Ch…Ch…Ch…Changes

Life has been busy lately. I have stopped teaching in our Continuing Education program, and focused my time on completing my degree starting this summer.

I am currently taking two classes that are 100% online. It has been an adjustment for me for a few reasons. First, being a student again is hard. There is a lot of shit to shovel. Second, I am seeing our new systems operate like the Portal, WebCT, etc from the outside. I have to resist the temptation of “troubleshooting” mode, where I explore ways to make the process better and just focus on the classes. Third, I never got real familiar with WebCT, and pacing myself and doing everything electronically is surprising harder than it sounds. I am having fun though, and that is what counts.

We are almost done setting up our new office. The desks are in place (including the cabinet doors, which we had to hunt down). Kristin’s new desktop is here and being loaded as I write this post. We are still picking out some more lighting, storage, etc to make the room a perfect office. I am even eyeballing one of those portable AC units to keep the temperature a little more comfortable. Pictures soon!

Update:http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf

At work, we are on the edge of having resolved a lot of our Portal issues. In addition to performance and reliability improvements, there will be other subtle enhancements that I am anxious to look into further. These include a Facebook channel, mobile Targeted Announcements, a rich text editor, a better Email SSO experience, and resolution to some terrible technical problems that are unfixable right now. Who knows if these updates are of substance, or are just marketing bullets on a sales pitch. We are fully operational in our testing environment, so the switch should be happening within the next week, assuming testing goes well.

In other news, our garage sale has made us almost $300 so far, and the space we got back in our quaint house is quite impressive.

Windows 7 RC here I come…