Thursday, September 10, 2009

Daily HAHAs!

First up, a pigeon is faster then the internet at sending data! In South Africa a pigeon beat the countries leading internet service provider in a time of 2 hours and 6 minutes, half of which was flight time for the pigeon and the other half downloading the data from the hard drive it carried. Meanwhile the ISP only transmitted 4% of the data during that period.

Next up, last night President Obama gave his speech about health care on TV. Regardless of what side of the fence you sit on for this issue, I found something quite amusing about the whole deal. Before his speech began last night a reporter on CNN commented on how he'd face a tough crowd and how our legislation is not like the British legislation where they got hecklers and whatever else going on in there. In a sense they said we were more polite and respectful. I have to admit, it was quite an amusing build up to this.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Work or not work?

Someone said to me yesterday that I spent a lot of time solving technical problems and must be tired.

Recently I finished a loan disbursement application for the financial aid office at the college I work at. It grabs all the students loan disbursement information, packages it in to PDF files, and mails the files to the students school email accounts.

There were technical bugs, but things worked out and I ended up replacing a system that was originally running on Cobol and doing line printer output with a nice neat form. Now that it's done the application is working and people are saving money on printing and postage costs. (5000 letters is a lot of stamps!)

I feel like I didn't do any work, I just had fun.