Listening now to Georgia State Universitys Dr. Mark Becker give his (and GSUs) first such address. Weve been a research university since 1995, and its time to move to the next level with that. Ill link to the promised audio of the address as well as any news that comes from it.
Go Georgia State!
I stayed home yesterday, and I was able to watch the inauguration and much of the following festivities. I was moved by the historic and inspiring spectacle. Today, for President Barack Obama, the job for which he worked so hard begins. I am moved to renew my commitment to do the best work I can, at the office and at home and here on this little blog. There’s a boatload of work to do. Here we go.
Macintouch this morning points to Thomas Tempelmann’s Find Any File application—
Contrary to Spotlight, it does not use a database but instead uses the file system driver’s fast search operations.This lets you search for file properties such as name, dates, size, etc., but not for file content (use Spotlight for that)!
Find Any File can find files that Spotlight doesn’t, e.g. those inside bundles and packages and in inside folders that are excluded from Spotlight search (i.e. system files).
And Find Any File is fast. Not always as fast as Spotlight, but faster than other, similar file search tools you might find for the Mac.
I need something like this. Good to find it.
Why did Textile italicize the two middle paragraphs in the block quote above?
I voted this morning in the Georgia primary. Coming to work, I pondered a bit on how things have gone here in America since last I voted. I thought about who would win—I believe that many of my neighbors and I have different political inclinations—about who would win the metro Atlanta area, how the entire state would go, and who would move on toward the nomination and the presidency. Ultimately I hope we get less of the same, but that whatever we get it’s less divisive than what we’ve gone through for the last generation. The high turnout in the primaries and caucuses up to now indicates that lots of people want something different.
Once on the train I remembered I had some appropriate music with me, so I listened to the great Who’s Next. Specifically, to Won’t Get Fooled Again. Of course, the lyric is actually
I get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again.
So do I, brother. So do I.
I found this little Post-it by the elevators this morning… depends on how one defines “useful,” I suppose.
Whew. Smashing Magazine’s 50 Beautiful CSS-Based Web-Designs in 2006 inspire me to crack those CSS tutorials and improve the design of my sites. These are nice. Take a look and get inspired yourself.
I often used to link to Charles Wiltgen’s PlaybackTime, but he stopped posting more than three years ago. Thanks to a post here at The Unofficial Apple Weblog, I found out he’s back, and has been since January. And it’s nice to find him as ornery and well-informed as ever in his response to a Cory Doctorow piece against Apple’s DRM in iTunes.
John Udell thinks through User-generated content vs. reader-created context:
Everything about this buzzphrase annoys me. First, calling people “users” is pernicious. It distances and dehumanizes, and should be stricken from the IT vocabulary (see Those clueless users) as well as from the publishing vocabulary. IT has customers and clients, not users. IT-oriented publishers have readers, not users.
Second, “content” is a word that reminds me more of sausage than of storytelling (see Sausage, traffic, and clueless users). As writers and editors we don’t “generate” “content,” we tell stories that inform, educate, and entertain—or should.
He is exactly right. Though he’s writing for a tech industry audience, the ideas apply to education and indeed to anyone who reads or writes on the web. The term “user” is almost as bad as the word “consumer,” a corruption of the idea of a “customer.” You are no more a consumer or user of this site – which is text and pictures, thank you, not just “content” – than you are a consumer of books or newspapers or radio or television. You’re a reader, or a listener, or a viewer; you have a mind, and with the web, you can respond to what you read or listen to or view with more than a letter, or an email; you can publish a response or critique. That’s the small-d democratic innovation of the web. If your response – or indeed anything you publish here – is thoughtful enough and well enough presented, you can and will find an audience… who can respond the same way.
There are still far too many in the world who think about such exchanges of ideas incorrectly, and in one dimension: as content to be consumed. They’re wrong, and the more we publish on the web, the more likely they are to either change their minds or lose their influence.
This post is more than comments and links that I hope you find useful; this post is a marker for me. I had to put something up here, not just in my journal or calendar, about what I’ve learned and seen at this conference and the impact this experience has had on me. The sessions, workshops, and conversations here have inspired me to a new sense of purpose personally and professionally: to find more ways to teach and talk about the power of media and storytelling to hook students into learning, making the process something they can own, can see the point in. The list after the jump is a catalog of the most significant things of the last few days. (more…)
Daring Fireball points to news of a “trojan” for Mac OS X. Key exceprts from the Ambrosia Software Web Board -> New MacOS X trojan/virus alert where the news was posted, by Andrew Welch, president of Mac software developer Ambrosia Software:
Please go and read it; some of it is technical, but it’s worth trying to understand. The fault here is less the Mac operating system than naivete or misplaced trust. Don’t open it if you don’t know what it is and what’s in it. Andrew Welch summed up the discussion thread (as it stands at this point) this way:
Regardless of anything, explicit user actions are needed for anyone to become infected by OSX/Oomp-A—if you don’t download, decompress, and then double click on the file, you can’t become infected by it. It tries to fool the user into doing this, because it is at its core a rather simplistically written program.