Writing

In a disquieting year, the opportunity to quietly take stock of our blessings is valuable.

There is no shortage of opinions about AI, and those opinions meet operational realities in mission-driven nonprofit work. But where do aspirations, fears, and realities meet?

After migrating sites, it's time to send old posts off into the sunset.

Some new ideas and new features emerge on the site, just in time for the fall

Sometimes the best way to learn new deployment patterns is to build something completely ridiculous

Something that I’m going to be delivering soon is a demonstration of AI tools to my staff. We’re looking at how we can use these tools to help bolster our mission, especially in the current environment and federal funding shifts.

In an attempt to give us a bit of levity, here are some of the major AI models' attempts at humor

Confused by uncertainty? Focus on what you can control with five strategies for professional resilience in turbulent times.

We're measuring how good an AI model is on vibes now. Or: The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Reclaiming our digital autonomy through blogging? It's a powerful reminder that we can shape our online experience rather than being shaped by platforms.

Building out the recent posts list to include direct links to posts on the old blog, while ignoring them if that post exists here

Something old, something new: A new chapter begins for edwardjensen.net

With warm wishes and high hopes for the New Year 2025, and for peace and certainty in challenging and uncertain times

If you have Office 365 email, chances are you or your email admin have turned on the First Contact Safety Tip system. This is the system that automatically adds a warning to emails from senders you don’t normally get emails from, saying “You don’t often get email from…”

We’ve seen an uptick lately in invoice fraud where I work. The formula is thus: Scammers make up an email chain (to create a sense of urgency or legitimacy) and then send that email to someone in accounting within an organization. The goal, obviously, is to trick someone into paying a fake invoice to a scammer.

Despite my absence from posting on here, there’s been a lot on my mind lately. Certainly, the results from the recent US elections and the impact that we may be experiencing in 2025 and beyond has been on my mind. There have been people far more equipped and eloquent weighing in on this. But something else has been on my mind - in fact, for the past decade. This year – 2024 – marks the 10th anniversary of a mini podcast series I did called The Downtown Phoenix Podcast. In only eight episodes total, I addressed a number of key issues facing a changing downtown Phoenix in 2014, interviewing diverse voices and bringing new perspectives to the table that usually didn’t get a seat. With apologies to past, current, and future employers, it will be the work I am the proudest to have done. Despite that series ending, the podcast bug has never left me. Every iteration of a home office I’ve had since then has had provisions for doing another podcast/broadcast project. As I’ve tossed around many thoughts about what something could be, I’ve thought about something regarding nonprofit IT. As much as I say IT is IT, our corner of the IT world is an interesting one and I’m willing to gamble there are some good stories worth sharing. Consider this post to be me throwing this idea out into the world. Anyone interested in taking part? Or anyone interested in helping find these stories worth sharing?

As part of a recent IT upgrade, I rebuilt our entire printing infrastructure. There were some issues with how it was previously built, so this was a good time to start from scratch. One of the issues was our PaperCut MF installation, of which I’ve documented our challenges on this blog this year.

"In today’s Friday Five: Some thoughts for IT administrators on giving tools to their users to make security-conscious decisions"

I’ve been seeing a lot of QR code phishing attempts lately. If you’ve not seen the tactic in your environments, the recipient receives an email, and it asks them to scan a QR code on their phone to authenticate and open the link. Here’s a sample email I received from a colleague in my environment:

With the first snow of the 2023-2024 winter upon us, I took the opportunity last weekend to get some autumn photos around downtown Saint Paul, Summit Avenue, and Cathedral Hill.

As we settle in to the Independence Day holiday, one of the things that happens is that we hear all of the John Philip Sousa marches on the playlist. While his most popular marches like The Stars and Stripes Forever, Semper Fidelis, or The Washington Post get played a lot, there’s an obscure march of his that has a uniquely Minneapolis connection.

I’m about to write probably the most controversial sentence I think on this blog in its decade-plus long history:

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote on my LinkedIn about unashamedly using tools like ChatGPT to help out with tasks.

I want to love Microsoft Planner. But there are some things it has in it that just confound me. Rather, I should say it has omissions that confound me and make me question its usability.

Back in January, we started down the path of migrating from an on-premises version of PaperCut to their cloudy PaperCut Hive. Even after you read the papers and technical guides, sometimes you just get it wrong.

Today marks a year since I moved to Minnesota. In this special edition of The Friday Five(-ish), here are some photos from the past year

Where I work, we’re almost complete with a migration from PaperCut MF on-premises to the fully cloud PaperCut Hive product. For the most part, I’m pretty pleased with how it’s gone and how it supports some of our organization’s transition goals to less on-premises. But there are some things that have been some definite head-scratchers in the process.

Back in October, I put some thoughts out on LinkedIn about the future of social media and if we’re headed toward a renaissance of the blog. Given the public agita about the current social media landscape and the associated issues regarding content moderation, ownership of those platforms, and bullying and minimization of minority communities.

Happy New Year to everyone. Let’s hope that 2023 is less chaotic than 2022 was.

About a decade ago, the Phoenix architect Taz Khatri gave the urbanist Yuri Artibise an “exit interview” of sorts after he left Phoenix for British Columbia. While the original post has been lost, the internet doesn’t forget, and they’re on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

As it’s been a few months now, I guess I should fill in my blog readers (all four of you) of some major news. In April, following a whirlwind recruitment process, I joined the staff at MEDA, the Metropolitan Economic Development Association, in Minneapolis. That meant that I had to relocate from Phoenix, the up-until-now subject of this blog (and the only place I’ve called home) to Minneapolis, in somewhat great haste.

Back in April 2019, I prepared and delivered my lecture, A Brief History of Midtown Phoenix. The lecture spanned the past 1,500 years of midtown Phoenix history and included a survey of Midtown’s buildings. The thesis of that lecture is that the abrupt end of World War II in August 1945 caught Phoenix and Arizona leaders by surprise, thus setting up developers to build a new city that fit what they wanted. That was the North Central Avenue corridor, which is what we now call midtown Phoenix.

So I have a series of photos I've taken called _light rail at the speed of light_ - extended exposures of METRO light rail trains on their travels through Phoenix.

"Want a rolling feed of National Weather Service warnings and watches for an area? Check out the IEMBot Monitor!"

Editor’s note: This was set up when I lived in Phoenix. The underlying equipment to support this system is no longer in operation; however, this post will remain up for historical purposes. Live weather data for midtown Phoenix, Arizona, can still be found at midtownweather.com.

Over this past year of COVID-19 lockdowns, I’ve taken the opportunity to re-conceptualize my personal (and business) IT portfolio. Prior to the pandemic, I was rather haphazard about things. Even though I espoused the benefits of having a master plan and having things fit into that plan, in practice for my personal IT estate at least, it was a different story. I focused on getting things stood up quickly rather than robustly. It worked, but it sometimes incurred a price.

When I prepared my midtown Phoenix history lecture last year, A Brief History of Midtown Phoenix, one of the things that I wanted to do was to learn more about the full history of the Phoenix Indian School, which most Phoenicians know only as a giant park in the middle of Phoenix with a dog park and where they launch fireworks on July 4. With a few exceptions, most contemporary history books of Phoenix and its urban history tend to gloss over the site.

Prior to its closing next week, I thought I’d make one final trip to Metrocenter to see it before the lights turn off for good June 30. I grew up close to this mall and visited it more than I probably care to admit in the 1990s. I wrote an appreciation essay on Metrocenter earlier this week, which I invite you to read first before viewing the photos.

The big Phoenix news story over the past weekend is that the closure was announced of Metrocenter (1973-2020), the struggling shopping center in north-central Phoenix. The mall will close at the end of June after 47 years of operation.

As video calls have taken a bigger spot in our lives in the past few weeks, here are some cheap and easy ways to up your video call game.