I have never linked to Dilbert before, but sometimes they are so funny I just have to share.
Month: February 2005
Categories
Conservation
I was interested to read about Homesourcing and be reminded that I seem to be caught between two radical philosophies concerning conservation and energy independence. Radical not because they are unreasonable or extreme, but because they are so different from the most common proposals for energy independence.
Homesourcing is really another name for tele-commuting, the other radical approach is espoused by some bicycle enthusiasts I know – bike to work. Each of these ideas appeals to me in different ways. I will not expound on homesourcing (since I have linked to it) but biking to work adds the advantage of keeping yourself in shape although it limits how far you can live from the office. The only downside to homesourcing is that there really is something to be said for mixing in the same physical location with other people that you are working with.
Maybe I should bike to work two or three days a week and then work from home the rest of the week. That would be about the best of both worlds.
Categories
WordPress(MU)
I have been hoping to move to WordPress as a show of my support for Open Source Software, and to keep myself free of the constraints of the free license for Movable Type. So far those constraints have not been a problem for my needs, but I would hate to move to another platform in a crunch so I am looking while it is anything but urgent.
Unfortunately my needs include having multiblog support because I am unwilling to run multiple sets of tables to manage my multiple blogs and I want some central control for all my blogging. This meant that I had to find and attempt to use WordPress MU. I finally got it installed, but for some reason it does not produce blogs, just entries in my tables. Well, actually it produced a blog at wp.php rather than index.php but for the non-admin blogs it produced table entries only.
I considered some other OSS platforms for my site blogs, but I decided that – at least for now – they are not what I want. I have finally concluded that I have spent too much time on this project and I would rather devote myself to another, more altruistic, project on another site where I will be combining the wordpress software with phpGedView for a platform which will support online genealogy collaboration
While I will be focusing on that project, I would welcome any suggestions as to how to implement an OSS platform for multiple blogs that I can easily customize to look just like my current site and be fully valid XHTML.
Categories
Ubiquitous Computing
I have been thinking about ubiquitous computing since our discussion in class and I think I have the best current example of ubiquitous computing – Shadow netWorkspace. Not that Shadow is alone in that distinction, but it is one we can all relate to. I can be at any computer in the world with internet access and log on to Shadow and create, upload and view documents. I can keep up with anything that the rest of the class is doing there as well. I do not have to carry any hardware with me because the necessary tool (computer with internet access) is available almost anywhere that I go.
Come to think of it, my blog is accessible from any computer too.
Categories
Excess Capacity
I enjoyed reading about the Laffer Curve as it relates to taxes. I found it especially interesting because I have been thinking about the Sam Walton approach being applied to broadband internet access. I admit that I am wishing that I had bradband access at home and claiming (privately until now) that dialup internet access is no longer considered reasonable access to the internet.
We have the technology and the capacity to deliver broadband to everybody. I realized that this went even farther than broadband. We have 6% of our workforce not working right now and we have people who do not have access to every good thing that they want because of prohibitive costs (college students have plenty of use for broadband, but can rarely afford to pay $50 per month to pay for it). I am convinced that both telephone providers and cable providers could still make a profit on broadband while offering it for $20 per month – which would be affordable enought to virtually eliminate dialup service.
Wait for a later post where I will list some of the benefits that I see of having universal access to broadband.
Categories
Good Catch
I do not think this little fact can ever be overemphasized: Learning Theory Does NOT = Instructional Design Theory. The minute we confuse our prescriptive theories with the descriptive theories upon which they are based it becomes impossible to accurately study or develop our theories.
Learning theory is a descriptive theory and instructional design theory is a prescriptive theory which should have learning theory as a base.
Good catch on that one Rovy.
Categories
Utah Society
I was amazed after my recent move to Missouri at how different things were out here. Inside the church people have a much more friendly and functional attitude and outside the church people have a much more friendly and inclusive attitude. Laura asked why it is that Mormons – who ought to be the friendliest and most helpful people should be so closed in an area where they are so dominant (Utah). I think I have finally figured out what is going on – in Utah and in Missouri.
In Missouri, within the church, it is necessary to be accepting of people who do not share all of our values and beliefs because most of the people around us don’t. In Utah, within the church, it is easy to not associate with people who do not share our values because they are in the minority.
In Missouri (and I hear that most of the Midwest is like this) people are open and friendly and non-judgmental. That stands in stark contrast to the way things are in Utah. Society is very closed. It divides all to sharply along ward and stake boundaries and there is little association with anyone outside you religious circle – especially, but not exclusively, with anyone who is not a member of the church. There is some exception to that as people intermingle with others outside their wards and stakes at school and work, but that mixing occurs in very small doses when compared with the frequency of association within ward groups.
Some people might think that this is all a bitter exaggeration, and it may turn out that my memory of society is not entirely accurate, but even if my memory is imperfect there is another, more sinister, indicator of the cliquishness of the society in Utah. We are often taught that Mormons are persecuted throughout the world. That teaching is technically accurate, but it has the undesirable effect of making people paranoid and closed to outsiders unless it is tempered with the accompanying fact that 99% of that persecution comes from a group of people that is no larger than the membership of the church (which is less than 2% of the population of the United States and less than .2% of the population of the world.
Telling stories of persecution is supposed to make us resolve ourselves to stand firm when things get tough, but maybe we need to spend more time talking about standing firm and less time saying “poor picked-on us.” It seems that we are prone to forget that others are also picked on and it also seems to promote our inadvertently picking on others. The result in Utah, where Mormons are in the majority, is that Mormons tend to be closed to non-Mormons and non-Mormons are not inclined to become more trusting of Mormons than they were before.
Categories
Testing Content Management Systems
I am trying to start using a content management system that is free (as in – not the free license of a system like MT) and produces valid xhtml but I am unwilling to mess with this site where everything is running so smoothly. I once tried to move to WordPress when my site went down and found that it was easy to set up, but I could not do anything. I got a blank site and no way to access the simplest publishing or administrative interface. I have no idea what was wrong but I am less excited about WordPress than I was before.
I finally found a solution. I am going to set up a blog etc. on my family genealogy site. If I get a working system I will test how easy it is to port these blogs to the new format. If I find a good combination I will change all of this, but hopefully the end users (if there are any of you) will see almost exactly what you are seeing now. I have a couple of systems to try – WordPress (it will probably get a second chance), Mambo and Drupal.
I thought it was very interesting to read about the Chicago School in the context of movements within the fields of anthropology and sociology. After reading about the Chigaco School in Where the Action Is (Dourish 2001 p.62) all my confusion was cleared up from the beginning of the Strauss book.
I talked about how RSS would be the best way to keep up with class blogs. In case anyone is interested in using RSS, I have found a page that lists some good RSS readers for any platform – RSS Readers. If you use Firefox as your browser (or possibly even Mozilla) there is a plugin called Sage that you can install here to have an RSS reader built right into your browser. If you choose to use an RSS reader and want the class blogs I have created an OPML file that you can import (I believe with any of the readers listed on that page) with all of our class blogs (3 so far) I will add more if others start blogging. You can download the OPML file here.