This weekend brings the news that San Jose City College will be outsourcing student email accounts. It is a model that I've discussed with colleagues for many months. When institutions have antiquated email systems the pressure will be great to move towards a new model. Details haven't been released so it is unknown if Google is using the same revenue model (advertising) or a customer paid model.

Earlier this year CCSN outsourced its technology department.

I've spent a while today trying to upgrade the Blog Theme module for Drupal to work with Drupal 4.7. Somehow I'm just not seeing the error. It is not throwing any errors so maybe I need to break it in order to track the variables more easily. Fixing Blog Theme is the last "must have" for upgrading this site to Drupal 4.7. A few more challenges remain for one more site.

Update: Persistence does pay. Attached below is a module for BlogTheme that seems to work with Drupal 4.7. The only other modification to the config is setting Taxonomy Theme to be called as a menu hook instead of init hook by changing taxonomy_theme_init () to taxonomy_theme_menu().

Update #2: This is odd. I'll have to work more tomorrow on what it means. If I put blog_theme.module into the modules directory it works fine. If it goes into the modules/blogtheme/blog_theme.module directory it doesn't work. It should but it doesn't.

Once upon a time I was a great fan of Netflix others wrote about it as did I. There came a time when we had a falling out. The problem was one-sided as the non-existant customer service did nothing to help and we parted ways. A year later I gave it a try again and was soon getting the little red and white envelopes each week.

Along the way there were rumors of throttling but it seemed to be an occasional issue, not a consistent problem. Who knows maybe it was just my imagination of a problem and not a real one. None the less, a nagging feeling at the back of the mind that something isn't right. Recently we've had news that confirms the practices of the once wonderful service. It seems I might not have been the only one to think the service was pretty good. Read more about When good things go bad...

As expected Jack Carter announced his candidacy to be the next US Senator from Nevada. Carter contrasted his philosophy with that of Senator Ensign by saying "The singular difference between the junior senator and me is he works for the Bush administration and I want to work for Nevada."

The union hall where Carter made his announcement was filled with supporters, who from time to time broke out chanting, "We want Jack". Also on the podium were several local politicians and Carter's parents former President Jimmy Carter and first lady Rosalynn Carter.

It was quite an impressive showing, but I must remark on the Secret Service detail accompanying the former President. They were a group of diverse, polite, attentive, well dressed young men. While notable in their suits and from the star pins on their lapels they were seemingly otherwise just members of the crowd. Their quiet attentiveness was impressive. While standing a few feet from the former President, a member of the crowd approached with their hands in their pocket. The nearest Secret Service agent quietly and nearly unnoticed leaned over and asked the man to take his hands out of his pocket just to be sure there was noting in them. It was quite impressive, exactly the kind of attentiveness we want in those guarding our Presidents.