All posts for the month September, 2013

How I got a portal-like interface with Moodle

Out-of-the-box, Moodle’s default user interface is pretty gregorian, and by that I mean old-fashioned. As soon as you log in, no matter what kind of user you are, you see the same thing: A list of the courses that you are enrolled in. That’s the only power that Moodle gives the front page: You only […]

Ninety-five percent confident

The story isn’t just that scientists the world over are “extremely confident” about the fact that we are boiling the planet, it’s confident about it even when considering all human activity. The last report was 90% confident about greenhouse gases, now they’re 95% confident about all such climate change activity, including aerosol sprays (which actually […]

LM Investment Victims

I’ve started a site “purely for the voluntary effort to collect details and stories about each other to enable further collective action and understandings” for persons who have been affected by LM Investments.

Breaking software on purpose is evil

Just this week I was making a portal of commonly used links for teachers and administrators. The portal area was a different platform than the one being linked to. To be exact, I was using a Moodle to link to PowerSchool. One of the brilliant things about the web is that a URL address gives […]

All over, Red Rover

After publishing “Life is unfair, fundamentally” I have gotten a lot of positive feedback, thank you. I wanted to update you, not so much on where I am with all this, but share some of the other tidbits about how this loss has affected people I’ve now met online. I know of people who explain […]

IRC Code Section 501(c)(6)

This is the text that gives the NFL (and other clearly for-profit organizations) non-profit, tax-exempt status*: Business leagues, chambers of commerce, real-estate boards, boards of trade, or professional football leagues (whether or not administering a pension fund for football players), not organized for profit and no part of the net earnings of which inures to […]

Jumping from one assessment to the next

I sat down in front of my inbox and got a query from a colleague: Where’s that assessment that’s due for next week? Of course, the tone wasn’t as sharp as that at all, but that is how my brain heard it. And so instead of cracking away at that of course I have a […]

I love that git

One of the core work duties I have is maintaining a few pieces of software that have to play nice. The biggest slice lives on a web server, inside a directory. In there is the school’s learning management system, as well as other pieces such as facilities bookings and other administrivia. Some of those pieces […]

Life is unfair, fundamentally

We lost half of our life’s savings in an instant. There were a few days there where I read the email and my brain knew the implications of what it was saying, and mental torment followed as I prepared to tell my dear wife, emotional struggle of having to deal with the singular notion of […]

Parents just don’t understand

Ever since starting to operate and maintain a learning management system, more and more I have in my own mind’s eye an understanding of the “typical user” as one less and less able to use a computer effectively. This isn’t defeatism, though, it’s being exposed to more and more users who simply have no idea […]