I was preparing for the Lone Star College IT Advisory Board Meeting tonight, and one of my agenda items is to discuss local user groups and how to encourage student participation. I contacted Zain and Jared from Microsoft, and they referred me to this amazing website that shows many of the UGs and SIGs in […]

HP officially announced their new tablet PC today – the TouchPad. The announcement has been met with mixed reviews. Critics have cited everything from the length of the announcement (it’s nearly 2 hours) to the lack of current app support. Fans of the tablet point out that it has a chance of competing with the […]

A recent article in the AP examined a woman who was fired for posts made on Facebook. The company was sued by the Labor Board, and recently made a settlement, in which they revised their “social networking policy”. This is interesting. There are a lot of things to consider when you post something online – […]

So I was migrating some ASP.Net MVC Apps from a Windows Server 2008, IIS 7 server to a Server 2003 IIS6 server temporarily (while I did some maintenance on the 08 server). However, I found that the MVC apps did not work past the default page. Fortunately, I’m not alone. Thanks to Steve Sanderson for […]

I was working on a couple of things earlier today and realized that some of my Windows 7 features weren’t working any more. Specifically, I couldn’t get the taskbar thumbnail peek feature to work. After about 30 minutes of fruitless googling, I switched my theme, thinking maybe it just needed to be reminded of its […]

Well, after Tuesday Updates this week, my Vista computer was left with many many problems. Between the windows printer dialog being totally MIA, and Office crashing randomly and repeatedly, I made the decision to reformat. However, being the enterprising young geek that I am, I’m not satisfied with simply reinstalling Vista Ultimate. I’m going for […]

Zhang et al (2009) insist that “incorporating a human computer interaction (HCI) perspective into the systems development life cycle (SDLC) is critical to information systems (IS) success and in turn to the success of businesses.” The problem, they remind us, is that typical software development progresses with the needs of the organization in mind, rather […]

Thanks to @Subdigital for this awesome suggestion: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

IT poses an interesting challenge during reorganizations. Between security policies, differing hardware, and existing software, integration of two business units requires time and effort across both companies. In a TechRepublic article (2001), Loraine Lawson offers the following suggestions for IT restructuring: How many people are in IT How many users are they supporting What are […]

Introduction In their article “Best Face Forward” (2004), Rayport and Jaworski discuss ways in which companies can integrate humans and computers into a unified interface which interacts with customers. The thesis they begin with is that without specific attention, most companies develop disparate interfaces between departments, or even projects within a department. The goal of […]