Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Every so often, someone contacts me after finding one of my photos and asks permission to use it for one project or another. A few of these haven’t gone anywhere, but here’s one that did: landscape designers The Berger Partnership are using this photo on their website detailing their work on renovating Cal Anderson Park.
“Ikons” by K.M.F.D.M. from the album XTORT (1996, 4:11).
Snagged from lemurlad — and as he pointed out, these results shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows me.
95 Genius Points
WOOHOO! You seem to know as much about this movie as I do! You’ve done brilliantly. So brilliantly, in fact, that you may deserve to wear Chris Knight’s underwear. You have achieved the rank of Real Genius Genius. I’m so proud.
My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender:
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You scored higher than 96% on Genius Points |
Link: The Are You a Real Genius Genius Test written by dasnugglebunny on Ok Cupid.
“Return to Innocence (Long and Alive)” by Enigma from the album Return to Innocence (1993, 7:07).
A funny short-short story by Paul Di Filippo set in the near future after the collapse of the Internet:
I HAD TO run a few errands downtown, but I hesitated to go.
What if I ran into bloggers?
Ever since the total, irretrievable collapse of the Internet in a chaos of viruses, worms, spam, terrorism and busts by the FBI anti-porn squad, that archaic species of human had become a bigger street menace than mimes, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or panhandlers ever were.
[…] I had almost gained the security of the lobby of my bank when my luck ran out, and I was accosted with no easy means of escape by a wild-eyed figure.
Backed into an embrasure by the advancing apparition who had been cleverly lying in wait for prey, I was startled to recognize — beneath the grime, elf-locked hair, tattered clothing, and unkempt beard — a man I had known from his earlier life.
[…] The recognition was plainly one way. Doctorow’s crazed eyes betrayed no familiarity with my face. I was only another potential flesh-and-blood “hit” for his “site.”
Doctorow carried a mud-splattered messenger’s satchel over one shoulder. From this bag he now removed an old-fashioned wirebound spiral notebook and pen. He made a tick mark on paper, recording my “visit.” Then he launched into his spiel.
“Welcome to a directory of wonderful things, my friend! Get ready to be amazed, thrilled and astounded! I’m going to show you stuff you never believed existed, stuff that will brighten your life, enhance your senses and enlighten your consciousness! For instance — ”
(via — no, no irony here — Boing Boing)
“Future is Not What it Used to Be, The” by Parallax1 from the album Parallax1 (1996, 5:46).
No, no — not Plato. Plato Learning, Inc. They’re the company that provides the online program that we’re using in my math class.
It’s not that the program is bad — in fact, it seems to be simple enough (I’ve only gone through the introductory “this is how it works” section so far), and their website lists a number of success stories and awards for the program. It’s simply that after going through the first section and poking around at the CDs, I can’t find any good reason why the software is Windows-specific.
Basically, the entire setup is HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PDF, and Flash, with a Windows shell that it runs inside. To start a session, you go to the PIM site, choose your school, and then you’re presented with the options to do a lesson or check your progress. When you choose to do a lesson, a small nscc.iss file is downloaded. That file is actually a minimal text file with five small variables:
[Site Info]
Site=NSCC
SID=SD1
externalserver=isswebdb.academic.com
Server=isswebdb.academic.com
PORT=1521
Windows has .iss files registered to the shell program, which then connects to their servers using the information passed on inside the .iss file. After a quick logon/password check, the shell program then proceeds to run the courses off of the provided course CDs.
As best I can tell, the shell program needs to do four things:
.iss file,In other words, absolutely nothing that requires Windows. The only thing preventing them from being able to offer the home-based services to Mac users as well as Windows users is the lack of a Mac-based shell. While I’m no programmer, I really have to wonder about just how complex something like that really would be…I’m guessing not terribly. Certainly something a major educational software company should be able to handle hiring a Mac programmer to do.
Ah, well. Macs are still the minority, so things like this aren’t exactly a surprise. Annoying and frustrating, yes — but not a surprise.
Amusingly, figuring all this out gained me a small “star moment” in class today. While about half the computers in the classroom were handling the nscc.iss file correctly (downloading it and triggering the launch of the shell), the other half apparently didn’t have .iss registered as a known file type under Windows. For those students, clicking the ‘do a lesson’ link resulted in nothing but a standard Windows “I don’t know what this file is. Open it or save it?” dialog box. Saving it, of course, did nothing, and trying to open it just presented the “pick a program” dialog box. Neither the students nor Ms. DeSoto had any clue what was going wrong, or how to get around it.
While my computer had worked as it should, I was watching the guy next to me fumble his way through trying to get things to work correctly. When the “pick a program” dialog popped up he started scrolling through it, and I noticed a program called issstub.exe pass by. Figuring that there was a good chance that issstub might handle .iss files, I told him to give that one a try — and as soon as he chose that one, the shell program opened right up, connected, and was ready to go. I pointed this out to another couple students who were having the same problem wile Ms. DeSoto watched, and then she passed the process on to the rest of the class. Success!
As the hour ended, I was packing up my bag when she walked by and patted me on the shoulder. “Thanks so much for finding that — you saved my day!”
Hey. Day number two, and I’m already sucking up to the teachers. ;)
“I Was Born to Love You” by Queen from the album Made In Heaven (1995, 4:49).
Well, okay, so there wasn’t any big yellow school bus for me today.
And no, there wasn’t a short bus either, smartasses. ;)
Still and all, it was my first day in school in fifteen years, so I figured I had to mark the occasion in some form.
While this was the first day, so everything was just introductions, syllabi, and getting things started, it was a decent enough start. First up was ENG101, taught by JC Clapp, who Prairie had recommended to me. We spent the first half of the hour going over the syllabus, then had the second half to write a brief “who are you and why are you in this class” bit (not really an essay, more of a short scrawled letter).
Next was MAT097, with Jennifer DeSoto. While I’d chosen that particular class because it fit well schedule-wise, it will be interesting to see how I fare. Rather than being a traditional lecture/assignment style course, it’s very self-driven and done nearly entirely online — the teachers are closer to being tutors, and the class hours are there for us to use the school’s computers to connect to the online course. Technically, it’s possible to do all the online work from home…if you have a Windows based PC. “ Ah, well…looks like I won’t have an excuse for skipping out of the classroom sessions. ;) On the bright side, if the numbers make a bit more sense to me this time around, it was mentioned that there have been students who’ve completed two or three courses in the space of one quarter. I don’t expect I’ll be one of those, but….
So, we’re off to a good start. And on we go from here!
I’ve been using the free traffic monitoring service StatCounter for some time now to get an idea of how much traffic I’m pulling in. Here’s a look at the past year’s traffic for Eclecticism: