Katy Perry Live on Letterman
by Mark on Aug.29, 2010, under entertainment
Tonight, I’ve done just about anything but watch the Emmy Awards. I’m finishing out the night watching Katy Perry’s performance on Live on Letterman, where she performed Tuesday for the release of Teenage Dream
Get Teenage Dream
Best TED talk. EVAR.
by Mark on Aug.26, 2010, under general
Sebastian Wernicke gave a great TED talk that was posted in April. He analyzed some statistics on the history of TED talks and discovered how to create the best TED talk, or the worst TED talk that would be allowed to be presented:
You can go create your own TED talk using Sebastian’s tedPAD.
How Google is ruining my day
by Mark on Aug.01, 2010, under technology
Last week I received an announcement from Google that they are going to include Reader, Blogger and Picasa in the application suite for Google Apps. These are three of the most-requested apps that were not included in the Google Apps for Your Domain suite, even for enterprise accounts. I’m a major Google Reader user, so you could imagine how excited I was by this news. I was even more giddy when I received the e-mail telling me that I could have ask-mark.com participate in the early testing program.
I quickly signed up and converted a few of the user accounts to test things out. The transition site said that no data would be lost, and that I would have the option of allowing users to migrate the information from their personal accounts to the Google Apps accounts. After I chose a few accounts to convert, I looked for the option to allow or disallow content migration. I couldn’t find it. I also looked for the option to add more of the apps, like Reader and Blogger, to the list of apps available to my users. I couldn’t find that, either. This was already not going well. My anguishing tale continues after the jump.
Update: There are four updates to my tale at the end of the post. Google is starting to redeem itself.
iPhone 4 initial impressions
by Mark on Jun.25, 2010, under life story, technology
It’s a phone. It (sort of) does what a phone should do. I like the weight of the phone – heavier than any phone I’ve had in the past seven years. It feels solid, unlike the lightweight plastic feel of a BlackBerry Pearl, or even a Motorola RAZR v3. The screen is bright and crisp. I’m not quite sure how much better the screen is than on my 2nd gen iPod touch, since I only have the glossy packaging film on the iPhone, whereas I have a matte protection film on the touch.
When I get home, I’m going to spend a bit of time syncing the phone with my computer, and installing all of those apps that I had previously found useless on the iPod touch. After the jump I’m including a short recap of my iPhone saga from the past couple of weeks. If you’ve followed it on Twitter or Facebook, you can probably just ignore it.
(continue reading…)
Graduation
by Mark on Jun.17, 2010, under life story
It’s been a long two years, but the big day is almost here. Tomorrow, all of the many days without seeing my wife, the hard work, the study group meetings, the pre-presentation nausea and the drinks after class will have finally concluded with my graduation from Northwestern’s MSIT. I will be graduating with twenty-four of my newest friends and colleagues, joining an elite group of the country’s best and brightest IT professionals. Come noon, we will be adorned in purple, black and orange (for Engineering), awaiting our entrance into the Ryan Family Auditorium. And by 1:30 pm, we will have received our degrees and flipped our tassels.
If you’re so inclined, you can watch a stream of the ceremony at mccormick.northwestern.edu/videostream (go figure that an engineering school would be streaming its graduation ceremony on the web). If you’re looking to hire an IT manager, let me know 
HOW-TO: Set Gmail as the default mail handler
by Mark on Apr.12, 2010, under general
At work, we recently transitioned from using Novell GroupWise as our enterprise mail application to Gmail. With this transition has come a lot of headaches, mostly trying to explain to our users that the loss or change of some features they are used to using is not the end of the world. One feature that has changed is that mailto: links are not working properly. Since we have not uninstalled GroupWise from all of our computers, the desktop client still opens up when a user clicks on a mailto: link on a web page.
Our initial research only revealed solutions that required Gmail Notifier or Google Talk to be installed. Those are pretty much non-solutions for us, because we don’t want to install yet another client on these machines. What’s worse is that these clients tend to want to remember your username and password; that’s a “no go” for our many multi-user computers. Digging a little deeper finally brought me to a solution involving only Windows XP Registry changes.
(continue reading…)
Latest comment spam
by Mark on Feb.07, 2010, under general
I’ve been blogging more in recent times. The increase in activity has brought me additional attention from comment spammers, I think. Most of my comment spam has been claiming to be from bloggers at Harvard Law School. I’m not even sure why that is. The e-mail addresses and URLs all appear to be legitimate, but the comments are all nonsense like I would expect from spam.
So, if you really are a blogger at Harvard, and you want to leave a comment here, shoot me a separate e-mail at mark [at] ask-mark [dot] com.