Posts

What’s Wrong with Asking for a “Highly Satisified” Rating? Virtually all businesses today are concerned about how the public perceives them. They recognize – and rightfully so, in my opinion – that customers who have a positive experience, who receive great service, or receive quality, tasty foods are more likely to be repeat customers. They also know that customers who have a poor experience are just as unlikely to return. Thus, measuring the customer experience by asking the customer to complete a survey of their experience is an important means for getting information on how well the company is doing in meeting the customers’ needs and expectations. I’m not sure all managers understand the value of the survey and the need for accurate feedback. ...

Updates to Technology Projects I’ve had several technology projects running for a while now and thought it was time for an update. Nextcloud, OnlyOffice, and the Like Back in February I set up a Nextcloud server and incorporated OnlyOffice. The concepts are pretty cool, but I have abandoned both of those projects. In all honesty, having completed my dissertation, I write so little that requires a word processor that I’ve not yet found a need for OnlyOffice. And when I do need such services, I have LibreOffice available on all of my computers. MS Office is on its way out since I no longer need to power of a word processor for my writing and my licenses are beginning to expire. (I still have a couple of licenses that will be expiring soon.) ...

Science Fiction and the Polymath Throughout my junior high years I was a huge science fiction fan. One of my favorite authors of the time was Isaac Asimov. I was quite surprised to learn that Asimov not only wrote science fiction but had also penned books, short stories, and essays that ranged from religion (Guide to the Bible), chemistry (he was educated as a biochemist), engineering, and the list goes on. This realization intially confused me. How could a science fiction writer be so bold as to write on so many different topics? How could he know enough in each of those fields to qualify himself to write books on them? It would be many years before I encountered the term “polymath”, but surely Asimov earned the title. ...

Me? A Manager? Not so Much For the past year or so my manager has been after me to move into a management role. I managed to avoid doing so until fairly recently, using my work on my doctorate as an excuse for not really having the time to take on all the work of learning the role, learning the courses I would manage and so forth. Recently, however, I was approached again and, having all-but completed my degree, really didn’t have a good reason for ...

The Power of Curiosity I have always been a curious person. I’m the kid that took toys apart to see how they worked (and was sometimes able to put them back together again, too!) I was the kid that enjoyed reading the WorldBook Encyclopedia because, well, just because. Learning about different stuff fascinated me. Even as a very small child I was curious. My mother used to tell the story of the time when I was maybe 3 or 4 years old and came in crying because my eyes were filled with sand. I had apparently held a toy over my head and looked up as the sand fell out because I wanted to see what it looked like from that angle. ...

Nextcloud, OnlyOffice, and the Like Every once in a while I get this notion that I need to move my data off of sites like Dropbox, OneDrive, and so forth. When I do, I start playing around with self-hosted services such as NextCloud, OwnCloud, and so forth. I’m currently in one of those cycles and have been playing around a good bit with Nextcloud. I’ve even coupled it with OnlyOffice so that I can edit documents in the ...

Connecting the MacBook to the Edgerouter VPN Today I fixed a problem that has vexed me for some time. Reading through the search pages, it seems it has vexed quite a few others, as well. I thought I’d share my solution to this problem so that others might benefit. What’s the problem? I’ve setup a VPN server on my Ubiquiti Edgerouter-X. The VPN works great with my Windows clients, but I’ve not been able to get my MacBook or iPhone to connect. Until today. The problem turned out to be quite simple, though it took a bit of reading to figure it out. ...

Making Progress … Slowly There has been a lot going on the last few months. I have been struggling to get my dissertation done. The biggest obstacle has been locating participants for a qualitative study. I finally got responses to my recruiting efforts and have been able to interview 7 people. That’s not a great response, but is better than nothing (which is what I had in the past!) and allows me to move forward. Did I say I was excited? ...

Moving to a Self-Hosted Bookmarking Service There’s a hint that bookmarks are going away. Services like Delicious that used to provide great web-based book marking services have closed down. In their place are the likes of Instapaper and Pinboard and the like that break stuff into different types. Instapaper to store sites that you want to read later, Pinterest for images you like, and so forth. That doesn’t work well for me, though. I want everything in one place. That’s also why I decided to try a ...

Is Education Relevant One of the questions with which I have wrestled for a while now is the question of what it means to be ‘educated’. The problem, of course, is that there is no one definition and that, I think, creates much of the problem in evaluating educational programs. The state of Georgia recently put on the ballot a bill that would create an “Opportunity School District”. In an effort to address “failing” schools, the state proposed taking them over and doing whatever is necessary to ‘improve’ outcomes. As I pondered the proposal, one of the questions that I continually confronted was what does it mean for school to “fail”? Who determines this? And, on what is it based? Advertisements for the plan suggested that “only 12% of third graders in our failings schools are reading on grade-level.” That, of course, raised other questions for me. For example, how does this compare to third graders in those schools that are not considered to be failing? What does it mean to read on grade level? Recognizing that people learn at different rates and that skills such as reading are commonly dependent on external factors such as how much reading goes on in the home, is the standard even appropriate? These and several other questions brought me back around to the question of what it means to be educated. ...