Rand Wacker

I’m doing a group project for my Organizational Behavior class at Haas and we need to do a fairly comprehensive online survey. I asked the LazyWeb a couple of weeks ago to little response (I really need to get comments enabled again), but no worries, I’ve found a great alternative. QuestionPro offers a great Student Research license that will let us complete our survey with much more accuracy and better analysis tools than the fairly limited tools offered by the free version of SurveyMonkey.

Online Web Email Survey Software

The Student Research Sponsorship Program is meant for students doing online research to use QuestionPro as the data-collection and analytical tool. Students participating in the program are provided free access to QuestionPro Survey Software.

Check back soon for a link to this actual survey, as getting a large number of responses will be important for us.

OpenSourceCMS - Home

This site was created with one goal in mind. To give you the opportunity to “try out” some of the best php/mysql based free and open source software systems in the world. You are welcome to be the administrator of any site here, allowing you to decide which system best suits your needs.

The administrator username and password is given for every system and each system is deleted and re-installed every two hours. This allows you to to add and delete content, change the way things look, basically be the admin of any system here without fear of breaking anything.

I’m feeling voluble today, apparently. I think it has something to do with it being Thursday, which is where my week always gets a lot easier. Attending the evening program, my work-week usually starts sometime Sunday afternoon. I have to put a few hours reading, preparing, group projecting on Sunday afternoon before the insanity of the week starts off. Mondays and Wednesdays are a minimum of 14 hour days, getting on the train around 7:30am and not getting out of school until 9:30pm. This makes Tuesday my proverbial “hump day” where I’m just fighting through to keep things on track for the rest of the week. Wednesday nights I’ll sometimes need a cup of coffee before class to ensure awareness, but then after that things get a lot more mellow. Thursdays are meeting day at work, and most weeks I’m either getting on a place Thu night or picking Alexis up. Fridays are Fridays and Saturday is explicitly off limits for anything besides sleep and relaxation to let the body repair itself. School work isn’t so overwhelming, but the group projects for different classes take a lot of time to coordinate/research/execute.

I’m enjoying school a lot though, perhaps more than I even expected too. There are of course a great selection of people like I mentioned before, and after an initial “how basic can you get” worry about the classes they are getting quite interesting. There’s a ton of extracurricular activities at Haas though that have me really excited though: upcoming guest lecturers and symposiums, some very useful workshops on career growth and management, and a few student clubs that have me intrigued.

Its pretty obvious that B-School students are a pretty self-selecting crowd, and often have similar motivations/goals in mind. This makes it very easy to meet people who have the same mindset or are in the same point in their career/life as you. Within B-School there’s an even more self-selecting group of people who have enough interest in particular subjects to sign up for, help run, or even create a specific group. A couple that interest me the most are Net Impact, the Tech Club (obviously), and Social VC…and the Culinary Club (yum).

Other benefits of being a student again include cheap membership in the RSF (gym/pools). With an on-campus parking pass I’ve been finding it very easy to head up to Strawberry Canyon for some lap swimming. Nice.

(From a friend, reprinted with permission)

So we have this wedding coming up in a week and a half over labor day weekend. Anyway, I just realized this past weekend that we hadn’t bought them their wedding gift yet and I had no clue where they were registered; after searching around a bit online, I finally found their names listed on the Macy’s wedding registry pages. It sounds like a shmancy wedding and with two of us attending, I figured we should spend between $100-150 on the gift (standard wedding git cost estimate = cost per person * number attending). After perusing the gifts, we found a nice serving plate for just over a $100. I was about to place the order when I noticed that they had also requested 13 napkins at $8 each to go with their tablecloth and silverware. It turns out someone had already ordered them 12 of the 13, so I figured I would be a nice guy and get them the final napkin as well. I added the plate and napkin to the shopping cart and placed the order…

Just today, I received the shipping confirmation. I was surprised by Macy’s quick turnaround and logged into the site to see if the stuff would actually be ariving by the wedding date. I was happy to find that the package would be arriving as early as next week, but then I noticed — to my surprise, the plate was backordered; they had decided to ship the napkin separately so it would arrive ontime. They shipped the lone napkin by itself!!! along with our attached card that says, “Congratulations on your wedding…blah blah blah… Best wishes” So by the time the wedding rolls around, they will have most likely received and opened our gift — a large box with a nice card and our $8 napkin. The plate will then arrive at some point during their honeymoon…

Bwahahahah! It does seem that things like this always happen to this guy.

Me, I’m still trying to figure out the origin behind the rule that you have up to one year after a wedding to send a gift.

Minor technology gripe of the day, why can’t Apple update its webkit renderer to support Firefox-style find-as-you-type? So often these days I’ll be reading something in NewNewsWire or Mail.app and just start typing in order to find something. Its one of the simplest UI advances I’ve seen in the past few years and I’ve become completely addicted to it in Firefox.

Even adding incremental-style find to traditional “Find…” interfaces would be much better than popping up a modal window that demands I type my whole term in, click search, and then cycle through what’s found (usually having to hunt for the highlighted word in a dense screen).

Sure NetNewsWire could add this on their own, but if Apple just updated their rendering widget I think everyone would inherit it.

Oh, and while I’m offline on the train and wishing for things, it would be nice if NNW had a pre-fetch mode for images linked in blogs. I’m missing the point of about 20% of the blog entries I read that are heavily image-dependent.

Greg Linden, an old co-worker of mine from Amazon.com and one of the forces behind Findory has one of the best speculations I’ve heard about Google’s recent moves:

Google Talk and VoIP over WiFi

So, Google just launched Google Talk, a VoIP application. Google is rumored to be thinking about a nationwide free WiFi network. Combined these two, add a WiFi phone to the mix, and am I about to get free mobile calling nationwide?

He says later (and I probably agree) that this is a completely insane idea and will probably never come to pass, but its the kind of non-linear thinking I would expect out of Google.

I am a bit disappointed they didn’t buy Skype though, mostly because I want more of my friends to use it. Guess I’ll have to log on to Google Talk when I get back on net and see if my Jabber client will finally be useful for anything other than work.

Pretty cool web photo gallery tools:

BananAlbum

JAlbum

Here is an example: danh Alaska

Dear Lazyweb,

I’m looking for a simple and cheap survey tool that my project team can use for a class presentation. We need to find something that is preferably free, can handle a couple hundred responses to a survey about 20 questions long, and will give us access to the full data set. We’d also like the data collection to be anonymous. I’ve looked at SurveyMonkey and it appears to be limited in their free offering. QuestionPro might work, but I’m wondering if anyone has any other suggestions. A simple-to-setup PHP system or something I could run on my own server would also be an idea.

If you have a suggestion, please email me and I’ll be forever grateful.

(Damn, I really need to get comments working again)

I wasn’t kidding before when I said that 80% of my good friends have picked up and moved out of the Bay Area recently, its totally true! I’ve realized now though that I might have a better chance of actually seeing some of the more active ones a little more regularly, but I need a friend tracking tool to make it happen.

Basically, I’ve got this core group of friends who’ve all moved far away, but we all travel very often. Sean just left for NYC where he’ll actually spend 80% of his time on the road to different sub-division offices. Erick now works with me at IronPort and while he’s based in LA we seem to have him on the road >60% of the time visiting customers. Sandy still works for Sendmail which means he’s constantly sent out on multi-week engagements at various customer sites. Wes is the only student among us now starting his second year of B-School at UNC, and while he doesn’t have work engagements pulling him every which way, no-one wants to be stuck in North Carolina for all that long.

So what I need is some way for all of us to keeps tabs on when we might be crossing paths in the same location. Yes, I know we could just talk to each other, but that’s just not the geekiest solution we could have for this problem! Any ideas?

For date night last night Alexis and I were going to go see the syrupy sweet “Must Love Dogs”. I like Diane Lane and especially John Cusack, but I hadn’t heard anything good about the movie. Luckily, we were going to the over-commercial but often-surprisingly-independent AMC Bay Street in Emeryville and at the last minute decided to see John Singleton’s “other” film, “Hustle & Flow” (I call it his “other” film because he was actually the producer on H&F, while his latest big-budget “Four Brothers” also opened this weekend). This was a very good movie and I’m happy we made the switch.

The only actual press I’d seen on the film so far though was on my favorite new movie show, “Rollins Film Corner”, where Henry Rollins (yes, singer/poet/actor/general badass Henry Rollins) pretty much assaults the camera every week with his opinions on film and sometimes culture and interviews some of the more interesting but less celebrated names in Hollywood: Crispin Glover, Michael Madsen, Rob Zombie). You can catch Rollins’ diatribes on Friday nights on IFC, during their Indie Fridays. Henry’s show usually bookends a fantastic small film on the late end, with the always great “Dinner For Five” starting off the set.

So check them out. Hustle and Flow is one of the better movies I’ve seen this year; great story and fantastic acting.