Amanda does it again

That Amanda Congdon, what will she do next?  How about join the fight for net neutrality.

If you aren't informed on this subject, then for the love of all that is good and holy, get informed.  A good place to start is with Amanda's piece over on Rocketboom.

Oh and hey, I really dig the widescreen presentation, very shiny.

An answer to the quiz

There were a couple of people who were close, but no one hit it on the nose, so here is what I did:

First you snag the firewire cable from the iSight and connect one end to the broken drive lappy, and the other end to the not-so-broken drive lappy.  Then you restart the broken drive lappy in firewire target disk mode; once the HD of broken lappy pops up on no-so-broken lappy you launch System Prefs and use the Startup Disk chooser to choose the HD loaded via firewire.  You then reboot the no-so-broken lappy and that's it.

Once the not-so-broken lappy boots, it will pick up where the install left off, in this case asking for disk 2 of the install media.  There you have it.  Oh and for the questions regarding my sanity for deploying a machine with a dead CD-ROM, that machine would be running an Excel spreadsheet, and nothing else.  Didn't need a CD-ROM for that.

Sillyness First: a quiz!

So, this is going to be a Mac OS X tip in the form of a quiz... MacGyver style.

The Scenario

You have too craptastic TiBook's that you are in the process of wiping clean and reinstalling the OS on.  One is just about to finish the install, and the other one is finishing up disk 1 or 4 disks.

As laptop 1 finishes, you notice a strange buzzing noise coming from the CD-ROM of laptop 2, and after some fiddling you realize that the CD-ROM has died.  Laptop 2 is asking you to insert disk 2 of the install, but of course you can't now since the CD-ROM she be dead.

You have exactly 2 hours to get both of these machines ready for field deployment; there is not time or money for replacing the CD-ROM and there is no time to start the install over... you have to continue from where you left off.

Your resources

Apart from the two laptops you have an iSight and an iPod, and all the accessories that they would usually come with.  The question now is, how do you finish the install on laptop 2?

This happened to me today, and by the time I left the office at 12:00 I had the OS on both laptops, ready to go.  How did I do it?

Depending on a number of factors, there may be a prize for the winner...

User Tagging: Some Results

It has been roughly one month since I started my little end user tagging experiment, so let's take a look at the results.

Mostly Harmless

Surprisingly, to me anyway, I have much less 'tag spam' than expected.  I think I have blown away maybe 40 tags that were spammy (profanity, single letters and gibberish mostly).  On the upside every post I have written since quietly going live has been tagged by end users.

My next step is to look at augmenting the built-in WordPress search with the tags that I am gathering.  I might just write a replacement search for the site that uses tags and content indexing... who knows.

In case you were wondering

Yes, I am planning on releasing my customized version of UTW as soon as I can. My apologies to Chris Pirillo, things have been crazy yo.

Right now I am using a 3 tier classification structure for my content: categories, author tags and user submitted tags.  After a year of collecting this could be very interesting.

Testing the waters

Nevermind, the machine is now spoken for.

I am considering selling my powerbook g4 and I was wondering if there are any intersted parties out there.

The machine is wonderful, especially for travelling; my needs have just changed and this bad little boy is going to waste here at the Davis compound.  Here are some specs:

CCCU Con Day 3

Well I am in the last session of the conference, and strangely I am pretty impressed.

Thankfully day two and three were much more fun than the first one.  Not to say it was all ponies and rainbows, but I went to some really nice sessions, and made some good connections with some of my peers at other colleges and universities.

One of the most importnat things to come out of this conference for me were the conversations that I had with people who wanted to know more about opne source solutions, and how they could benefit their institutions.  It was very eye-opening to know that we at Asbury are really out in front when it comes to leveraging the power of open source on our campus.

All in all, it was a good experience.