The list:

• Database Administrator SQL Server for us Desire2Learn, an eLearning system. We have other projects needing Oracle DBAs too.
• System Support Specialist Linux, Windows, VMWare. Includes Desires2Learn but also other projects.
• Business Systems Analyst 2 Desires2Learn support.

We have a great team. So you should come work with us.

Contact me if you are interested or want to know more. (Staff directory and search for ezra)

Reoccurring Outlook calendar entries can apparently take only one pattern. There is no way to make one calendar entry for multiple patterns. I cannot make one for say both the 14th and 28th or even worst the 14th and last weekday.

There is no concept of day before last weekday or day. At first, I looked at setting the reminder for the 28th, which could be the day before the last day of February in a leap year and last day of a non-leap year. However, it would be as many as 2 days too early for most other months.

Reluctant Solution: Set the entry for the last weekday and the reminder for 2 days prior. I get the reminder in time even if the date is not ideal.

in*ter*es*ting

Just a month into a year of wanting to blog more, I missed a whole week. Like most resolution failures, I just got busy. Thankfully this was not a daily or weekly resolution. I have time to catch up. Maybe like my reading goals, I should push to get ahead so I can not worry about missing a week.

Desire2Learn swooped in to go over administration with us. We are learning a new culture from them very different than we are used to with Blackboard. Desire2Learn is also learning a new culture from us, because we are not the same as their other clients. We have strange preferences that make things more difficult thanks to auditors, aka more secure.

It will be interesting two years.

Guess I better go ahead and buy this teeshirt.

Last year we picked this product. It took over seven months just to negotiate and sign the contract. My head feels about to explode over learning a new product, new database, new operating system, and new company’s idiosycracies.

Last week, I was in Mexico Beach, FL. Here is a perspective shot I took underneath the pier on a walk on the beach. The colors were a bonus.

At my previous job, I would get CDs with the operating system and other software and install it myself. Letting someone else install this for me was a test in professionalism for me. With my third machine, I no longer care that I am not in control and even rationalize it as more efficient.

After work and dinner I started installing some of the software I like to use. Chrome, Tweetdeck, and instant messengers automatically synchronized by pulling my data from my account. Lastpass, Dropbox, and Keepass gave me easy access to setup accounts. I dreaded having to find my various configurations, credentials, and data files to get everything working.

Still, I put away the new toy after lunch because email mysteriously stopped downloading. A window asking for my password (the one workstations said I would not need to enter at work) was hidden going through the Alt+Tab list. Windows 7 is waaaay different from WinXP. Of course, I had been using WinXP for 9 years. Change is hard. Change is good. (Maybe.)

Do we consume too much information? I might. Lately I have thought about reducing the amount of following I do. Typically I hit this point when I realize it takes me all weekend to catch up. To be fair I reach this point by getting all caught up over a long weekend and seeking out new stuff.

• 40% the blog or news feeds (over 100),
• 40% Facebook friends (remove over 250),
• 40% Tumblr following, (remove 45),
• 40% Twitter following (remove 100),

Then there are the potential stoppages:

• Stop following tags on WordPress.com, Tumblr, Blogspot, Flickr.
• Stop using some social media sites entirely like Google+ or Diaspora.

Given my social preferences, I have lots of time to spend online.

Stories work so well to persuade us because, if they’re well told, we get swept up in them, we are transported inside them.

Transportation is key to why they work. Once inside the story we are less likely to notice things which don’t match up with our everyday experience.

For example an aspirational Hollywood movie with a can-do spirit might convince us that we can tackle any problem, despite what we know about how the real world works.

Also, when concentrating on a story people are less aware that they are subject to a persuasion attempt: the message get in under the radar.

Two sorts of people who may be particularly susceptible to being persuaded by stories are those who seek out emotional situations and those who enjoy thinking (Thompson & Haddock, 2011).

Drew Westen at Emory University has a good New York Times piece on how President Obama failed to keep up the grand story he built transporting people into building a better America during the campaign. He needs to resume telling it or start a new one to convince the American public he should be elected for a second term.

Guess I was feeling good about heading home for the weekend. Happily it was not already dark.

• Martin Luther King Jr on education:
Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the ligitimate goals of his life. Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking… We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character–that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.”
• More quotes:
• Everybody can be great, because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.
• I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.
• Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
• Apple to announce tools, platform to “digitally destroy” textbook publishing

UPDATE 2012-JAN-22: Santorum is now the winner of Iowa by 34 votes and will split the delegates with Romney due to the closeness. Gingrich won South Carolina. Thursday the statements about Romney wrapping up the nomination changed to “the winner of South Carolina traditionally wins the nomination”. Now they are saying nomination is a toss up with three winners of three primaries. Added to it is Florida has more expensive markets for running TV adds, so Mitt should handily pick it up.

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

From the Martin Luther King, Jr. entry on wikiquote.

At brunch yesterday, the point was being made to me over and over that if climate change advocates could ask deniers, “What would it take to convince you?” and give that data or answers, then that would spark the necessary dialogue to help both sides understand each other. Running across the quote above, it struck me as quite funny and unsurprising that I would be on the wrong side of MLK.

As though proving my point, my repeated argument that ideology trumps facts according to studies fell on deaf ears. False information (such as a misleading negative campaign ad) agreeing with a person’s ideology followed by a retraction or fact checking tends to result in strengthening the false info. The recalled “facts” are those necessary to defend conclusions. It appears to work this way for both liberals and conservatives. The mechanics appear to include remembering the false information because they agree and not the correction because they disagree.

Even before I ran across this through to the present, I try to expose my self to Libertarian, Republican, Green, and Democrat information sources. I find myself dismissing some things and then armed with the ideas above feel bad about having done so. So I dig for more information and sometimes find I was wrong. Doing this is hard. It is far easier to just assume I was already correct. But then I am an information glutton.

So in my little way, I will participate. This blog will show a message on the 18th and 23rd on a visitors first visit. Get the Stop SOPA WordPress plug-in and participate too.

Depending on the quality of the people following the topic, a great, okay, or poor answer will be given.

Another good Quora question: “What are some systems we live with today that were designed for a world of the past?“

Deep depression that fails to respond to any other form of therapy can be moderated or reversed by stimulation of areas deep inside the brain. Now the first placebo-controlled study of this procedure shows that these responses can be maintained in the long term.

Neurologist Helen Mayberg at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, followed ten patients with major depressive disorder and seven with bipolar disorder, or manic depression, after an electrode device was implanted in the subcallosal cingulate white matter of their brains and the area continuously stimulated.

All but one of twelve patients who reached the two-year point in the study had completely shed their depression or had only mild symptoms.

The idea of stimulating brains with electricity or magnets in my or anyone’s brain feels disturbing. It sounds like all these went through it as a matter of last resort. Last weekend I watched a called Blood & Guts: A History of Surgery on the brain. There is a scene where a guy is touching his nose repeatedly and using intense magnetic fields prevent the subject from being able to control muscles. My spine shivers every time I watch this. (So why do I watch it over and over?)

Of course, an old way of solving this was trans-orbital lobotomies. Take an ice pick and hammer it through the upper eye socket (the orbit) into the prefrontal cortex. Hook me up to electrodes, please…

Speaking late Sunday on the sidelines of a conference celebrating Hawking’s 70th birthday in the English city of Cambridge, Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner said his company had a team in England to explore ways to help the celebrity scientist communicate more quickly.

There is a job available assisting him with the computer.

Given research into thought powered devices, I would really like to see a cyborg Stephen Hawking controlling things digitally. There are some cool bio feedback techniques to control cursors and pick out items from a screen. From what I understand, picking out the word he wants with where he looks from choices is getting slower from missing. Bypassing the eyes which used to be fast and going straight to the brain through electrodes could be very cool.

The problem is… Electrodes are invasive, often heal very slowly, and get infections. Too bad helmets which read our brain waves a la Macross proved much less effective. (Accuracy is paramount and anything sitting on a head is likely to miss.)

Somehow I decided to maintain my own home page that lived on the floppy disk. Pages I wanted to read later, I would add to the bottom of the home page. A few years later, I created a password protected secret page in my work personal web site to replace the floppy. The strategy was the same of keeping an HTML file. Stuff I did read, I removed from the file. Ugly, but it worked.

Then I started blogging. Reminders to myself to read something came by posting them to my blog. As I was constantly in my blog, I did go back and read things. Not removing read links meant confusion and sometimes multiple reads. Eventually I stopped reading links saved for later.

Bookmarking and clipping web sites arrived, especially their exploiting code placed in the toolbar to record bookmarks. I tried several: Evernote, Delicious, Magnolia, Diigo, Instapaper. However, I found I rarely went back to look at what I saved. Saving entries was easy. To see what I saved required going to the site, which I rarely did. Often by the time I did go back to read bookmarked items, they had slid behind the paywall or expired, so pure bookmarking sites were awful. Clipping had its own failure in that multiple paged articles made saving content a pain and reduced the likelihood I would save it to read later.

Most of my online reading came from blogs, so I tried to use my RSS reading to handle it. First with bloglines and later with Google Reader, I thought starring entries would perfectly handle what to read later. Keeping entries marked as unread certainly did not as it has the annoyance of automatically marking as read anything older than 30 days. The feature to tag posts with something like “read later” helped. It works but only for posts in GReader.

Chrome added an Apps feature. Surely Read Later Fast would be the solution. It is in my web browser, so like the home page it is around all the time. Like the saving web sites it preserved the whole page. With a single click I could dismiss it as read. I just… forgot it was there. (I just re-installed the app and connected it to diigo.com to find over a dozen items from over a year ago.)

Guess what I really need is something like Read Later Fast to have an icon in the address bar to remind stupid me there is stuff for me to read. (I use One Number to remind me I have Gmail and GReader posts to read.)

First, other sites tend to die. Ping.fm screwed me by my not understanding their technology. By using it to cross-post, every link and every image used their shortened URLs. When they lost the database, every link and image was broken. I think ifttt.com works better, so I have it making a backup of this blog at ezrasf.wordpress.com and sneezypb.posterous.com. (Well, except the tags do not go over.)

Second, I can control the format and quotes better on this blog than social media. Sometimes I wish I had quoted more of an article when it disappears behind the paywall, is moved, or removed.

Finally, it would be good for me to spend more time thinking about things before I post. About a tenth the things I intend to post on this blog, I give up on posting and instead share on social media. I feel like there is more thought and intention that goes into a blog post.

P.S. Originally this post started before Christmas. I had it scheduled for today. Setting the goal for the year ought to help.

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