Randy Walker

SVSU has created a new portal page for students, staff, and faculty. This new portal is powered by Novell's Express Portal. This is all fine and dandy, except that the university already has a license for Blackboard.

Granted, our Blackboard license doesn't include portal features but we can upgrade our license to include portal software.

Advantages of using Blackboard over Express Portal:

• the SVSU population is already familiar with the Blackboard interface
• Blackboard and WebAdvisor/Colleague from Datatel integrate nicely.

The only benefit that Express Portal has, that I see, is that it integrates with our Mail and Network storage systems (both powered by Novell technology). It has one huge drawback: currently, mySVSU does not provide support for working with Blackboard!

It seems to me that upgrading Blackboard would be a better way to go.

I really hate dialup Internet access. It's so slow. And I'm stuck with it for like 3 months. :(

I got a new computer on Thursday (I ordered it Monday). I got a Mac mini! I cleaned up my old computer this weekend so that I can give it to my sister.

OS X rocks! I've used it before at work and stuff, so I'm fairly used to it.

I need some suggestions, though. What's a good FTP client? I've tried a few but none have these two features I want: icon view and arrange by kind. Doesn't seem so hard to me... but what do I know?

I need to get a keyboard still. I've borrowed Mike's USB keyboard and loaned him a PS/2 one. I'm probably going to get the Apple Keyboard as soon as I get the money.

I love this little guy :)

You may have noticed that I spruced things up around here. This new layout I designed by hand myself. Including the graphics. I think that it is much more sophisticated than my previous efforts.

Now, I say that I designed everything myself, and that's true. But the graphics were actually created by some friends of mine: the red and gray background was inspired by work from Amy and the yellow edges and drop shadows were created by Jeston Tigchon.

If you really like this site's look and you're running WordPress version 1.5, then you are in luck. You can use the theme on your site.

This post has been superceded. Refer to this post instead.

Check the version number in the latest nightly build of WordPress: it's 1.5 beta 1! I've updated. After the botched attempt to upgrade to 1.5a6 right before vacation, it's good to see things back to normal here :)

Here's an updated Admin Theme for 1.5b1.