To educate, inform, inspire

My first year in retirement

Those who know, realize that I retired as a tenured full professor from an Illinois community college effective June 30, 2017. Since it has now been a full year, I thought it might be helpful to provide a bit of a recap on some of my activities. I am just […]

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2017 – What a summer – part 1

I am traveling a lot this summer and thought readers might like an update as to my activities. In a nutshell, here are the trips I completed in the past few months. I plan to summarize these travels in separate posts. The first 2 trips are summarized in this post. […]

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Super Bowl 51 Commercials

As I did last year, I paid attention to the commercials on the first Sunday night in February. Others may be aware of this tradition as well. Lots of new commercials frequently interrupted by a football game. Ok, it was fun to watch the game as well. This year had […]

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Productivity tips – Google Calendar

As we start another semester, I thought it might be appropriate to include another of my “productivity tips.” For reference purposes, I have already addressed the following topics: Productivity tips (general) Hygeia (and Hazel) Auto Hot Key (AHK) This is my continuing attempt to help readers “work smarter, not harder.” […]

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Apps

During my summer of travels, I encountered a number of apps for smartphones and tablets. Since many of these were new to me, I thought I would provide an overview of some of the ones others mentioned (during various conversations at events this summer). Here is a quick list of […]

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Koken

I recently became aware of the Koken Content Management System (CMS). Essentially, it is a content management system for photographs (and essays if desired). Given that I take a lot of photographs, I thought this might be worth investigating. I also discovered it integrated with Adobe Lightroom. Like most CMS, […]

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Book review: Digital Defense

Periodically, I review books for the American Library Association. I thought it might be helpful to students to include a copy of my latest book review here as well. This will be published in the June issue of Connect Magazine at the ALA site also. I do need to keep […]

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Productivity tips – AHK

How often do we start our computer, open a handful of applications, visit various websites, and then begin our work. Same routine almost every day. This is where a tool which has been around for a long time comes in very handy. Instead of manually starting all these applications and […]

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Productivity tips – Hygeia and Hazel

This is the second in a series of productivity tip articles inspired by a recent conducted by Pariah Burke. Last week, I examined PhraseExpress [Win] and TextExpander [Mac] which allow you to insert snippets of text which are then expanded (saving me a bunch of typing). This is one of […]

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Productivity tips

I had the privilege of participating in a webinar conducted by Pariah Burke recently. He focused on a number of applications he uses to increase his productivity. This inspired me to develop a series of short articles on various tools one can use to be more productive. I plan to […]

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Super Bowl 50 commercials

Yes, I watched Super Bowl 50 last night. No, I didn’t pay that much attention to the football. I think one of the teams won. I confess I really like the commercials. Rather than just watch the commercials, I thought I would do a bit of analysis. As we all […]

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A cautionary tale

I recently experienced a situation which has several “lessons learned” and I thought I would share. Since many readers of these articles are students and former students, you may benefit from this experience. The saga began in late December, 2015. My wife got a phone call alleging to be from […]

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Phishing = Fraud

Some of you may know that I serve as a reviewer for the SANS OUCH newsletter. The next issue will deal with the subject of phishing. I thought it might be appropriate to also add a little information in my weblog about this topic. Perhaps you will enjoy reading this […]

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Rules to think about

We are near the midpoint of the fall semester at school. From time to time, I observe certain things and thought it might be helpful to put these together as a set of “rules” to think about – particularly for students in the CMWEB program at school. Of course, these […]

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Displaying your tablet on a desktop

Although I have made several prior weblog posts on this topic, I thought it might be appropriate to revisit this in light of iOS 9 and Windows 10 being generally available. For reference purposes, here are two of the prior posts I have made on this topic. Reflection (and more) […]

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