Anti-Social Media

Wherein the 'back channel' bites back.

Note for the unintwitiated: Twitter tweets are typically read from the bottom up, in chronological order.

OK, so this post is about the potential downsides of the 'back channel' at a conference. If the recent eduWeb conference was a back channel success, I'm predicting a few back channel failures, but not necessarily at the HighEdWeb conference.

Social media can obviously get vicious, but personally, I'm hoping that most people have a little more class than to post snarky comments right in front of me.

I will be presenting at HighEdWeb 2008, and yes, there will be lolcats. Putting Twitter up on the screen while I present... not as likely. Will I go back and review all the tweets that happen during my presentation? You bet I will.

Epic Technology

OK, a couple of things:

1. This did not happen. I'm not trying to comment on our CIO's tech savviness. Everyone just likes to beat up on administrators, so I took advantage of that and pandered to the lowest common denominator. At least there aren't any guns in this issue.
   
2. We love thee Twitter oh so much, but dear Twitter, why dost thou torment us so? In other words, you will be a target of my ridicule from now until you stop giving me the damn Fail Whale!
3. Hi Mark! You got a cameo mention! Congrats!! - You too could end up in Redesignland if you say something that riles people up.
4. Thanks to Propeller Head for the idea for this comic!
   

Waiting for Oracle

We got the license for our new WCMS last March, and honestly, I've been playing with a development server running on MySQL for a couple of months. But the production server will run on Oracle.

We've been waiting for the DBAs to get the Oracle instance up and running, but it hasn't happened yet (due mostly to the wonders of bureaucracy, not due to any malfeasance on the DBAs' part).

But anyway, that leaves me waiting and waiting and waiting.