I realized I’ve not updated my reading list in a while…
Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray my pager does not beep!
#SysAdminBedtimePrayers
I regularly (read: daily) have WebEx conference calls and often take them on my mobile while commuting. Most of these are repeating so it’s the same conference code every time. I recently learned of a way to simplify dialing in from my mobile.
What you need to know is the call-in number, the conference code, if you are joining as the call leader, and if the conference is configured to prompt for you to speak your name before joining – some of mine are, but the calls are set such that the response isn’t used. For me the following us the usual sort:
Number: 1-800-555-1212
Code: 1234567
Leader: no
Name prompt: yes
With this, I create a contacts entry with the name “08:30 Tu-Th OPS Concall” and the phone number: 1-800-555-1212,, 1234567#,,,#
This will dial the number, pause for a few seconds for the conference system to answer, enter the conference code with the requisite # sign, wait though the leader prompt, and send # for the name prompt.
My M-W-F 08:30 does not have the name prompt, so that entry ends at the # following the conference code.
I’ve had lots going on and little time to write. We had a great vacation in Oak Island, North Carolina, last week.
At the moment I’m having lunch in Bloomington, Illinois. I’m here through Friday working on a software install for a customer.
Sometimes life just happens. The last several months have been hectic.
I’ve read a few more books, though mostly for class. I was taking Anthropology 440 in the spring term at UNC, which I aced, so my cumulative GPA is 4.0! If I ever again think taking a 400-level to fill a core requirement is a good idea…
Work is most of the hectic, though I can say I’m still liking it. This past Wednesday marked six months that I’ve been there.
Baseball season has started and we have our same fantastic seats for the Durham Bulls. Their season isn’t going so well, but, they’re still my team.
Angela and I took a weekend away last month. We went to Enfield, NC, which makes Enfield, CT, look positively metropolitan. We’d found a Living Social deal for a bed and breakfast named Bellamy Manor, which is beautiful. For dinner one evening we went to On The Square in Tarboro, NC, which was a 45 minute drive away by way of mostly two-lane state highways. One of the owners of The Lodge at Roanoke Valley, which is the Masonic Temple building in town, told us of the restaurant while we were there for an art exhibition.
We now have a third motorcycle, and it wasn’t at all what we had intended to buy. We’d wanted to buy a third motorcycle, one that either of us could ride, so that we didn’t run into an issue when one was in the shop. Angela can’t get my 1998 Kawasaki Voyager XII off the sidestand, though her 2002 Kawasaki ZR-7s is comfortable for both of us. We had planned for a Ninja 650R or its fraternal twin, the ER-6n – the unfaired or “naked” version. However, a coworker was selling his bike for a price that was great and it’s a model that, in terms of various aspects, similar to the ZR-7s, so we went for it. I never thought I’d own a machine from this particular company, but I’m now the owner of a 1998 BMW R1100R.
Tomorrow we’re celebrating Mother’s Day with my parents (they had other obligations last week) by taking them out to 604 at West Village in Durham.
I’ve had the Kindle Touch just over three weeks now and, stealing a few minutes, decided to post what I’ve read thus far.
Completed:
In progress:
I came across this “Run Your Campus” article via the Managing Your IT Career blog (has an academic focus but does contain more generally useful advice.) I fell a bit behind in keeping up with this blog (among others) in the fall due to events in my life, but some things are truly better late than never.
I feel this article has much to offer anyone in IT; probably more for academic IT, but there’s still some as you get further from that. The paragraph “Your university computer is not really yours” is really spot-on! When I was at UNC, that was compounded by the fact that I was a public employee and things like my state-provided computer and e-mail account were subject to public records laws. It’s a practice I have carried-forward to SAS: if it isn’t related to work, it goes to my personal e-mail.
This does take an interesting turn for my account at UNC as it continues to exist and I have legitimate access to it beyond my employment there as I am still a Carolina student. Even so, I tend to draw that line with it.
#1 – the lack of landscape mode is something I only found because of a mention elsewhere. It’s not personally been an issue for me, but Angela’s DX is capable of this.
#2 – PDFs, as in copied to the device via USB. I tried one and found it pretty much impossible to adjust the text size. It was small by default, though easily legible, with fairly large margins but any pinch-zoom resize attempt lead to at least some amount of text being cut off on the vertical sides. I understand using Amazon’s conversion service solves this, but at a price. The PDF I tried was actual text rather than a scanned image; I imagine viewing a scanned image in PDF format wouldn’t be pleasant.
#3 Pinch-zoom. I’ve only tried this when viewing the PDF as I find the pop-up available when reading a Kindle book (the “Aa” button that appears at the bottom of the screen after tapping to bring up the menu) to be far more usable.
#4 Text-to-speech. The first time you go to use it, change the volume. It will be set around 75%, but will actually be using something far quieter until the level is changed for the first time. You can imagine how I figured that out – it involved my car stereo and me having first adjusted the stereo volume up to compensate. I tried using this with Curveball but found it rather unusable due to how it treats some conventions used in that book. Em dashes are rushed, having a verbal run-on effect, and footnote numbers are read after a pause at the end of the sentence to which they belong. The Wedding Gift works better, but there are still many emphatic problems, including unnatural pauses due to commas in quotes that were part of a fast-passed dialogue, e.g. “Yes, ma’am,” which would have really been close to “yes-em” when actually said becomes “yes *pause* ma’am.” Salutations are not handled, thus “Mrs” is read as “Emm arr ess.” Still, I’ve made it a quarter of the way through that book using that on my commute to and from work.
#5 Web Browser – filed under “Experimental” for a reason. It’s functional, but that’s about all I can say for it. You wouldn’t want to really use it for much, though I’ll grant that the gray-scale rendering of sites like Twitter and Facebook is better than I would have expected.
#6 Refresh – I have noticed ghost text on occasion. There is a setting about full refreshes/redraws on page change which eliminates this, but page redraws become longer and much more visually disturbing (the screen goes black for a moment for every page change.)
2011 was an incredible year for me. I can truly say that it has held the highest highs and lowest lows I’ve ever experienced.
This year ends with me having gained so very much professionally and personally; I am in many ways a much different and better person than I was at the start of the year. However, this is tempered with personal loss – the year ends with my family fractured, possibly irreparably.
May 2012 be everything you desire.
My sweetie got me a Kindle Touch 3g for the holidays. I’ve now read one full book, Broken (Extrahumans), and have read a considerable amount of another, Curveball, and have a rather good feel for the device. Here are my thoughts and observations. Continue reading
Danielle White is Stephen Fry proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache
