Category: Miscellaneous

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Back to School 2012

Posted on By Tom 2 Comments on Back to School 2012
EdTech, Miscellaneous

Aviary google-com Picture 1

And so it begins again. Students return on Monday. Our teachers were back last Monday. The summer is over and we’re getting back to the business of educating kids.

Not that summer has been a vacation for me. I’ve long ago left the cycle of having summers off. In fact, summer is typically my busiest time as we try to do upgrades on our systems. This summer was particularly busy because we tried to change/upgrade just about every technology system we have. It’s been a crazy time with late evenings, working on days that I would normally have off, and trying to conduct a three ring circus of vendors working on frantic deadlines to get everything ready before August 15.

Here’s a list of our projects this summer…

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Social Marketing Gone Awry

Posted on By Tom 3 Comments on Social Marketing Gone Awry
Miscellaneous

Screen Shot 2012-06-18 at 2.17.15 PM

So, Shell Oil decided that they would embark on a new marketing campaign to promote drilling in the Arctic. They took help from a conglomerate of social media marketing companies, which also included the Marketing Heaven. The campaign, entitled “Let’s Go”, let’s users create their own marketing slogans using a series of photo templates.

We at Shell want everyone to feel as “pumped” as we do about freeing much-needed Arctic resources. After all, the Arctic is the common heritage of all humanity, and what we do there matters to everyone.

That’s why Shell is inviting you to create your very own Let’s Go! ad for our Arctic campaign. We’ll feature it on our website, and you can show all your Facebook friends how pumped you are to seize the day’s opportunities too. The best submissions will win exciting prizes—including an all-expenses-paid trip to see the Kulluk in action!

Screen Shot 2012-06-18 at 2.18.20 PM

What could possibly go wrong?

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Blog Migration Complete

Posted on By Tom 3 Comments on Blog Migration Complete
Miscellaneous

It’s done. I now have more control over my online destiny. Today I migrated my domain name, randomconnections.com, to a host that gives me more flexibility and management – Godaddy, of all things.

First, the saga of the blog…

My old web hosting company was Accuwebhosting. It was an absolute pain in the posterior, as for as hosting was concerned. I was severely restricted as to what I could do with databases, and I could only allow uploads to one subdirectory. The first version of this blog was a home-grown ASP application. The blog kept crashing, and the host provider said it was my recursive ASP scripts. Yeah, right.

So, I switched over to WordPress. It was actually cleaner and much easier to use, but my blog still crashed and my hosts still complained. They wanted me to delete some of my content to make the site run more efficiently. Yeah, right.

WordPress kept upgrading their products. When version 2.5 came along I wanted to upgrade so that I could take advantage of some of the security features. My host informed me that I would have to upgrade my platform, which would mean deleting my current database and reconstructing everything from scratch. Yeah, right.

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Happy Pi Day

Posted on By Tom 8 Comments on Happy Pi Day
Miscellaneous

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510 5820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282 3066470938446095505822317253594081284811174502841027019385211055 5964462294895493038196442881097566593344612847564823378678316527 1201909145648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273724587 0066063155881748815209209628292540917153643678925903600113305305 4882046652138414695194151160943305727036575959195309218611738193 2611793105118548074462379962749567351885752724891227938183011949 1298336733624406566430860213949463952247371907021798609437027705 3921717629317675238467481846766940513200056812714526356082778577 1342757789609173637178721468440901224953430146549585371050792279 6892589235420199561121290219608640344181598136297747713099605187 0721134999999837297804995105973173281609631859502445945534690830 2642522308253344685035261931188171010003137838752886587533208381 4206171776691473035982534904287554687311595628638823537875937519 577818577805321712268066130019278766111959092164201989 Pay no attention to those Ides, 3.14 is the true March holiday for geeks.  Pi has been around for nearly 4000 years.  The ancient Babylonians and Egyptians knew about it, and Greek mathematicians refined the concept. Supposedly the concept … Read More “Happy Pi Day” »

I’ve Seen Fire and I’ve Seen Rain

Posted on By Tom No Comments on I’ve Seen Fire and I’ve Seen Rain
Local, Miscellaneous

It’s been a rough night. It started in the afternoon with storms sweeping across the Midwest and into the Southeast. Laura came home to find her mom in her raincoat with purse in hand, heading down to our basement. She heard “tornado warning” on the radio, and not knowing the location of counties, etc., thought it must be for our area.

Friday is usually our “date night”, and we had planned to go out that evening as well. Once we had reassured Laura’s mom that no bad storms were headed our way, we were able to go ahead with our plans. We had a very nice leisurely meal at The Lazy Goat, then headed on home just in case any storms were on their way.

When we got to our street we noticed a deputy sheriff’s car up near John Knox church. As we turned onto our street, this was the scene that greeted us…

IMAG0018

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