Moore-Norman Technology Advisory Council Meeting

I went to the MN Technology AC meeting Tuesday evening and met with the Java instructor, Frederick Akins. Dinner was great and I received a nice soft-sided brief-case.

Unfortunately, I was the only person from 'industry' to show up for the Java part of their program. I mentioned some of things I think the students should be doing:

• layering their apps
• writing tests
• look at Groovy, Grails, JRuby,
  
• write apps for browsers (not too much swing). I suggested using JSF, Wicket, Tapestry, or maybe even Struts.

They always want new projects to work on so I mentioned having the students contribute to an open source project. I don't see my employer letting students work on our code. One think I mentioned a year or 2 ago - I'd love to see an eclipse plug-in that would read a Cobol buffer and map it to Java objects. The plug-in would need the Cobol buffer layout and something to map the Cobol fields to the Java fields. I'll have to mention this to Frederick. I guess it wouldn't have to be a plug-in, it could just be a Java app (or JRuby, Groovy, Grails...).

favorite bbsposts of all time

This story is main reason I read bbspot. I found this years ago and it's still pretty funny today: Microsoft Buys Evil From Satan.

Pretty good follow up story: Evil Monkeys

Memories of Murrah - by Kimberly

Tomorrow is the 13th anniversary of the Murrah bombing so I thought I post Kimberly's power-point on the subject. She made this last fall in a multimedia class.

Ace Hardware rebate

I bought some weed-n-feed at Ace yesterday. The cashier if I wanted the rebate for it. I said, "Yes".

Since I had signed up for their Ace Rewards program when I ordered an electric lawn mower a few weeks ago, I was able to go online and and fill in the info for the rebate. I didn't have to mail anything. Very Cool!

Now I''ll get my $3 in the mail in 6 to 8 weeks.

NDN Hand Game Event

The four of us went to a dinner and hand game event last night. The event was put on by the Edmond Public Schools Native American Education program. It was a great time. Many thanks to everyone who helped run this event - Mrs. Yellowfish, Mrs. Smith, and Susan. I don't remember the other peoples names.

We were fed Corn Soup, Fry Bread, Grape Dumplings, fruits, and brownies. Very good stuff. I got some tips on making Grape Dumplings. My first try wasn't all that good. Susan wants me to make them for her internship presentation.

The hand game was played by the Plains Indians back in the day and is a lot of fun. We played the version that the Ponca and some other tribes played.

You have two teams and one team guesses and one teams hides. The hiding team has 2 small objects and one of each is given to two players. They put their hands behind their backs and when they are ready, show their clenched fists. The guesser has to guess which hands the objects are in. If he/she are right, then the guessing team hides and the hiding team guesses. If he/she guesses wrong, the hiding team gets one or two points (depending on whether they guessed wrong for both or just one of the hidden objects).

Each team starts out with 5 sticks/points and you win when you have all 10 sticks/points.

While the games is going on, the singers are drumming and singing. The hiding team claps and tries to distract the guesser by waving their hands in between the guesser and the hiders. This is one the really fun parts.

Our team got creamed. We lost the last game in less than 2 minutes. It only took about 4 bad guesses.

Almost everyone won a door prize - mostly t-shirts and canvas bags. A really nice Pendleton briefcase was the 'big prize'.

Here are some pictures of the event:

Open Office -vs- MS Word 2007 - part deux

So Susan changed a Word 2007 .docx file with Open Office and saved it. Then Monday morning, she needed to print the file to turn in that day. Open Office opened the file but it was empty. I really don't any more details than that.

So Susan and Laura ran out and bought Office 2007 Student/home edition after school.

They then installed it. Ok, they tried to install it. I believe the trial version that came with the pc was in the way. So, they tried to uninstall Office and Works but they wouldn't uninstall. Trying to install the new version of Office again wouldn't work either.

When I got home today I restored the pc to an earlier restore point. I was then able to uninstall Works but not Office. I tried a few things - even backing up, then renaming the registry entries. Still no dice.

All the while I'm chuckling to myself (sort of) - ha ha - your MS crap doesn't work!!! But I know Susan is upset about all the bickering between myself and Laura. All Susan wants is something that will work.

So Laura calls the MS help line people. I am amazed! She got through to someone who could actually help within 5 minutes. They spoke with a Indian (dot not feather) accent but they helped. The trial version was gone and the new software was installed within half an hour. There is some sort of configuration crap going on due to my renaming registry keys that they couldn't fix. I'm pretty dubious about that.

Anyway, I am very impressed how quick MS was able to fix the problem. It's kind of sad too, I should expect this sort of service but with all the horror stories you hear about tech support you get jaded.

They used the 'new' net meeting to take control of the pc. Pretty cool since they were probably in Bangalore or Jakarta.

My trip from Yahoo Email to Google Email - part 2

I finally got my 2339 emails moved from Yahoo to gmail. These emails take up 286 MB (4%) of the 6617 MB google gave me for my email.

Here's part 1 of the journey.

When I started moving them today I was able to move about 100 before things quit working. I shut down ypops and thunderbird and waited a few minutes before starting them up again. It didn't help. I rebooted and that fixed the problem.

So now I'll just have to tell everyone to use my gmail account instead of yahoo.