Blog

My blog. Personal thoughts, anecdotes, and musings.

HighEdWebDev – Still Hate Planes Published October 26, 2006

We just landed in St. Paul about thirty minutes ago. The flight from Detroit was the longest flight I’ve ever been on. We spent at least twenty minutes in the plane before takeoff and it was getting quite warm. The flight itself was quite uneventful. I can’t say the same for the landing. We landed hard and then the pilot slammed on the brakes. Everyone lurched forward in their seats and you could hear the bags in the overhead compartment shift toward the front of the plane.

HighEdWebDev – Going Home Published October 25, 2006

Well, I’m sitting in the Rochester museum uploading pictures to Flickr and waiting for my plane. Security was no problem this time and the TSA screeners were really friendly and helpful. Everything went smoothly and it took literally 2 minutes for me to get cleared through. Maybe things aren’t so bad after all.

HighEdWebDev – Best of Track! Published October 25, 2006

Our Ruby on Rails presentation won best of track! We present twice more in a few minutes, and then we’re going home!

HighEdWebDev – Museum Excursion Published October 25, 2006

The planetarium and science museum trip was awesome. After the day’s events were done, we were picked up by school buses and taken to the museum. Each floor of the three-story museum featured tables with food and an open bar, and we had the whole museum to ourselves. There were some incredible exhibits and I did take pictures but I’m still uploading them to Flickr. I also have a pretty cool video clip of the dinosaur robots.

HighEdWebDev – Day Two (continued) Published October 24, 2006

This conference is awesome. The presentations on Fair Use and application security were well worth my time. Dale Grady, presenter for the application security presentation, has developed a great code scanner that can pinpoint possible vulnerabilities in code so that it won’t be deployed. I’m really interested in developing something like this for UW-Eau Claire so if anyone wants to collaborate with me, I’d love the help. We’re getting ready to head out to the science museum and planetarium, I’ll take lots of pictures although I don’t know how well that would work out.

HighEdWebDev – Day Two Published October 24, 2006

I’m writing this on my WordPress blog while sitting in a great presentation about WordPress. I started out the morning watching a really well-done presentation on optimizing pages for search engines. The presenter made some excellent points and I’ll be changing how I do some of my optimization from now on. This presentation is great. It has confirmed the things I already knew and has taught me some things as well, such as the search engine on this site is only good for searching posts and not pages.

HighEdWebDev – Day One Published October 24, 2006

The first day was great. Some of the big things of the day were Shooting and producing videos using Vegas Video and Flash Our Ruby on Rails presenation Giving effective presentations A great presentation on the FieldSet Really good presentation about Apache configuration. After the conference, several of us traveled to Dinosaur BBQ and had a ton of food. We had to wait about 90 minutes for a table but in the end it was well worth the wait.

HighEdWebDev – Our presentation Published October 23, 2006

Our presentation went very well. We had a packed room of over 50 people. I’ve been getting lots of interesting questions and i’ve been doing my best to answer as many as possible. I’m not sure how much I’ll get to write during the conference but I’ll try to keep up because there are lots of neat things going on.

HighEdWebDev – Fieldset Published October 23, 2006

Just saw a great presentation about using Fieldsets to semantically mark up web forms. The examples I saw were so much nicer than table-based or list-based forms. I’d recommend looking into this further. I know I will.