Day 104: For the people!

I tend to spend most of my Thursday with a glazed look in my eye and a little rivulet of drool escaping from the corner of my mouth. But I'm trying to keep it together well enough to provide you with decent lessons.

Today's lesson is from the Wonderful World of Webdesign.

Lesson 105: Don't build a website just to implement cool new tech. Build a website that people want, using the cool new tech.

While some tech developments find their markets, just building a website to show off the latest and greatest without thinking about how your users use your website is a good way to waste a lot of money for nothing.

I mean, for instance, if you're managing the website for the Anywhereville Senior Centre you don't necessarily want to jump right on the bandwagon with every tech thing that comes along. Is your average user even on Twitter, or Pinterest, or whatever new tech trend that's cropped up?

If they aren't, why do you need to be?

It's a good guideline at least.

Summer Lessons: The Cardinal Sins of Internet Browsers

I'm feeling especially grouchy today. Maybe it's because a fire alarm was going off in the hospital I work in and it gave me a headache. But regardless, it's inspired me to be rather snarky. I apologize in advance...

Watching people use computers, and watching people teaching me things on computers has brought to the forefront of my mind some things which should really never be done when it comes to browsers. I'm going to start the compilation of a list here, and I may add to it as I see fit.

1: Thou shalt not open, and especially not go out of your way to open, Netscape or Internet Explorer when Chrome or Firefox are offered to you.

It just gives me the chills that I've even seen this happen... perfectly good browsers waiting on the desktop to be used, but you're going to go into the program menu just to open IE? I shudder to think.

2: Thou shalt not enter the address "www.google.com" in the address bar of Chrome in order to go google something. It's GOOGLE Chrome. 

Really? Congratulations, you just divided by zero.

3: Thou shalt not type "http://" before a web address. Even typing out "www." may be taking it too far, but for that you can be forgiven.

Your browser knows these things. Unless you're worried about secure browsing and you're afraid you won't automatically be redirected the "https://" (the s stands for secure!) it's just nails on a chalkboard unnecessary.

Day 77: Clarifying Quebecois Lingo

Today's going to be a little different than usual. Rather than a lesson I've learned today, it's more of a lesson in progress. I haven't been able to check the accuracy of the information I was given, so maybe you can help me out, and we can crowdsource this lesson.

You see, going into Information Services and Users today, I was a little late. The guest presenters, reference librarians from Concordia, had already started their presentation and were talking about reference avenues. You may have seen "Chat with a Librarian" services offered by many University libraries, so they were sharing a few other options. Email, text message, video chat, instant messaging, things like that.

One of my classmates asked: "What's the difference between text messaging and instant messaging?"

My reflexive reaction was to be perplexed as to how she didn't know something so obvious, but I had missed part of their explanation so I thought maybe they had said something in their presentation that had really muddled the issue and caused confusion. So I asked a friend, and she bestowed upon me today's potential lesson.

Lesson 73?: In Quebecois french, the same word is used for text messaging (via phone) and instant messaging (via computer).

When I was in France, we referred to text messages as "SMS" or "texto". We didn't do much IMing, but when we did it was just "MSN" because that was the client we were using at the time. So my knowledge of French suggests different words are used. But my knowledge of Quebecois vernacular is decidedly subpar, so I don't know, is the same word used for both?

Day 59: Droppin' the knowledge bombs up in here!

So much for McGill's IT Knowledge Base. Count this as a win for me then!

IT services maintains a pseudo-wiki of answers to every technological issue you could ever have. How-tos, troubleshooting, information... it's really very informative and quite useful.

Because of it, I learned how to not only access the school's VPN from home, and my iPad, but also how to print to their uPrint system directly from the comfort of my own home. They're also very good about updating and adding new issues as they appear/are reported, like WebCT's inability to display PDFs properly on an iPad.

However, when I was on campus, wanting to connect to my P: drive (the personal drive, each student has their own) from a computer I could not log onto with my own McGill ID, it looked like I was out of luck. They only had instructions for setting up a connection so it appears on your computer as a remote drive. Honestly, I don't keep very interesting things on my P: drive, but I still don't want just anyone using that computer to have access... who knows what they'd put on it!

But then I noticed how they were instructing you to connect... They wanted you to put a specific URL into some annoying Windows wizard. But...

Lesson 59: Going directly to the website https://webfolders.mcgill.ca/students/[insert short username here] allows full access to your P: drive through your web browser! No annoying set up, no opening your drive for the world to see, you just need your short username and your password. Exactly what I needed!

Which makes me wonder...

Why don't they just list that as an option?

Day 37: The Drain Pipe that is YouTube...

I lost an entire 24 hours of my life, at least, to completely wasted activity trying to upload stuff to YouTube. I have 25GB of Quidditch games recorded from the Canadian Cup on Saturday and I hoped I could get them all transferred, edited and at least started on the uploading.

As it is, I did... but all the uploading failed after 12 hours, and all of it has to be redone.

*sigh*

Lesson 37: Never assume anything can be done quickly on YouTube.

As an aside, today is my last day as a free individual. Tomorrow NaNoWriMo starts and I have to write approximately 1750 words per day on top of homework, classes, work, Quidditch and maintaining this blog in order to achieve the 50,000 words in a month goal.

So my apologies if I let any of these things slide. I may start including NaNovel excerpts in my posts...

Wish me luck!