Miracles do happen

So today the second miracle happened in my life. I know we throw that word around a lot in reference to sports and other small things that happen in our lives that we didnt expect. This miracle goes way beyond any of those and falls in the actual could only have happened by God's grace category. My dad was taken to the ER on Sunday evening with chest pain. He had a mild heart attack. That is was the start of the miracle. The miracle came to full fruition today when they took him in for an angioplasty to fix what they believed to be a small blockage in an artery. When they got in to do the angioplasty today and injected to die to find the blockage they found that one of his arteries was 99% blocked and there was a good amount of blockage in a couple other arteries as well. They immediately put him on the schedule this afternoon for bypass surgery. They got in this afternoon and ended up doing a quadruple bypass. They found that there was no damage done to his heart. Everything is functioning properly now and the doctors are very happy with the results. There is no way that this situation can be explained other than a complete miracle happening. For him to have 99% blockage and blockage in other arteries and only have a minor heart attack and no damage to the heart. This is the second time in my life I have witnessed a miracle. The other was the day before either my 14th or 15th birthday but that is another story for another time. Thank you God for a huge miracle and keeping my dad around longer with us.

Wake Up People

So this post s definitely going to be a rant. Why do so many seem to think that the Desktop is a place to store files? The desktop is not meant for that. Sure you can use it TEMPORARILY for things but it isnt meant to be the place that you keep stuff permanently. The desktop is meant for shortcut icons and pretty pictures. Speaking of pretty pictures, the "picture" on the desktop is called a Wallpaper not the Screensaver. Come on people it is amazing how many of you out there get these terms mixed up. Wallpaper = Pretty picture on desktop. Screensaver = That thing that turns on when your computer sits idle for 15 min that can display pivoting 3d text, multiple pictures or a multitude of other things. Wake Up People and learn these two facts and it will make your resident IT professional at your job a lot happier.

Video Games = Society's Scapegoat

Here is an interesting article, talking about how video games are taking too much blame for the "downfall" of society lately. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10005871-17.html I agree with the author, video games are taking way to much blame for things. We are going after video games like GTA IV because a couple of kids have re-enacted the game. Most recently a kid in Thailand killed a taxi cab driver because he saw it in GTA IV and emulated it in real life. Now dont get me wrong I am not advocating games like GTA IV in any way but we put a bit to much blame on video game producers for these games. The game is rated M for Mature. That means that it is intended for people 17 and up. That means that if it is getting into the hands of anyone other than 17 year olds and up the PARENTS are buying the game for their kids. Parents are the ones that need to step up in this country. Parents nowadays seem to try and push the responsibility to everyone but themselves. The schools are supposed to teach our kids, the government is supposed to regulate the movies and video games, the schools are supposed to watch what our kids eat, the list goes on. The video game violence while it may be more "realistic" today than it has been ever before, it still falls short in comparison to most movies. The violence in Saving Private Ryan which came out in 1998 thats 10 years ago far outways the realism of the violence in GTA IV or any other of the "violent" video games of today. I think that video games get a bad rap because a few people out of the MILLIONS that play video games dont have enough sense to realize, or havent been taught by their parents, that video games arent real they are make believe and what you can do in a video game you cant and shouldnt be doing in real life. In real life if you get shot you cant just keep right on going and heal yourself with a health pack just down the road. So Thailand's response to the killing of the taxi cab driver was to stop the sales of GTA IV, wouldnt the better response be to put a call out to parents to actually do some, i dont know, PARENTING?

Why Apple Why?

So I went to synch the music on my computer with my iPod Touch. I currently have only been using it for podcasts and tv shows. It is currently set up to pull podcasts and tv shows off after I watch them once. Great system for keeping the storage from getting overloaded. Well as soon as I turned the synch my music feature on it started to reload all of the old audio podcasts that I have listened to onto the iPod again. Now yes audio podcasts are technically music since they are mp3 files but really apple? You are the pioneers of the podcast you would think you would have figured out a way that iTunes and the iPod would view podcasts as something other than music. Especially now that we are on iTunes 7.7 and had many many generations of iPods. Come on Apple you should really get this one right.

Website = FAIL

So today we started using Google Analytics to keep track of things on our webpage. The analytics are amazing and give us some great information about our visitors. So you might ask where the fail comes in, well with Analytics you can actually keep track of Goals on a page. Essentially if you are an ecommerce site it would be keeping track of people adding things to their carts, viewing their carts, and then finally a Thank You style page after they have made their purchases (a funnel to the Thank You page essentially). Well it would be really great if we could do this on our webpage except the FAIL of our page is that the big things we would want to keep track of (ie a student filling out an application for admission) is done by an outside company and is in no way assosciated with our webpage. That is just plain ridiculous. Basically we are directing the traffic to a point where we have no way of tracking any of it and cant measure how many people go through the application process online. I sure hope that we can change this in the not to distant future so that we can keep track of things.

Some people should not use a computer EVER

So today I got a call from a user who was having problems logging into the website. I was out of the office so I had to call her back. When I called her back and found out what the problem was I figured it would be an easy thing to remedy boy was I wrong. The problem was that she was attempting to go to the old url and not the new one. Simple fix but apparently not for her. Trying to get her to navigate to the new url turned into an excercise in futility. She went to the old webpage and before i could even stop her she was about 4 levels deep in the wrong direction on the old url. When I finally got her back to the homepage which took some time, i said ok now go to the top and where you see xyz.blah change the xyz to read zzzzz.blah (yes i didnt give the real domains but if you know me and where I work you can figure it out). Once I got her to do that it still took her a little bit to find the link I was trying to direct her to in the first place. Once we got there she was finally able to login. The funny thing is she tried to claim that she was never informed that we were going to be making a domain change, there were 4 emails within the last month informing everyone of the change in domain name. The scariest part of this whole thing is that this person now has to relay the information to other users. Heaven help them cuz if it is anything like my conversation with her they are going to want to scream and throw things. I know not everyone has a lot of computer knowledge but everything I tried to walk her through is something that in this day and age of the internet that anybody who uses a computer SHOULD KNOW.

Conference in Canada, Eh?

So this past week I attended a tech conference in Canada. It was really interesting to get around other IT guys and realize that the problems that we are encountering in our IT department have been had by those in other university IT departments as well. It was very comforting to see that we are not alone in our problems.