I often feel nostalgic at the end of every year. Not for what I did this year, per se, but it’s just a natural time for me to think about a lot of things, some of which are themes that attract themselves back into the front of my brain. Assuming that’s where fresh thoughts are …
Author Archives: John
Documenting Your Growth
I used to be an expert at a program on my computer. When I say expert, I don’t mean just good. I used Finale (music notation software) from version 1 (1988) heavily until 1999, completing a good solid decade of almost daily use of that program to write and arrange music. I knew it in …
Browser Bookmarks
One of the things I regret is not saving all of my chats and email from college. I remember learning how to download email at some point and kept copies of some of it on floppy disks. My many hours (days, weeks) on IRC was altogether lost. It was such a blow to lose that …
Preparing Videos for Canvas
As a course designer for the Canvas LMS, I want to be able to make videos of presentations I’ve created and post them into the course. I primarily use two tools to do this: Quicktime Player (Mac) and Screencast Pro from Telestream. Quicktime for some reason only exports the videos I make using the built-in …
MacOS Permissions After File Sharing
I recently was experiencing some issues around file sharing on MacOS (Big Sur on one end, Monterrey on the other) that had me mucking about in the Sharing pane of System Preferences. When I connected to the Monterrey machine remotely through SMB in the Finder, I had no access to any of the folders in …
Memory and Scent
My Background I’m feel somewhat vulnerable for discussing this, but the topic is so fascinating to me, I feel like there is at least some benefit in putting some thoughts down about it. I have a strong affinity for smells; I can’t say I am in anyway unusual from other people in this regard, except …
Reflections on Teaching
My first year of teaching graphic communications and computer applications were intense experiences. I’d just graduated with a masters degree (in music) and suddenly I was thrown into a new job that I hadn’t precisely prepared for! But I had a lot of computer experience and I set about designing lessons on that experience as …
How to perform advanced tasks in Microsoft Word
Topics Mail Merge Forms and Templates Recording Macros Using Footnotes and Endnotes Creating Bookmarks Tracking Changes and Comments Envelopes & Labels Creating a Table of Contents Mail Merge Mail merge is a function whereby you create a template of communication, such as a business letter, and replace the information therein with specifics such as name, …
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Slidedoc(k)ing
I am a detail oriented person. I recently read a colleague’s dissertation and before I could get to the details in the writing, all I could see where inconsistencies in the use of spaces and punctuation. For sure, it was a draft and some people work that way—getting their ideas down first and worrying about …
Extracting Email Addresses
So email can be a pretty seamless tool for most of us to communicate with others; sitting at a computer, it’s easy to create a message, send it, and when received, to read. That’s not even worth saying. And I’m not here to make a commentary on how inefficient email can be in the workplace …