Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: design

  • Creature of Habit

    I can be pretty scatterbrained. Time has a way of whizzing past when engaged in some activity. Creating and adhering to a schedule makes being where I need to be easier and less stressful. Pre-smartphone, I set Google calendar to send me SMS notifications to give me a heads up about meetings or appointments. If I…

  • TED Talk: Taryn Simon

    My favorite quote from Taryn is, “Photography threatens fantasy.” Disney uses intricate interior design, photography, and video to construct fantasy. Advertisements, magazines, weddings, and portraits are about showing others the ideal instead of the reality. Have you seen the Dove Evolution video? (This one has music and singing by a Baha’i musician Devon Gundry.) What about…

  • Superhero Economy

    Watched a number of episodes of Justice League Unlimited today. Buildings, roads, and machines get pulverized by the violent actions. Someone rebuilds all the destroyed stuff because in the next episode, everything is pristine to get pulverized again. So much rebuilding must suck for insurance premiums. However, it does ensure lots of construction employment, material…

  • Stalking Students

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    On the BLKBRD-L email list is a discussion about proving students are cheating. Any time the topic comes up, someone says a human in a room is the only way to be sure. Naturally, someone else responds with the latest and greatest technology to detect cheating. In this case, Acxiom offers identity verification: By matching…

  • Tell Michael Chasen

    From a January 13, 2009 email from Michael Chasen to the customers: Please share any feedback with me directly at a Web site created for just that purpose called Tell Michael Chasen.  I will personally read every message I get, so please let me know what you think. That page in the email is no…

  • Feedback Loops

    Remakes don’t scare me. Some are good. Some are bad.  The thing to remember is, “Its just a movie.” The world won’t end over a poor movie. There’s always another one in a few weeks to either like or hate. If it stands up to the test of time, then you’ll buy the Blue-ray and…

  • Expression Costs

    (This started out as a blog comment for Sania’s post Facebook Killed Your Blog. I’m posting it here first.) We share blogs with the whole world. So our blogs get lost in the noise, bolstering the need for a whole industry optimizing getting found in search engines. Its a concerted effort just get noticed. That’s…

  • Mail From Address

    It appears CE/Vista has several locations for defining the email addresses it uses for SMTP. $WEBCTDOMAIN/config/config.xml: mail.from= From address for messages sent. $WEBCTDOMAIN/customconfig/startup.properties: WEBCT_ADMIN_EMAIL= Some internal errors have a mailto: prompt to contact the server administrator. $WEBCTDOMAIN/serverconfs/log4j.properties: log4j.appender.EMail.To= Report fatal errors. $WEBCTDOMAIN/serverconfs/log4jstartup.properties: log4j.appender.EMail.To= Report fatal errors. $WEBCTDOMAIN/webctInstalledServer.properties: WEBCT_ADMIN_EMAIL= Installer picks up this value for populating…

  • Higher Ed Twitter List

    Karlyn Morissette posted her Master Higher Ed Twitter List. Other than @eironae and @barbaranixon, I didn’t know anyone on the list. So I thought to post a list of higher education professionals I follow categorized by primary expertise. Blackboard twitterers might be another post. Those in bold are coworkers. College / University / Departments @atsu_its…