Mobile Hippie

I just completed a nearly painless upgrade to WordPress 2.5. I say “nearly painless” only because I managed to trigger a page error when attempting to upgrade a couple of plugins. (Apparently you have to deactivate a plugin before you upgrade it, which is a reasonable requirement, but it doesn’t say “deactivate first” anywhere.)

Technically, the actual 2.5 upgrade went off without a hitch thanks to WordPress Automatic Upgrade. Everything in my template just worked, which I couldn’t say after the 2.3 upgrade earlier this year.

So what is my favorite new feature? Well, so far it has to be the automatic plugin upgrade, but I am looking forward to using some fo the media features and the media browser is a clear improvement.

FreshBooks is hiring again.

This is quite possibly the most inventive call for applicants I have ever seen. Proof that with a burgeoning company and a copy of iMovie you can make yourself look like fools, but still come off in a positive light.

Nice job FreshBooks.

Disclaimer: I use and love this product.

Just made the switch to Wordpress for my personal blog. Since I’ve used it to teach a course and configured it for several clients at the new job, it only makes sense that I invest a little time into it to start blogging again.

This lovely theme will have to do for now until I can design my own.

I would imagine the human factor associated with adopting a centralized calendar—or for that matter a content management system—becomes more complex the larger the institution gets. On the other hand, the larger institution should have more resources and personnel to throw at the issue–though this is not always the case. (more…)

I am so glad it is Friday.

Which File Extension are You?

Possible results.

Woohoo! I’m not Windows Me!

Which OS are You?

See the other possibilities.

Well, it might be more appropriate to say that we, my wife and I, are considerably indebted to the bank with a small amount of equity due to an excellent purchase price.

The hurry-up-and-wait process ended this morning in a flurry of activity that began with a phone call late yesterday afternoon.

So to sum up the week, my daughter couldn’t hold down anything on Thursday; the title company called yesterday and wanted us to sign with two hours notice—we declined until this morning due to “scheduling” issues, but were fine with signing first thing this morning; which we did, despite the fact I was awoken this morning by my son’s projectile vomitting in my face. (Yes, you read that correctly.)

The next two weeks are guaranteed to be crazy, but at least I have my Internet connection back—oh yes, that is another story for another day.

When I heard this statistic—which is a statistic for Pacific University, though likely to be fairly typical—I couldn’t help but be a little discouraged by it. Pacific’s growth plans include the development of residence halls (dorms to anyone not used to higher-education speak) with rooms that will house individuals—no roommates. If 90% of incoming students have never had to share space and resources with a sibling, how can we expect them to share space and resources on a larger scale.

While I will readily admit to having a room of my own for the majority of my middle and high school years, I experienced the benefit of compromise-laden living with my younger brother for about 10 years of our lives together. Including my married years, I can say that I have spent twice as many years sharing a bedroom as not. There is a lot to be gleaned from the ability to share a relatively small space on a regular basis. With siblings, or with a life partner, there will inevitably be arguments and clashes of opinion, but it is the response to these conflicts that helps to shape our emotional intelligence.

While I believe you can learn empathy in a number of ways, it seems to be that the lessons learned from compromising with a roommate could be extremely valuable. While there may be some merit to the solitude that an individual room in a residence hall could afford, I would hope that the incoming freshmen would be encouraged to share a little of themselves in a way more intimate than instant messaging—which increasingly seems to be the choice of the college-age crowd.

Daring Fireball: Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Adobe’s ‘FAQ’ Regarding Their Acquisition of Macromedia - Made me laugh. I wish all legalese could be translated with such acumen. Did I mention I’m buying a house?

I believe I thoroughly despise Dreamweaver over FTP. It has literally stolen a good hour of my time today. Using Dreamweaver over FTP has probably stolen more than a week of my time since I started using the product.

To be fair, it helps if you are connecting to a decent server. For some reason the servers at Pacific are always painfully slow, which is something I have pointed out to the IT guys. Part of the problem could be related to heavy student use during peak hours. (What else is there to do on a Monday night?) Though, there has to be something else that is causing the problem—the hosting service I use for contract work and my personal site is in New Jersey and I get better performance out of it.