This morning is the start of fall term at PCC. The campuses are bursting with energy yet again.
In my part of this world, all is going well at this point. Our systems are usually stressed during the first week of a term and again on the first day of registration. It is looking like the beginning of fall term may be on par with the beginning of this past winter term — which saw usage in our student portal, MyPCC, grow 50% over last year’s numbers. This implies that winter term 2009 will see continued growth.
If our day holds out in MyPCC, our next big target date is November 19, the start of winter registration and historically our busiest day of the year. We still have some improvements to get in place before then which doesn’t give us a lot of time.
Here’s hoping for a busy, but quiet, rest of today.
Played around a little bit with Dipity tonight. Dipity is a pretty cool tool to develop an interactive timeline on topics of your choosing. The example below (cramped by my choices while playing with their advanced embedding options) includes entries from this blog and activity from my Pandora account.
I could also include events I choose to add to the topic directly, events from other related Dipity topics, any RSS feeds, Flickr account activity and more. The entries can be viewed in a timeline, a list, flipbook or geographically. My Dipity topic invites comments as does each event when viewing the details of the entry.
Here are some more samples of what can be done with Dipity. These are actually newly spawned services from the Dipity crew.
There is even Archaeologist, the Digg Dipity (just had to say that). Dipity succeeds in conglomerating diverse content in a visually informative manner.
A wonderful night with our little girl as she transforms into a young lady. Crickets serenaded a summer evening of thoughtful discussion and flowing poetry. We learned more of how words mean much to her and how she is growing into a deep and loving person. Crickets, huddled parents, the big dipper, a pencil, paper and an open imagination.
Our favorite end of summer concert happened this past Thursday on the waterfront in Portland. A beautiful night for great music and fireworks. Music lovingly presented by the Portland Youth Philharmonic and the Oregon Symphony.
Patience pays off. Downloaded Firefox 3 this afternoon with no trouble. Install went smoothly and all is well. The “awesome bar” worked well since my open tabs before the upgrade did not get restored after the installation.
Memory usage, at a quick glance, looks better than Firefox 2. Random and most non-scientific comparison between Firefox 3 and IE 7 with same set of tabs open and both playing a TED video of BumpTop shows Firefox using slightly more memory but at least half the CPU of IE.
The BumpTop desktop resembles mine, just not sure that is a good thing. Tossing something across my desk doesn’t usually result in billiards style reactions. The mess gets worse or something breaks.
Enticing options are the many ways BumpTop allows me to easily sort my piles even while retaining some apparent history of its previous organized (or unorganized) state. I can also flag items or increase the size (and apparent desktop weight) of an item to signify importance. It would be cool to automatically associate item size to priority or an upcoming deadline. If I could also pile items such as email threads and add items to multiple piles without physically creating an additional document, BumpTop would provide all my organizational needs with a very enjoyable interface. The fun desktop.
A few shots posted to flickr of clouds gathering west of Portland before an evening of thunderstorms on May 24. We didn’t get much of the storm near our house but some rain after a walk to pizza and ice cream. Nice lightning show for the way home.
Mark on the acrobat.com team left a comment on my previous post about a snag they had this morning. It seems service was available soon after I tried but I had to go on to other things. I have had a chance to play around a little tonight though.
I still like the Buzzword interface as I reported on before, but the conglomeration of pieces in acrobat.com seems a bit fractured. I am in the Share area where I can upload files and share but this is apparently different than my Buzzword documents that I can also share.
I just recently learned of Jonathan Corum’s Personal Injury Warning System. It is a fun trip through his historic record of personal injuries and the warning signs that might have prevented each incident. Despite the extensive injuries, Jonathan retains a highly detailed memory. Here is my first attempt at a PIWS sign.
1973 Texas
Hide-and-seek does not mean you are invisible or able to pass through immovable objects.
Permanent Damage: Small scar dead-center forehead.
Looking Back: Too bad I didn’t have Dan’s advice to get me through that lamp post.
1973 Texas