The Redheaded Penguin

Well, after hours of grief dealing with Outlook at home last night, I never could get it to connect to the exchange server at work the way it should… and it decided that it didn’t want to remember ANY passwords for other accounts. So, I scrapped the entire deal at home. I did make the switch at work, and didn’t run into any problems… it probably helped that I didn’t have as much email at work to convert over, but being able to setup the exchange was a huge plus I decided, especially since my new phone syncs with the exchange server as well. Now my calendar is always with me to remind me of those meetings and appointments that tend to slip my mind all the time… now, hopefully I’ll be able to make the switch at home… might have to stay home from work so I can talk to the campus IT folks to get it done though…

Okay, with more and more things at work needing me to use Outlook, I think I’m finally going to bite the bullet, hold my nose, and make the switch from Eudora… actually, I started the process a few hours ago since I have to go from Eudora to Outlook Express to Outlook 2007… can’t go straight because that would be too easy. Luckily with the new phone I got, I can easily check my main email accounts and can even take advantage of the MS Exchange server at work… There are many many things I don’t like about Outlook though… the biggest is the way it stores emails (and attachments) in one huge file. I always liked the fact that with Eudora, each mailbox was it’s own file. So, with proper management and filing, no single mailbox file ever got that larger. This allowed me to create archives of old emails in Eudora… archives dating back to 1995 actually… now, I didn’t archive everything, but I did archive a lot. In fact, I think I have over 850MB of emails (not counting attachments) archived away. Well, when I imported these into Outlook, the main outlook file ended up being 1.4GB… I’m sorry, but no single file should be that large… especially if it’s just emails…

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Just a quick mention to some interesting posts about educational technology and the internet from years gone by…

First, a series of scanned photos from a 1962 book about various “teaching machines“.

Next, we have an article from 1995 talking about how the internet really won’t change our lives very much courtesy of Newsweek.

And finally, a video about the power of the Internet, also from 1995 I believe…

Oh, and a hat tip to elearnspace where I actually found the links originally…)

Okay, if your car breaks down I can see you telling the mechanic “It no worky.” Your car is there for the mechanic to look at and diagnose the problem. But, if you email someone for technical support related to a computer or software issue, you might want to provide a little more information than “it doesn’t work”. The tech can not see what you’ve done, does not know what error is being reported, or anything. It’s like asking the mechanic to fix your car without giving any details of the problem or the car. Do you think troubleshooting computer problems is like magic? Even though it might seem that way at times (I know my mere presence sometimes appears to fix certain computer problems that people report), in reality there’s a little more to it. So, the next time you email someone for support with a problem, please provide them with a little more information than “It no worky”.

Okay, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m using the Google Reader to manage my subscriptions to more RSS feeds than I probably should. Anyway, one of the nicer options about Google Reader (at least in my mind) is the ability to “share” items that you find interesting. Basically, Google Reader creates a page especially for you that contains the RSS stories that you choose to share with the world. Well, that’s all well and good and stuff, but it means that people have to know where that page is in order to find things (or be your “friend” in Google… but that’s another story/issue). Well, luckily they have a way to put a “clip” of shared sites on other webpages. I wish I could modify they color scheme/layout a little more than the options they give, but it’s better than nothing. Anyway, now available on the left hand side of this page is a list of the 10 most stories that I’ve most recently marked as “shared” in Google Reader. There’s also a link at the bottom that will take you to the “full” page of stories I’ve shared, if you want to see other stories that I’ve shared in the past…

This turned into a really really long blog post about Dreamhost, Lunarpages, and my view on “issues” both companies have had in the past few months… Basically, the”respect” I used to have for Lunarpages has long since disappeared and they continually remind me why I left.

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Well, saw on another blog just a minute ago that Sun has “acquired” MySQL, a popular open-source database system that I depend on heavily for just about everything I do on the web from on-line surveys and research studies to websites to this blog and more. From the sounds of it, they will still have the “free” version available for me to use with things…. hopefully this will be a good thing in the long run, but only time will tell…

For some reason, our site has been running really slow the last couple of days, especially today. I’m not sure exactly what’s going on, but it is making me wonder if switching web hosts was a good move or not. Well, I do think moving away from my former host was a good move, but not sure if my choice of new providers was the best. It was motivated in large part by the free year of hosting. I’ll give it another couple of weeks I guess and then go from there. Don’t really want to switch again so soon, but might have to if the slow performance keeps happening…