Having satisfied the publishing of text — with a WordPress blog installed on a hosted domain — the natural next step is publishing photographs. While it’s easy to upload and embed images in a WordPress post, it’s better to have a specialized image gallery when the photo archive is large. The long term goal is to show random thumbnails on your WordPress sidebar, inviting the browsing images in your gallery, but that’s a feature for some later day.
On my quest for management research based on systems theory, I’ve generally been disappointed since the systems foundations are rarely apparent from a superficial reading. Typically, when I read management research, I get a queasy feeling inside, because a lot of the content written is anti-systemic.
In contrast, when I read Johan Wallin‘s 2006 book, Business Orchestration: Strategic Leadership in the Era of Digital Convergence, I felt strangely comfortable. I attribute this to the lineage from which Wallin has come, so that there is “systems thinking inside”. Wallin completed his dissertation in 2000 in association with Rafael Ramirez. Ramirez is a graduate of the Social Systems Science (S3) program1 at the University of Pennsylvania, and now a professor at Oxford. In addition, Wallin worked closely with Richard Normann, immersing him in the Value Constellation model. I suspect that the average reader would be oblivious to the fine distinctions that systems theory makes. For management researchers, however, such foundations enable a strong scientific foundation, rather than simplified metaphors that break down under scrutiny.
On a previous post, I had recommended using creating a blog on wordpress.com to avoid the myriad of technical issues of getting a blog running. However, as the last point in that article, I suggested that the next step was to “move your content to your own hosted domain”. I’ve now encountered a series of friends who are technically competent, but I’ve got the benefit of experience with web design considerations where they “don’t know what they don’t know”. Thus, while I’m installing their web sites — I’m doing three at the same time — I’ll document my steps here.
If you’re uncomfortable with transferring files via FTP, you might as well stop reading now. These instructions are for web sites hosted on site5.com, but they should be pretty close for any provider that offers Fantastico and cPanel.
The Focus section of the Globe & Mail newspaper this past weekend centered on happiness. The Authentic Happiness Inventory Questionnaire, developed five years ago by Christopher Peterson (from the U. of Michigan) was reproduced as 24 questions in the newspaper. Matthew Trevisan reports that …
thousands of people have taken the test online, with an average score of 3.24 out of five. Pretty good, considering that most of the people who take it are what Prof. Peterson calls “seekers.”
“I mean, if you are happy as a clam, why the heck would you go to a positive psychology survey?”
Well, I’m a researcher, so I was just curious as to how I would score. Since I hate doing arithmetic, I found that the questionnaire is available on a University of Pennsylvania site by Martin Seligman. (You can register a userid there, to add to the statistics, and take the test). It turns out that I score 4.33, on a 5-point scale.
I know youngsters (i.e. the under-30 crowd) who “live on the web”. When I say “live on the web”, I mean that that they really use the browser as their primary computer interface. Key indicators for this behaviour are the use of webmail and online RSS readers. They prefer to use a browser interface to read and send e-mail (e.g. through Gmail/Googlemail or Yahoo Mail) and read news and blogs (e.g. with My Yahoo, Google Reader or Bloglines).
I come from a different generation. A decade ago, when connections speeds of 56kbps were considered fast, the mindset was distributed computing. This meant working primarily through a PC interface, while downloads were managed invisibly in the background. In my personal life, this means that I prefer Thunderbird for reading and sending e-mail offline; and Feedreader for quickly checking news and blog headlines, and browsing only the content that I find interesting. I’m impatient with the slightest delay on the Internet (although delays at home are usually a family issue on router bandwidth, with my sons becoming hogs with P2P traffic). I prefer the immediacy of PC-based applications (with an eye on Traymeter to see when Windows XP has a runaway thread). For maximum productivity in my corporate work, the ultimate fat client luxury is Lotus Notes client, with Lotus Domino servers scattered around the world.
I saw a snippet on lawyers in the Globe and Mail “Social Studies” section, and tracked down the original blog posting by Penelope Trunk on “Six Myths about Today’s Workplace”. Since I’ve been coaching high school students on careers recently, as well as completing my Ph.D. (as I near 50 years in age), I was entertained by Myth #5:
#5. Going to grad school open doors.
Grad school generally makes you less employable, not more. For example, people who get a graduate degree in the humanities would have had a better chance of surviving the Titanic than getting a tenured teaching job.
qoto.org/@daviding (Mastodon) on IngBrief on daviding.com on Media Queue
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