Saving this one for my daughters!!

RSA Animate

Thanks to a friend of mine on FB - I ran across this video from an organization called 'RSA' Animate'. Interesting thoughts on our educational system.




Enjoy!

Food Inc.

This new movie is coming out to theatres in bigger markets called 'Food, Inc.'. Every time I see some sort of documentary about this topic, I do a little 'hanging my head in shame' that I am still eating like I am and allowing my family to do the same. In a round about way this led me to a 'TED' presentation by a guy named Mark Brittman on the same subject. Check it out:




Then when you are finished watching this - check out the trailer for the Food, Inc. movie.

The next evolutionary step of the mobile device

iPhone, step aside, there is a new device in town.

;)

Enjoy! dv

The Rise of the Machines!

A friend sent this article to me today and I thought it was interesting enough to rant about. It has to do with the current financial crisis and the fact that nobody can really pipoint how it happened. With movies like Terminator and The Matrix floating through our heads we usually think of computers taking over the world as battle. Maybe they already have and we are doing it willingly in the name of speed and efficiency? Here is an quote from the article:

"But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. ... Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide."

Read the article to find out who originally wrote that statement in their manifesto. It will blow you away. - dv

Google 'Chrome'

It appears that Google has introduced a beta of their new web browser called 'Chrome'.  I thought I would give it a whirl and have to say that is very fast.  Not available for the Mac yet, but apparently they are working on it.  Since it is still in beta (does Google ever take software off of beta?) you may run into a few bugs now and then. So, if you are running Windows - take a gander. It has a few cool new features that I think are intuitive and in true Google style, they have a different take on the UI. Check it out and see what you think!  Enjoy!

Cool Web App For Finding a House

Once again, my friend Larry sent me a link to a website that is worthy of the rant. A company called 'Trulia' (which helps you in searching for homes) introduced a new tool today called 'Snapshot' which has a very cool UI design (UI = user interface). It allows you to select a price range and shows all the houses that are for sale within that range. Pretty common I know, but it also shows you where they are on the map and includes a little picture of the house (if available). In the words of Larry, 'simple, elegant and it works'. The perfect tri-fecta! Until later, Enjoy!

Career limiting moves...

I ran across this article from Baseline and thought it was interesting enough to rant about. The jist of the article is that you need to be careful about what you put on your 'myspace' or 'facebook' site due to the fact that recruiters and HR folks are using these as a way to screen potential employees.

Imagine, a future employer visiting your social networking site and finding out something about you that is very different from the way they think about it. For example, you like to 'Party like a Rock Star' every night and you are applying for a job working for a high school as a guidance counselor. Although it may not be right (and maybe it is right) that they use that in their decision process, the fact of the matter is that it will influence their position on whether or not they hire you. Kind of like tattoos that creep up your neck and stick out when you are in your 'interview' suit. Like it or not - the interviewer is going to form an opinion about you. (I call these types of things - career limiting moves...)

Another thought is that you can use these sites in a purposeful way to promote yourself. It also talks about the site 'LinkedIn', which could be equated to a 'professional' version of myspace/facebook. Using sites like these, might be a good backup to a resume. On 'LinkedIn' you can create a lot of content about yourself and the potential employer could learn a lot more about you with out having to create (and read) a 5 page resume.

So, I am not sayaying to hide who you are, just be aware of the ramifications..... Until next time - Enjoy!

Linux for the Desktop?

Ran across this today and thought I would use it to re-enter the blog-o-sphere.

A while back I ranted about Linux on the desktop and how that related to Windows domination. Here is a survey that shows some stats on the topic. Looks like almost 80% (of top IT leaders) still aren't using a Linux desktop in some form or fashion. For bigger shops it all probably gets back to TCO (total cost of ownership), if it takes twice as many people to support it, the cost of the OS (free for Linux) seems to lose it's value propostition. We have a few (Linux Boxes) where I spend my days, but mostly they are just acting as terminals to run a remote session of Winodws, not sure if that counts....

Anyway, for more information on where I got graphic, click here.

Enjoy!!

Doom and Gloom for Windows?

Ran across this article today about the future of Microsoft. Gartner (a pretty respected company that analyses and reports on trends in IT) is claiming that Microsoft "faces serious competition that will make Windows moot unless the software developer acts". Interesting thing though. Linux doesn't seem to be picking up steam at the desktop level and, for a business, the Mac (although a beautiful work of art) is generally more expensive and incompatible with most client/server business software. So, who is the competition? The article brings up a good point in that there is not any competition in the enterprise space except for themselves (Microsoft). I would say that the SaaS space is where the competition is ultimately going to come from. When everything (or almost everything) becomes browser based, it won't matter what desktop OS you have, it just has to be compatible with the applications you are trying to run from wherever they may be on whatever you may have in your hand at the time (pc, phone, etc..).

Until later - Enjoy!

Data Centers Heating Pools??

Ran across this article today which lead me to this article from IBM, and thought it was interesting and innovative enough to rant about. It is from a site called 'GreenerComputing'. As a person who is pretty familiar with a smaller data center and the amount of heat that gets produced, coupled with my desire to use alternative forms of energy (I would love to have wind turbine in my back yard), I thought this was pretty cool. The innovation is intriguing and I am sure that even on smaller scales you could do similar projects. Here is a quick example of how much heat gets generated from a small data-center. A few years ago, we had a data center that was comprised of a mid-size phone switch, and about 6 servers. Occasionally the 'chiller' would stop working and the room would start to heat up. Once, this happened on the weekend and nobody was around to respond to it. One of our team members happened to stop in and heard the alarm going off. The room had heated up to about 125 degrees and as soon as he opened the door, it instantly fogged up his glasses (this was before the days when servers would shut themselves off when they got too warm). Needless to say we installed a remote monitoring system that called our phones when the temp got to warm. Imagine what you could do with the heat that is being wasted by larger data centers????

Anyway - Enjoy!!

Banking Crisis Visually

A friend sent me this link yesterday (thanks Larry!) and I deemed it worthy of the rant. We have heard a lot of press lately about the banking crisis. This blog site gives you a good visual of what we are up against. Kind of crazy what happens at the end of 2007. Time to get out of debt ladies and gentlemen....

As a side note - make sure you are using Firefox for this one. IE doesn't seem to like it. I don't know about Safari.... Enjoy!

SaaS

OK - I haven't posted in a bit. Sorry about that. I ran across a cool site last week that I wanted to share with all (all 2 of them) my readers. A little background first. Since I work in the IT industry it is part of my job to keep up on different technologies. Part of that includes watching for different paradigm shifts when they happen and seeing if it makes sense for us to move in the direction of the shifts. One of those shifts has been the concept of 'Software as a Service'. From a business perspective I love this idea. My favorite part of this shift is that it lets the folks who are really good at server maintenance do what they do best, and it let's the customers (us) focus on our business as opposed to spending time maintaining servers etc (I know of a certain blogger who might be wishing his Apple server was a SaaS...). Anyway, another part of this rant is the fact that it really is starting to annoy me that I have to run all my own backups for my (and more importantly - my wife's) stuff. When there is all this space on the internet, why can't there be a little bit of space that is easily accesable for us to use. Enter ideas like Google docs and (one that I thnk has the potential to be way better) Zoho. I ran across Zoho last week and thought to myself, man, we are getting close. (I think that Google docs is a little bit sterile and clunky). Not only would we have a place to store all the data we create, but the on-line apps to create and edit them too. there is an on-line word processor, spreadsheet, calendar, database app, etc. I love this idea since I use three or four different computers (Lenovo/Vista, Dell/XP, IBM/XP, Macbook Pro/Leopard) and this solves the 'where is my data' issue that I seem to have. I like the thought of 'anywhere - anyhow'. As I was checking out the stuff on Zoho, I was thinking to myself, all they really need is some sort of email program, like 'gmail'. To my suprise, they are coming out with one Q2. Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think.

Along those same lines, here is an article about SaaS. More from an enterprise level, but the thoughts are still the same. As we move forward we are becoming increasingly mobile and we don't want to have to have our laptop or files with us, but rather be able to get to them 'anywhere - anyhow'.

Enjoy!