Nov 26, 2007

Back to life, back to reality...

Yes, that's right, boys and girls, the Thanksgiving/Fall holiday break is over. Off to work I went. I was greeted with an email that read (basically), "I deleted my home page. Can you fix it?" Of course I can. Or can I? As it turns out, it was not JUST the main page that got sent into electronic never-never land, but rather, that user's entire SUBSITE! Now, had it been one page, that is readily recoverable from the Recycle Bin in Sharepoint. Alas, deleting a WHOLE site is basically like taking your entire DVD collection, throwing it into a shredder, setting the shards into a bonfire and then sending the remains down the river in a barge.

Well, maybe not quite that bad. However, there is no "easy" way to recover just one subsite. Had we trashed the entire main site AND all the subsites, no problem. We have backups. The backup system, however, is not "fine-grained" to the point of recovering individual, template-based subsites. Go figure. I took the cheap way out - I created a new site and told the user to have fun storming the castle..er, recreating their content. :-)


Since today was apparently the day for trashed web sites, I also made a trip to a local district who needed help with their webpages. The kicker turns out to be about 6 or more copies of EACH page, image, etc, scattered throughout their web folder. To top it off, they had been using WORD as their web page editor... I don't know who had the bright idea at Microsoft to allow Word to "save as a web page," but it was a very, very BAAAAD idea! The district has switched to Dreamweaver, and will get some training on how to create pages, etc. This will let them create STANDARDS-BASED web pages... I had a rant about standards-based stuff a while ago, but I don't recall what that was exactly now... :-)


I'm a bad eBayer at times. Well, I should correct that some. I always pay, no matter what I win, so not bad in that regard. But, bad in the sense that I tend to bid on things (like baseball cards) that I don't really care if I win or not. I'm not trying to rack up the price, because heck if no one outbids me, then I win, right? But, yeah, hoping someone will outbid me. Sometimes doing this makes me a bad eBayer. Now, having said all of this, my intentions are to take the auctions I win and sell the cards individually. If there is one thing I have learned on eBay - collectors generally want that ONE card they need, and they would rather NOT buy a ton of useless cards to get the one. So, this means I win the auction, break it down, and sell it in parts... Kinda like Richard Gere in Pretty Woman... The key is to come out making more than I spend... Yeah, that's where I tend to fall short. Which is why I haven't quite made my millions selling on eBay (yet). I'm getting better at it, though! :-)


A while back, I started a conversation about getting magazines at work that don't pertain to my job directly. It ends with "Anyway," and that's it. Which, I suppose, given the random things that go through my head could have been an entire section, was not the end of that topic.

These magazines I get focus on areas of technology that I know little about, but have been picking up "just enough" by reading through the stuff I get in the mail. I spend much of my time reading, shaking my head and re-reading a paragraph a couple times because whatever they were trying to convey just sailed 8 miles over my head (Everyone who knew my Dad is free to picture him waving his hand over his head, making his "airplane passing by" sound). But, I find that reading these things does two things for me: First, it keeps my humble, reminding myself that in no way, shape or form do I know everything about the uses of technology. Second, it gives me insight into things that might be useful to me some day, and I just haven't figured out the direct application of this knowledge I am acquiring. Okay, third, it gives me yet more things to 'pop in my head.' :-)

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