Alumni Blues

I worked with the first Canon printer that I actually liked yesterday! A BJC-85, which is a little portable printer, designed to be lugged around with your laptop. The print cartridges are a bit small, they actually include two of each, I assume because you'll go through them so fast. The printer was a cinch to install in Windows 2000, and it had three different methods I could choose from to connect it, Infrared, USB, or parallel. Much nicer than the HP portables I've used... I found an interesting discussion about Macintoshes in Higher Ed over at MacNN today. I'm not really big on a school telling its students what they can use, but I can certainly sympathize with a campus IT department only wanting to provide support for one platform. ITS, the central computer people here, provide almost no Mac support. One of the administrators had to ask if I could check something from a Mac for him, since they didn't have any that he could even use for five minutes. The really frustrating thing, is that we have to do all of our warranty repair requests for Apple products through them. This generally results in one of their technicians coming over to replace a part, and us standing over his shoulder and telling him what to do. Then Apple pays them fifty bucks...

This is the time of year that I really miss being a real college student. When the school year is just starting, there are thousands of new faces, the excitement of seeing friends after a summer apart, and all of the co-eds in shorts...

I think the worst case of homesickness for my beloved alma mater struck me while visiting NAU with my sister and parents in 1997. At the time, I was interning at Wybtrak, taking the fall semester off from school. We took a few days to go camping near Sedona, and stopped by Northern Arizona University, where my sister was thinking about going. It was move-in weekend, and I could feel the excitement in the air. The campus was very ISU-like, and it made me really miss my beloved Ames...

I'm editing this in Radio Userland for the first time, after following the instructions. It's rather handy, but so is the browser method. Radio Userland seems to let me select things more easily, I always wind up selecting spaces between words, then having to go back and edit the tags manually later. I think Radio Userland looks more professional on my screen when my boss walks in too. ";->" I haven't played around with the actual music features yet, mostly because I have my entire CD collection on my hard drive thanks to Windows Media Player 7. It stores them as a .wma file, which has some license restrictions attached. I don't really care, because I'm listening to my music, it doesn't really affect me.

I just had an inspiration for a great Radio Userland feature for Manila site editors. Howabout the ability to select a string of text, then right click and have Google do a search, and display the URL's in a window that you can select from, which would link the selected text string to that URL. I'm not saying it'd be easy to code, but it'd be darn cool for those URL's that you can't remember....

My friend Liz has a weblog now. She works as a web lackey for CNN in Atlanta. Welcome Liz! Her homepage is here. Her weblog is here. Liz is pretty cool, and has a neat job, even if she didn't know who Wolf Blitzer was...

I picked up my copy of The Conquerors today over lunch. Age of Kings is such a great game, and this expansion pack will only make it better. It's too bad I won't have much time this weekend to play...

I returned from lunch to find my RhinoSkin ShockSuit waiting for me. It's very lightweight, but seems to protect the Visor well. I chose the black color, it looks the least geeky on my belt.

Unfriendly Skies

Argh! My History is gone! One of my student employees was moving the G4 that I had under my desk, and he accidentally cut the power to my workstation! Now my Internet Explorer History is gone, it's like having my mind wiped, now I have to resurf the whole net... If there's an application that I hate more than Netscape Communicator, it's WordPerfect. Today, I'm struggling with an error message that is popping up for those who were using networked copies of the program. Upon launching the program, I get the error message "The File Box.id is corrupt or missing". That file lives on the server, so I replaced with a good copy, same problem. I removed WordPerfect from a user's machine, and re-installed it locally from the CD, same problem. I posted my problem to the support newsgroup, no responses. I e-mailed support, no response yet. I called Corel's support line, they want money since we have an academic license, we don't even get the 30 days of free support.

The other reason I have negative feelings about WordPerfect, is that in general, the users I have who use WordPerfect are crankier and more resistant to change than the average Word user. If I suggest using Word until I get the problem solved, they get this look of fear in their eyes, as if it could actually physically harm them to use the "other" word processor.

Update: Problem solved! For some reason, using the shortcut on the desktop produced the error, but if you used one from the Start Menu, the local install worked. The network installs started working again once I checked the permissions at the file level, and realized that users didn't have permission to access the box.id file.

I'll admit it, I watched the last episode of Survivor last night. Rich won, and he lost thirty pounds while on the island. I'd like to point out that I've lost 32 pounds on my diet, and I haven't had to eat any rat.

Sometimes it just doesn't pay to leave home. "John" is back early from Brazil, thanks to the efficient folks at United Airlines. It's like he never left!

Searching

Don't you really just have to wonder at the set of circumstances which led to this story? I've never been to the South, and I'm really not sure I want to go... While doing my first day's reading in "The American President", I noticed that the author mentioned Harding as an "inept" President several times. I e-mailed my Professor, wondering why, and he pointed me at the Teapot Dome scandal. Ahh... I'm still not sure why Harding is blamed for this, I don't find much mention of him directly...

I'm applying for a new job. This is the position I applied for orignally at UNI, in June of 1999. I was one of the final two candidates last time around, but they took the "other guy". Now the "other guy" is leaving, and I'm applying for the job again.

Today, I'm browsing around Manila Newbies, after realizing that I really need to have this site indexed and searchable. I wanted to order a belt attachment for my HandSpring Visor, and can't remember what day I posted those links. Update: I've got the search feature implemented there on the left side of the screen, but unfortunately it only searches pages that have been modified, so unless I go through and modify something on each of my older pages, they'll never be indexed! Time to go looking for those typos...

At least I found the page I was looking for earlier...

Freshman Spotting

My first day of class is behind me. It's a much bigger class than I took this summer, about 60 people in all. I have the same professor, and now I'm that dork who sits in the front row and chats with the professor before class and during the short break we take. The class is called "The Modern Presidency" and it's a great time to be studying the Presidency, since the nation is selecting a new one during this semester. I've got a brief bio page over on the website that I hate. My DreamWeaver skills are a bit rusty, but I managed to throw that together pretty quickly once I figured out how to create links again...

I can't quit my day job, since apparently I'm not included in Jeremy's plan to spend his lottery winnings.

AllAdvantage has changed their business model. Now you can win money in daily drawings instead of getting paid 50 cents an hour to surf. Maybe Jeremy should investigate this as a backup in case his lottery dreams don't come true.

Gateway sent me an e-mail this morning (how thoughtful) telling me all about their two new laptop models. The Solo 1150 seems to be competition for the iBook from Apple, and wouldn't be a bad low-end notebook for a student. The Solo 5300 looks to be an attempt to make a sexier looking laptop. The price isn't bad for what you get, but I'll actually need to see one in person before I'll be sold on the styling. That white area could get easily marked, stained, or scratched, and wind up looking horrible. I'll need to see what they're made of before I can make a reccomendation to buy one...

It's easy to spot the freshmen at the WRC. When five girls come in together, wearing T-shirts from the same high school, and mill around for about five minutes, then leave, it's pretty obvious they're new here.

Back To School

I watched Life is Beautiful last night. What an outstanding film, truly an uplifting and beautiful movie. I watched it on DVD, in Italian with English subtitles. A dubbed-English audio track was also available on the disc. I give this movie 9 out of a possible 10 points, and would definitely place it on my "must-see" list. I enjoyed it much more than Jakob the Liar, which is a very similar story, but isn't nearly as funny, charming, or touching as Life is Beautiful. I'd write more about what I thought of the movie, but I thought that Roger Ebert's review was right-on. Say what you want about Microsoft Windows, but at least the problems that I face aren't as bizarre as the ones on the Mac platform. Today's bug is that pressing any of the function keys (F1-F12) will crash the Mac. This is on our netboot machines, and it happens no matter what application you're in. The wonderful thing about a bug like this, is that it affects those who are the most advanced users, since they know the keyboard shortcuts. Those people are also the ones who gripe the most and the loudest when something like this happens.

I'm quoted on today's page over at MacWindows. Since their link will die in time, I'll post my comments below, in case others are suffering from the same difficulties in regards to changing passwords in a Windows 2000 domain from a Macintosh:

I've had the same problem here, and it gets even weirder than that. If I create a new user, and check the "User must change password at next login" box, and the user then logs in with a Mac, they are prompted to change their password. If they then go to a PC, their new password does not work, but their old one will! However, from a Mac, the new password works, so in effect, the user has two passwords for the same account. Changing their password again from a PC seems to clear up the problem.

Today is the first day of school. Actually, tomorrow is the first day of school for me, but for most of the students here at the University, it's today. Campus is crawling with students, I had to park three times farther away from my office building than normal, and four freshmen have already stuck their heads into my office to ask directions.