After some fruitless battles with the web site designer associated with my domain (Site Builder), I decided to keep it simple and build a linked pair of web site  / blog using "off the shelf" tools from Google. Besides being a lot simpler, this approach allows me to document suggested technical support for the frames I'm looking at. Assuming specific tools makes the suggestions more useful. Readers who know other tools should easily translate my advice into guidelines for their favourite tools. Finally, using Google tools forces me to concentrate on content rather than frilly graphics, sexy animation and miscellaneous flim-flam. As long as the bells and whistles are there, you tend to get sucked into spending all your time finding ways to incorporate them.

This blog disappeared for about 2 weeks for reasons that were insanely difficult to track down. After a lot of floundering around, I discovered that the URL had been directed to cloudymountain.org, the cloudymountain domain. This, in turn, is something it turns out I asked for. I thought I was asking to redirect cloudymountain.org to the google site, but it worked the other way around, dumping the very few browsers of this site into a non-existent cloudymountain site. It took me hours and hours of tripping around to re-discover this facility, then 2 minutes to fix things. It's a classic example of "you can't find the right answer if you don't know the right question"! Anyway, we're up and running again. Lots of interesting stuff going on. More later.

Here is one of the smartest ideas I've ever encountered. Mistakes are valuable because we analyse our mistakes. We take success for granted, even though it may be due to dumb luck or a total misconception of the situation. When trouble hits, you put your learning cap on. In this case, it was the sudden death of my iPhone. I'll let you know how we brought it back to life, but the important lesson was in the consequences of the crash. If this had happened to the machine that runs Outlook, I'd be in serious trouble. I would stand to lose all my e-mail history, which is 90% of the records I keep of my life. At the very least, I would be reduced to going directly to Shaw to get new e-mails and to use the klunky on-line app to send mail. Documents saved on the PC would be lost unless backed up (who does backups?) Applications lost on the PC would need to be re-installed and, in some cases, re-purchased. The cloud-based approach is utterly different. All important docu

When I briefly taught Computer Science at Mount Royal, my course was "Distributed Systems". My theme was how we can escape synchronous interactions between individuals and between individuals and machines. Traditional dialogues with computers went: 1. Type something 2. Computer replies 3. Type something else 4. Computer replies etc.... Two things were changing. 1. With distributed systems, you no longer had to be in the same place as the computer. This was already taken for granted back then and the students dutifully slept through this point. 2. You were no longer constrained to have the conversation at the same TIME either. You could send an e-mail, for example, then go on about your business. You could collect messages when it suits you. Students would wake up briefly in time to miss this point, then go back to sleep. Thus, in both time and space, we were being set free from former constraints. This is happening now in a much broader context. A long time ago, I wa