A couple of months ago, MBNA sold my MasterCard account to Bank of America. Since then I’ve received a stream of unsolicited emails from BofA. With all the phishing fraud these days, I only deal with a financial institution when I initiate it, never from an email coming from God-only-knows.

I’m Continue reading →

Just an idea, really. Nothing sinister.

Giving students a personal learning environment deprives them of the opportunity to learn the meta-skill of creating their own interfaces. Now that my own interface has migrated to a wiki, it’s so easy to change, I tweak it several times a week. As the world Continue reading →

What do monsters eat?

Things.

What do monsters drink?

Coke.

Why?

Things go better with Coke.

Last night I sent this message to the 3,776 people who had signed up to receive a newsletter from me over the last six years.

Dear Svetlana, I am removing your name from my mailing list. In fact, I am destroying the entire list. Newsletters cause more annoyance than good, Continue reading →

I am not making this up. Just ask IBM scientist epreditor Potato. (He’s the robot below.)

IBM spells out work rules for avatars
Associated Press
07/26/2007

SAN FRANCISCO – IBM Corp. will publish official guidelines this week for more than 5,000 employees who inhabit Second Life and other virtual worlds Continue reading →

My *$(W@! computer is turning me into a tinkering Mr. Fix-It. Upon booting up this morning, an application called GDI+ showed up in my task bar. Roaming around microsoft.com, I found pages of irrelevant, geeky, impossible instructions, some complete with substitute code. I cleaned up my Registry and Continue reading →

Can Amazon find any more ways to slice and dice the data it displays for books?

I selected the books for this Listomania: Informal Learning recommendations. Everything else is straight from Amazon. I may start using the Fox Index when selecting books to buy.

I consulted for SmartForce 1998-2001, so this item in the San Francisco Chronicle caught my eye:

A top Google executive, David Drummond, has agreed to pay $700,000 to settle a complaint by federal regulators that accused him of helping to misstate the financial results of his previous employer, SmartForce.

The Continue reading →

Yesterday I listened in as Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz chatted with an in-house group. He has the ability to boil complex issues down to their essence and communicate them in an honest, clear, straight-forward voice. Both his substance and his style impressed me. I’d like to have someone like Jonathan Continue reading →