// June 22nd, 2005 // 9 Comments » // My Stuff
Burger King currently makes a great line of Star Wars toys. Recently some friends and I have discovered that Watto happens to have an extra special ability, sweet humping action.
Check out the video.
Some other links relative to Star Wars BK toys:
Moving Pictures: Darth Vader Lords Over Burger King
g0nk.com: Time to boycott Burger King!
Wallo World: Star Wars Kids’ Meals Take Some Heat
// June 21st, 2005 // 1 Comment » // Technology Bits
Those who know me already know I work for Plymouth State University in Plymouth, NH. My unofficial title is Web Developer and I spend a lot of time developing web applications for internal audiences. In addition to my development duties, I also specialize in integrating separate software systems. Enter the portal. Most of my work revolves around one product, Luminis made by SunGard SCT. This portal solution is based off the open-source product UPortal. Our implementation is dubbed myPlymouth.
On to my point… Doing development for myPlymouth on the Luminis platform became far more interesting in December of last year when Jon Wheat of Messiah College created the Luminis Developers Network (aka LDN, aka LumDev). Suddenly I had a whole community of developers doing similar jobs as me, wanting to enhance to product in similar way, and with an easy way to collaborate on these efforts.
My excitement about LDN has caused me to shamelessly promote the site on many occasions. In Hawaii at Summit, in Boston during a presentation, as well as in every communication I’ve had with anyone even remotely interested in Luminis.
Anyway, I post on LDN often and in the future will likely syndicate my posts here. The following bulleted list summarizes the posts I originated there.
- Syndicating LDN in Luminis III.2 (12/20/04) – my first post, I found it ironic that the LDN RSS did not properly syndicate inside Luminis. Jon got it fixed though.
- Statistics (1/21/05) – as I began researching a way to get stats, I requested ideas on how to accomplish this.
- Classifieds Channel – How To (1/27/05) – step by step instructions on how to get the UPortal communities “Classifieds Channel” implemented in Luminis.
- My Calendar Channel (2/20/05) – a request for info on how to hack the delivered calendar channel
- Summit ‘05 Lum Dev Meetup (3/2/05) – a request to meetup with anyone from LDN who was interested while I was in Hawaii. (I ended up meeting a few and recruiting more. For related escapades, register at LDN and read these comments)
- Luminis Statistics from Uportal (4/12/05) – an overview of how to extract statistics from the underlying UPortal infrastructure.
- YaleCAS (4/18/05) – implementation details and excitement about YaleCAS, a great tool for SSO integration with homegrown apps, especially PHP based apps using phpCAS.
- Site Demos/Guest Logins (5/2/05) – a request for demo logins from the community
- CampusEAI Consortium (6/7/05) – a question to the community about CampusEAI. I’m still curious about this.
- Northeast SCT Luminis Recruitment/Business Case (6/10/05) – summarizes the presentation I attended and presented in recently in Boston.
Obviously I’ve also commented on a ton of other people’s posts, but that is less necessary for me to summarize. Though I will occasionally post summaries of other posts I find particularly intriguing.
// June 20th, 2005 // 14 Comments » // My Stuff
I am a bit obsessive about some things. One of those things is tall buildings. I was interested to go see whatever building was going to be built in the empty footprint of the World Trade Center (1360 ft).
In December of 2002 CNN reported on proposed designs. Honestly, I think all of these are lame including the one they chose by Studio Libeskind, now dubbed “The Freedom Tower.” This building is planned to be 1776 feet tall, intentionally aligned with the year of our nation’s birth. There are aspects of this building that are nice, including the observation deck at 1500 ft and that it will likely be the tallest building in the world when it completes, but this is then paled by the fact that the highest floor is only 1100 feet. This is far lower than many existing buildings and is also where discussion of tall buildings gets difficult…
CTBUH is an international non-profit organization spending their time talking about really big buildings. The official criteria for the world’s tallest building definition states: “The height of a building is measured from the sidewalk level of the main entrance to the architectural top of the building, including penthouse and tower. Towers include spires and pinnacles. Television and radio antennas, masts, and flag poles are not included.? Although they added three more classifications including: Highest Occupied Floor, Top of Roof, and Top of Pinnacle or Antenna. I really feel as though “highest occupied floor” is the most significant. The rest seem a bit more arbitrary.
So that all sounds straight forward right? Four records each assigned to whoever meets the definition. Nope, not that simple, how do we define a building? CTBUH defines them as a freestanding, habitable structure. This excludes the following amazing structures:
- KVLY-TV tower, 2063 ft – undeniably the tallest man made structure currently in existence
- The Petronius Platform – an off-shore oil rig which is 2001 ft if you include underwater structures
- The CN Tower, 1815 ft – located in Toronto, Canada, the CN Tower is excluded merely because it is an observation tower and not a building
Anyway, I’ll ignore those as well, and talk a bit about the ones that are actually considered tallest buildings on some official grounds. Taipei 101 (1667 ft to highest relevant point) in Taiwan takes three out of four of the distinctions leaving only “Top of Pinnacle or Antenna” to go to the Sears Tower (1736 ft to relevant point) in Chicago.
These two buildings are dang cool. Both have much more interesting designs than the Freedom Tower, I especially like Taipei 101. Or, how about a similar size building currently under construction, the Shanghai World Financial Center ( ft) has been under construction since 1997 and has encountered many delays , but take a look at the design, this is a very appealing structure.
I think the WTC should be replaced with a monstrous building that exceeds all the records with no room for debate. We should push up past 2000 ft and approach 3000 ft. There is some fear about a repeat of 9/11, but I think that is crazy. Instead we make a stand and say to the terrorists, “You can knock ‘em down, but we’ll build bigger and stronger.” If we fear them in this way we let them win.
There was one serious contender as an alternate, which was proposed by Donald Trump. Twin Towers 2 (1858 ft) would be a visually identical recreation of the original Twin Towers. They would be moved slightly, and built a bit higher, but basically be the same. I like the added height and space idea, but I think a visual recreation would look and feel like a replica, never capturing the same sense of wonder, nor establishing any new status of their own.
In response to this and other complaints there is plans underfoot to do another redesign which will be unveiled later this month. Hopefully it takes the best of both and combines it into something far more interesting and useful.
Do you wonder if maybe 2000-3000 ft is unreasonable, maybe a bit too high? There are plans already to push these numbers elsewhere. Burj Dubai (est 2314 ft) will stand out in the desert city of Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The actual height of this completed building is being guarded like a national secret and is rumored to reach a height f over 3000 ft. Even the more conservative estimate will make Burj Dubai stand alone.
A less likely building is Tokyo’s Sky City (est 3300 ft). Discovery recently featured a show about Sky City. This is entirely in the heads of Tokyo engineers, but what they present is an intriguing look into the future that might be. One of the more interesting aspects about this is the plan to build it so levels became habitable from the ground up. Making it possible for people to begin moving in very quickly as the building continued to grow. Takenaka has had plans for Sky City since 1989 and his vision has seemed to grow in possibility over the years. Some other details can be found here.
Other interesting Tall Structure related whatnot:
- Solar Tower Buronga (3281 ft)
- Wikipedia: World’s Tallest Buildings
- The Petronas Towers (1483 ft) Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – tied with itself for second tallest building in the world. The sky bridge connecting the two halfway up is the most interesting architectural feature as far as I’m concerned.
- Jin Mao Building, China (1380 ft) 5th Tallest Building in the World
// June 18th, 2005 // 1 Comment » // My Stuff
When PJ finally made it home from Iraq after a year away, his friends and family threw him a big party. See the gallery of that night here. At this point this is sort of old news, but I just got around to getting the gallery posted.
// June 16th, 2005 // 1 Comment » // My Stuff, Technology Bits
I finally got around to changing up my site. I was never happy with the old look, and in turn this discouraged me from blogging things. Now, I have a look I’m happy with (isn’t the rhino great!) so I can actually start using this. Additionally, my friends at spiralbound.net and maisonbisson.com have both done redesigns and are excited about their blogs so I might as well ride the bandwagon.
Those who care about the tech side of things, I have switched to WordPress and Gallery 2. Plus, I’m trying out using ecto for my posts. We’ll see how it goes…
// June 10th, 2005 // 1 Comment » // Technology Bits
Originally posted on Luminis Developer’s Network 6/10/05
The official title was: New England Colleges and Universities – Developing the Business Case for a Digital Campus Portal
Yesterday, June 9th, SCT put on a small conference hosted by Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. There were 4 presentations by existing Luminis clients to a room of clients who are considering or planning implementation of Luminis. Overall this was a fun event and an opportunity to talk to some other schools and get a feel for the sorts of things they are looking to accomplish with Luminis.
The presenters were:
“Luminis – Integrate It All”
Northeastern University – http://myneu.neu.edu/
Kevin Leggett and Maura Boyd
Apparently they have given this presentation numerous times including at Summit. Maura is a CPIP guru. They have integrated may external apps through CPIP. The biggy there is that they are a IBM shop and have suite of CPIP’d apps including Lotus Domino, IBm WebSphere, etc.
“Upgrading from Campus Pipeline to SCT Luminis”
Wentworth Institure of Technology – https://lconnect.wit.edu
Maureen Crawford-Hentz
Maureen is a non-technical user from career services with extreme excitement about the Luminis platform. She is a content editor and contributor who strongly encouraged all schools implementing the platform to get non-techies involved early on. Ownership of the content encourages her and her staff to continually keep content fresh and updated. One real gem of wisdom I took from her is to find out who on campus is making and putting up posters all over campus. If you can harnass those people to generate portal content their excitement can translate to fresh new content that is in touch with students.
“Keeping myPlymouth Exciting” or “Making it Strategic”
Plymouth State University – http://my.plymouth.edu
Ken Kochien and Zach Tirrell
Our presentation covered our inclusion of alumni in our portal as the permanent consitituent fo the campus. We also gave overview of the exciting things we are doing technically with YaleCAS, LDI, and leveraging the underlying UPortal infrastructure. I then also spent time giving on overview of the benefits of this community site (no surprise there). The presentation is here if you want to see the slides.
“Possibilities Achieved – Unifying Campus Community and Services”
North Shore Community College – http://pipeline.northshore.edu
Gary Ham and Jan Forsstrom
This presentation was also a fairly polished, at least, second showing. North Shore has a very solid Luminis implementation. They are leveraging the whole scope of services provided with Luminis, as well as integrating many/all on campus services in a fairly seemless fashion.
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