Participants, Focus, and Goals




Participation is NOT restricted to Students or Professionals; anyone interested in learning new software tools, is welcome to join us as an Amateur.

Focus on accountability, to experience with redundant web-based storage and organization of information; the type of information needed anytime, anywhere, for professional or personal use; just like a virtual agenda or portfolio.

Goal: Synergy. Continuous growth is our Goal, which can be measured by the number of tools available, the number of tools in use, and the number of participants in our mailing list. Those numbers should be added to the Site Map, to be able to compare them from time to time.

(0) comments

   Thursday, January 22, 2004  

Disappointing Moments


Now that I was going to promote our List-Group, Yahoo!Groups is failing. There is a lot happening on those Groups: conversations, pictures, links, and other documents of importance to each Group.

It has been like that for several hours now, and we can only hope for the best; after all, the same may happen to the any other Server, including the one you are looking at; is patience the actual price of progress?
...maybe for us, but those in charge of cyber-security should be concerned and ready to learn about what caused the problem, and how to prevent the same in their Servers.

(0) comments

   Tuesday, January 20, 2004  

Fear of failure

Today I spent more than one hour trying to participate in a local forum. While running out of patience, I experienced more curiosity than frustration, so I subscribed with a different email address to obtain a different user-id and password; going further in my troubleshooting, I used that new identity in the same forum, logging from a different computer with the same result; so I proved that the forum was not working properly, at least during that period of time.

It is disappointing to be rejected by a failing system, which may lead us to think of other excuses, placing the blame elsewhere; but if you try again later, things may change. Fortunately, that site had a feedback form to tell them about my bad experience, which may help them investigate the situation.

Something similar happened when trying to register for Spring Cluster session at NSU; in that case, I was notified of their problem and told when it was fixed.

Now that I tried both interfaces again, no problem!

(0) comments

   Friday, January 16, 2004  

Regulatory Compliance

(0) comments

   Tuesday, January 13, 2004  

Wasting or Investing





To make every minute count, I was noticing MiYahoo! interface calling me with another name, so I blamed my daughter, who didn't remember when or how she could have change my profile to show his boyfriend's name; I thought she would eventually go back and fix it, but because I had a few minutes to escape, I decided to do it this morning.

I had a few minutes to escape (like now) when I prefer to divert my attention to this less important tasks, to take a break from the pressures of work or school; like therapy, the mind jumps to a different focus to return with a fresh or revitalized view.

While fixing my name I remembered using Rocky's name on a travel reservation, for which I did change my profile with the intention to go back and fix it afterwards; well, that purpose was forgotten, until now that I came back to the task; now I have to go back to my daughter and tell her about my mistake.

This is an example that logging our actions is more an investment than a waste of time, because it helps our memory, during the login process or in future searches; after all, we need those break anyhow.

(0) comments

   Friday, January 09, 2004  

Troubleshooting overconfidence





After installing and updating a spying/advertisement robots detector and a free antivirus in my daughter's and my step brother computers, during my year-end visit to California, I found my home laptop computer getting very very slow.

At first I thought it was the new wireless card I installed on the DSL connection, but the operating system was increasingly degrading, just like the dead desktop I keep in my living room, to fix as soon as I find some time available; the plan is to replace the floppy drive and re-install an old operating system before upgrading it to Windows 2000, which is not getting installed by itself from the original CD Rom that came with that PC.

Back to the laptop, I was trying to update the antivirus, when I realized that there was no icon present or active on the task bar; furthermore, on the antivirus web site, there is an announcement that they no longer support the version I had; so I un-installed that antivirus, rebooted and installed the same free antivirus I used in California.

Leaving the antivirus detection overnight, it deleted 6 corrupted files and isolated 20 other infected files; now it is active all the time, until a more advanced virus deletes it like before; this happened because I either forget to update it, or a new virus came my way.

In an old machine at work, which I suspect it is monitored, a free personal firewall keeps me alert of each new network communication; anyhow, with so many icons all around my browser, I was guilty of overconfidence and it may probably happen again.

(0) comments

   Tuesday, January 06, 2004  

Experimenting with MoBlogs and Movable Type

These images come from the new MoBlog maintained by my daughter's cell-phone; I have sent some pictures by email and through their interface too; also created another MoBlog to share the experience with people from my country, which you can see as the first Favorite on my MoBlog.

MoBlogs are newer and easier to develop and maintain than the fascinating photo-blogs.

Another great opportunity I couldn't ignore or delay, was the option to have my own Movable Type (MT) blog, where I am organizing the entries by topics; each entry may belong to one or more topics, so when you choose a topic, you will see all the entries on that topic; the only problem for now is that the view by topic is not working yet, but other MT features like 'Search' and 'Recent Entries' are more elegant than the old-style blog you are reading now.

(0) comments