Nerdy Girl

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4
Sep 09

Wired/Wirelessly I Go

Well I finally bit the bullet and got High Speed Internet service from Verizon. The week has been a little frustrating in that there was bit of a snafu with when exactly the technician was going to be here for processing the service. Since Verizon never gave me a firm date, I wasn’t able to be home to let the technician come in and check my jacks when he turned it on Tuesday. I didn’t find out my service wasn’t working until after 6 PM that night. Then it was a matter of trying to figure out if the service issue was in the house or on their side of the wiring.

R came over and checked my lines yesterday and found that there was no battery (that the charge in the phone line that makes everything work) on the line. I ended up turning in a Repair ticket last night and I was really wondering if I made a mistake when it took 45 minutes to get to talk to a real live person. Verizon’s phone system sucks and it got caught in a circular loop at multiple times. By the time I finally was spoke to the gal in tech support, I was pretty close to saying the heck with it.

Once I got her to understand that 1) I wasn’t calling about my High Speed Internet, and 2) that I was very frustrated with how long it took to get ahold of a live person, and 3) I had no connection at all to my wiring outside, she hooked me up fairly quickly with the repair department and they were able to get a technician over here today.

I have to say that Leon the technician did a fantastic job getting everything taken care of. He was polite, courteous, and made sure all my issues were resolved. It turns out there was a bad port on my DSL connection and there was some sort of problem with how they had my phone line set up over in the central office. His supervisor is definitely going to get a letter from me commending Leon on his service.

Tonight has been spent trying to figure out the whole wireless connection aspect of this. I found myself frustrated earlier, but with a little digging through the manual, I was able to figure out how to get things set up on my modem so that I could connect wirelessly with my iTouch, work computer and printer. This wired/wireless thing is pretty sweet. I have one more free USB port on the computer since the printer is now networked in wirelessly. Now I just have to figure out how to get everything set up.

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28
Jun 09

The Nerdy Girl's Summer Reading List

With my job as a senior business analyst – which is really a lump-all category for technical communicator, process analyst and sharepoint administrator for my department’s site collection – I’m heading back into the world of Information Architecture. So here’s the technical reading list for the summer:

Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become by Peter Morville

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites by Louis Rosenfield and Peter Morville

Designing Web Usability (Voices That Matter) by Jakob Neilsen (read this one before, but it never hurts to review the foundations)

Prioritizing Web Usability (Voices That Matter) by Jakob Neilsen and Hoa Loranger

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Best Practices by Ben Curry and Bill English (while directed at Server Admins, there’s a lot of good information for SharePoint Services Admins)

SharePoint 2007: The Definitive Guide by James Curry, Piotr Prussak, Christopher Regan, Christopher Buechler, Bob Fox, Murray Gordon, Michael Lotter, Jason Medero, Nilesh Mehta, Joris Poelmans, Christopher Pragash

SharePoint 2007 User’s Guide: Learning Microsoft’s Collaboration and Productivity Platform by Seth Bates and Tony Smith

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21
May 09

Do You Tweet?

Martha tweets and as of a couple weeks ago, Oprah tweets too. Do you tweet?  I do.

If you don’t know what a tweet is by now, it’s a message sent via the social network twitter.com. Along with the word tweep (a person who tweets) its one of the words entering the vocabulary of the hip and happening folks who use twitter to talk about their lives, their business,  network with people interested in the same things as they are, and drive people to check out their content on their web sites.

The only time I get a message from Twitter is if someone has added me as a contact or sent me a direct message. With Facebook, I had to go in and edit my settings so that my inbox didn’t get flooded with messages. I really don’t want to have to work that hard with my extra-curricular computing.

Of all the social networking tools out there, I like twitter the most. It’s short, it’s sweet, and it lets me communicate what I want without having to deal with a bunch of messages from applications I don’t use. The Twitter folks also seem to have the spam tweeters under control as well.

So try twitter. You just might have some fun.

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24
Apr 09

Making the Theme a Little More Me

The theme on this site is currently a modified version of the Spring Blossom theme put together by agodlymaiden. I like agodlymaiden’s design, but since it didn’t reflect me and my life, I did a little tweaking.

The first step was to find one of my own images that I wanted to use in place of the one agodlymaiden had used. I picked an image of a redbud tree branch that I took a month or so ago and sized it up in Photoshop so it matched the original header in size. I went into my FTP program, renamed the old header file and uploaded the new. Step one was done.

The next step was modifying the style sheet so the text in the header worked with the picture I now had. I changed the text to white and then experimented to determine how far it needed to move down from the top of the image to be readable. There’s nothing more more annoying than not being able to read text because it doesn’t have enough contrast between the background and the lettering .

I have something I can live with for the moment. Once I get done reorganizing all the blog posts into their appropriate main categories, I’ll move into the next phase of the site redesign. The next phase will involve modifying things a little more so that the categories are driving force behind what appears in the bar in the header. That will be an interesting challenge because I’m not sure how all the different parts of the template go together and I know next-to-nothing about PHP. That being said, I know enough to be dangerous.

Thank goodness I have a copy of the original theme backed up. That way if I mess things up too badly, I can start over.

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9
Apr 09

The Redesign and Reconstruction Have Begun

I’ve merged several of my old blogs into one big blog. I’m tired of maintain multiple blogs and I figure it’s time to bring all the little pieces of my online life together in one place.

So bear with me as I rearrange and consolidate content. It will get better – lookwise and feelwise. It just might take a little time in the meanwhile.