveals: Browser#ResponseReceived(): invalid content type text/html…

  • Science Mysteries, Explained – Popular Science The world is full of mysteries, and we at Popular Science strive to do our part to help you make sense of them. What causes Slurpee-induced brain freeze? Will junior1s piano lessons make him smarter? Can men produce breast milk? We’ve covered these important bases and more to help…