Michael Gracie

Rough schedule today, hence the laziness

• Doing what I couldn’t with TotJot, and sounds just as nice - TotSpot. The company is presently in private beta, which is something we didn’t do at TotJot - our engineering arm built a solid, extensible platform and then we decided to go the PR consulting route (despite having PR experience on the team already). Bad move (along with overbuilding the backend infrastructure before having a real user base), but the concept is still bright, and I wish TotSpot all the best. Mashable is presently handing out some invites.
• What has eight letters, begins with an “F”, and may turn out to be a very useful web utility? No, not Facebook…Freebase. I tinkered with Freebase some time ago, and now Alex Isgold has an update on the open database platform.

And last but certainly not least…

• Democracy sans justice - A kindergarten teacher allows their students to vote an autistic classmate out of the room. Worse - it wasn’t done by secret ballot - the child was forced to stand in front of the classroom while this public humiliation took place. Even worse - the teacher admitted the case, yet has been placed in an “administrative position.” I wouldn’t let my dog within 50 miles of this teacher.

Well…maybe. There is no doubt that if sys admins could lock down their users machines, you’d solve a lot of issues, but that isn’t really feasible with all the new tools flowing in the door. Everytime someone downloads a new program that doesn’t require admin rights, someone else is going to develop an exploit.

There is no quick fix for this, whether it be under Windows, UNIX, Linux or otherwise. All you can do is educate.

Several high school students are in potentially scorching water after hacking into their school district’s computer network to change some grades and grab a few tests.

These students were obviously very concerned about their grades, and getting into a good college is supposedly very competitive nowadays. Unfortunately, they may not get there, which in a strange way, is…well.. unfortunate. They were talented enough to get into the system - they might have been talented enough to help out some college with their security issues.

I was asked to skip a couple of grades when I was in school. I don’t think it was because I was smart, but more because I was a hassle in class. The teachers just wanted me moving onward (and outward from their presence). I didn’t do it because I always had a crush on some cute girl, and didn’t want to leave. The result was I never got the girl.

Now a young boy from Korea is taking skipping grades to the extreme, as he has been accepted to the physics department at a university.
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The old saying “its not what you know, its who you know” is losing steam. In a world on instant startups and flourishing home offices of one, what you know is becoming much more important. But it isn’t all important. How you use that knowledge is what really counts.
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The Guardian covers a story about how students fair poorer in testing when they have access to computers to assist them in their studies. I end up getting the frank report from a technology blog. I don’t know which is worse, the computers in the classrooms, the calculators used to do the statistics for the study, or the journalist who buried the facts behind the policy flip flopping, at the bottom of the story.
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I was impressed that Telus of Canada was utilizing RSS to get their marketing message on the street (see RSS Marketing for more on how this works). I was even more impressed that the message was a quick and dirty, common-sensical guide on avoiding phishing exploits. Take a look at Gone phishing – forged e-mails, spoofs and scams - myTELUS, and tell me what you think.

I think it is one more example of taking care of your users.