SeatGuru.com - Your Enlightened Guide to Airplane Seating

SeatGuru.com - Your Enlightened Guide to Airplane Seating
- Find the best seats on an airplane.

Managing Change and Risk

Rogers E, (1985), Diffusion of Innovations, The Free Press, New York, is the original source of the adopter categories:

1. Innovators
   
2. Early adopters
   
3. Early majority
   
4. Late majority
   
5. Laggards
   

There is a nice description of each group at http://www.affinitymc.com/managing_change_and_risk.htm.

There is a nice distribution curve and some interesting activies at http://www.modern.nhs.uk/improvementguides/human/6.html.

Geoff Moore's use of the categories below is noted at http://www.nipltd.com/approach/method/chasm.

1. Easrly Market
   
2. Chasm
   
3. Bowling Alley
   
4. Tornado
   
5. Main Street
   
6. Assimilation
   

Fight Spam on the Internet!

http://spam.abuse.net/
Nice site. Includes seperate sections to help users and sysadmins. Sysadmin site section has a lengthy list is links about mail transfer agent strategies to reduce spam.

Stop Spam!

http://www.scambusters.org/stopspam/index.html
Good list of other resources (links to web sites).

SpamCon Foundation: to reduce spam (junk email)

http://www.spamcon.org/
Organization trying to reduce spam with what appears to be a legislative focus.

Spam Site | Spam Filter Reviews

http://www.spam-site.com/
Lots of information on Spam and various tools that are available.

Anti-Spam Filters

http://mmmservices.web.cern.ch/mmmservices/Help/contents/0_4_spam-filters.asp
A nice explanation of the various filters being applied by one hosting service.
1. Checking the validity of the envelope sender address
2. Well known spam destinations
3. Attempts to use CERN as a relay are rejected
4. Well known dangerous attachments
5. Bad local addresses
6. BadStrings (viagra)

freshmeat.net: Category Reviews - Spam Filters

http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/964/
August 23, 2003 review and discussion of various Bayesian and heuristic filters.

Lego Films

Go to brickfilms.com to see stop-motion movies made with Legos. "Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." Bertrand Russell (WIRED, Nov. 2003, p. 52)
BrickFilms

DATAPILOT cell phone sync utility

My wife and I have the same cell phones. With this program it was simple to enter a set of phone numbers and store them in both the phones. I use it as a stand-alone program, with its own set of contacts, but it is capable of synchronizing with Outlook or Palm Desktop, too. www.datapilot.com or 800-282-3678
DataPilot Cell Phone Sync Software

NGSCB

Microsoft's new security infrastructure, NGSCB, is pronounced "ingscub", according to PC Mac, Nov. 11, 2003, p. 101. NGSCB is supposed to have a "trusted" mode that will better protect us from rogue programs. We will see.
Microsoft NGSCB site

Cyberguys Power Strip Liberator Plus

Have you ever had trouble plugging in a power brick? The Power Strip Liberator from Cyberguys is the solution you need. It is a one-foot extension cord. A five pack is only $8.95 (product #121 2535), but shipping is something like $10 additional. You can find them on-line at www.cyberguys.com or call 800-892-1010. If you use a computer in an airport, get the Liberator Plus (around $3) and you can share an electrical outlet with another computer user, since it has a pass-through outlet, too.
Cyberguys Liberator Plus

Tablet PC and Tegrity

On-Demand Lectures Create an Effective Distributed Education Experience

Moviefone

For times and locations of films, dial 305-777-FILM (3456). It works in any area code. You can also use the moviefone.com web site.

Digital cameras

In order to increase resolution, some cameras use "honeycomb CCDs" rather than the regular rectangular positioning. New "pro" cameras don't have the shutter lag that is "the most annoying aspect of the digital camera" according to John Dvorack. He also says "You will want a new digital camera in two years no matter what you buy." (From pcmag, Nov. 11, 2003, p. 61)

IM archives

For legal purposes it may be necessary to archive all IM interactions. This article lists some products that can do that. I use Trillium and it keeps a transcript of every interaction. I have found that useful on a number of occasions.

PCWorld.com - IM Poses Legal, Personnel Problems

The Chronicle: Daily news: 10/17/2003 -- 02

Harvard is offering permanent web-based e-mail accounts to its alumni. The Chronicle: Daily news: 10/17/2003 -- 02 (restricted access)

Videoconferencing Service from Internet2

$2,000 per year for 300 port hours of multipoint videoconferencing. Additional time is 10 cents per minute per port.

H.323 Videoconferencing Service of the Internet2 Commons

Wireless VoIP at Dartmouth

Syllabus News reports that Dartmouth is rolling out campus-wide wireless Voice over IP access using PocketPC PDAs.

Template for Flash training material

The Center for Research in Medical Education is working on a template for on-line training. It uses flash. This is an outgrowth of the Harvey Lab. My contact there is Richard Bambarran. Mitral Regurgitation: Introduction

SFX Lunch and Learn

The Richter Library Web Services Dream Design has some info about SFX in their June 27 entry of their weblog: Richter Library Web Services Dream Design: June 2003 Archives

PowerPoint Slide Sizes/Resolutions

There are two places to set slide sizes/resolutions in PowerPoint 2002 (XP). In Slide Show > Set Up Show... you can set the resolution to 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, or the current screen resolution. This is used when displaying the slide show and is stored in the PowerPoint program, not in the PowerPoint slide show, I think. In File > Page Setup you can set the width and height of the slide. This is stored in the individual slide shows. This second location has two interesting functions.

1. You can create vertical slides for 8.5 x 11 inch paper. Some faculty create their slide shows this way, not for projection, but for creation of overhead transparencies. Set "Slides sized for:" to "Letter Paper (8.5x11 in)" and set the orientation to Portrait. You can still apply designs, so you will end up with very professional transparencies.

2. When converting a slide show to stream using Impatica for PowerPoint, the page size determines the size of the impaticized file. The following numbers are from the Impatica web site and create a file size that will display the entire slide and the control strip at the bottom on the display size indicated.

For 1024 x 768 displays, set the page size to 10" x 7.5".
For 800 x 600 displays, set the page size to 7.5" x 5.6".
For 640 x 480 displays, set the page size to 6" x 4.5".

Howard Strauss

If you ever get the change to hear Howard, DO SO! He is a featured speaker at Syllabus Fall 2003 and it would almost be worth going just to hear him. His current title is Manager of Technology Strategy and Outreach at Princeton University. He talks fast, jumps all over the place, and is able to communicate a vision.

Classroom polls

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~pebbles/classroom/index.html

Use of wireless handhelds to perform realtime polls of students during lectures in a Chemistry class.

Wireless access on campus

We need completely wireless connectivity as more students have it at home. That would include all interior and exterior spaces.

In the same article quoted below, Bartel says, "Students expect to see on campus what is in their homes. If it is not in the university, people will start wondering about the credibility of the institution." (p. 14)

Laptops, PDAs, and TabletPCs

What is the usage of traditional laptops, PDAs, and TabletPCs at USM? How is it changing over time? What are we doing to take educational advantage of this change?

Charles R. Bartel, from Carnegie Mellon, says that he sees laptops "the vast majority, PDAs are probably coming up in numbers, and Tablets are probably in third place at this point." (Syllabus, October 2003, p. 12)