Email Migration Saga and Solutions
August 5th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
Email: We take it for granted until the day it threatens to leave us. Anyone who has ever lost messages, or even just experienced a temporary power or internet outage knows this. Unfortunately, due to a few factors, I am also all too familiar.
This is a narrative tale of woe and triumph, but also contains advice for those who may be experiencing the nightmare of importing messages to Entourage from Apple’s Mail (and possibly other email clients, particularly those who use mbox files for storing messages). So read on!
The problem with to do lists
July 11th, 2009 at 11:04 pm
Anyone who knows me knows what a fan of to do lists I am. Whether handwritten, typed, or in some sort of electronic task manager, or even just on a sloppy post-it, it’s all good. I’ve run into this problem lately where I’m very productive, and hence want to be able to cross things off the list. However, my list contains all these high level items like “Client X’s website.” So even if I finish 90% of the site (wow), I still can’t cross off this item. I’ve thought of two solutions to this:
- Divide to do list into manageable, cross-off-able, subtasks.
- Stop letting to do list manage my life.
Heh, heh, we’ll see. Do to do lists rule your life? How do you handle this conundrum? Am I just OCD?
Taking care of our students: advising, retention, mentoring
February 1st, 2009 at 11:59 pm
As I’m sure many (most? all?) colleges are right now, my employer and alma mater has been talking a lot about the “current economic crisis” and how it will impact the institution. Before all this drama hit we were also in the midst of a college-wide strategic planning process started by our still relatively new President. Well, these discussions have had many interesting and sometimes frustrating facets, but at one of these meetings the issue of retention came up. That is, once we admit the students, how do we make sure they’re happy enough to stay here?
The meeting attendees threw out ideas: Do we have tutoring for struggling students? What warning signs does the Dean of Studies office pick up and how do they act on them? How does general campus morale (including mood of the staff who interact with students) make an impact? What is the role of the adviser?
It is the last of these questions that sort of struck me. At this institution, we have a strong tradition of close relationships between adviser and advisee. As I’ve talked to students, both when I was one and since then, I noticed that they convey a range of very different relationships between themselves and their advisers.