More than 14,000 attended the last six home games (five of them losses). If not for a winning team, why do people go?

A few reasons:

• You’re outside
• It’s cheaper than a movie
• You’re close to the action
• The ballpark is beautiful
• The scenery beyond the ballpark is more beautiful
• While the Osprey with uniforms drop an occasional fly ball, the osprey with feathers living outside the centerfield fence occasionally makes an incredible catch in the Clark Fork River
• Comforatable seats
• Pretty good food
• Really good beverages
• Lots of chances to win everything from peanuts to $10,000
• Three hours of bonding with family, friends, colleagues and fellow Missoulians

July 24^th is UM Alumni & Friends night at the ballpark. What a great opportunity for those of us in the UM IT community to share in the camaraderie. Did I mention you could win $10,000?

If you’re not there it’s a shame.

(Answer somewhere below. I’m not telling you where)

I’ve talked to lots of colleagues lately about using blogs for campus communication and community building.

The reception to my idea has been tepid.

It took me awhile to understand why, but I think I finally get it.

Exhibit A:

(From an actual conversation - names changed to protect the guilty)

Sally (to a co-worker): “Joe, you blog, don’t you?”

Joe: “Hah, I used to five years ago when it was the cool thing to do.”

Exhibit B:

(A totally hypothetical situation)

A campus administrator bans all blogging by his employees because he fears a loose cannon will expose campus fraud, corruption and mediocrity.

What’s going on?

Joe perceives blogging as an online personal journal filled with schlock.

The campus administrator perceives blogging as the tool of 21^st century muckraking journalists.

You may have perceived the surgeon in the story above as a man, and thus failed to recognize that the surgeon was the boy’s mother (note: there are other possible explanations, so keep thinking).

Yes, surgeons are most often men, but they don’t have to be. Blogs have most often been used as personal online journals and platforms for Woodward and Bernstein wannabes. But they don’t have to be.

There are many challenges in IT these days: funding, security, identity management, content management, personnel management, data ownership, web portals, web 2.0, digital media production, training, support, just trying to keep up with the ridiculous speed of change.

Are we stuck in the ways we perceive these challenges? How might a little lateral thinking help us?

Pick a challenge and talk among yourselves. Feel free to use this blog’s nifty commenting feature to share your creative lateral ideas and let’s work together to find solutions.

Gettysburg College, Iowa State, the University of Arizona and the Pennsylvania College of Technology all shared how they allow parents to access academic and financial records-FERPA-protected information-specific to their son or daughter.

These campuses handle parent (or guest) account creation in different ways. Some allow the parent to request an account and connect that account to a registered student. Others require the student to create and manage their own guest accounts.

While account creation mechanisms differ, all of these campuses deal with FERPA -protected information the same way. The student has control through a web interface to choose what data the parent account can access.

Gettysburg College built its web portal 10 years ago and has been a thought leader in portal develoment. You can visit their parent portal information page at http://public.gettysburg.edu/it/cnav/parents.htm.

Cycle the Rockies is a blog following the journey of nine students, two instructors and two documentary film-makers who are biking from Billings to Whitefish while exploring energy issues in Montana. The Billings Gazette did a story on the adventure earlier this week.

Green Daily goes on to say that by the year 2010, 20% of every American’s electricity bill will go towards paying for this wasted energy.  Let’s see, if I could pay 20 percent less to the power company, I might be able to afford that trip to Finland next year to see those relatives I’ve never met, but number into the hundreds. And Finland is an expensive place to visit.

So by all means, turn off those computers and monitors when you leave work (unless they are University servers: Don’t touch that switch!). Turn off anything that has an LED light still glowing and isnt’ being used except for a little bit each day. Or even better, unplug the device completely if the glowing eye won’t shut off. It actually takes less energy to start them up again next morning than leaving them on all night in “Sleep Mode”.

But there is debate about how much to shut off and if it takes too long to catch up to all those updates that take place on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. But first thing, turn it on and go get a cuppa joe or catch up with your buds and before you know it, your machine will be ready to tackle the day.

…in the glory days of rock ‘n roll musicians would gaze upon the warm glow of happy faces softly silhouetted by the light from a butane lighter. Crowds swayed to heart-felt ballads, displaying joy by igniting a flame, held at arm’s length above their head. Sure it sounds dangerous, but the prefect mood was set by millions of concert goes during the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Enter into the mid-2000s, the dawning of the mobile technology epoch. No longer do we scorch our fingers on HOT lighters, but we illuminate and capture with cell phones.

Last week I attended the Swell Season concert at the Wilma Theater in downtown Missoula. Not a lighter in sight, probably due to the fire code, but the glow of LCD displays lit the night as pictures and videos were recorded on a multitude of mobile devices. No longer do the words “cameras or recording devices not allowed” mean a thing! Most of the audience has this device attached to their belt, in their purse, or held to their ear. And they are not afraid to use it!

While I have yet to find video from the Missoula concert on YouTube, I did spend a portion of last evening watching clips from other Swell Season concerts. Quickly I was transported back to the magic of the evening while watching Glen and Marketa sing the songs they performed here.

Butane sales may be down, I have no data to verify this, but I can assure you the usage of mobile devices extends beyond the realm of placing phone calls. Rockers unite! Light the night! Pixel by pixel!

If you don’t know what RSS is, celebrate RSS Awareness Day by learning a little something about it.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It allows you to subscribe to web content of your choice. It saves you the time and effort of visiting all of your favorite websites. I hope to convince campus colleagues who bombard us with email messages to adopt RSS-enabled communication channels instead. That transition will only take place when a critical mass has bought into the RSS solution.

I subscribe to dozens of RSS feeds in OneStop - my preferred RSS feed aggregator. In a short amount of time, I can scan news and nuggets of wisdom from my favorite websites and blogs. I became aware that May 1 is “RSS Awareness Day” because of an RSS feed. More importantly, I am aware of how some of the smartest, most creative and most visionary people on the planet are shaping the future of communication, education, business and human relationships through technology because their ideas are available to me the minute they are published.

Happy RSS Awareness Day.

This problem has been around for years, but a number of higher education institutions have reported a significant increase in this activity in the last month, and UM has not escaped.

IT Central has published a support page with more details, check it out here.

Yesterday, a colleague asked me why we had so much spam in our University email. She claimed she had never received a single spam message in her Google gmail account.

Really? Never? How could that be, I wondered?

Less than 24 hours later, Seth Godin wrote in his blog:

“I just discovered that my gmail spam filter has been blocking orders from Google checkout! Astonishing.

I have also heard from two people who applied to my internship and never got the note I sent announcing that we’d completed our hiring cycle . . . Stopping spam is a worthless endeavor when you also stop non-spam.”

It’s hard to make everyone happy when it comes to email.