Indeed, Bilbo.
The time has come. With our migration to Google Apps, I'm migrating to Blogger.
Right now.

Please follow me here.

The material seemed to be helpful to those who attended. Perhaps 5% of the attendees were students. I was pleased with the response, and was happy to help convey this important information in a personal atmosphere.

Katie's story

I hope we've all read it.

It's more than a political agenda from our nation's president. It's more than "boys will be boys". It's more than "...kids these days...". It's more than our-country-is-headed-to-hell-in-a-handbasket. It's more.

One girl, alone in her love (for Star Wars), isolated by gender, left to contend against the pack mentality of youth. Unique. And ashamed. Shamed by a group of people who fear someone ... something different. Unique.
And so the battle rages. The reign of the beautiful people - the popular people. The revenge of the nerds. Geeks. Dweebs. Dorks. Gamers. Smarty-pants. Comic-book fanatics. CCG-ers. WoW lolcats.

What are we? We are expanding. When most of us ( the geek-nerds) grew up, we were repeatedly humiliated, teased, taunted, harassed, mocked, ignored or tossed about. We were (in general) smaller, nicer, unwilling to fight back with our fists or words, outnumbered, and desiring peace (so we could go play whatever we loved so dearly).

We wanted to fit it, to be cool, to look "pretty", to say the right (cool) thing, to wear the right thing and walk the right way.

So we hid. We vanished. Cloistered in basements, corners or in front of computers we thrived ... sometimes in tight groups - often alone.

But the world has shifted. We are still mocked, and mistreated, but most of us survived and grew up. We got jobs. Our toys are shinier. We bought things, and made things, and innovated, and still could not learn enough. We thrived.

Then along came Katie. An ancient beacon called us. Pain. A flood of memories...

But, we are thriving. We respond. All of us. ALL of us. Thousands write, call, email, blog, send toys, donate and make a connection. Katie is one of us. We will no longer stand by, or hide or run when pushed. We responded.

I was a Katie.
It may have been Star Wars, Star Trek, computers, games, comic books ... doesn't matter. We were different. Nerds and Geeks. We've come together. We've affected our culture. Everything isn't just fine overnight, but being a geek or nerd isn't so offensive now. Isn't so lowly. And we are growing.

Katie, stand tall. Be who you are. We're here.

We worked with Richard to update the Standard Deviation formula(s).

I hope that if Faculty decided to go this direction, we can simply open the system up to all students for all classes. I think it would eliminate some confusion. Faculty are still concerned with the response rate, but the Faculty test group this term had very high response rates.

Adam has the card encoding working smoothly, with configuration only needed on the workstation. We hoping to provide this to them soon, so that card encoding can get underway. We would want the bulk of cards encoded before opening day, so that users could simply enter the facility.

Google Apps. It's a whole suite of tools that includes gmail, calendar, sites, gchat, blogger, etc...

WOU's page can be found here.
Next week Admissions and the Library will be moving over (mostly themselves). We have worked on the documentation and refined a migration process for all campus users.

Some students may not want to transfer, but many faculty/staff have email, calendars and contacts that range over decades. Although transition is never completely smooth, the end product is good and the migration path is refined.

This migration is basically all that I've done for the past 3-4 weeks, hence no blogs :)

So I had to ask for help to convert a Word document to PDF. Didn't really wanna download an app to do it, so here's what I learned:

Word 2007 can do this itself.
Click the circley-roundy-buttony thing in the upper-left hand corner.
Click Save-As.
Select .PDF document, and off you go.

Simple? Yeah. Finally. Finding it? Harder.

Ubuntu.com ... downloads....
Wait! Ubuntu Netbook ?? Cute, cute and OK. Let's give it a whirl...

So you download the .ISO (it's only 700 MB...)
You use a third-party app to set it up on a flash drive.
You install, and voila!

OK, so it's not QUITE as fast as I'd hoped... for a NetBook edition. It still came with a bunch of stuff I don't want (Evolution email, social networking, etc...) but I scanned a few forums to figure out how to get rid of those.
The hardest thing was getting my wireless to work. The drivers did not install, but did detect "from a third-party", but the 18 times I tried to install them they just gave an error. So I looked up the error, and tried and tried and tried and cleared and refreshed and all kinds of stuff.
About 15 minutes later after my 7th reboot, they magically install, so all is well there...

The left-bar allows you to "pin" apps (or remove them) to it. It's similar to the Mac/Win7 docking.

Utilities were a bit challenging to find at first, but that went OK. I got skype installed and tested my webcam and mic. Boot time is about 18seconds (from button to desktop). Mostly that's solid state, but I love it.

The button in the upper-left hand corner is odd. It takes you to an app-grouping screen that seems useful, but most of the time just confuses me...

I gotta play with it more, but so far I'm pretty happy. Performance seems to be slightly better after removing the extra apps and turning off the "startup programs".

I wish I had more time to really push it, hook it up to my 28" HDMI monitor, etc...
That will come with time. At this point Skype, "office", terminal and wireless all work.

Doing this will not only remove some extra contacts, but will help to focus contacts to those still associated with WOU.

woutv is nearly complete.

We have an issue with the featured videos, some formatting to copy and enabling "click-throughs" ( the ability for folks to post video on other pages, that brings them to wouTV and plays it here).

Danielle has done an outstanding job on the graphics and look-n-feel. Eventually Ron will have to port it to PHP, but that will enable Danielle to have full control over the page in the future.

It's a great project and Bill is very excited about it!

Of course, I wrote the algorithm, tested it, ran it and was happy. Until I realized that I should have said anyone making LESS THAN $8.50/hr...
And I had closed my script.
And I was cranky.
So I re-wrote it (shorter this time), and fixed the 2! (count them, 2) folks who made more than $8.40, but less than $8.50.

Sheesh.

1. You can't use ports on Unix < 1000 (aka port 80 and 443) unless you are root :(
2. Even if you are root, a very specific file has to be owned by root (not oracle) for it to even start.

Anyway, with setup from Ross, and help/configs from Ron we got it rolling.
Overall it was a very smooth transition. I'm not sure I've heard a thing about it from the SRD.

On a side note, the most complicated issue I expected was the Oracle Wallet (and it's Certs), but it turns out that you can simply copy the folder over an POOF! it works ....
That's pretty slick and saved us a lot of time.

Faculty will be able to release video to a set of students (securely, dynamically based on enrollment).

This is a good first step in taking advantage of a medium that students connect with, and faculty/staff are willing to work with.

I learned a little about the resolution required by iPhone browser pages and CSS.

PR expects the app to be released by January 1