Teaching my niece bad habits.
Posts tagged `personal`
I find myself in downtown Philadelphia, staring at the window of the Cathedral-Basilica of Sts. Peter & Paul. I am a long way from my hometown, a smallish suburb of Chicago, feeling at odds with Philadelphia’s large stature—the sixth most populous city in the entire United States—and my own touristy insignificance.
I took a picture of the Liberty Bell earlier, but it was a mere formality: the bell, in real life, was smaller, duller, and much less impressive than I realized. Congress Hall, too, was neat but tidily boring. I thought of the Nick Cage vehicle filmed in next-door Independence Hall and can’t help but think it’s all been trivialized to the point where it’s impossible to care.
Today is my dad’s birthday—would be, if he hadn’t died this year.
I happen to be backing up some computer data and came across a large archive of documents that I took from his computer in the days after he died.
Going through a dead family member’s documents is always a strange experience, but it’s also a time for learning. There were no skeletons in my father’s proverbial closet, neo-Naziism or secret lives or anything like that. All we found was a shitload of credit cards, investment accounts, and backups of backups on his computer.
See this in PDF format; revised 28 October 2008.
As a professional working in Information Technology, I often encounter hesitation and trepidation on the part of functional users to engage my employer’s information system, an ERP system known as Banner. The engagement of technology—especially for older generations of users, in which was not inculcated the idea of information systems (i.e. the Internet) as pleasurable or entertaining—has been a focus of information systems and organizational behavior research for some time. In much the same way as MacGregor’s landmark work (Montana & Charnov, 2000, pp. 251-52) split the concept of innate employee behavior into two extremes—essentially wicked and lazy on one end, earnest and self-actualizing on the other (“Abrahamic,” to borrow Herzberg’s phrase)—so traditional IT adoption research has rather myopically divided all impetuses for system use into either endogenous or exogenous antecedents of behavior.