Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computers Inc., dreamer, thinker, visionary, genius.
In 2004, he announced he had pancreatic cancer.
Steve died, Wednesday, October 5, 2011.
R.I.P. Steve Jobs
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Author Archives: Chris
Looking Forward to HighEdWeb 2011
Let’s review for a minute. From my HighEdWeb 2010 Wrap Up:
High Ed Web 2011 will be in Austin, Texas. Our department might send two people next year. I’ll go out on a limb and predict the hot topics next year. Semantic content (Web 3.0) for mobile, desktop, vehicles, televisions, toasters, etc. (We can make content inter-operable; maybe using a CMS.) Location-based (geo-loco) applications with a side of augmented reality or geo-fencing. (Facebook Places exploded this year. Foursquare has the most users, for now. Gowalla is based in Austin.) HTML5 and CSS3 are growing, even if at a slow pace. (The W3C made an announcement about holding off deploying HTML5.)
Semantic content is a generic way of saying well-formed, valid, well-structured coded-content. HTML5 is another attempt at semantic markup language with some juicy improvements thrown in. In 2011 more work was done on HTML5 and CSS3 so that we can start to see the benefits of using them on sites. This blog’s theme is written in HTML5, and I’ve used CSS3 – sparingly – on a few sites.
In early 2011 Chevy came out with the Cruze, a car that can read your Facebook wall – the Chevy Cruze commercial debuted at the Super Bowl in February. The Cruze also has an app: you can remote start your car from your smartphone. Of course all of the game consoles and “smart” TV’s can connect to Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, etc.
The geo-loco thing is like Twitter – it’s there but not everyone is using it. The big thing for Twitter this year (and years past) was real-time news updates and celebrity tweets. Some of the top trends were #winning, #tsunami, #Libya, and of course #MBteamS.
Mobile devices and the content we serve them is another hot topic. Tablets like the Apple iPad or Android Tab or Blackberry Playbook are all the rage and they present yet another challenge when it comes to serving content to a small-er screen. A few years ago, smartphones were the big kid on the block and we rushed to make code semantic and adjust to their small size. Now tablets introduce another size and the ability to behave like a desktop or a mobile phone; coders bang your heads here.
Along with mobile devices of various sizes running apps and visiting websites came along the idea of progressive enhancement. PE has probably been around a long time – lurking in a dark corner next to “best-practices” – but it’s new to me. I’d like to see a presentation or workshop on PE and how it relates to semantic HTML5 and CSS3.
As it turns out two of us are going to High Ed Web 2011 this year. In a strange twist of events we hired a new programmer, and he’ll be tagging along with me. We also implemented a CMS in 2011 – Hannon Hill Cascade – so we’d like to meet other Cascade users. We will be going to Atlanta for the Cascade User Conference, but that’s another post.
Texas Reds Steak and Grape Festival 2011
This year they changed the date to the fall in the hopes of cooler weather. October in Texas is still warm, but it’s closer to harvest. So, it should be interesting to see if the vintners present new wines or yearlings.
The Texas Reds Steak and Grape Festival is October 7-8, 2011, in Downtown Bryan, Texas.
A new twist this year: general admission is $4 or $5. They’ll have the event gated” so they know who paid and who didn’t. The rational? To make up for the revenue they’ll loose for the two days. Seriously? I find it hard to believe that the City of Bryan makes $50,000 in two days from the 5 square blocks of downtown where the event is being held. I may not go just on principle.
Oven Baked Spare Ribs v. 1.0
My wife wanted to try this recipe for oven baked spare ribs. Her recipe – or specifically her mom’s recipe – is very simple.
Start with ribs on a rack in a pan, and lay tin foil on top of the meat so it doesn’t burn (don’t wrap). Cook at 350° F for 4 hours.
Take the tin foil off, flip over (bones up), and bast with barbecue sauce. Cook for another 30 minutes.
Turn over (meat up) bast with barbecue sauce. Cook for another 30 minutes.
Repeat the turning process until ribs are tender.
This recipe was originally meant for baby back ribs and the result was semi-tough ribs – like all of our other tries. There has to be a secret recipe out there somewhere for fall-off-the-bone spare ribs.
Texas faces worst dry spell since 1895
Texas drought 2011-09-11
Texas isn’t the only place affected by heat and drought.
August was yet another busy month for global weather extremes. Highlights included record-busting heat and drought (again) in the south-central portions of the U.S.A. The climatological summer of June-August was the 2nd warmest since accurate measurements began in 1895. An intense heat wave also affected southern Europe in mid-month. Severe tropical storms lashed the eastern seaboard of the USA (Irene) and the Philippines and Japan. Torrential rains caused devastating flooding and landslides in Nigeria and Uganda. But the 2nd most important extreme weather story (2nd to the USA heat wave and drought) was the record cold wave and blizzard that hit New Zealand on August 14-15. Source: Weather Extremes : August 2011 Global Weather Extremes Summary : Weather Underground.
This drought and summer-heat is still going, and may continue until summer 2012. It did cool off last week though – lows in the mid-50′s, highs in the low 90′s – but we’ve only seen 1 inch of rain since August 1. That cool off is 2 weeks ahead of schedule. Usually we have a cool spell during the 3rd week of September.
Since January 1, state and local firefighters and crews from across the country have battled 18,887 wildfires over more than 3.5 million acres in Texas, according to state officials. Source: More wildfires erupt in Texas as it faces worst dry spell since 1895 – CNN.com.
Back in June I reported about Global Weirding and the number of counties in exceptional drought. Well, as expected, the trend continued into September. As of September 6, 81% of counties are in exceptional drought – the worst on the Drought Monitor’s scale.
See how fast wildfire spreads – Texas Parks and Wildlife
Ten years after “9/11″ September 11, 2011
Here we are in 2011, ten years after the attacks of 9/11 – September 11, 2011 – and what have we done? We (aka the United States government) destroyed what was left of Iraq and Afghanistan, captured Saddam Hussein (hanged December 30, 2006), assasinated Osama bin Laden (shot May 2, 2011), and almost rebuilt One World Trade Center (1,776 feet high scheduled for completion in 2013) near the site of the former Twin Towers in New York City. Our national debt has nearly trippled in the past 10 years. And we’ve been in a recession since 2008.
I remember where I was September 11, 2001, at 7:46 AM (CDT). I was watching CNN in my living room, drinking coffee, about to get in the shower and go to work. It took the news networks about 10 minutes before they trained their cameras on the burning 1 WTC building. I was at work when the second plane hit 2 WTC. In total 2,977 victims died between the four planes that crashed that day.
One thing is for sure America will never be the same.
War (What Is It Good For?)
OK enough is enough! An acquaintance from high school wrote this on his Facebook. (Obviously he’s in the military.)
31 lost, 31 unwanted visits, 31 doors receive that dreaded knock, 31 families with shattered hearts, 31 pairs of boots lined up with rifles and dog tags and helmets, 31 comrades remembered and grieved for, 31 funeral services, 31 names on newly made grave markers, 31 empty places at the table, 31 souls who gave all, whose lives leave a void, so let’s take 31 seconds to re-post this and pause to reflect on such a sacrifice as 31 gone forever!
My reply was this:
I say the rest have 31 days to get out of country. Oh BTW budget cuts mean no hazard pay, no benefits, no severance pay. Welcome back boys! Get in the back of the employment line. Thanks G.B. and the rest of Congress that went along with this charade. Sorry Chris that you are in the military and support this action. I think the government has done a good job duping us from 9/12/2001 onward.
The World Wide Web Turns 20 Years Old
It was August 6, 1991, at a CERN facility in the Swiss Alps, when 36-year-old physicist Tim Berners-Lee published the first-ever website. It was, not surprisingly, a pretty basic one… Source: 20 Years Ago Today: The First Website Is Published – Wired.com.
Wow, 20 years of the WorldWideWeb (W3)!
First Web page circa 1992
Back in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee along with Robert Cailliau and some folks at CERN invented the World Wide Web. By 1991 they were sharing hypertext documents. By 1992 Stanford had a “web server.” In 1993 NCSA released Mosaic, a basic, but more sophisticated, browser for personal computers.
The original page changed often with updates of the project and eventually it was removed, but a copy of it was saved to the W3C website – http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html circa 1992 version – as a historical document.
The first web page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, which centred on information regarding the WWW project. Source: Welcome to info.cern.ch.
I’ve spent almost 15 years looking at WWW and HTML. By 1995 it was easy for anyone to download web server software and have it running a website. I would say things were a lot simpler back then, but in fact “times” are the same. Times and hypertext documents were much less sophisticated back in 1995. The technology grew to match the demand.
Even today I think it’s important to recognize the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web. The Web is just one services using the Internet to transmit data. The Internet was around well before the Web.
The Web is not identical to the Internet; it is only one of the many Internet-based communication services. The relation between them may be understood by using the analogy with the global road system. On the Internet, as in the road system, three elements are essential: the physical connections (roads and cables), the common behaviour (circulation rules and Internet protocol) and the services (mail delivery and the WWW). Source: CERN – How the web works.
The Internet was “invented” or started in 1958 with the ARPA project. In 1983, it went global with the TCP/IP standard.
Social-ism Media Propaganda On Sale
Aaron Wood, aka Justonescarf on Etsy, has some pretty cool social media propaganda posters for sale.
Aging Air Traffic Control UPDATED
Thirty years ago today air traffic control was changed forever.
On August 3, 1981 nearly 13,000 of the 17,500 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) walked off the job, hoping to disrupt the nation’s transportation system to the extent that the federal government would accede to its demands for higher wages, a shorter work week, and better retirement benefits. At a press conference in the White House Rose Garden that same day, President Reagan responded with a stern ultimatum: The strikers were to return to work within 48 hours or face termination. As federal employees the controllers were violating the no-strike clause of their employment contracts. Source: http://eightiesclub.tripod.com/id296.htm
Fast forward to 2011 and we face a crisis. More than half of the replacement controllers are due to retire because of mandatory retirement rules. There is a mandatory retirement age of 56 for controllers who manage air traffic. And the minimum age (now) is 30. Do the math and all of the controllers they hired in 1981 were forced to retire by 2007. They made some exceptions and they replaced several controllers early, but the fact is we’re in desperate need of more air traffic controllers.
UPDATE
I find it a little ironic that this year the FAA ran out of money and furloughed 4,000 workers. Today the FAA got funding to re-open. They were loosing an estimated $30 million per day of airline ticket taxes.
Since authorization for FAA funding expired in late July, the agency has also been unable to collect federal taxes on airline tickets — leading to a revenue loss of approximately $30 million a day. If the dispute had continued until Congress returned in September, the federal government would have lost over $1 billion in revenue. Source: Senate passes bill ending partial FAA shutdown – CNN.com.