Mac +/- for Macs & Mac users, plus or minus, more or less.

UVa is a conservative school. Ask Anastasia, who was a TA here. These are, to a great extent, the children of privilege, power and pedigree.
Walking (say it with me) the mile from my car to my office this morning, I passed 3 different moving Free Ride to Vote for Obama vans. Every sidewalk was chalked up with reminder after reminder to vote today for Obama. Posters were up on every kiosk. A pro-Obama student with a signboard was in front of every major building, ready to help anyone get to the polls.

On that mile long walk, the entire evidence of the McCain GOTV effort was one white chalk "N" added in front of a single instance of the word "OBAMA" chalked on a walkway.

I've been setting up my own test/practice server for some stuff unrelated to I&I. Or at least I thought it was unrelated. I guess it falls under #2, "Freedom to Experiment."

Looking for open source WebObjects projects, this one rose to the top.

I think implementing something like SiteMaker qualifies as a solution to a problem our users don't know they have, and it's also investigating what other institutions are doing. All part of I&I's vision.  I know I've heard somewhere about UVa investigating a content management system that would be available to all staff and faculty. SiteMaker looks pretty compelling. 

Campus Technology magazine recognizes UM.SiteMaker as the winner of its Innovators-2006 award, in the area of "The Web". — August 1, 2006

Where I had initially intended this server for messing around in PHP and MySQL, now I think I may install SiteMaker and play around with that.

Facilitator: Mike Dawson  Scribe: Joel Bass  Contributors: Jeff Wimer, David Buchanan, Brian Cadieux

1. Innovation while maintaining stability
2. Freedom to experiment and explore
3. Advocate more choice, new ideas and alternatives to the current way of doing things
4. User friendly services and applications
5. Customers/ User base fully capable and knowledgeable of working with their technology
6. Having new tech before the users do
7. Solutions to problems the users didn't know they have.
8. Test bed for experimentation with new technologies
9. Expanded relationships with vendors
10. Show what's possible rather than hearing it from users
11. Investigate what other institutions are doing
12. Apply innovation to existing systems
13. Include users in the process

Comments added during the Gallery Walk: Hamp: "Technology leader, not follower." James Ptak: "Solutions Incubator?" Anonymous, regarding #8: "beTech has a test bed system"

Watch out dynamic Internet, I'm taking a php class over the next 10 weeks. Soon your inner workings will be clear to me.

In the ITC "all" meeting this morning, our newish CIO James Hilton asked us to think of our jobs and community in terms of what is possible, not in terms of why something can't be done. (I'm paraphrasing here.)
So I do believe I'm going to try to find out who has control over the SQL servers for student and people and see what can be done about upgrading them.
Or at least moving my databases off of them!
The reason this site (and student) is so slow is because the database server is completely overwhelmed–or maybe underpowered. Serving any static HTML is lightning fast, but when serving dynamic content it slows to a crawl.
While I admit this is a sore point of mine, I really believe that removing these bottlenecks could have a profound effect on the community building our CIO wants so badly. Static pages don't build community, but you have to be stubborn as I am to continue to use dynamic content on student or people with performance as bad as it is. And as bad as it has been for a year or more.

Technorati Tags: Drupal, Tech, UVa

Here I am sitting outside the Crowne Plaza hotel after attending a seminar on computer color management, logged in to the VPN on my wireless powerbook, installing PHP based photo gallery software remotely while waiting for a friend of mine to show so we can head off to SCA fight practice.

Technorati Tags: funny, Macintosh, SCA, Tech

The West Cafeteria in the Hospital makes some disturbingly addictive chicken fingers, but the pizza is terrible. Even when I put it in the toaster to reheat and crisp up, it tasted of bitter cheap cheese.

I miss Bambina's Pizza.

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Preppy undergrad to his female friend: "I don't know how to explain it, but I'm like exploring things and shit."

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Not pictured: two quad core G5 video stations with 23" LCDs. Whee! End of the year spending is fun.

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Everyone needs a little extra support this time of the semester.

Technorati Tags: Funny, UVa