techNOcool

Spoiler alert: If you plan to do the Sept 19, 2008 NYTimes crossword but haven't done so yet, come back later.

A couple years back, Alternate Reality Games were all the talk in educational technology circles. It used to give James and I unreasonable pleasure to refer to these by their acronym - ARG. Speaking for myself, it still gives me a giggle. Say it aloud and you'll see what I mean.

With all this arg-ing (which often led to an "Avast, ye matey" or some such) I was delighted back then to discover that there's actually a Talk Like a Pirate Day.

The reason this is relevant now, is that during breakfast this morning I was doing the New York Times crossword and came upon an across clue "_________ Day (September 19)". I had no idea what this might be. Later I came upon a down clue "'Well, I'll be!' as it might be said on September 19". I had a few letters in both clues by then and so it came to me that today is Talk Like a Pirate Day and we all know pirates say "Shiver me timbers!"

Don't you love it when technology work leads to seemingly useless knowledge that later leads to brilliant crossword solutions?!

Posted by Susan Fenton at 4:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Google has announced it's new browser, Google Chrome, to be released very soon in beta (of course - does Goggle ever release a 1.0 version of anything?). The announcement is in the form of a long web comic, but is worth a read.

My initial reaction was skeptism combined with a dose of paranoia: Why should I bother trying out yet another browser and how can I be sure Google Chrome isn't phoning home with my every click through a web page?

The paranoia part I'm willing to set aside for a while after reading the comic. It does sound like Google has a product worth a look here. I'm anxious to see how well splitting tabs up into their own processes works, because I'm fed up waiting for Firefox to let me get back to my browsing whenever it's starting a download, for instance. For some reason that always locks up the browser for an unacceptable length of time.

So I'll be downloading Chrome when it's released and trying it out at work. If anyone else does the same, I'd be interested in hearing your reactions.

Update - I downloaded and installed Chrome just before going home last night. Some quick impressions:

• Surprise! It installs in Docs & Settings. Not just the user settings, the whole program. I logged into an admin account to install. Never got asked where I wanted it, etc. When I logged back into my own account it was nowhere to be found, so I went back into the admin acct and saw it was in the admin acct Docs & Settings. The good news here is that anyone can install it without admin permissions. That may also be the bad news. Not sure.
• The only import options were to import from Internet Explorer. So I'm faced with having to figure out a way to get my Firefox bookmarks imported. Haven't tackled that yet, but hopefully it will just be a matter of copying a file from here to there.
• The interface is very clean. It feels too clean right now - like I'm browsing with one hand tied behind my back. But once I figure out where the stuff I need is, it shouldn't be a problem.
• It logged into MT VERY quickly. I'll have to test more to see if that's a fluke, but perhaps some of the MT slowness we've been experiencing was Firefox's fault??

Posted by Susan Fenton at 3:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)