CogBlogged from ‘December, 2005’

I can blog about my big toe and rude telephone trees, but I’ve been completely lax in blogging my experience in going back to the classroom. This semester, my wife and I have been taking an Arizona History class, offered at Maricopa’s Scottsdale Community College. What is remarkable, is the teacher, and reason for taking the class, is a local/state legend/icon named Marshall Trimble. He’s taught at Scottsdale likely since they erected the first classroom and my buddy Jack who grew up here had him as a high school teacher at Coronado likely 30 years ago… So more then teacher, he is living history, having grown up in the little town of Ash Fork, west of Flagstaff, and steeped in cowboy culture, augmented by his years at Arizona State University, working as a trail ride entertainer, and likely doing billions of singing stints in cowboy bars up and down the [...]

Last night, I was using my wife’s PC laptop to test a web site in Internet Explorer, which nicely reminded my that 11 Critical Updates were needed. After running these and restarted, the machine was totally frozen about 90% into the startup sequence. It was toast. Stretching my minimal PC rescue skills, I was able to reboot in Safe Mode (F8), and use System Restore to roll it back to a version from 2 months ago. That was a relief when it came back. I doubt I will trust Windows Update again. We just need the laptop to eek out a few more months. Maybe I can convince the Mrs to get an iBook ;-) meanwhile at work, my Dell laptop surprised me last week when it hung on a restart, with a lovely DOS like warning of a corrupt SYSTEM file. I left it with our IT help desk, [...]

Someone out there has been working at hacking this web server. I am so #&$^$ing tired of wasting my time rebuilding it, trying to fortify it, being a server den mom is not in my interest. This web server provides free services such as Feed2JS and the cheerful barkings of this blog among others. Frankly, I am getting tired of trying to deal with people who have nothing better to do but foist their crap onto my free, non profit, educational oriented web sites. Cut it out. Go ahead and take on a worthy opponent, some big old corporate web site or government installation, but stopping f****ing with me. I am about this close to just shutting it all down. Would anybody mind that? Maybe not. I think I’d rather be laying brick. I have no use for “people” that keel like they can s*** all over the web.

Some people may pay heed to the title of Glen Campbell songs (who is a local, and has even taken tours of the Phoenix Jail) and give me a call or email before landing at Sky Harbor Airport. Micheal Roy, from Wesleyan, and I have exchanged emails for a few years but have always missed crossing paths at conferences. He emailed a few weeks back that he was coming this week for the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) meeting, and we set up a breakfast meeting time (which I managed to enter on the wrong datem, but we managed to chat over coffee this morning in the lobby of the Hyatt hotel). He arrived last weekend, and since I was out of town, I provided some recommendations for some desert hiking in the Superstition Wilderness area. I described my favorite, an intense hike with about 3800 ft of elevation gain [...]

I’ve been hibernating but not necessarily in a subconscious state. First it was the Thanksgiving cold that decided to stay at least a week. Then it was the rush at the deadline of our Learning Grants applications, our internal grants program that has a 100% online application and review system (which means about 100% of my time watching over for minor glitches and helping people find the Big Giant Submit button). Then it was/is making the last dash for our Wednesday release of the new MCLI iForum publication. Then it was about 4 simultaneous requests for quick turn round event registration sites, 3 of which required extra custom programming. Then it was chilling up in Strawberry for 4 days (we hit the low 20s F last night). Then it was… well, it is getting tedious.

Swallowed whole. The Company Formerly Known As Macromedia. No funny joined names. 7 years ago, I might have cared. Today? A collective yawwwwwwn.