Super Ginormous

Category: Work

I spend most of my day at PowerServe. These posts touch on life around the office.

  • Mastering Photoshop CS2

    Mastering Photoshop CS2

    I’ll be attending the “Mastering Photoshop CS2” seminar in Atlanta on August 21st. It looks to be a pretty cool mix of classes. It’s been a while since I attended a seminar specifically on Photoshop, so it’ll be nice to be able to “sharpen the saw” with tips and tricks learned from this seminar.

    Learn the ingenious techniques that experienced Photoshop professionals use every day to accomplish amazing effects with a minimum of effort. Discover a faster, better way to use Photoshop®. No hyper-technical jargon, no beginner basics – just class after class of “real-world” techniques that will advance your skills and make you more productive than ever before. After an enlightening day with Deke McClelland, your confidence in your Photoshop skills will be at an all-time high.

    The last Photoshop seminar I attended was several years ago. It was geared towards users of all levels, but without fail, it seemed like all of the advanced sessions I attended had beginners in them that monopolized all of the speaker’s time with question after question. Hopefully this seminar will work out better than that…

  • Wherefor art thou, Basecamp?

    UPDATE: It appears the problem has been resolved. Though I am still curious to know what happened…

    Is it just me, or is Basecamp (and all of 37Signals’ websites) down now? None of their sites is resolving for me now. I know they just moved their servers recently…and perhaps this is related to that move somehow.

    A TraceRoute is showing that one of their servers is unreachable…

    69.36.39.150 ASN=18462[Destination Unreachable] burnham.37signals.com.

    I’m sure similar tests on other URLs would yield similar results.

    This outage concerns me because we use the Premium level Basecamp plan to manage all of our projects. When Basecamp is offline, it effects our ability to work efficiently (especially given our dependancy on this app now…) It begs the question now … what will 37Signals do to compensate users effected by their outage? And is a hosted offsite solution really the best thing for our business? I’m not sure, but ActiveCollab is looking pretty good right now…

  • PowerUp

    It was inevitable that it would happen. PowerServe now has a blog.

    Not much available in terms of content, yet. (Most of it comes from my own blog.) But we’re going to be adding articles, features over the coming weeks & months (as time permits) that will give readers a better idea of who we are and what we do. So, stay tuned, and subscribe to the RSS feed for updates!

  • New Media and Higher Ed

    As a geek, I take for granted the technology that I use on a daily basis. I read RSS feeds through FeedDemon several times during the day. I blog occasionally. I visit Wikipedia several times a week either to look up information or to make sure spammers aren’t screwing articles of interest to me. I also listen to a number of podcasts, such as Desiring God Radio and LostCasts. I use these technologies to stay abreast of the latest news, trends and technology out there that is important to me. Blogs, Podcasts, Wikis: these are all “tools” that would be extremely beneficial for use in Higher Education.

    In preparing for my speech I learned a lot about new media technologies and their use in higher education and, frankly, I was surprised by what I learned.

    Of the 35 colleges and universities in the University System of Georgia, only three had a publicly available (i.e. on the homepage, news or admissions page) RSS feed – Armstrong Atlantic University, University of West Georgia, and Darton College. Only two of the 35 schools had podcasts – Armstrong Atlantic University and Georgia College and State University.

    Why aren’t schools taking advantage of these new technologies? Based on the feedback I received from workshop attendees it comes down to:

    • Cost
    • Server Capabilities/Restricitions
    • Technology Access
    • Knowledge/Implementation Limitations

    The good news is – many are in the process of implementing some or all of these tools into public and private portions of their website. This is good news for students, faculty and alumni alike.

    By utilizing technology that is out there, and gaining in popularity, they can avoid having to play catch up once the general public “adopts” them.

  • Fear

    We all fear something, be it death, snakes, spiders, etc. My fear is public speaking. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said, though, “the only thing to fear is fear itself.”
    I conquered my fear by giving a presentation at the Georgia Educational Advancement Council Summer Conference at Augusta State University this past Friday. I’m still amazed I agreed to speak at the engagement with so little time to prepare, but given the topic – New Media 101 (Blogs, Wikis, Chatrooms, and more) – I felt like I could handle it. In attendance at my workshop were 40-50 University System of Georgia employees from institutions all over the state. I had no idea what their depth of knowledge would be, no idea what the format of the discussion would be… I just showed up to do my best. A few minutes in, it was pretty evident that there would be a consistent back and forth between what I was presenting and questions from the attendees. This worked out perfectly.

    I was worried going in about doing well, mis-speaking, getting something factually wrong, etc. – but in the end, I did okay. I built all of these “worse case scenarioes” up in my mind trying to defeat myself before I even got started. As my boss told me before going into this… “You’re the expert here. You know this stuff. You’re going to do alright.” And he was right.

    I survived the presentation, got over my fears of speaking in public, and sent people on their way equipped with the knowledge I shared in my presentation. Thank God. :)

  • New Media 101

    I just found out today that I’ll be making a presentation at the Georgia Education Advancement Council (GEAC) Summer Conference on the campus of Augusta State University next Friday. I’ll be speaking about “new” technology – blogs, wikis, podcasts, chats, etc. – and how they can improve an institution’s ability to communicate with alumni, prospective students, etc.

    I’m looking forward to the opportunity.

  • Reply?

    If you printed out an email that you had received and it had a ‘Reply’ button on it, would you assume by pressing the button, you could respond to the email? I seriously couldn’t have taken that support call… God bless our email support guys. (more…)

  • Go Scott Go!

    Scott V. reminded me that one of our programmers, Scott Parel, qualified for the BellSouth Classic. Kick some butt, Scott! We’re praying for ya.

    Scott ParelScott is a professional golfer on the Nationwide Tour, basically one step down from the PGA Tour. Well on Monday he played for one open spot in the BellSouth Classic and won it, by shooting a 67 and then winning a 3 man playoff; that is big stuff. Scott works with me at PowerServe when he is not on tour, so all of us guys in the office live out a professional sports fantasies through him. He has done this twice before, and each time it was the US Open, which is basically impossible but he did it anyway.

    If you want to check in on how he is doing you can look at the BellSouth Classic leaderboard. If he finishes around the top 3 he might get an invite to the Masters, next week. How sweet would that be.

  • We Have Liftoff: MAU.com

    MAU Screenshot

    Months of hard work have finally paid off – we launched the new MAU.com, just moments ago.

    The site was an awesome undertaking. We had to convert several years worth of static content, and reorganize it in a logical way. We worked closely with MAU staff to ensure everything worked the way the organization needed for it to work. All of us at PowerServe really appreciate having the opportunity to work with MAU on this project. We hope you’ll check it out.

    MAU, Inc. is one of the nation’s largest workforce solution providers. Based in Augusta with offices in Georgia, South Carolina and Illinois, MAU provides provides comprehensive and integrated workforce solutions for corporations and businesses.

    PowerServe worked with MAU, Inc.’s marketing team to redesign MAU’s site to showcase what sets MAU apart from their competition. The new design is clean, simple and flexible. It was designed to compliment existing marketing materials, as well as to give MAU a more refined look on the web.

    Our goals for this site were simple: make it easy to use; make it look more professional; make it more search engine friendly; make it more extensible.

    To make it easier to use, we conducted a site audit of the pre-existing website, and organized content into a more logical structure. This helped us to “trim the fat” and remove a lot of older content no longer being utilized or that was no longer relevant.

    To make it more professional, we developed a design that would compliment some of the print materials MAU had already been producing. We also wanted to design something that would compliment the MAU logo colors: blue and orange. We utilized SlideShowPro on a number of pages to give the site a more polished, dynamic feel.

    To make the site more search-engine friendly, we recoded the entire site from scratch, utilizing web standards, and semantically sound markup. The reduction in code also helped the site to load faster. It is now more compatible with all mainstream web browsers, including Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, Mozilla Firefox 1.5 (Mac/PC) and Apple Safari 2.0.

    To make the site more extensible, we utilized a new template structure to make it 1) easier to add new pages; 2) easier to manipulate the look and feel of all pages; and 3) easier to manage existing pages. Design changes take seconds versus the minutes and hours they once took.

    This redesign project was a huge undertaking, but the final product was more than worth it.

  • Lost (and Found)

    Since yesterday afternoon, I’ve been freaking out because the office digital camera came up missing. I thought, perhaps, that I had simply misplaced it somewhere. I thoroughly checked my desk and my laptop bag – no dice. I went home, checked all of the usual locations that I tend to place items – no dice.

    Fast forward to this morning… I’m looking everywhere in the office for the camera. I’m looking under my desk, under papers, in drawers, on shelves. It’s nowhere to be found. Then, the unthinkable happens… my personal camera is missing as well.

    Coincidence? I dunno. Immediately, thoughts start racing through my head… ‘Am I this absent-minded that I have misplaced two cameras in such a short period of time?’, ‘Did someone steal them?’, ‘Did someone simply take them without asking?’ I start asking coworkers if they had seen either camera – no dice. They’re as astounded as I am. After a little bit of detective work, we determined that it’s highly likely that someone our office had been trying to help came into our office and took them.

    Am I mad? Not any more. Am I disappointed? Yeah. It’s only ‘stuff’, and it can (and was) replaced.

    After praying about it, I’ve discovered in myself, that I take for granted all that I have, and I leave it out in the open for all to see… That’s pretty much like inviting someone to permanently borrowsteal from you.