I’m starting a new podcast project today, and I’m not sure how many episodes it will have. In the episodes I’ll talk about how I’ve learned about my heart — and what I’ve learned. The project is part of a great class I’ve had this term, Designing On-Line Curriculum, at the University of Florida. You can download the podcast episode here, or listen with the embedded player below.
Let me know what you think — more episodes will be coming later this week.
I’ve been busy blogging over at the Inside Interop site, and there’s a lot more activity to come. We’re working on various social networking approaches to building the Interop community, and I’ll be writing about those here very soon.
I’ll also be starting a new podcast series here — the subject is how I’ve learned about working with cardiac issues. The impetus behind the series is simple — it’s for a class at UF — but I hope that folks will enjoy the way the series goes together. I’m using it as an opportunity to try some new blog capabilities, so it should be an adventure all around.
This morning I blogged about the Silicon Valley phone sabotage on the Inside Interop blog. It’s a great object lesson in physical security — why padlocks can be just as important as firewalls in protecting an I.T. infrastructure. It’s also a good lesson in the importance of redundant paths for critical services. We’ve seen, time and again, just how vulnerable single points of failure make a system, and this incident proves it yet again.
My first small article as a returning freelance writer is up. It’s good to have something “in print” again, but it’s obvious (to me) that I’m still in the process of getting my mind’s muscles back in shape. The physical side of things seems to be heading in the right direction…I just hope the mental side can keep up. I suppose there’s something to be said for being healthy yet “not the sharpest tool in the shed,” but I don’t want to be the one saying it.
Keep your eyes open for a new series of podcasts coming soon. One of my classes at UF has a project requirement for podcasts and I thought that “learning about cardiac rehabilitation and health” might be a good topic, since I’ve been giving it more than a little thought lately. My only real question is whether to do them as audio or video podcasts — if you feel strongly about it one way or the other, let me know.
OK, so I know it’s been a loooong time since the last post. I intended to spend some time blogging around the holidays, but I didn’t feel very good so that didn’t happen. Then I was going to start blogging seriously when my position at InfoWorld was eliminated, but right after that I ended up in the hospital for 19 days, so that didn’t happen. Now, I’m home, and blogging on a free-lance basis, and it’s time to get back into the real world…so here I am.
The plan is to start keeping up with this blog on a regular basis, both for things I don’t have anyplace else to write about, and to let folks know about my other activities. There are some reviews coming up, but until then you can read the beginnings of my work on the Inside Interop blog.
Thanks for stopping by — there will be more, later.
Sometimes, folks help you see traditional technology in an entirely new way. I’ve been shown the possibilities of sticky notes in ways I never thought possible.
Keeping in mind that these are the same folks who brought us dancing fountains crafted from Diet Coke and Mentos, I have to say I’m seriously impressed by the work, here. I can’t even imagine what they might do with a good stapler…
My schedule means that much of my television-watching time is late at night. Of all the folks I see on television, I have to admit to enjoying Craig Ferguson the most. In many ways he reminds me of the Tom Snyder back in the ’70s — sometimes funny, sometimes serious, but almost always worth giving a bit of thought and attention.
Last night he had a wonderful monologue on the importance of politics and voting. Coming immediately after David Letterman’s interview of Barack Obama,
it was a wonderful statement on why all the political stuff matter so very much.
Together, this is the sort of conversation and commentary we could use more of. At least, that’s what I think.
Update: YouTube reference to the Barack Obama interview was revised because the first video I linked to disappeared.. Revised 9/15/08
I work with several blogs, and I have to tell you that I pretty much hate the native user interface for all of them. I don’t care whether you’re talking about Movable Type, WordPress, or Blogger, the basic UI pretty well reeks.
Under Vista, I had become quite happy with Microsoft’s Live Writer, a solid blogging tool that is especially good at putting images into a blog post and linking to images or video clips in other blogs. My happiness was tempered when one of my blogs changed policies, requiring entries to be edited before they went live. Live Writer couldn’t deal with the blogging platform’s interface in order to post an entry in “draft” mode, so I was back to creating (or at least finalizing) blog posts in the native blog UI.
Since moving to the Macintosh, I’ve discovered Ecto, and it has quickly become one of my favorite programs on the Mac. Not only does it have solid editing tools, it will happily work with the application interface for Movable Type and Wordpress to post in draft mode, set advanced publication times, and insert all sorts of interesting things into a blog post. The user interface is easy, the rich-media features are hardy, and the overall experience is wonderful. I first heard about Ecto, as I hear about so much, from Lifehacker, and their advice has been good on this one.
Now, if I could just figure out a mail program that is as good as Outlook — and far better than Entourage…
No, not the clouds in the sky, but cloud computing. It’s a broad category, with folks meaning everything from Google Mail to widely-distributed applications (think SETI at Home) when they talk about cloud applications. I just wrote a blog entry at InfoWorld on the question of what happens when your cloud fails. I’m going to be looking deeply at cloud computing this fall — you’ll hear more about why in an upcoming post.
Audio slide shows (or SoundSlides) are wonderful ways to tell a story — they are, in fact, one of the best tools I’ve found in the last year in school. At InfoWorld, we’ve put up another SoundSlide on the Pimp Your Datacenter project. This one was a great collaborative effort, with photos from several contributors, narration by Brian Chee, and production, well, by me.
Of course, now I have to go out and buy a new copy of the software for the Mac, but that’s a small price to pay. The functionality of the Sound Slide software is superb and the Mac is the best platform I’ve used in years. The combination — well, I’m looking forward to seeing how much I can do with it this year.
OK, so I’ll admit that being able to work in Honolulu is a very cool thing. I’ve been working on reviews and project with Brian Chee, director of the Advanced Network Computing Lab (ANCL) for nearly a decade and I remain in awe of his technical abilities. The fact that he’s also a great friend makes working out here even more productive than normal technology field trips.
On this trip, we’re working on firewalls. When I was here in March, we were finishing the work for the InfoWorld Pimp Your Datacenter article. We took some of the photos and had Brian narrate them into a couple of slide presentations. Here’s the presentation on the air-conditioning installation — I’ll have the electrical installation show up soon.
It’s been a while since I’ve sat in a computer lab well into the night. We’re deep into a big test, things are working as we’d hoped, and very talented engineers are looking deep into data packets in an attempt to coax expensive hardware into doing as its told. My role in all this is peripheral; I take notes, ask questions, and nod thoughtfully at appropriate times. I’m a reasonably knowledgeable guy when it comes to computers and networks, but the folks in the lab tonight are playing well over my head.
I walked outside a little while ago and remembered one of the facts of late-night work: the air feels different in the early morning. Years ago, when I worked the third shift at a steel pipe mill, I enjoyed going out to inspect rail cars at 3:00 AM. No matter how hot the day had been (and Birmingham, Alabama in July can be very hot, indeed), the early-morning air was soft and gently warm against the skin. Walking out in the orange-yellow glow of the sodium lights, I walked through velvet-soft air to the rail cars stacked high with lengths of seamless steel pipe. There’s an excitement to working when most of the world is asleep, and it almost makes working through the night worthwhile.
There’s a considerable difference between the view tonight and the view way back then. The Honolulu skyline is mottled light and dark with offices and apartments occupied and bright, or empty and dark. Thirty years ago, most offices left the lights on all night long; in places like New York City, it was as though no one ever slept. That’s not to say that Honolulu is dark tonight — the light is still well above the baby turtle confusion level, and the city has an energetic hum, but it’s obvious that people have started thinking about turning off lights when the room is empty. It’s a small thing in the overall scheme of things, but it shows that office managers and homeowners are thinking about energy and efficiency at least as much as the high-profile eco-celebrities who are always private-jetting off to lecture the less fortunate on the evils of consumption.
I’m typing this on ecto, and like most of the Mac software I’ve tried, it works. That may seem like damning with faint praise, but after more than a year of wrestling with Vista operational software is a blessing. The nifty design of the Mac hardware, while nice, is not a compelling issue for me. Software that works when I want it to work is. I’m sure I’ll be disappointed down the line, but for now I’m a happy camper. We’ll see if the feeling holds when I come back to the lab in the morning.
You know, I had high hopes for re-building my website and being a dedicated blogger this Summer. Then reality intruded. Suffice it to say that I’ve done little besides work and basic life functions over the last couple of months.
I’m in Honolulu now, working on a huge firewall test for InfoWorld, and it’s interesting thinking about what’s going to be required for the Fall. I’m learning a new computing platform (yes, I’m moving to the Mac), and trying to figure out how to let the computer help me with time management/time tracking functions.
More soon — ecto really is a good blogging tool, and it should make it far easier to keep new material happening here. Thanks for waiting.
There’s no question that the business of newspapers (while never easy) has become particularly difficult in the last decade. The questions come over the reasons for the difficulty and the best response to the troubles in the industry. This week we’ve seen two different responses — one that I think could be helpful as we try to move forward, and one that pretty well encapsulates the attitudes that are leading us deeper into troubled times.
Jon Talton has written a serious and meaningful indictment of newspaper management in the current era. I saw many of the same problems he discusses, though mine were seen at magazines rather than newspapers. In too many cases, tech-phobic managers tried to block the technological forces of change rather than use them to deliver great content to the readers. Even more damning, too many publishers used a decline in readership as an excuse to abandon the existing reader base, rather than trying to build on reader loyalty to find new ways to grow.
The kind of inward-looking, defensive attitudes that Talton rails against are on display in Roy Peter Clark’s Poynter column on why the readers are wrong. I have listened to fellow journalists run through the arguments that Clark makes, and every one rings hollow, blaming our readers for not properly understanding our purity and greatness when we are the ones who claim to be professional communicators. If the public in large numbers say that they see bias in our coverage, then the proper response isn’t to claim that the majority of the population is unable to properly read for meaning, but to apply the same sort of rigorous scrutiny to our pages that we claim to apply to government, business, sports, and the other societal structures that we cover.
I firmly believe that the public isn’t falling away from newspapers because they no longer read, but because we’re no longer giving them stories that they want and need to read. Our readers aren’t fixated on celebrity twaddle because they’re shallow, but because we as an industry have offered them little else. Let’s stop pretending that our highest calling as journalists involves looking back at a "Golden Era" of limited competition for reader attention. Society needs the stories we’re able to tell, and deserves a press that looks at itself as honestly as we claim to look at them.
There never seems to be a shortage of bureaucrats eager to take away our freedom by invoking security. In most cases, their proposed actions do absolutely nothing to promote real security, but do a great deal to make it easier to control and oppress the public.
I cover security, but it takes a real expert to make a convincing case against the proponents of fake security. Bruce Schneier has made a powerful case in his latest Wired blog post. The most important point he makes — and this is critical — is that the "choice" so often offered between security and privacy is not a choice that need be made. In most cases, the acts and systems that provide security don’t impinge on freedom and privacy.
We haven’t seen candidates asked questions about this in any meaningful way, but perhaps it’s past time for that to change. The way the next administration views privacy and security will have a significant impact on our lives for years to come.
