http://wigblog.blogspot.com Occasional ruminations and essaylets 2006-11-11T21:45:00Z en-US http://wigblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/abysmal-architecture-of-michigangov.html Ever since then-Governor Engler outsourced michigan.gov to an IBM datacenter running Vignette in Colorado, I've thought that our great state's Web presence was pressed into a misshapen cookie cutter. Last Tuesday I tried to find out when the polls closed Richard 2006-11-11T20:49:00Z http://wigblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/eminent-domain-2006-election-and-me-in.html On the hottest day of 2006, a July day with the heat index well above 100, I participated in a film shoot. This was a political commercial produced by a good friend, one of the leading makers of commercials in Michigan, Doug Monson. For over a year I'd as Richard 2006-11-07T02:21:00Z http://wigblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/northwest-airlines-boarding-pass.html Now comes one Christopher Soghoian who wants to raise awareness of a major flaw in airport security: TSA visually inspects your boarding pass, but does not use a scanner to verify online that the document is valid. So Chris now offers the Northwest Airli Richard 2006-10-27T18:19:00Z http://wigblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/understanding-related-searches.html Recently when trying to better understand patterns of searches at Michigan State University I color-coded related search terms and analyzed 13 months of data. Not too surprisingly more people seek football tickets in the fall, bookstores at the beginning Richard 2006-10-27T17:23:00Z http://wigblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/one-of-those-crisp-fall-days.html Friday was one of those crisp Fall days that football announcers proclaim "And it's a beautiful day for football!" Sadly the prospects for a happy football feeling in East Lansing on Satuday are not propitious, so here's some Fall color to cheer folks up Richard 2006-10-07T11:12:00Z http://wigblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/my-first-experience-trying-to-correct.html For my Day Job at Michigan State we've been working on celebration of 50 years of computing at the university. MSU engineers started building the university's first computer, MISTIC, in 1956 -- fifty years ago. Click to see full-size screen shot MISTIC Richard 2006-09-09T10:07:00Z http://wigblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/memo-from-new-york-times-what-matters.html David Pogue, who writes about computers for The New York Times, declares in his most recent column: "White-collar types on both coasts have become addicted to the BlackBerry, thanks to its ability to display e-mail instantly as it arrives and to synchron Richard 2006-09-08T09:45:00Z http://wigblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/overloaded-google-news-links-to.html Prominently listed among the 3,462 articles about Steve Irwin, Google News offered this headline: Stingray Apologizes for Crocodile Hunter Irwin's Death Click to see full-size screen shot Of course, it links to a parody news site: No doubt there are Richard 2006-09-06T21:43:00Z http://wigblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/80-gig-for-80-bucks-and-tiny.html Once upon a time it was amazing that disk storage cost a dollar a megabyte. Today I bought a disk drive that was the size of a PDA. It cost $90 for 80 gigabytes. That's 80,000 megabytes if you're paying attention. It's a LaCie drive, USB powered, no n Richard 2006-09-04T08:16:00Z http://wigblog.blogspot.com/2006/08/florida-universities-know-how-to.html Every institution, including every university, should have a business continuity plan. Universities in South Florida are executing those plans right now, as Ernesto, either storm or hurricane, approaches. Others can watch these universities execute these Richard 2006-08-29T03:35:00Z http://wigblog.blogspot.com/2006/08/columbia-please-redirect-without.html Normally I try not to complain about rank stupidity at a univerisity. When you work at a university, you know what crazy ideas committees come up with. But when you find a truly goofy idea, it is hard to stay silent. Columbia University spanks you if yo Richard 2006-08-27T09:41:00Z http://wigblog.blogspot.com/2006/08/lately-ive-been-thinking-lot-about.html Lately I've been thinking a lot about what it must have been circa 1956 when professors and others yearned for a computer where they could perform scientific calculations. You know, moving from pencil and paper, and slide rule, to a computer. These wer Richard 2006-08-26T10:33:00Z