#5 - Fiona’s take on Across the Universe

#4 - Sam Bring’s it home

#3 - Best Alice in Chain’s tune ever

#2 - Van: These are the days

#1 - Van again, with the ultimate in chill out and let the music speak

I might occasionally post an interesting article I come across that deals with religion – and I’m not shy about commenting on posts others make – but by and large I’ve found that religious discussion quickly devolves in to a situation where the person I’m having the discussion with comes to one of three conclusions:

A – I’m a hell bound heathen best left to the demons who are already tormenting me as I walk the earth

B – I would be an awesome jewel in their crown if they could save me/bring me back in the fold; or

C – Because our beliefs in this area diverge, there is no need to attempt to find common ground anywhere else – for it would be unfathomable that people who have beliefs that differ in one area of their lives could continue to have positive interaction in other areas.

So, the best solution I’ve come up with is to try as best I can to refrain from debate unless explicitly asked.   This has had the unfortunate side effect of allowing some friends who I go to church with (and yes, I do still go – more on that later) to draw their own conclusions as to what the “problem” is with me.    A side discussion related to this article made me decide to dedicate a few minutes this evening to discussing where I’m at, what I believe, and the problems I’ve had reconciling my spiritual life with every other part of my life.      Before trying to do this, I wanted to collect my thoughts so I could present them in a coherent and compelling manner – but being tired, and remembering that this is the internet, I decided to just shoot from the hip.    If people want to comment, I welcome it – just try really hard not to digress in to one of the caricatures outlined above.

There are several major issues I have with the version of the Christian faith that I’ve come to know since I was a child.   Now, you may be inclined to argue that I have the facts wrong – am taking the message out of context, or simply don’t have the right frame of reference.   All those may be valid points, but the fact remains that it’s not as if I’ve never been exposed to church, Sunday School, bible study, etc.     For better or worse, these are the lessons I gleaned from those years of cumulative experience.    If I got it wrong, it wasn’t for lack of paying attention or simply misreading a line or two from Jude in a Gideon bible while looking for the room service menu one night.

I spent many, many years trying to reconcile these issues in my own mind – telling myself little lies to make myself feel better about what I believed – and trying to rationalize why I continued to keep coming up against the same walls again and again.    The fact that I was never able to satisfactorily resolve them might be a failure of my own ability or my own desire – but it’s still a failure.

Big problem #1: Christianity, as I came to know and love it, conditions you to not only believe that you start as a failure, but then further, that nothing you do could ever be good enough to redeem you, and therefore, you must choose what’s behind door #1 to get your keys to the kingdom.     This is the celestial guilt trip.    The eternal set up.   You were made to fail, so that you could be redeemed.   I struggled with the nuances of the story for a long time, before coming to the conclusion that I was dealt the hand in life I was dealt.   I don’t remember, as an ethereal spirit, floating up to God and saying “golly gee, I’d really like to be born now!” – so, I’m not going to spend my limited time on this earth apologizing for and feeling guilty for things that the all knowing being who created me supposedly built in to my DNA to make it impossible for me NOT to do.    The absurdity of it is jarring when you step back and take a look.

Big problem #2: One oft repeated argument I’ve heard for the validity of the Christian experience is “look at all the lives that have been changed”.   There’s no denying that there are many people who have powerful, life changing experiences that they attribute to a relationship with Christ.     I’m not telling them they’re wrong.   If you believe that, and feel that your life has been changed or impacted – I am in no position to tell you you’re wrong.   What I will say though, is that if this is one of the arguments you use, you have to also look at the multitude of lives in the church that profess Christianity, yet aren’t really changed at all.   This problem of hypocrisy always bothered me – and I don’t say that to call out Christians in general – I’m including myself in the list.   I was in church for a long, long time – yet there were behaviors I had that the church very strongly viewed as wrong, or undesirable – yet not only were they not impacted/changed – but I never felt any real compulsion to change them.   There were many more that were like me than weren’t.    It creates a confusion, because you start to think “what’s wrong with me, that I’m not having this life altering experience – am I doing “it” wrong?”

The fact of the matter is, when I started to struggle violently with my faith, I can emphatically tell you it was the “friends” of mine who were allegedly “strongest in the faith” who abandoned ship first.   Whether for fear of contact pollution, or fear of exposure of their own feelings of spirituality, it informed me deeply that the bonds you build within the walls of your church are every bit as superficial as any other social bonds you make.    The real friendships – the ones that last – are forged in the times of trouble, when it’s difficult to be a friend.   Anyone can be your friend in good times.

Big Problem #3: One of the other major issues for me is that there are just core stances that the Christian church takes (and a surprisingly good number of them) that I just couldn’t pretend to go along with any longer.    Whenever modern day Christianity starts to have institutional bigotry and hatred exposed, the very first stance that they take is the mealy mouth backpedalling that sounds like this “love the sinner – hate the sin” – ever heard that one?    From the Christian churches stance on homosexuality, science vs. faith, insistence that all paths to God that didn’t go through Christ (and in many cases, their particular version of Christ) were wrong, to the “scoreboard” mentality where more value is placed on who is getting saved and baptized on Sunday morning than the good you’re doing for your community – there were just too many gaps to keep pretending I could fill in.

Some other minor issues continued to drive a wedge for me – but they were all some variance on one of these three major themes.    So – where does that leave me now?   Well, as I said, I still do try to go to church.     Why?   Because there are people there who I genuinely like and enjoy spending time with, and want to continue to see be a part of mine and my children’s lives.   Also because there are opportunities to do good for others through the collective power of the church, and probably – whether I want to admit it to myself or not – because I do hold out hope, no matter how slim, that one day I’ll hear the words I need to hear that will make it all clear in my mind, and bring me back to a point where I can accept the problems because I believe the larger “truth” of it to be correct.

Santa Claus

Right now, though, I will describe where I’m at to you the same way I described it to a very dear friend of mine.     When you are a small child, Santa Claus is a big deal at Christmas time.   You know the story, you believe it with all your heart, and the excitement of that time of year – from waiting for Santa to show up, to leaving out food for the reindeer and cookies for Santa, to watching the sky for the sleigh – it’s all very compelling, very real, and very much a part of the experience of the holiday.    Then one year, the illusion is over, and it’s just not the same.    For a small period of time, for some it’s a single season, for others longer, the confusion and disappointment of that loss of illusion tarnish the holiday.     Finally, ultimately, there comes a time where the holiday means something different to you, and you start to enjoy it again for different, but just as compelling reasons.

Right now, I’m a little kid who just lost Santa Claus at Christmas, and I’m waiting for the holiday to be fun again.

If you’ve installed/configured WordPress on previous versions of IIS, this behavior will trip you up at first – but there’s a simple and quick solution to the issue.   The problem for WordPress installations comes by way of the new error page handlers in IIS 7.5.   By default, IIS 7.5 is configured to use a custom error handling that doesn’t allow the quite necessary lack of a wp-config.php to trigger the redirect to the WordPress installation.    Instead, you’ll land on the error page, scratching your head and questioning whether you did something wrong.    To solve the problem, click on the virtual directory/application where you’ve installed WordPress in the IIS Management Console, and click on the “Error Pages” icon, as shown in this screenshot:

Clicking on this icon will allow you to edit the settings for this feature.   Choose “Detailed Error Pages” and reload your WordPress site in the browser.   You should now be taken to the familiar installation/configuration routine, and be well on your way to a completed installation.    After the install, you may want to turn on the custom error handling, depending on how you intend to configure the rest of your installation.

The card had Bodin’s footprints on it, and it said “Dad, I am following in your footsteps.”    I sat and let the impact of those words hit me for a few minutes, before thinking “I hope not”.    I hope you’re better than me.   Better than I’ll ever be.    My deepest, most heartfelt desire is that you’ll both be better people – better parents, better spouses, better citizens – better everything, than I ever can.

I love my kids so much, and I’m honored to be a daddy.

Some of their concerns were valid ones – concerns that I have in fact myself raised about the state of content. All of them, though, lacked context – or any basis in the reality of what it takes to keep hundreds of people from tech savvy IT student to 60 year old administrative assistants writing web pages in Microsoft Word pointing in the same direction.

I work very hard at my job. No one asks me to put in the extra effort that I put in. I do it partly because I want to do the best job I can, but also because I love the school and want to do whatever it takes to help it and the people who work there.

In exchange, I don’t expect to not be criticized. Criticism is a part of growth and improvement, and without it we grow stagnant. I don’t expect constant affirmation. I realize you do what you do, the best you can with what you have, and that’s that.

What I don’t appreciate, though, is being asked to respond to criticisms that weren’t shared with me directly. To answer questions raised at a closed door meeting I wasn’t a part of about work I’ve done. If you really cared what I had to say, you would have asked me.

The entire experience is one in a series that are teaching me that the extra effort really is largely ignored, and in fact reevaluation of where I am and where I’m going is probably in order. Here I am. You know me. I have been here, giving you everything I have for more than two years, You’re either happy with that or you’re not. Make up your god damned mind. I’m tired of spinning my wheels having the same conversations and explaining the same decisions over and over.

Flash forward 18 years later, to May of 2010.   On May 8, I will finally be a graduate of Marshall University, after a long, strange and meandering journey.    The story isn’t that unusual – I fell victim during my first couple of college years to the lure of the parties, distractions, and general laziness that can unfortunately accompany freedom.

Later, when I got those deficiencies corrected, it was heading toward the mid-to-late 90′s, and I fell victim to the lure of immediate employment, an incredible job market, and boundless opportunity.    Then it was the responsibility of a career, a wife, a family.    Before you know it, you look back at your 18 year old self with an odd mix of nostalgia and sadness.

I would have liked to close the loop on my formal education long ago, but it took this long for technology and circumstance to catch up and provide an environment in online learning that made it realistic for me to work this goal in to my life.

At a time when more people than ever are starting to question whether a college education remains a sound investment, it’s hard to deny that there is a widening gap on the ROI of attending college, as tuition costs increase much faster than salaries for those lucky graduates who can go on to immediate employment.

Higher education is no longer the only, or even the best, place to go for an excellent education in a specific subject area.    With the entire world at the fingertips of anyone willing to explore, it’s very possible for someone to become highly educated without ever setting foot in a classroom.

When you have institutions like MIT and Stanford helping tear down the walls by embracing open source education, it becomes that much more difficult to pretend that being physically present on campus, or hearing a faculty member lecture in person is necessary or even beneficial.

The winds of change in education are blowing, and if you’re a campus administrator or faculty member, the only two choices are to embrace that change, or attempt to fight it.     What does “embracing” change look like?

A recognition that if you are serious about improving the value of the education you provide, increasing your enrollment, and prospering in the face of change you must recognize that not all (or even the majority) of your students are going to have the time nor inclination to be physically present when you want them to be.

Lives are busy things – like it or not, you are selling a service – and if you don’t make it appealing, people will start shopping elsewhere if other vendors do.    Technology is already there.   Catch up.

Get rid of the “one toe in the water” mentality when it comes to online learning.    Take it from a student who is also a techie.    If you have a degree program that offers a “some, but not all” approach to online courses, it’s worthless to me.   I won’t even look your way.    Either embrace online learning, or don’t.   Doing anything half way only leads to failure.

Help your faculty understand that they are no longer the keeper of the keys when it comes to knowledge.   You have experiences as a faculty member that make you especially knowledgeable in an area, and I as a student appreciate that.    You aren’t the only person with those experiences.    Understand your role as a facilitator, a guide – you are not always going to be the only source of information.   You are not entitled to teach me anymore than I am entitled to an “A’ from you.

All of the traditional arguments against online learning are ridiculous to everyone who hears them outside of a college campus.  Stop using them, and recognize them for what they are – an attempt to cling to the old way of doing things:

“If everything is online, who will come here?”   – who cares?   Why not view it as “look at the opportunity we’d have to increase enrollment if we thought of ourselves as a global provider of education, offering anyone in the world the opportunity to learn from our faculty”.

“If I can’t see my students face to face, I can’t teach.” – Then you need to start thinking about what you’re going to do when you retire – because the world is changing, like it or not.    Ask the print media industry how it feels to fight a sea change.

“I can’t accurately assess what a student is learning online.” – Inability to assess isn’t a failure of delivery, it’s a failure of assessment.    I’m still amazed at the focus on thwarting academic dishonesty in an online learning environment.    The subtext is “if someone cheats there way through, they’re earning a degree without learning”.    Consider that if the content is compelling, and well delivered, there’s much less of a temptation to blow off the work and try to cheat your way through.   Why not spend time making the experience a compelling one that people wouldn’t want to miss?

There are others arguments as well – but all of them are just as silly.    This is where the world is headed.   I can refute reasons why its not over and over, but it doesn’t matter so I’m not inclined to go further.   This change is coming – it’s just a question of how quickly and whether you and your institution will be ahead of the curve, or fighting to catch up.

I would have been done with my personal journey a lot sooner had there been more opportunity for online learning earlier.    As it is, I’m glad to be finished now.   I didn’t do it because I thought it made me smarter.   I have no more pride in finishing my degree than I had embarrassment over not having finished it.   It was never (at least in my opinion) a barrier to success.

I did it because I wanted to finish what I had started.   I wanted to close the loop.   I wanted to be able to look at my kids and say “I did it, you can to”.     And when they get ready to do it, it will likely be online.

I was a huge skeptic when I first heard about the series.    It’s not because I don’t believe in the reality of the obesity problem.   I very much believe in the reality of the problem.

Here’s a picture of Laura and I in 2001

And here’s a photo of us from Thanksgiving of this year:

I know what it’s like to be fat.   It sucks.   And it’s hard to imagine when you’re there that you’ll ever be anywhere else.    When you’re starting at 50, 100, 150 or more pounds of extra weight, making adjustments to your diet and exercise patterns seem insufficient to overcome the problem.    It’s easy to tell yourself that there’s no hope – you were simply born to be this way.    No matter what you do, you won’t be successful – that those things that worked for others can’t or won’t work for you.    I can also tell you from the other side, that this is complete and utter bullshit.     It takes a long time to get fat.    Once you’re fat, it’s going to take you a long time to get “not fat”.    It’s going to suck at first.    You’re going to feel like you’re starving.   You’re going to slip up, and want to quit, and feel like a failure, and a thousand other uncomfortable things.    But…..if you’re committed, and IF you start to make change, and IF you stick to that commitment – eventually, you WILL reach a tipping point where things “click”.    Where food becomes simply another thing you do to sustain yourself (just like breathing) rather than an event you look forward to.

Once you reach this tipping point, it’s a downhill ride.    And even though I’ve taken the ride, I was skeptical of Jamie Oliver and his little show.    I was skeptical because as a Huntingtonian, I have a vested interest in seeing my city shown off in a positive light.    As a West Virginian, I’ve seen our state burnt one too many times by the stereotypical “fat, stupid hillbilly” mentality.   And as a former fatty, I have no interest in seeing people who I know are having enough of a struggle being shown as stupid, lazy, gluttonous, or further ostracized in any way.     So, yeah, I was skeptical of this show.    I approached it as something that more than likely would turn out “ok” (it has to be good TV, right), but probably wouldn’t have any lasting impact, and at worst would cause harm for those involved.

Then I started watching the show.    The first episode was a little shaky, and I feared that everything I was afraid of was going to come to pass.     As it went on, though, it got better, and I began to get a comfort that both Jamie’s heart was in the right place, and that the advice he was giving was sound.     If you haven’t been able to see all of the episodes, you’ll be pleased to know it’s available on Hulu (for the time being anyway) so that you can catch up and make your own decision.

It didn’t turn out to be the show itself that pushed me over the edge on supporting Jamie’s campaign.   What really did it for me was the talk he delivered as the recipient of the 2010 TED Prize.   If you haven’t had the chance to see this talk yet, I encourage you to watch it right now.    It’s hard, after watching, to believe that this man doesn’t have a heart for helping those struggling with the problem of obesity.   You can see the frustration he has for the way things currently work, and you can almost sense that he’s begging for people to stand behind him, realizing how important this problem is.     After watching, I’m definitely a fan.   Take a look, and make your own decision.

When this design was launched, it was just as the “cover flow” style of interface was coming in to its own.   It hadn’t yet been played out to the extent it has now.    It was also my first major redesign in my new job, and I was trying to establish a rapport, so there was a certain desire to go for something unconventional, grabbing a little bit of the “cool, I didn’t think about doing that” factor.    There was also the assumption that the “cover flow” items would end up being either A) featured news items, or B) items submitted by students, faculty and staff that would rotate periodically as time went by.    In reality, none of this happened, the design sat as launched, and grew stale.    Couple that with the fact that it was launched with no infrastructure behind it (just basic HTML and CSS) and it never really gained traction, leaving the entire @marsall.edu site disjointed, with lots of different designs competing for attention.

This past week, I launched this design:

Before I start to step through it, let me get this out of the way first.   I realize some people will like this design change a lot, and I also thoroughly realize that same people will think I’ve taken Satan himself as a lover because I’ve thrust this atrocity on the world.   That’s cool – but bear with me while I talk you through the rationale behind what changed, and why.

Some major problems that became apparent to me after the launch of the first design above:

1.  The “web team” could push out anything we wanted, but it would only be as good as the number of people in various departments or groups who could take whatever we came up with and adapt it to their own sites.   The best University sites have a consistency across the departments and groups.   Sometimes that consistency doesn’t extend beyond a header, but at the very least, when you’re on an “officially University branded” site, you’re aware of it.   That is something that had never been completely accomplished at MU.   That’s to no detriment of those responsible for creating web content for their departments.   People can only be as successful as the tools you provide them with, and MU hadn’t done a great job of providing a consistent tool set for content creation.

2.  There was a ton of reliance on Flash.  Flash had traditionally been used as a “get an announcement in front of people, and provide some sort of spinning widget that makes people go wow” kind of technology.   People (by and large) quit going “wow” over Flash a couple of years ago, and in an increasingly mobile world, it just doesn’t make sense anymore to use Flash where CSS and Javascript will reproduce largely the same effect.

3.  There are an increasing number of tools available that allow people of varying skills to create content, and I needed to put something together that met people where they were, in whatever tool they were using, and let them create content that could be immediately understood to be part of the “official” brand.     If content is to stay current and relevant (read: useful) to people consuming it, creation and maintenance of it has to extend beyond Information Technology and out in to the subject matter expert community.   To do this, you have to open your mind a little about the tools that people might want to use to get this done.

4.  You want a framework that’s capable of growing with your content creators.   As inexperienced developers start working with tools to put content together, guess what?   They gain experience.   And as they gain experience, you don’t want them to almost immediately feel hamstrung by the framework you’ve surrounded them with.   You want something in place that’s extensible and flexible enough to grow with your content creators.

So, with all of this in mind, I came up with a three pronged attack for revising content creation.

For experienced HTML/CSS/Javascript Developers

Creating templates based on a flexible Framework (960 CSS) that could accept ASP, PHP, flat HTML – essentially whatever they wanted to develop in, and still maintain a reasonably similar look/feel to the rest of our content.

For less experienced developers, but those who wanted choices and extensibility

A system of templates and plugins based on WordPress, that allowed easy content creation, with a rich plugin architecture so that as they began developing content, the system they were surrounded by would have answers for their needs as they discovered them.   From working with inexperienced developers, I can tell you, there’s nothing like seeing them realize a need (event calendar) and then seeing their face light up when they realize that a rich development community has already encountered and solved their problem with a plugin.    This is incredibly empowering for new content creators.

For very junior content developers, or tired old men like me who need to get something out quick

Utilizing “out of the box” tools like Google Sites that allow extremely rapid creation of complete, feature rich sites that serve specific needs (see Marhall’s new “Lost and Found” site with RSS feeds for both lost and found items)  allowing people to rapidly push out content that needs to be created quickly to solve specific problems.     Just because it’s “easier” than developing from flat HTML/CSS doesn’t mean it’s wrong.   Sometimes the smartest/best way to do something is to make the best use of the tools available to you.

Aside from all of these things, there were a couple of personal goals that I wanted to accomplish:

• Add some sort of video presence that would allow for user submission
• Solve persistent problems with user search
• Enhance existing infrastructure where possible
• Eliminate (as much as possible the reliance on Flash, replacing it with HTML5, CSS, Javascript
• Lay a framework that expanded the network of content creators
• Lay a groundwork for future mobile consumption of content

So, with this background, I pushed forward, using a combination of WordPress based templated sites, Google sites based templated sites, flat HTML sites, 3rd party boxed solutions, social networking integration, and anything else I could find that seemed useful.

I am proud of what I’ve been able to accomplish with the resources I had available to me.    Is it maddening to do this and get the “I absolutely hate what you’ve done with X, Y or Z” email from the user, faculty, alumni, or staff member who has no understanding of how content really gets created, the number of people actually working on it, or any other background – sure – but you roll with it, and do your best to make sustainable decisions that set the University up for success.

Make no mistake, I can do better.   Part of my personal make up is a demand that as I move forward toward the “next” redesign, I WILL do better.  I demand it of myself.   But god damn it – I’m proud of what I’ve done too.

For those who don’t spend their days surrounded by computers, this might come as a surprise, but keeping equipment cool is often one of the most expensive costs associated with running a data center.

Finding new ways to keep servers cool while expending less energy can translate in to very real cost savings for organizations of even moderate size.   The larger the deployment, the more important it becomes to be creative when deciding on a cooling strategy.

Ed was relating to me a story about a conversation he had with a gentleman who was charged with managing a data center with over 7000 racks (and dozens of servers in each rack).    When Ed asked him what cooling solution he had chosen, the gentleman said “outside air – I have chillers, but I don’t use them, because I’ve constructed my data centers in environments where the outside air is cold enough to keep the equipment cool.”

Good lord I felt stupid.   Genius.