Via OLDaily comes this piece about developers at Cambridge building a new interface for Sakai based on Google’s OpenSocial API. This is good because Sakai utterly sucks at the UI level and the observation about it being written by and for hard core Java developers (who love architecture) with no space for innovation by others is completely accurate. It’s a very long-standing complaint of mine.
Comcast gets mad props for finding and following up on my post about their local office, which is both fixing the door and fixing the signs.
Air Canada gets my ire today with numerical error codes when trying to buy a flight. You have to call them to find out what the error means. Rapidly running out of patience, especially when I’m trying to give them a pretty sizable chunk of cash.
Update: Comcast emailed me for details, followed up with my local office and got the signs and door fixed!
Saying something negative about Comcast is hardly news, but stopping by my local office provided two examples that struck me as emblematic. There was a sign on the door telling people not to slam it. However, the problem was that simply letting go of the door made it slam. This means that the problem is not the responsibility of customers, but rather very simply that their door needs fixing. However, the sign made it their customers’ fault. Then there was a sign telling people off for using their cell phone while in line. While no-one’s excusing the potential rudeness of conducting a call while also conducting business, and it can certainly be annoying, the sign framed the problem in just the wrong way.
Simply a matter in both cases of striking precisely the wrong tone.
I had an opportunity to present at this Digitial Government conference last week. Here’s the session information. I think the presentation itself should be online soon. It was loosely based around this JISC document on Web 2.0.
Given the audience, I was quite nervous, but I think it went off well. There ended up only being two of us on the panel (the third member was sick), so we each used more time, which I was grateful for (I can get a bit chatty). A number of questions were directed at my topic, which I presume indicated interest.
A week or so ago, I read the strange tale of neighbors and noise. In a lovely application, an english teacher (who surely deserves some kind of acknowledgment for creativity) had his students read and respond in a couple of different ways, recording their performances, and putting their content on a wiki.
Lovely.
Read about it in Ironic Sans: “Dear Sophina” — An amazing follow-up to “The Astoria Notes”.
Hidden away in Google Scholar Preferences is the ability to automatically show links to import citations into EndNote, RefWorks, etc. I didn’t know that. It could have saved me considerable time. Via this thread on mefi about Ottobib - an ISBN to citation converter.
Alan creates a meme: Linktribution. Actually, I was thinking about this concept today, because I was searching for some code I wrote some years ago, and found it reproduced in a number of places online. That’s fine and dandy with me since it typically has my contact information in it (umm….outdated however).
Whenever people attribute things to me in e-mail (on Blackboard lists for example), I can pretty much guarantee that they’ll get my name wrong. Most people do…..”Todd”, “Davis”, “Carter”, “Tod Carter”….I have finally learned to let it go, and forgive people for not hearing it right when I say it either. I have to twist my mouth to approximate an american accent when spelling it out.
I’ve been working on some things I don’t want to talk about yet, but there’s a light I’m beginning to see at the end of the tunnel, and no, it’s not a train.
Oh, and I want to follow up on the Creative Commons thing. Forget Creative Commons, most people I encounter haven’t heard of blogging…sigh.
The list of Google services tied to my account keeps getting longer and longer. I noticed my Gmail services menu has now added an integrated Writely and Google Spreadsheets (”Docs & Spreadsheets”) tool, and there’s also a “Photos” web service (Picasa as a web service) item now. The full list (at least for me):
My kids’ elementary school has the principal blogging using blogger, and the school calendar maintained using Google Calendar. This makes it really easy to keep track of what’s going on at their school, using my customized Google Homepage. I’ve added the RSS feed for the principal’s blog to my home page, and the school events to the calendar widget. A bit of digging reveals that Google Calendar also supports RSS, so I could be reading both in any RSS reader.
Now, if only the teacher blogs (yes, there are those) had RSS feeds too, but they use Think.com sites instead.
It’s gratifying as, dare I say it, a pioneer in this stuff to see it becoming mainstream…eight years or so after it all got going!
My boss was in this part of the state today, and stopped by. He very kindly took our team out to lunch. We don’t exactly work in a major metropolis….it’s more a truck stop off I-81. We ate at a simple barbecue place in a standard shopping plaza (a Kroger and about 8 other stores, and that’s about all there is around there). As we were finishing up, someone looked up and said, “Oh, there’s George Bush.” My first reaction was mere confusion, and then surprise as a black SUV parked, and a secret service guy walked into the restaurant, followed by George Bush (the senior).
I quickly snapped a very bad picture using my cellphone, and then my boss and one of my co-workers, neither of whom could ever, ever be called a shrinking violet, headed over to ask if he would allow to have our picture taken with him. He very graciously did, and my boss pulled out his digital camera.
He asked if this was a “Mother and son” picture, which unintentionally gave us a bit of a laugh, and then we left him to get his lunch. It was all very low key. No huge entourage. Just him and a couple of guys basically. It did occur to me that such a picture could have cost me several thousand dollars a few years ago.
I was born and bred in England, and so really have no automatic reverence for the presidency, and I hope, no particular reverence for anyone who holds high office, so I’ve found my reaction to be a bit more subdued than my co-workers who were pretty tickled about the whole affair (although to be fair to them, not with awe). Part of me feels that the really classy thing would have been to just ignore him and let him have some lunch, and acknowledge that there was nothing special about him, that he was just a guy doing his job. In terms of the cult of celebrity, I feel a little bit that I let myself down by having the picture taken. I didn’t say anything meaningful. I just had my picture taken with him, and, considering the alternatives that didn’t really make the world a better place. I just kept an old man from his lunch.
As is usually the case, about three hours later I thought of some things I maybe would have liked to say to him, aside from my mumbled “Thank you”. Perhaps I could have told him that although I didn’t agree with a lot of the things he did while he was in office, I thought he was a pretty decent guy and I respected him, and I could have thanked him for his service both then and in earlier times. But he is no longer a public figure, I doubt he would care to hear my opinion, he’s eighty-one years old (and looking very healthy) and he probably just wanted some barbecue.
I could have said something about his son, and the war, and the country. Would it have made any difference? I doubt it. Was it my moral duty to do so? Maybe so, even if it were a whisper in a storm.
I’m surprised that an old guy having some lunch at a truck stop could confuse me so.