Tag Archives: Education

Kootenay Network cooperation

Posted by on May 12, 2011 No comments

I had this idea a little while back about getting the kootenay area computer techs together to share knowledge, idea’s, tips and tricks. I had just recently finished my all in one USB installer for windows and such as well, so I was eager to share that and help techs save literally hours of work every time they wanted or needed to reload a system. So I changed my other website (kootenay-networks.com) from my main business website, to a mix of business and the Kootenay Network cooperation. This was all done a few weeks ago.

So I fired off a bunch of emails to all the computer companys I could find online and in the phone book in the immediate kootenay area, as well as posted some free ad’s around the net. After two weeks, guess how many new members I had on the forums? … that’s right, 0. I saw a few views on the things I posted, but nothing major. I did however get a few emails of people thinking it was a great idea, but they just didn’t have the time to be a member, let alone a active one. This actually did make sense, because when I was working full time as a tech for another company, I did not have any time to learn new things during work, and sure didn’t want to spend all my free time doing more work… although I actually did 😛 but only cause I’m a major geek when it comes to computers and do really enjoy working with them. So this is where I am at. I’m just wondering how I could do things a bit different to make it easy for people to find information, so they don’t have to spend much time. I was thinking something more like a wiki as well as the forum, so people could at least get quick answers and then actually contribute / converse if they like on the forums.

If any one actually reads this, I would love to get some idea’s on getting more techs in a co-operative spirit to help better the standards of every one in the area.

Zeitgeist Newsletters

Posted by on October 21, 2010 No comments

I read through the first newsletter for the zeitgeist movement a little while ago and thought the information in there was excellent. Here are a few lines out of it.

In a sustainable society, human motivation would be driven by contributions to society and hence themselves – not abstractly “making money”. The system would be designed to best facilitate the needs of the population directly. Yes, this is that dangerous phenomenon we hear so much about, with the image of blood engulfing the planet Earth, denoted as “Socialistic”. God forbid society might actually be ‘designed’ to benefit the people which live inside of it. The fact of the matter is, the profit motive incentive and hence our competition oriented system is entirely “antisociety”.

In a sustainable society, a “steadystate” economy would be in order. This would mean that there is no pressure to consume, as labor is not linked into the feedback loop.

There are 2 as of this writing. Check them out here

“Mark Twain To Reveal All After 100 Year Wait”

Posted by on July 11, 2010 No comments

Here’s an interesting post from slashdot.org.

“”The Independent reports that one of Mark Twain’s dying wishes is at last coming true: an extensive, outspoken and revelatory autobiography which he devoted the last decade of his life to writing is finally going to be published one hundred years after his death. Twain, the pen name of Samuel Clemens, left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century, but in November, the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain’s three-volume autobiography. Scholars are divided as to why Twain wanted his autobiography kept under wraps for so long, with some believing it was because he wanted to talk freely about issues such as religion and politics. Michael Shelden, who this year published Man in White, an account of Twain’s final years, says that some of his privately held views could have hurt his public image. ‘He had doubts about God, and in the autobiography, he questions the imperial mission of the US in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines,’ says Shelden. ‘He’s also critical of [Theodore] Roosevelt, and takes the view that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel. Twain also disliked sending Christian missionaries to Africa. He said they had enough business to be getting on with at home: with lynching going on in the South, he thought they should try to convert the heathens down there.’ Interestingly enough, Twain had a cunning plan to beat the early 20th century copyright law with its short copyright terms. Twain planned to republish every one of his works the moment it went out of copyright with one-third more content, hoping that availability of such ‘premium’ version will make prints based on the out-of-copyright version less desirable on the market.””

Education is a marketplace.

Posted by on June 2, 2010 No comments

Here is a sad, but true article from slashdot. You can get the paper saying you have a degree in computers, yet know very little practical information about them. Also education is a huge business! How big are most students loans? Huge! As such colleges and university are run like a business, to make money. This means advertising will be less then forth coming. I have also heard that important things are being left out of the curriculum to be replaced by what a company’s “Human resources” are looking for, which often has little to nothing to do with what you will actually be doing at the job. This is probably why I keep seeing clueless people running I.T. departments and find very talented people as the grunts (of course this is not the norm, but I see it enough to be disturbed).

“Advice Line’s Bob Lewis comments on the mixed state of IT education in the US, which sees some students graduating with computer-related degrees despite never having written a line of code. And while some institutions are emphasizing the value of teamwork in their curricula, an approach that fosters specialization in lieu of uniform standards, others are simply advertising their ‘success rates’ in graduating students. ‘Education is a marketplace, and if you have the money and want to buy, you can find someone willing to sell,’ Lewis writes. In other words, ‘If you want a degree that indicates you know something about computers without having to actually know very much about computers, you can get one.'”

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