The guys at Jib-Jab are notorious for putting out some hilarious political videos, here’s their latest piece of work. I think you will agree it’s pretty funny!
JibJab - Funny eCards, Birthday Cards, and More at JibJab
I just heard on Twitter a few minutes ago that Lu Hardin, UCA President, may resign tomorrow. This is pretty big news considering all that he has done for the University of Central Arkansas during his tenure as President.
As a resident of Conway I know that he is an extremely popular person in town and it’s hard to find a person who doesn’t like him or respect his accomplishments.
This comes as kind of a shock to me and a few others that I have talked to. I will bet anything that he shows back up in politics at some point in the future, possibly the Governor’s Race.
Here is a snippet I found on the homepage of the Log Cabin Democrat. This story is also being reported on Arkansas Business and a few other statewide News Outlets…
The University of Central Arkansas Board of Trustees will hold a special meeting today to discuss president Lu Hardin’s future with the university.
The meeting will take place at 11 a.m., and Rush F. Harding III, vice chairman of the board, told the Associated Press that Hardin offering his resignation may be one of the university president’s options.
Vice president for university communications Warwick Sabin said he hasn’t heard of any plans for Hardin to resign and said he has not been able to confirm the 11 a.m. meeting of the Board of Trustees as of 7 p.m. Wednesday.
“I’m confident the president has the votes to stay, if he would choose,” Harding said. “However, I know the president cares deeply about the institution and he’s assured me that he wants some resolution to this issue and he will put the interest of the university above his own.”
The controversy began when news surfaced that Hardin had secretly received a $300,000 deferred-compensation bonus in May. Hardin has since repaid the money and said he would not accept it until faculty members receive raises and enough private funds are acquired to cover the early payment of deferred-compensation.
UCA administrators first said the money used to pay the bonus was public funds, but Attorney General Dustin McDaniel said in an advisory opinion that the money used to pay the bonus was public money because it came from student book and food sales.
“The board is having a meeting in the morning to sit down with the president and figure out how to get this behind us,” Harding told the Associated Press.
Information later surfaced that a memo had been distributed with typed names of three university vice presidents containing talking points on why Hardin’s bonus should be kept secret. All three vice presidents denied authoring, or seeing, the document before it was distributed.
The university Faculty Senate met last week where faculty addressed concerns about Hardin and the administration. A Faculty Affairs Committee was to review and deliberate the facts considering Hardin’s bonus and, if they feel action is necessary, recommend it to the senate. Faculty senator Ed Powers was selected to chair the committee.
Powers has previously said that “much of the action suggests there might be corruption in the system.”
A vote of confidence and a request for Hardin’s resignation are two of the options Powers said the committee could suggest to the senate. A closed meeting of the committee was scheduled to take place today.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
TheCabin.net ·· Log Cabin Democrat of Conway, Arkansas
I have started seeing a lot of MODx Groups starting to form on various social networks out there. Jay Gilmore, a developer from Canada, has been making his rounds getting the word out about MODx and setting up these user groups, he’s doing an excellent job! Today alone I have seen MODx groups forming on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Plaxo Pulse.
If you aren’t familiar with MODx, it’s an open source PHP Application Framework that helps you take control of your online content. It empowers developers and advanced users to give as much control as desired to whomever they desire for day-to-day website content maintenance chores. I have blogged about MODx a few times on here and a lot more information can be found on my partner Greg’s blog about MODx and our experiences with it.
It’s great to see these communities starting to form across the social landscape because with open-source software, the one way to insure that it’s going to grow and thrive is for it to have a large community of supporters backing it’s development and overall direction…
Looks like Microsoft is going to launch a social bookmark service that is very similar to delicious in the next few weeks. From what I have gathered it is going to operate very similarly to delicious but will have some features and similarities to other popular social bookmarking services as well.
I am an avid user of delicious (click here to see my delicious account) and have been for a while now, I absolutely love the concept of social bookmarking. I have accounts on Digg, Magnolia, and a few other places around the net but I keep coming back to Delicious to tag my links out. I am probably one of only a few power-users out there that really likes the new delicious interface too. Since no one else in our organization uses social bookmarking I am more or less a standalone user, although I hope one day I can get my partners turned onto this cool concept and actually utilize the social aspect.
Hopefully Microsoft can pull another rabbit out of their hat with this service offering kind of like they did with Windows Live Writer. It’s going to be cool to see how this is embraced. I am not completely sure how they are going to roll out the service but I do know that it will be release first in their MSDN and Expression communities.
Also, in what little bit of information I have gathered anyone who already uses a service like delicious will have the ability to import their existing links and tags into the new solution, that should be pretty nice. Here is a preview to the beta of the service, Social Bookmarks - Preview.
I had someone send me an email today about not being able to download audio files from our Church podcast. I recently did an upgrade to the newest version of Wordpress and didn’t realize until after the fact that the newest installation breaks the PodPress plugin.
Wouldn’t you know it? I did a little research and finally ran across a blog post that mentions a possible no-hack workaround and I am going to give this a try, hopefully this will work because I really hate to get in and hack around on Wordpress’s core code.
A lot of people are reporting incompatibilities between Mighty Seek’s PodPress, the popular free podcasting add-on for WordPress, and the recently-announced WordPress 2.6. Earlier in the week, we reported a simple hack you could use to get things working again.
A reader, John Leavitt, sends word of an even easier fix - the No Revisions plug-in. It disables the new Revisions feature, which seems to be the source of the PodPress problems.
I tested this out on a site that uses PodPress and WordPress. After upgrading to 2.6 about a week ago, I had been unable to add audio podcasts using PodPress.
After installing the No Revisions plug-in, PodPress seems to be working again on the site. If you haven’t upgraded to WordPress 2.6, you’ll probably want to wait until PodPress gets updated for compatibility. If you already broke your podcast site with the update, though, give the No Revisions plug-in a try.
Plug-In Fixes PodPress Problem With WordPress 2.6 - Podcasting News
I have three projects that are slated to begin this week, and at the close of business on Monday I am still waiting on three project outlines from my clients, ha. One of my partners, Greg Smart, posted a good article on his blog a while back about this same topic.
This is something that all of us in the development community run into from time to time, we have our task lists emptied out and are ready to embark on a new client project and all of a sudden we find ourselves waiting on content or a project outline from the client.
It’s not the client’s fault, they are usually just wrestling with the reality that putting together a website outline or writing content for the web is a little harder than they had first thought, and unless you have done it you really don’t realize this up front. It’s still a frustrating thing for us as developers because here we sit ready to go to work and have all of our ducks in a row and we have to wait…
Over the years I have learned that one of the biggest mistakes a developer can make is to rush his client to make critical decisions regarding their project outline or “navigation”, they will inevitably “miss something” that will need to be coded in later and it usually ends up adding a few additional hours to the project, if not more down the road. The best thing I have learned is to just be patient.
There are a few things that you can do to sort of get the ball rolling during the discovery phase of a project that I have used in the past with mixed results. One of these tricks is to build a discovery document, MS Word or Excel work great for something like this, just build the document with standard questions that will enable you to build an outline for the project and at least get a starting point. In this project discovery you should ask some tough questions that maybe the client hasn’t considered before and make them think. By putting together a discovery document on the front end of a project you can probably cut out a few hours of development time down the road…
Another technique that I have been exploring lately is the use of UML (universal markup language) to build a project outline in flowchart form. This helps put a visual face on project and gives the client a better perspective to what their project is going to include as well as how it is going to be organized.
These are just two examples, I would love to hear from some other developers out there that have ran into this situation before and what techniques they use to overcome this fact of life. Please be sure to comment…
