I’m posting this from Seattle, where I’m attending the Educause conference. Internet response is somewhat turgid, since I’m using my Blackberry for a modem (but it’s still pretty cool that I’m able to do that, with a Bluetooth connection to the device while it sits over on the other side of the room). This has been a good conference. The sessions have been pretty interesting, and the “side meetings” have been especially fruitful. It’s ironic, but I’ve had great conversations with my colleagues from 7 of the other UNC System schools. We had to go 3000 miles to get together, but there is a lot of value in what we’ve discussed.

I leave tomorrow to head home. I wish I’d had some extra time to explore the area, as this is the first time I’ve been to Seattle. There truly is a Starbucks on every corner here ;-).

I’m headed off tomorrow to the annual Educause meeting in Seattle. I’ll try to blog some if I see or hear anything compelling. I’m looking forward to actually getting some work done on the flight out & back, as I need to get some traction on several projects at work; seems that the “crisis du jour” keeps pushing things back…

Back home Saturday…

So, my wife’s Powerbook G4 15″ has been having problems with its “8” key. Sometimes, you’d get one “8” and sometimes two or three…all the other keys worked fine, but I was thinking that I was seeing the beginning of the end, and would need to buy a keyboard. That was especially true tonight, when the numlock key was accidentally on, and it looked like most of the keyboard wasn’t working ;-). I decided that instead of forking out $120 for a new keyboard, I’d see if something was gumming up the “8” key. Well, this was the first time I’d popped the key off a Powerbook, and man, that’s a weird little mechanism under there. See this page for a picture of how the “scissors” works. Sure enough, when I popped off the key cap, there was a bunch of dog hair there — courtesy of our two chocolate labs. I cleaned out the dog hair, and set about putting it back together. I used my fly-tying lamp and magnifier to see how to assemble this…a real chore for 50-year old eyes. Took a minute to figure out how the key cap hooked on, but soon I was back in business. Booted up, and voila! A happy “8”.

My old home laser printer (a circa 2002 Konica/Minolta 2300DL) has been getting flaky lately. It took longer and longer to warm up, threw spurious paper jams, and had developed a habit of not feeding paper unless the input tray was almost full. Had not actually planned to buy a printer yet, though, but we found a great deal on a Xerox Phaser 8560N at Costco.com. It was $499 (no shipping) plus tax, the best I saw elsewhere was about $150 more. Ordered on Saturday 9/8, and it showed up on Wednesday 9/12. I did a bit of reading about it to try and make sure I was not getting an product without a future, since it’s not a laser, but uses the Xerox solid ink technology. The solid ink supposedly is much more environmentally friendly than laser cartridges (so says Xerox, and it makes sense). The ink blocks look like chunks of crayon; they come in small plastic containers, like a transparent yogurt cup. Much less packaging & waste. The printer has a high duty cycle, and seems to be what’s advertised. It came with two blocks of ink for each color (yellow, cyan, magenta & black) and my reading seems to indicate that an ink block should be good for ~1000 pages. That sounds like a lot; we’ll see. Ink blocks are ~$30/ea., except for black which is a bit cheaper.

I’ve just installed it today and it seems to be as advertised. It has PC and Mac drivers (we’re a mixed household, 4 Macs & 2 PC’s in regular use, and one more PC when my college-age son is home). Nice print quality on standard paper. Have not printed any pictures yet, but I do have a separate photo printer. It has a ton of functions in the web-based control utility. It’s designed for the small business environment, really, and it has lots of features like job accounting, email alerts on supply or paper outages, notification of job completion, etc. Way more features than I’ll ever use. As you can see if you look at the link to Xerox above, there is a family of these printers, and this is an entry level, but the software is the same for all, apparently.

If you are in the market for a printer, check it out!

So, I just got my copy of Parallels 3.0 and it’s really a great upgrade. The new coherence mode lets you run Windows apps in “free floating” Mac windows, lets you have the familiar Windows “start” button & system tray on the bottom of the Mac screen, and generally integrates the two OS’s very well. You can launch OSX files into compatible windows apps, and drag & drop across the OS’s. This is really the best of the Mac & Windows. I do have one USB peripheral, a Fujistsu scanner, that doesn’t work under Parallels, but that’s the only thing I’ve found that’s not working! Check it out if you are a Mac user who needs to use Windows from time to time…

Well, I have been using a little Toshiba linux appliance for my internet gateway for probably about 4 or 5 years now (an SG10; actually, I have two of them) and I finally decided to retire it since I was not using any of the disk storage nor any of the features from having a linux box as my gateway; in fact, I got a “nasty-gram” from dyndns.org about a glitch with the dns updates.  So, I said, what the heck, I’ll just use my Airport as a router, not a bridge wireless (got the Airport a couple months ago when the 5-year old linksys AP finally died).  Well, it was not straightforward.  It didn’t like being converted from bridge to router, and then, for some reason I can’t parse, though it purports to support the RFC 1819 addresses of 10.0 and 192.168, it didn’t like to route the 192.168 setting, and that killed an hour or so until I figured that out.  I dunno why.  Then, I tried to use a USB disk with the Airport, and it rebooted…but it’s not all the Airport’s fault.  I also had a run-in with the software to configure TCP ports for an old Kyocera-Minolta laser printer.  Seems that it has to reboot when you take out the old port, and reboot when you add the new port, and if you try to short circuit and only reboot once on the XP box where I was setting this up, then it gets really unhappy.  Earlier in the week, a disk died on an old Gateway box I have (gotta rebuild it this weekend).  Grrr….

So, I’ve been pretty excited about Web 2.0, mashups, etc.  Lots of cool stuff going on.  However, I’ll also admit concern about the amount of unauthenticated content on the Web today, as well as the growing amount of noise, relative to meaningful information (i.e. the signal to noise ratio is going down).  Blogging (such as this!) requires nothing but a bit of web space, and no knowledge on any subject, just the desire to make a statement which may have no veracity and be something that wouldn’t be said in polite society.  I am a “first generation” webbie; I’ve been doing this web stuff since 1993, back when web servers were rare (only about 5000 when I put one up in November 1993, at UNC-CH where I was working at the time).  I believe in civil discourse, and have been around long enough to try to live by “read twice, click once” so that you don’t consign things to the ether that you will regret.  Anyway, with that intro, here’s that post from the Chronicle of Higher Ed, with a variety of interesting links…

Well, my first attempt to download didn’t get the whole file (~160MB of MP3’s in a zip file, 82 files in all this time).  Second time got it all.  I loaded it into iTunes last night, and listened on my commute (~50 minutes of drive time) this morning.  I like this, but I’m thinking that I’m unlikely to get through a whole issue before the next weekly one comes out, especially if I listen to any NPR.  Looks to be about 8 hours or more of running time.

I like the way they did it.  The production is good, and they change readers with each piece so you get different voices and that keeps the interest up.  If you are a subscriber, check it out!  If you are not, you might want to give it a look…an excellent magazine!

This is really cool…I subscribe to the Economist magazine (a really great news magazine) and now, they have supposedly put the whole issue on a podcast. Am looking forward to listening to it on my commute. Getting ready to go download now!