⚙️ Work

I moved 4GB of my work files from my personal iCloud storage and into my UCalgary-provided OneDrive storage¹. After working through the process of trying to access work files stored on a laptop left behind by a former team member, it’s basically impossible to access content on an encrypted mac. So. If I want any of my work to be available if I get hit by a lottery, I need to store it in a UCalgary-provided cloud storage bucket. I’d been using my iCloud storage because it just works, and works reliably on all devices that I use. I hadn’t been able to say that about OneDrive. Hoping the sync issues I had before aren’t still a thing.

And I ended the week by spending some quality time manually reviewing each one of the 70 applications for the Learning Technology Specialist position, before hopefully unplugging as much as possible for the weekend.

🔗 Links

I was too heads-down this week to have much time to follow rabbit holes from my RSS subscriptions etc.

Digital Learning

• JR Dingwall @ JR Blogwall: How to Use Digital Learning – Part I - describing what sounds like a really useful new book: How to Use Digital Learning with Confidence and Creativity. The topics and contributing authors will make this a must-read. I look forward to picking up a copy when the paperback is available.

AI

• Kim Groome, Leeanne Morrow, Paul Pival: Works in Progress Webinar: Lessons learned from implementing an AI reference chatbot at the University of Calgary Library (via Paul Pival)

  I haven’t watched the webinar yet, but it’s on deck. It describes a pilot project from 2021, using a now-primitive LLM chatbot. It’d be interesting to run a comparison pilot based on modern frontier models, but this is super interesting to have a pre-AI-hype baseline.

🍿 Watching

• ★★★☆☆ Dune: Prophecy

  Episode 1 was ok. There was an opportunity for plausible world building as the backstory for the movies, but the series is set 10,000 years before them, and everything is basically the same. 10,000 years is an awfully long time. That’s some impressive social conservatism to the point of fossilization. 

  Episode 2 - it hit me, this is The Wheel of Time, But In Space, Somehow. Anyway. The Sisterhood == Aes Sedai.

• ★★★☆☆ Zack Snyder’s Justice League. 3 stars.

  It was on. I was procrastinating. Holy moly is that a long movie. 3 movies in a trench coat. Much of it looked like it was composited from maybe a thousand photoshop layers, with complete disregard for physics or fluid mechanics etc. The ending was better in this version, avoiding the weird “they smell fear” death of steppenwolf in the theatrical release. Also, being given $70M to recut/reshoot a movie after it’s been released is probably not the most effective use of $70M.

• ★★☆☆☆ Mr. Deeds.

  Don’t judge me. The remote was all the way over on the coffee table.

🧺 Other

Spotlight on my laptop had gradually become useless. I use it mostly to launch applications. ⌘+Space Term launches Terminal. ⌘+Space BB launches BBEdit. etc. But something weird has been happening since upgrading to macOS 15 - ⌘+Space lists documents and websites, with a long (and getting longer?) delay before applications are listed. So ⌘+Space BB might list the BBEdit website, and documents that include “BB” in the title or contents, and internet search results for “BB”, but not the BBEdit application. But, if I wait a few seconds, 2 seconds at first, then 4, and now up to 12 seconds, it’ll update the results to list applications that include “BB”, letting me get to BBEdit. Frustrating, and not ideal for a quick application launcher. So, I’ve been reverting to launching applications the old fashioned way, clicking on icons like a caveman.

Googling² suggested that the Spotlight index may have become corrupt or just needed a rebuild. I found a thread on Reddit, which I will not be linking to, but the crux is, run this in Terminal:

sudo mdutil -E

and let that chew for a few hours while your laptop gets nice and toasty. It runs the command-line Spotlight mdutil command as root/admin, and the -E flag tells it to “Erase and rebuild index.” I let it run for a bit, and did a shutdown/restart. It seems to have fixed the problem, so far…

🗓️ Focus for next week

Shockingly, meetings!

• Microcredentials Framework Working Group
• Learning Spaces Team
• Planning support for another campus platform that we’re bring into our portfolio
• More microcredentials
• LTAC
• AI Conversations community session
• TI Winter Celebration
• HR
• AI
• Communications planning
• A consult
• some other miscellaneous meetings

And fitting in some time to prep the interview protocol and schedule interviews for the Learning Technology Specialist position.

And celebrating 14 months of an open ticket to enable the Zoom AI Companion feature³. Following our institution’s Strategy 4: “Make our processes clearer, simpler, better than any other university. Goal: Ensure it is simpler and faster to set ideas in motion here than at any other university.” 🎉🤷

Friends, I’m just. so. tired. and. need. a vacation. but. that’s. just. not. going. to. be. possible.

Anyway. It’s almost the holiday break. I decided to go ahead and block off from noon on the 18th through to the new year. Which sounds awesome, but will also include reviewing the stack of applications for the Digital Learning Platforms Administrator position… Maybe my sciatica will behave long enough to get at least one ski day in there…