Category: observations

We had a new employee start in a group near me this week, highly touted, “we’re lucky to get them” and all that. It’s a clerical position like mine, so my expectations are set accordingly.

I wasn’t quite prepared for her to ask for the manuals for Microsoft Excel (the onlike/Windows help files are pretty comprehensive), nor could I imagine what — on one’s second day — would require RTFM. We have a site license so manuals are not available, anyway. Between the online help and Google, what else do you need?

An hour or so later, she asked someone else “why anyone would use Excel, instead of Word? What’s the difference?” I was glad my back was turned. To me, they’re like a fork and a spoon: they have their uses, and a complete place setting has both. Eating soup with a fork can be tedious.

It will interesting to see how financial reports get done in an Excel-less world.

The position description required a solid understanding of mainstream office software, so I’m not sure how this one was finessed in the interview process. I know I didn’t apply for a lot of jobs because I didn’t want to make claims I couldn’t back up. Not everyone adheres to that, evidently.

My config file stuff didn’t work, nor did this .htaccess file.
Continue reading “spammers win, this round”

Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent

I’m going to solicit redesigns of my sites – and the best one gets an iPod. Yep, that’s right: redesign my site into an aesthetic masterpiece, and I’ll buy you an iPod.

This should be interesting. I’d like to see some interesting design ideas from this.

Edward Tufte: Ask E.T. forum

Project Management Graphics (or Gantt Charts), by Edward Tufte

A fascinating thread on project management, with incisive remarks by Professor Tufte and some excellent “from the field” feedback from hands-on project managers. Perhaps I underestimate the value of the big wall-chart . . . .

I persist in thinking this is something that can be done digitally, in a database of something, but it turns out that folks who manage the kinds of projects I can only dream of use paper for a couple of reasons. They may use a piece of software to handle data entry and printing, but what they actually use and live with as The Plan Document is a pasted-together wall-chart of the project status, written on, annotated, and talked about.

An inflammatory but nonetheless insightful quote:

The design of project charts appears to have regressed to Microsoft mediocrity; that is, nothing excellent and nothing completely useless. (Is the reduction of variance around a modest average the consequence of monopoly?) Most of the charts in Google look the same or make the same mistakes: analytically thin, bureaucratic grid prison, not annotated, little quantitative data. The computer Gantt charts, so lightweight and tinker toy, do not appear to have been designed for serious project management.

I read an article on the use of MS Project by its own development team and the adjustments they made as they got used to eating their own dog food. I’ll see if I can hunt it up.

I dug into the logs and found that her email address is a much sought-after tidbit.

I’m not at all bothered by it: it’s good to see kids reading something with a little heft to it, even if they’re not getting the deeper textures. Goodness knows, they’ll get that later when they re-read the series before book 6 comes out and again for book 7.

While I was looking into this, I discovered this book. Nothing earthshattering to learn that Harry’s world is based on the idea that love is stronger that hate, especially in the Order of the Phoenix: that proves to be our hero’s salvation in this one. It seems to be a thoughtful contribution to the welter of books for and against the whole HP canon: perhaps it’s because unlike most of the naysayers, he’s actually read the books.

For some reason, people are posting comments to this entry as if I were J K Rowling.

I’m glad to know the young people of today have discovered reading, but I wonder about how well they’re comprehending what they read . . .

Chad Dickerson

We launched RSS feeds at InfoWorld in April 2002 after I realized it was kind of silly to force NewsIsFree to screen scrape us to get our headlines (you can get them straight from us here).

Just like I launched the initial, now defunct, CNN newsfeed in 1999 . . . . it made no sense to let other news organizations repurpose our product.

<update> But it goes deeper than that. Considering how news itself is largely a commodity (so many wire services and producers), the value a news outlet adds is filtering and editing, in other words, presentation. RSS is just another mode of presentation, albeit a skeletal one. But it has matured beyond the RSS .91 days and will mature even further: why any organization that has built it’s reputation on being first with the best would avoid a new low-risk/low-cost distribution channel is hard for me to understand.

Well, after several detours through the Slough of Despond at this job, I am on the verge of completing my 6 month probationary period and becoming a full-fledged employee of the State with all the rights and emoluments thereto appertaining . . . .

It now seems that some of my tech skills and interests are useful, so I am taking advantage of the opportunity to learn more about PHP and CSS. PHP seems more straightforward than CSS so far, or at least more familiar. I have successfully created a database, and some pages to query and display its contents, all in a matter of hours.

It helps that the summer lasts until late September, giving me a nice 3 month window of opportunity without students and the background distraction of teaching to get in my way: faculty like to — and plan on — travel in the summer, and staff can’t afford to, so that keeps us out of each other’s way.

I noticed that you can export your library or any playlist that you’ve made with iTunes: what would be interesting to see who else owns the same stuff you do and let that guide you to new sounds. Perhaps this is how audioscrobbler works, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to. but it might make a nice complementary feature, especially since iTunes tracks ratings and the frequency of use for each track.

vpizza.org photo gallery

This is the highest elevation at which there’s a photo.

This guy built a weather balloon from off the shelf components, built and installed a linux-powered computer to run the camera and weather sensors, equipped it with packet radio equipment for flight control, and proceeded to get it up to almost 18 miles above California on his first attempt.