Library & Information Services invites applications for the position of Computing Lab Manager to be responsible for the configuration, security and maintenance of all public computing facilities on campus. S/he will work directly with faculty and students to provide the software and hardware resources needed to support the teaching and learning mission of the College. This person will supervise some student employees.
(Middlebury College, Middlebury VT)
her ”Who would you like to talk to?”
me “Arin Goldberg”
her “Did you say Erin Goldfitter”
me “No”
her “okay. Can you say the name again?”
me “Arin Goldberg”
her “Thank you. I found someone named Aaron Goldstein, is that correct?”
me “No”
her “hmmm. Let’s try again. Who are you trying to reach?”
me “A-rin Gold-berg”
her “hmmm. I can’t find anyone by that name. What is the person’s email address?”
me “aring”
her “oh, are you looking for Arin Goldberg?”
me “yes”
her “just one minute, I’ll connect you”.
So this sounds really obnoxious, but it wasn’t actually. I was being helped by Microsoft speech server. I loved how the program kept rephrasing the question so that it sounded like I was REALLY talking to a real person who cared. Neat. I really have to learn to ennunciate better, though, I guess. (It’s not exactly the conversation, but how I best recollect it)
Rather than subject you to the “important message from Robert Redford“ (ooh aah) that was forwarded to me today, the gist of the message is that you can go to this website (http://www.savebiogems.org/westernarctic/takeaction.asp?RR0407) and easily send an email to the Bureau of Land Management to tell them how you feel about oil drilling in the Western Arctic Reserve of Alaska.
Here are just some key parts:
…sacrifice one of America’s greatest natural treasures — the Western Arctic Reserve of Alaska — to massive oil development.
Over the next 30 days, the Bush administration is taking public comments on its plan to put 96 percent of the reserve’s wildlife-filled northeast region on the auction block.
join me in flooding the Bush administration with messages of protest over the next critical weeks.
Please do your part by going to
http://www.savebiogems.org/westernarctic/takeaction.asp?RR0407
and sending an electronic message telling the Bureau of Land Management to
withdraw its destructive plan and to permanently protect the reserve’s world-
class wildlife habitats.
I just went through a nerve-wracking few hours after doing the latest Windows Update. After rebooting, well, attempting to reboot, all I got was a message that said “NTLDR Missing, Press CTRL-ALT-DEL”.
After some digging (and being thankful to have the calm Don Kiely here) it seems that because of a large pile of tmp files on my c: drive, it created a problem for the NTLDR file (NT Loader) that was exacerbated (look it up) by the update.
What I needed to do was delete the files and defrag the drive. But there was no apparent way to do this. I did (note now past tense) not have a boot drive for my new computer. If I booted up with a boot cd, it did not find my system drive. I needed my boot.ini to do this. You cannot copy files to removable media from the Repair Console, so I couldn’t attempt to create a boot drive from there. Rich’s machine had Win2000 and my laptop and tablet do not have floppies. My former laptop had a slot where I could put my cd rom or a floppy drive. For some reason I thought that it was for the current laptop and spent a lot of time looking for my floppy drive (thinking I had tucked it away someplace stupid when I moved last year).
Eventually, I found the instrux on microsoft.com/support for creating a win xp boot setup drive on a floppy disk and did this from the Win2000 machine while also recreating my boot.ini drive on that floppy. I will make a few of those now. So I booted right back into my system and will defrag tonight during dinner then deal with the missing boot file on my hard drive. But Don has headed back to Alaska and his last words out the door were “first thing I’m doing when I get home is make myself a boot disk!”
Don Kiely has been here since Friday night. He spoke at VTdotNET last night. I’m too tired to blog about all the fun we’ve been having and how fantastic the meeting was last night, but I promise I will soon.
Watch this space for some news from G. Andrew Duthie … he’s hinting that he’s gonna spill the beans on Monday. grin grin grin (nah – he’s not moving to Vermont…but it’s still good)
Apparently there is a security hole (buffer overflow) in Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.0.1 for Windows. It is patched by the current 6.0.2 update you can get here. The security problem, according to someone in my user group, is much more serious than Adobe lets on on their website. This may be old news, but I had missed it until now.
Chris Auld should win some kind of award for finding this way too funny political t-shirt.
My husband was reading more about the FIeld2Base’s ConstructConnect application that he pointed out to me about a month ago. He is really fascinated by this technology. In addition to the fact that you can use the tablet pc on a construction site to redline blue prints and send them back to anyone who needs them, there are some other pieces of the inking and mobile technology that have really piqued his interest.
One seems to be that inkable forms are created by scanning the existing paper forms that people are already used to filling out. The other is that cached data, documents etc. are automatically uploaded whenever the user/tablet is in range of a wireless or cell connection. That means that the unit has to be always on and always polling for a connection. The connection is actually to Field2Base servers which then either emails or faxes the forms or sends the data to the client’s processing system.
I remember seeing a wireless pocket pc demo from MobileDevCon 2002 where the pocketpc would go in and out of range of a wireless connection to a company network. It knew when to persist data, when to upload data and when to leverage a live connection to the network.
The application I have written for my client does not work quite in this way. The data entry portion of the app is explicitly designed to be used off line with persisted data (xml files). When the user has a connection to the internet or the network, they can then upload their data through a web service and also download the info they need for the next day.
The more I learn about this technology, the more I want to rewrite entire chunks of the application. Hopefully I’ll have an opportunity to do that sooner than later.
I have come across a wonderful excuse to dig deeply into ADO.NET2.0 and, having been a data kind of girl for nearly 20 years, am feeling drunk on all of the amazing things the ADO.NET team has done to make my life easier with this update.