Remember when I was all happy about good work news? It’s public now.

It gives me great pleasure to announce the appointment of Laura Roth as Assistant Vice President for Information Technology. This is a new position that will integrate all technology resources at the Health Sciences Center into a unified support structure. This includes networks, databases, telecommunications, the help desk, academic technologies, Computer Based Learning Center, classroom support (ETRU), telemedicine (MDTV), and web services for the School of Medicine.

Laura is perfectly suited to this new position. She started as a programmer with the University 23 years ago and has been the director of HSC Information Systems Operations for the last 12 years. Laura has received national recognition for her leadership here and has been a frequent presenter at AAMC meetings regarding technology issues.

I am confident that under Laura’s leadership the WVU Health Sciences Center will continue to create, innovate, and improve our information technology systems to meet the needs of a growing faculty, staff, and students. Please join me in congratulating her on this new position.

Laura is my boss’s boss, but I have had continued direct interaction with her since I started here in 2000. She has always taken the time to listen to our needs, and has done her best to look out for us. That the restructuring is going to be under her command gives me hope that some of the strain will be taken off my department and and our sibling department, the help desk.

But mostly I’m happy to see her get a promotion.

Looks like I’ve made it through today without breaking anyt

The changes I tried to make earlier are now implemented.

If you look at the sidebar (sweeps arms to point to the viewers right) and look at the recent comment listing, you’ll notice the new and improved comment listing. Not only does it update immediately, but you can now scroll through and see this last 50 comments (this can be modified to display 10, 50, 100, whatever comments).

Thanks to Michael, who was willing to poke through the WordPress code and pluck out what I needed to, it was a relatively easy process. It’s combined with the WP plugin bdp comment, but it could easily be used with any comment listing system. No it’s not a plugin, because I’m not smart enough to make a WP plugin. But still, I’m very pleased with it.

The other thing is that I am not much more comfortable using Photoshop, and have added a raft of new images to my main page. As with the header images here, Ctrl + F5 will refresh the page and bring up a new random image. I’ve got a few more Photoshop tricks I’d like to try to figure out, so new images may be added, but for now I’m pleased with what I’ve got. So instead of a redesign of the front page, I just made new images. Which is good, because I’m actually really happy with the layout of the main page (the fly out menus work only if you’re NOT using IE. Because IE is stupid and evil. [It’s all straight up clean CSS. It’s just that IE doesn’t do CSS properly.])

Trying to learn new things.

If the website freaks out, refresh and it’ll probably be fixed.

ADDENDUM the First:
Nevermind. I don’t have the patience to fight with php today.

Since we’ve got down time this week, one of the things I’m trying to do is become more familiar with Photoshop. So, I’ve been playing around and trying things out, and as a result I’ve got lots of new headers for the weblog. I’m going to work on some larger images from the splash page of my site, and then I’m going to play with some of the more esoteric functions that probably won’t work so much for the image style I have to my website.

If you see anything horrible, please let me know. I already think I hate one the formatting and blending and fonts on one of the images.

To celebrate spring (since it’s not actually, you know, springlike here in WV) I made a new header image for the blog.

Now since I simply added this new image to the random rotation, it may be awhile before you see it. But when you see the purple crocus header? That’s the one I made for today. It would have a much faster experience, except that I decided to use Photoshop to do the image, so I could learn more about the program, it spent half an hour figuring out how to replicate a filter I use all the time in Corel PhotoPaint (I believe there has to be an easier way. But at least I got what I wanted.)

And I think it’s time I added more new header images here, as well as new splash images for my main page.

Just got some good news at work. Won’t be public for a few days, but I have hopes that it will make our lives a lot easier here in the coming months.

Wheee!

As I have mentioned in previous occasions, our house is relatively small, early 50s house, and when we bought it, it had two bedrooms, one bath, a living room, kitchen, a hall closet that has to double as the closet for the master bedroom (because it has none), and an unfinished basement.

Since we moved in we built a computer room and bathroom in the basement, both of which are finished and heated.

But even with those two additional rooms, with three adults the house can feel a little small at times.

So I am always looking for ways to organize, which is why I ended up with a subscription to Real Simple, and I have to say that for the most part what I have tried as worked extremely well in cutting down the clutter (especially after we had to remove all tables from the center of the living room so my grandmother could maneuver her walker after her fall in January).

So my recent organization binge has been to ditch all the jewel cases for my CDs, and put them into an organizer (DVDs are next, as their cases are even worse space hogs.)

First and foremost, I have forgotten how much music I own. This is beginning to feel like a Sisyphean task, as I realize I have CDs all over the house (because I couldn’t keep them all in once place) including what Michael brought up from the basement last night, a paper box full of CDs I hadn’t seen in years.

It’s actually been kinda fun going, “THAT’S where all my Stevie Ray Vaughn CDs went!” and “HEY! I forgot I owned a White Zombie CD! Awesome!” Unfortunately, almost all my heavy metal was on cassette, and those got tossed when we were remodeling the basement, because I quite literally had no space for them. So there have been some pleasant surprises.

Of course there are also the times when I say, “I bought a Jewel CD? I own ‘The Best of REO Speedwagon’? What the hell was I thinking? I don’t think these have ever been listened to! Maybe they really belong to Michael.” (No, that won’t work. When I met him he only had Megadeth, Queen, and Weird Al Yankivick CDs. Yes, I know that’s really weird.)

I also discovered that I own a Green Jello CD. (That’s right, Green Jello, not Green Jelly.) I am pretty sure I have not listened to that since the novelty of the Big Bad Wolf song wore off.

So now I’m staring at this last box of CDs, at a loss as how to organize what I have left. (I have 7 U2 CDs. What goes in the eighth slot on that sheet? What do I organize ‘The Wonder Stuff’ with? It’s pretty much the only British Bluegrass Pop I have. I have no idea.) And as someone who lives to organize, this is become pretty painful. I’ve got about 12 sheets of sleeves left, so I can’t just stick the Klezmatics in their own sleeve and move on.

Of course it probably means it is past time for me to stop for the evening. And I should probably continue to resist the urge to put White Zombie in the CD player, because I can guarantee my grandmother won’t enjoy it at all. :)

Next project? Getting an external hard drive and putting all this music on my computer. (Looks at pile of CD cases.)

Or maybe not.

This actually comes as a shock to me, since sometimes I feel like everyone around me is mumbling.

However, I did have to turn the volume up on my speakers to hear the highest frequency. Of course the fact that the air system in my office makes it sound like I’m in a freaking WIND TUNNEL may have something to do with that.

(via John Scalzi)

ADDENDUM the First:

When checking out the other answers, I got this:

Heh.

I’m continuing to work on the MS Outlook documentation.

And I still hate Microsoft.

Let me just say that when I click on a help file, I want something useful RIGHT NOW I don’t want to have to wait for my browser to load up and give me the option to watch some stupid video that I don’t have the interest in watching because it won’t answer my question.

All I want is to know what proxy access is called in Microsoft. But no, those terms are unrecognized and provide no useful assistance AT ALL.

Why is this so difficult? WHY?! WHY?! Why are their help files absolutely none at all?

(sigh)

ADDENDUM the First:

You can share calendar information with other people by using Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 in many ways.

I don’t think I understand what that sentence means. The more I think about it, the worse it gets.

I’m writing documentation for Microsoft Outlook (yes, there are people who don’t know how to use e-mail. [Be afraid.]) and I discovered that apparently to get out Office 2007, they applied the 2007 changes to only PART of Outlook. This means that half the time you’re using the toolbar and menu, while the rest of the time you’re using the ribbon.

Do you have any idea how confusing this is going to be for people who are already going to be cranky about change?

I HATE Microsoft and hope that if there is an afterlife, Bill Gates spends it supporting MS Windows Office products.

Which Science Fiction Writer are you?
(more…)

Think Geek has just added some Princess Bride t-shirts.

WANT WANT WANT!

Plus, one of my favorites is still available. If only I had an office mate…

Yeah, you’re thinking, “hasn’t Netscape been dead for years?”

Perhaps, but now it’s official.

And that is your useless fact of the day.