From all the classes I’ve taken in college, Mike Scott and Don Batory are two of my favorite professors. Aside of being well-prepared for lectures and such, the small details really do matter. The favicons on their websites for CS 307 and CS 378 are fantastic. Whenever I’m scrounging through my bookmarks or just looking among a dozen open tabs, having a quickly recognizable image helps me find just what I’m looking for right away.

A few years ago, I had fun using Gimp for one of the first times in creating the favicon for Chavez360. It was just a smiley face with a red headband. The favicon was very simple, but it symbolized something easily recognizable to any Chavez fan.

This blog is a whole different story, though. Even after almost a year of occasional posts, I don’t have a main focus so a true symbol is out of the question. However, after putting it off for so long, I had to come up with something. Fortunately, I have a short word in the title and used a online favicon generator to come up with something reasonable. Then not knowing what else to put in all the blank space left over, I added in some symmetrical symbols. Adding it to WordPress was simple.

No, it’s not the best favicon in the world, but it sure beats the default icon that Firefox provides so now when I visit, it feels just a little more like home.

I recently read Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. It gives us a few more examples about how the internet is changing the world:

We are used to a world where little things happen for love and big things happen for money. Love motivates people to bake a cake and money motivates people to make an encyclopedia. Now, though, we can do big things for love.

as well as explains why visitor interaction only sometimes succeeds:

Every webpage is a latent community. Each page collects the attention of people interested in its contents, and those people might well be interested in conversing with one another, too. In almost all cases the community will remain latent, either because the potential ties are too weak (any two users of Google are not likely to have much else in common) or because the people looking at the page are separated by too wide a gulf of time, and so on. But things like the comments section on Flickr allow those people who do want to activate otherwise-latent groups to at least try it. The basic question “How did you do that?” seems like a simple request for a transfer of information, but when it takes place out in public, it is also a spur to such communities of practice, bridging the former gap between publishing and conversation.

Whether you plan to have a small community or a large one, the focus is on making it easy and on trying to understand where your visitors will want interaction. If you’re interested in a web community or just want a little bit of occasional interaction with visitors, Here Comes Everybody will probably help you figure out how to do just that.

Just one last tidbit that I found interesting:

In 1991 Richard Gabriel, a software engineer at Sun Microsystems, wrote an essay that included a section called “Worse Is Better,” describing this effect. He contrasted two programming languages, one elegant but complex versus another that was awkward but simple. The belief at the time was that the elegant solution would eventually triumph; Gabriel instead predicted, correctly, that the language that was simpler would spread faster, and as a result, more people would come to care about improving the simple language than improving the complex one. The early successes of a simple model created exactly the incentives (attention, the desire to see your work spread) needed to create serious improvements.

I’m not quite sure what to make of Ada Lovelace Day. They cite research on female role models which I don’t quite relate to:

…students were asked to name a real person who was a role-model for them in their career ambitions. Sixty-three per cent of female students chose a woman, 75.6 per cent of male students chose a man. But crucially, whereas the male students said gender was not a factor in their choice, 27 per cent of female students who named a female role-model said that they were inspired by the gender-related obstacles overcome by their choice.

Personally, most of the role models I’ve ever had were male–from MacGyver (resourcefulness and inventiveness) to Ricardo Lopez (discipline and determination). And 100% of the tech role models I’ve had have been men. A few years ago, Udi and Wally were my dev idols. Then I was exposed to Wayne and Bruce’s PHP wizardry and backend skills. Yes, and if there had been any women role models in there, I still don’t think I could have been more inspired than I am now to work in technology. If I find a real standout in the next year, I’ll do a blog on a woman in technology for the next Ada Lovelace Day, but otherwise it’ll be a man, and I’m sure that’ll still work to keep plenty of others inspired.

It’s been about a year since I bought my Dell Inspiron 1550n, and for the most part it’s been very good to me. The keys feel good under my fingers. I can turn off the sound with one touch if I accidentally go to a site with annoying advertisements. I’ve never gotten a blue (or other colored) screen of death. The only thing I’d really complain about is that I often accidentally touch the DVD drive on the side and it pops open.

But yesterday while I was getting started on typing up a homework assignment, I noticed that the battery indicator showed the battery was half used up, which was really weird since my laptop was plugged in. Usually, that just means the power cord had come out a little bit, but this time pushing it back in didn’t solve the problem. I tried plugging it into another outlet. No luck. After just a year, my power adapter was dead. I tried every other cord I could find to see if I had another one that fit, but nope. By the time I finished with all my frantic attempts, the battery was depleted also.

So I had to use my husband’s computer to check Dell.com and see how much a new power cord would cost me. They had one available for the Inspiron 15, which I hoped included the 1550 (but which made no sense because all the other models were listed out fully).

As much as I hate being without my laptop, I figured I could save by opting for only second-day delivery. Still, that’s about a hundred bucks all included. And then after entering all my personal information, including my credit card number, an estimated delivery date of March 2nd was displayed–over a week away! That had to be wrong, but I couldn’t take any chances. There was no Cancel option given, but I found my way back to the cart and deleted my item.

Fortunately, my husband took care of it. He went to the electronics store today and picked up a new power cord so it was waiting for me when I got home. And this one was only 31 bucks. Note to laptop manufacturers, though: If you expect any customer loyalty, don’t cheap out on the power cords. Unfortunately, when I’m ready to get a new laptop, it’s going to require a bit more looking around.

I heard that once and can’t quite remember where, but I agree. There’s so much going on in the webdev world. Right now IE8 is in beta. People are arguing over whether HTML5 or XHTML2 is our future. More and more people are accessing websites from mobile devices rather than traditional computers. We check our feed readers to get the news instead of going to various sites. And there’s more and more focus on social media.

And even with all these new things that I have to constantly keep up with, I keep finding out about new things that have really been around forever. Up until about a year ago, I didn’t even know you could use Linux instead of Windows. That’s why I decided to go back to college and study computer science. I’m in a super easy introductory class right now, but this sets up the basics for everything ahead.

I’m ready for it, and I’ve started this blog to keep track of the new discoveries I make along the way. Feel free to leave any suggestions, comments, or encouragements. And thanks for visiting!