Posted by Danny on Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 1:06 am
There is no dead gremlin lying across a circuit connection within Caligula, waiting to be gently expunged so that my computer can again roar into productivity and entertainment; Byron has confirmed this after an evening of pulling out components to see if one of them was broken and causing grief to the otherwise healthy workings, like a dead but unborn septuplet. We got down to the motherboard and processor without removing an offender, and according to the Dell community resources I found, a lot of folks with my model find themselves about two years into their ownership with a suddenly fried motherboard producing exactly the same symptoms as are displayed by Little Boots, so there it (probably) is.
Excitingly, the Dell XPS 710 uses a proprietary (exclusive!) motherboard layout to fit its generically inaccessible ports into signature inconvenience on the back end of my honkin’ tower, which means that replacements are limited to the stock that Dell has remaining and are way more expensive than they deserve to be for the hardware they represent. Also, because Dell has moved back to the standard, non-proprietary layout for its more recent XPS line, they probably won’t be manufacturing many more, so I feel like hunting down a replacement and paying for it would lock me deeper into a dead-end device. My other option is to buy both a new motherboard and a new tower, and then schlep Caligula’s working guts into it; this is morally correct but financially prohibitive and means that I won’t have a desktop for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, I’m running the universe out of my capable but modest laptop left over from my B.Ed. year at Nipissing.
Its name is The Gentleman Caller and it will service.
Posted by Danny on Friday, June 19, 2009 at 6:14 pm
All this talk about tag clouds got me hankering to try one out, and all the exciting WordPress plugins I discovered while finding my cloud widget got me hankering to try them out, so I’ve made some fun changes.
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Posted by Danny on Thursday, May 21, 2009 at 4:57 pm
A quick, non-handwritten post for resource links and updates to previous articles will follow almost immediately.
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Posted by Danny on Saturday, March 14, 2009 at 6:33 pm
As I acquaint myself with WordPress’ levers, pulleys, and screws, I’m haphazardly contributing to a directory of links you can find south (at time of writing) of my biography on the left-hand column. My intention was to devote a section entirely to Open Education links and then gradually introduce them (and the concept of open education itself) to you, patient readers, over the course and career of this ’blog. In typical fashion, however, Stian Håklev just brought together much more information that I would have mastered in the next few months, and presented it with nearly TED-like production value to a largely awed and enthusiastic crowd of our OISE professors. So, uh, you should read his ’blog.
I will still gradually introduce many of these resources myself, largely because I am myself gradually exploring them for the first time and find that they are less daunting if approached more leisurely (this is my pedagogical gambit to avoid a Semelean tan). For those of you with interest in the topic and even less expertise than me, just bear in mind that others have tread here first and if you’d like to move more quickly, Stian is your man. The fast track starts here.
Posted by Danny on Saturday, March 7, 2009 at 1:29 am
Alright, perhaps a high-twee mission statement with an extensive pre-ramble wasn’t the most astute PR decision I could have made, though in a few years, when Philomathy.org rules the Internet and cyber historians clamour to write its biography, its aggressive salutation will be vindicated and lauded. Luckily, I have between now and then to remove the actual first post where I was still fooling around with themes and emphasis colours.
Welcome, readers! At the time of this writing, you don’t exist yet. That’s fair: at its peak, my first (collaborative) website project was getting about two hundred unique hits per day, and nonetheless things were allowed to slide into dereliction—I suspect I won’t have a web-comic this time around to entice readers for whom my tedious prose and occasional verse are insufficient to foster loyalty and fanaticism. Read more »
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 