The Empire Strikes Back

Best Microsoft Ad Ever!

I am a Mac user, but I find Apple's Ad campaign to have been annoying and insulting. Lots of great and creative folks use PCs. I am glad to see Microsoft strike back.

[Click here to see Ad]

Grandson's Birthday

[Click here to see more photos]

Yesterday we celebrated Jacob's birthday

Jacob turns one this week and we celebrated on Saturday. He is such a cute and happy baby. It was a lot of fun. It was very nice of Nicole's mom Kathy to host the party at her house. It was a big party and she had a real house full.

Car vs. Bike; Bike Lost

Cycling safety at SJSU

I have been a long standing advocate for the safe use non-motorized vehicles on and around SJSU. I have taken this position not because I am an old man standing on my porch yelling at kids running across my lawn. I have taken this position because I have seen far too many people hurt and am aware of the risks involved to both cyclists and pedestrians in an accident. We need to remember that most of the folks we see riding bicycles on our campus also ride them on the streets around our campus. This accident was a block north of SJSU.

Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, Campus Life, bicycling, CSU, California State University, San Jose, ssloansjca

Palin is not ready

This is not American Idol

Bob Herbert of the New York Times has this great editorial about the candidacy of Sarah Palin in the office that is a heart beat away from the presidency. The key problem is not her politics. As Herbert said:

Ms. Palin’s problem is not that she was mayor of a small town or has only been in the Alaska governor’s office a short while. Her problem (and now ours) is that she is not well versed on the critical matters confronting the country at one of the most crucial turning points in its history.

As Herbert said, "Ms. Palin may be a perfectly competent and reasonably intelligent woman (however troubling her views on evolution and global warming may be), but she is not ready to be vice president."

Another Editorial, New York Times Editorial, "If the choice (by McCain) was, as we suspect, a tactical move, then it was shockingly irresponsible."

Sam Lawrence on 9/11 and the social software movement

Sam Lawrence has this great blog post on 9/11 and the social software movement. Lawrence said, "Getting to who and what we needed faster was critical in this time of need. The companies didn’t matter, the people did." He sees 9/11 as a moment of change for social media. Lawrence said, "We commented, we connected, we asked why. News broke faster over blogs and email than traditional media. At the same time our government quickly learned that their systems weren’t built to connect the dots the way we really needed them to."

I learned of Lawrence's post from Shel Israel's Twitter feed. I highly recommend both.

Spam from SJSU?

Tech Tips: Spam e-mail reportedly from SJSU

It is easy for someone to fake the "reply-to" field of an e-mail address to make it appear as though an e-mail has come from a seemingly legitimate source, when it has not. This is called spoofing. Unfortunately this is common.

The e-mail addresses of SJSU users are sometimes harvested from the Internet, from Web pages and pdf documents posted online, and then used by spammers to trick the folks receiving this e-mail into responding to the e-mail in the false belief that it is legitimate SJSU e-mail.

Please accept our apologies for this e-mail. We are sorry, but there is not a technical way we can stop this from happening. If you have hard evidence that spam originated from a source on the SJSU campus, such as evidence that the TCP/IP address of the sender originated from our network, please contact us so we can investigate the situation further.

You can e-mail the university help desk e-mail at help@help.sjsu.edu

I am off to LA

If you want, you can follow me on twitter.

iTunesU is rocking at SJSU

Congratulations to Mary Fran Breiling and all the folks at the Center for Faculty Development and Support, Web Services, Apple and all the other involved SJSU Faculty and Staff! According to Breiling:

ITunesU @ San Jose State University is live in the iTunesU store! All of you contributed in some way to the successful launch of iTunes U. Thank you!

The content in iTunes U is accessible as promised. You will be very pleased to know that San Jose State is the first of the CSU’s in iTunesU. We are also one of the very few to attempt to create 100% of our content in accessible technology formats. I am very proud to be part of such an illustrious and pioneering group.

Enter the site from http://www.sjsu.edu/itunesu or by launching iTunes on your computer, then navigate to the iTunes store, then iTunesU (left columun) and finally scroll down the left column to Universities and colleges – then find San Jose State University.

Mary Fran Breiling deserves credit and praise this achievement.

Phishing continues at SJSU

Tech Tips: Phight Phishing
Phishing is an Internet scam where fraudulent "spam" e-mails and Web sites are used to trick recipients into surrendering their personal or financial data for malicious purposes. No authentic SJSU agency asks for passwords to be sent via e-mail!

If your log-in information has been compromised, you need to immediately change your password on all accounts you have unintentionally given up information on.

Also, these kind of spammers are aware that many people use the same user names and/or passwords in multiple places, like bank accounts, ebay and/or Amazon. So, you should change the passwords on any and all of these accounts that have the same password, even if the user name is different.

More information is here:

http://www.sjsu.edu/networking/facetime/phishing/

http://www.sjsu.edu/networking/best_practices/

My Fall 2008 New Media Class

The blog for my Fall 2008 New Media In Journalism class is here:
http://sjsumcom63.wordpress.com/

If you are reading this you are invited to check out the blog and/or the class itself! The class meets Wednesdays at 6 p.m. in room 226 in Dwight Bentel Hall at San Jose State University.

You can just show up if you like. If you have more questions you can e-mail me of course but, since e-mail is so last century, you can also text me (or call) at 408/605.0692.

I hope to see you there!
~Steve

Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, CSU, California State University, San Jose, ssloansjca