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Oakgrounds releases a self-assessment website within the Home Performance Resource Center (www.hprcenter.org). These free online career resources enable job seekers to assess which career pathways might be right for them. The Career Resources section provides an innovative set of online tools that are designed to help job seekers in the Bay Area learn more about the industry. If they are eligible, they qualify for subsidized training through community college courses funded by the Department of Labor.
The resources include video profiles of home performance contractors, and key information about the labor market including specific job profiles. In addition, and most importantly, it includes a free self-assessment tool that provides instant results about users’ preferences and skills as well as how these align with specific home performance careers. The self-assessment asks users about their preferences and skills in five areas: physical aptitude, social and technical problem solving, basic construction knowledge, sales skills, and work environment preferences.
This tool enables participants to assess their fit within the Home Performance Industry and then helps them match their skills with key skills needed for the home performance industry. Results can be viewed online or mailed to a user. For job seekers in the Bay Area, these innovative resources are bringing job seekers together with workforce investment board recruiters who are offering subsidized training at Ohlone College, Skyline College and Canada College. This website was the result of a direct collaboration between Strategic Energy Innovation, Gyst Media and Oakgrounds Inc.
"People think they are in the same building." says Ward Bouwman, owner of Oakgrounds. The Oakgrounds client doesn't have cable nor DSL internet access and their buildings are too far apart for a direct internet connection. By beaming the internet in from two miles away to all buildings, and by configuring the local area network, employees at one building can access the server, print documents, or chat with anyone else as if they where sitting at the desk next. Hardware was provided by Web Perception.
All high school students at Terra Linda now have access to a suite of Autodesk software thanks to the Marin School of Environmental Leadership. MarinSEL was able to secure a TL-wide software license donation for Maya, Revet, Auto-CAD, and Inventor. These 4 Software packages by Autodesk support creative thinking and design. The software will be taught as part of the project-based learning approach at MarinSEL in order to support designs around water, food, transportation and energy. We look forward to seeing how the students use creativity in their community service based learning projects. Thank you Autodesk!
Oakgrounds completes a successful Scratch summer camp. Scratch, an award winning computer animation program for kids by MIT, was taught this summer. With the help of Brian, 13, and Danny, 9 (scratch enthusiasts and class assistants), Lynn Meza and Ben Weiner keep the kids engaged with programming, animation, as well as outdoor activities. "We love the scratch camps," parents stated, "our kids are able to get so much more creative with the computer."
The program will continue to be taught as after-school programs in the Dixie School District Elementary Schools as well as again as a Summer Camp at Marinwood Community Center.
For more info. on Scratch Classes: see our Classes Page (click here)
Dear Mr Bouwman,
We want to email our staff by using a one email address like This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Is there a way to do that in Apple's OSX 10.6 Server?
Marty B - Santa Rosa.
Mac OSX 10.6 offers several ways to create a group email list, though some is not well documented. For easy solution in small business I prefer to use the following method, called the "Enable server group mailing List". This involves several steps in setting up, but it works well in 10.6.4. Once set up, maintaining the list is a breeze. Some limitations apply at the bottom.
Can you help me install Mindstorm on my new Snow Leopard computer?
- Mary P. Cambridge, UK
There seems to be a bug in the Mindstorm Install disk. I am not sure why Mindstorm did not post a fix on its website. The issue is that the installer disk removes the installed temporary files when it's done. People have found that by removing the PREflight section, the POSTflight program leaves the program installed.
Why does my Adobe Reader crash when when I run it from my server based home directory?
- Bill, TX
Adobe is aware of this problem and at times has fixed it in different versions. It does not appear to be a priority for them, because after an upgrade it can stop working all over again.
The problem seems to be that Adobe uses the home directory to store some cache data. Apearently the compiler it uses cannot handle the network drive. It might have to do with the copyright version of Adobe Writer, which might share part of the same code-base. Anyway, the directories that seem to be the problem are: /Users/Shared/9.0_x86/ or on the old ppc: /Users/Shared/9.0_ppc/. While working with various versions we have been able to work around this problem by using symbolic links to fool Reader into thinking it is running on a local hard drive. While this worked for a while, various updates tend to break it.
Joomla allows you to use your Mac OSX Server 10.6 native Open Directory for authentication at Joomla's front door. This is ideal because it gives the users of your school or company direct access through the front door. You will need to enable the standard Joomla 1.5 ldap plugin, which came with the installation software. The trick is to use correct settings for the standard LDAP--if there is such a thing. At a minimum you will need to set: (Suppose my FQDN is myserver.mycompany.com)
Ideally you want your users to always be able to connect to the myserver.mycompany.com, independent if they are at the office or anywhere else in the world. This is fairly simple with the DNS split horizon setting.
The split horizon trick is to run a local DNS server behind the company's firewall. This is the DNS server LAN local ip address of the server to local LAN machines. (For instance, 192.168.1.200 for any machine on the 192.168.1.x subnet) The machine on the Internet gets your public ip address when it tries to connect to the server (For example, 74.125.224.16).
- Environmentally Friendly - A well-designed system will allow you to achieve the dream of a nearly paperless office.
- Fast & Reliable - How much time do you spend waiting for computers to start up or load documents? A well-designed system will reduce your downtime.
- Thoughtful - How much time to you waste looking for files or trying to get systems to work together?
- Consulting - Networks & Servers
- Consulting - Systems & Databases
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