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Taylor Mali, teacher and slam poet, gives you a piece of his mind on what teachers really make. He has a policy on honesty and a$$kicking that if you really ask for it he has to give it to you! Betcha didn’t think he was going to say all that did you? My step-father, Bob Schenkkan, died yesterday (Wednesday, Feb 9th, 2010) at age 93. Bob was wonderful to my mother, my little brother, David and me, but Bob was a remarkable person and lived a full and remarkable life so I thought I would write a little and put pictures, links and other information here in a blog post on my site so that anyone who wants to find it can do so. Friends, family and acquaintances can be assured that his passing was peaceful and dignified with hospice in attendance and his wife and family surrounding him. His last years were spent at Arden Courts where he was much loved and well taken care of by the excellent staff and many of his friends and family visited him each week. Bob meant many things to many people, but one of his most important lasting legacies is his contribution and work for Public Broadcasting. Jim Lehrer might have put it best when he said, “Bob Schenkkan is a hero to me and to every one of us PBS people. He gave us life and then he saved us.” Jim Lehrer (video wishes for Bob Schenkkans 90th birthday from the KLRU Bob Schenkkan Tribute DVD)” Full KUT story and audio this has Ben Philpott’s tribute piece linked to it. Austin360/Austin American Statesman story More to come as I dig up pictures and find links. I’ve decided to go paperless in my office. Currently all my expense reports for independent consulting require scanned receipts and I use the flat bed scanner on my color inkjet printer to do this, then I organize the PDFs manually. That process works, but is very tedious and time consuming. I have seen the NeatScanner ads on TV and decided that going paperless is a really good idea as long as the scanning and organizing is easy and quick. This will depend on the design, reliability and layout of the scanner as well as how well the bundled software is thought out and works. First I hope to use a portable scanner that I can take on the road and use for expense reports. Then if the scanner is good enough it can be used as a desktop scanner for all documents and receipts. The scanning has to be easy and not awkward and the software has to be efficient and easy to use to organize and categorize all the receipts. Finally, it must be very easy to back up the receipts to a CD, DVD or USB drive by type or year and also very easy to restore and use those receipts if the originals are not available. The first step is to evaluate the possible scanners. Initial Requirements:
Potential Scanners:
Software:
If you read this and have suggestions for scanners or software please send then to hireme (at) rothgeb.net and I will try to acquire and evaluate them. Thanks! I wrote an article late last year here about the open-source and freeware applications that I used on my Windows XP PC (a Dell D620 Duo Core with 4GB RAM and a 100GB hard drive). It is now about time to update this article with what I’m using on my new laptop (a Lenovo W510 with an i7 Quad Core processor and 16GB of RAM). I’m a pretty heavy duty user and along with using Office to write docs and create presentations I do a lot of virtualization with VMWare for my consulting practice, but most of the tools I use to keep my Windows PC running smoothly will work for you as well. With Windows there are a few things you really must do if you time and data are worth anything to you like mine are. These are the “must dos” that I follow and recommend you should too. Below them are the tools you will need to do this so the next time you get a virus or a hard drive crash you aren’t out data, cash, time and customers.
Here is a list of the most useful applications and freeware that I use all the time that would be appropriate for regular everyday users. Most, but not all of them are open source or freeware, but most are well under $100. Thus with a modest investment in tools and time you can have everything you need to keep your PC running smoothly and your data and applications safe. The first thing I always start with is the anti-virus software:
Here are a few more useful tools I keep handy or install on my
Now these tools above are not the only tools that can do the job. They are just what I use or have used and can recommend. There are many more available tools and there are also many free tools, both Windows and Linux, that can be used to perform most or all of the same functions: anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-malware, disk partitioning, disk imaging and CD/DVD burning. Some tools will work well and others may not. Some will be easy to use and others may be really difficult or not have good documentation. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend or guarantee the freeware and Linux tools will always work properly or are easy to use (but mostly they do), but they are available if you want to try them out. Some may take an expert level of *nix skill to get them to work properly and easily. I don’t use “free” as a criteria to protect my valuable data, however, there are many capable open source and Linux tools that will do the job well. I try to balance how efficient a tool is (how effective, easy and how much time it takes to use) with how much is costs as my criteria on which tool to use. I have had success in the past with Partition Magic and Ghost because they were the first tools of their type for OS/2 and Windows and my employers at the time had purchased them for our use, but I am transitioning to CloneZilla and GParted LiveCD. I will continue to edit and expand this list and will add any open source and Linux tools that I manage to test successfully. I also use these three open source software packages on my Windows laptop and when I’m on my Linux desktop:
The Rolling Stone story on Stanley McChrystal and and his staff has highlighted Afghan War and fueled speculation that McChrystal might be fired or replaced. In my view this isn’t really the question and I think that McChrystal’s summons to the White House and his meeting with Secretary of Defense Gates actually show this. Wisely both Obama and Gates have decided that the was is bigger than just one man as is the Presidency. In characteristic Obama style the President is waiting to make a decision until he meets face to face with his commander in the most important foreign policy initiative of his presidency. Were I Obama I would sit down with McChrystal and ask him how he is going to make this right and is he still the right man for the job? After all, McChrystal has basically alienated everyone on the State Department side and many others in the civilian chain of command that he must work with in order to get some sort of acceptable resolution in Afghanistan and steps must be taken to resolve this or replace the general with someone who can work with Biden, Jones, Holbrooke, the NATO representatives and others. Only if McChrystal comes up with excellent answers should the President not accept his resignation. McChrystal is exceptionally capable and Obama has continuity at a critical time when the tide in Afghanistan just might be turning, after all it often looks darkest before the light, to consider. I honestly don’t think Robert Gibbs would have been in the loop on what may be in store for Gen McChrystal if Obama and Gates are truly waiting to talk to the general to decide. He certainly should have declined to answer when asked whether the general’s job was safe. I doubt that his statement that “all options are on the table” and “our efforts in Afghanistan are bigger then one person” means they can do this without him, but may mean they might have to do so if this has damaged McChrystal beyond redemption with those he does have to work with. Remember, he only has to answer to Gates, Clinton and Obama, he has to work with all the others. The public humiliation of Gen McChrystal is certainly meant to make him think long and hard about the atmosphere of disrespect he let fester and the lapse in judgment in allowing it to go public. Also, what his mistake may mean to the effort he is tasked with making succeed. It is just an added benefit that the President looks tough in the face of an impertinent general as well. I think President Obama has probably been called enough names not to worry too much about the leadership showing him respect as commander-in-chief as long as they are unified and working to make progress in the morass that is Afghanistan. He does have to consider continuity in leadership in Afghanistan at a crucial time, but this crisis may just act to clear the air and get all parties in leadership positions to really get their eye on the goal and work together for once. If I were Obama I might give McChrystal a few weeks to mend fences and get momentum back and then I would call all the players together in Kabul or outside of Afghanistan and see what progress has been made on the team and even knock a few heads together myself. Follow up, Monday June 28th: Well, President Obama accepted General McChrystal’s resignation to generally positive statements from both sides of the isle. The President garnered support and even praise from his handling of this affair from almost everyone except inveterate Obama haters. Obama showed respect and sensitivity for a military man who supported him by meeting with McChrystal in person to accept his resignation. Apparently McChrystal couldn’t assure the President that he could work effectively going forward with both the civilian diplomatic team and his command after the damaging comments in the Rolling Stone article. My prediction that this may have been an opening to clear the air and get a new better start in Afghanistan proved to be correct though in a way I didn’t see as likely, the appointment of General Petraeus as theater commander. Yes, it was important that the foundations of our democracy, civilian command of the military, were respected by the military. The public comments from General McChrystal’s team were intemperate and showed particularly bad judgement in setting a command tone in a theater where politics and may be more important than military effectiveness, but our democracy would not be permanently damaged if Obama had kept McChrystal and he had led us to success in Afghanistan. I still think that the most important aspect of this whole debacle is the effectiveness and ability of the military commander to work together with the whole team, diplomatic and military, in Afghanistan. The appointment of Petraeus puts a particularly effective leader in place to adjust the tactics so they can be as effective as possible. Petraeus will also evaluate the strategy and team and hopefully renew the focus on both means and ends so with a little luck and a lot of hard work good may come out of a nasty and unfortunate situation. I must say, after watching the Sunday news shows, that I too wish we did not have to be in Afghanistan, but unfortunately I don’t think we have much choice unless we want to put up with a permanent haven for Al Queda next to an unstable nuclear power, Pakistan. I do think it was a proper move to topple the Taliban and help rebuild a representative government in Afghanistan, but I lament the tepid support of our European allies who suffered attacks on 3/11 (Once Emme in Spain) and on the Tube in London as well as many other failed attempts at terrorism. Rebuilding Afghanistan into a stable state where human rights are respected is a job the whole world has an interest in and should be taken on in a more proportional manner. I still hope we can start to withdraw troops next year near the deadline and the Afghans military and police force can start to take over their own security, however, I don’t think the U.S. should ever “get out” of Afghanistan, rather, we should transition from military involvement in Afghanistan to mainly civilian developmental and economic assistance in Afghanistan. We cannot afford to be out of the Middle East, but rather should take the Saudi model of spreading schools across all those countries and teach our gospel of democracy, freedom of self determination and freedom of religion. This so Sunnis can quit killing Shiites and Sufis and men can quit oppressing women throughout that region. In business we talk about CRM and managing all the touches any organization makes from all departments to its customers. This way the tech support rep knows when the sales guy promises a customer something and they both know when that customer has spoken to a VP or the CEO. In our personal lives as opposed to our work lives we struggle to manage e-mail, IM, Facebooking, LinkedIning, Blogging, Twittering, etc.. Basically what we need is a configurable portal with a more efficient, standardized and powerful UI than any of our apps and sites offer us individually (and perhaps we need some form of reporting as well? – interesting thought). Either we blow these contacts off when they get overwhelming or we blow the rest of life off to stay engaged with all the various means of communication. There should be a better way, shouldn’t there? I’m proposing to call this new type of interface or application Social CRM or maybe SRM (Social Relationship Management). It would consist of an interface that manages all our e-mail, social networking sites, blogging, IM and our Calendar. There are probably other things I should throw into the kitchen sink as well, but I’ll add them later (now I’m going to get on my bike and take a ride in the real world). Well, I spent most of my day going through all my e-mail, reading news, facebooking, plaxoing and LinkedIning again. I have been thinking about how to deal with this for a while and have looked at some tools like Digsby, but they don’t really seem to work for me. What would be nicest I think would be to have an application like Outlook, but either in Java or a Cloud app, that integrated all your e-mail, social networking and news. It would also be nice if you could do your blogging and tweeting from that app and even better would be if it could automatically purge and archive all your info in a MySQL database and had powerful tools for searching (natural language searches anyone?) that database. Oh, and it would have to have portability and backup capabilities like sync and export/import (in many formats). Ideally it would be highly configurable in both UI and options so that you didn’t have to configure and reconfigure it. Oh, and while I’m asking for the moon it might as well have IM capabilities as well. With all the rage for smart phones and the reported imminent demise of the desktop/laptop (laptops are the new desktops now aren’t they except for graphics workstations, gaming systems and servers) no one is really looking to create the killer app for a full OS/Gui these days it seems. Oh well, sigh. Here are the things I would like to manage (all communication) in one app:
I must look into the APIs for the Social Networking sites and tools to see if we can add them to something like Thunderbird and Open Office in order to make the ultimate killer application. Here are the API pages: The idea would be to create an application with a UI that each user could arrange to their own satisfaction in order that it be as intuitive as possible. It would also be highly efficient to use automating many tasks and only taking one click (learning maybe) to do the most common tasks (like moving an e-mail to folders). Post your thoughts on SRM here and I’ll respond. Actually, in writing this I am seeing some possibilities. All these applications are essentially of three types: reading, writing, or reading and writing. All the apps/sites can mostly have data pulled to be read or written with an API like POP, IMAP Graph API or some other. The reading apps mostly have messages of some length in a list that can be read like a list of e-mails (with a reading pane), a list of messages in Twitter, a newsfeed in Facebook or a list of contacts in Plaxo, LinkedIn or Facebook. In fact Outlook (or as I prefer to call it LookOut!) actually manages messages, contacts and calendar and allows you to read and write to both, but it doesn’t identify where those messages come from or allow you to easily hide your personal e-mail so you can concentrate on your work e-mail for example. So in effect, if one could app the APIs to pull in FB, LI, Plaxo and Twitter data and you could easily manage what data you wanted to work with in your UI then Outlook might be close to the perfect tool. I guess in some sense the various social networking/messaging platforms have just outrun Outlook. This leaves the question of whether it would make sense to reinvent the wheel when all Microsoft would have to do is add plug-ins for the social networking platforms or whether someone should build a new cloud platform that will obsolete Outlook? Even though I’m quite technical (lately I’ve been installing supremely complex J2EE SPM and EIM software for a living as a Solutions Architect for large Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies) even what should be a relatively simple task like upgrading my Blogging software, WordPress, can be a real pain. I honestly can’t imagine what it would or could be like for non-technical people who have no conceptual understanding of how all this software works (nor any real desire to find out). I’m going to give some hints here in this post about how to handle this pretty easily for those of you with the inclination to do so. My WordPress Blog, “In Blood & Spirit” hosted on my site www.rothgeb.net, had been giving me messages for a few days that version 3.0 was available and I should upgrade to it. I went into my control panel and started poking around and found that the five or so plug-ins that I have installed (a counter, a post to Twitter and a couple of others) were compatible with the WordPress version I was running, but probably should be upgraded before I upgraded from WP 2.8.x to WP 3.0. This left 3 tasks to complete in my upgrade. Sounds simple huh? Not really. Tasks:
Now the WordPress upgrade is usually pretty simple if you haven’t customized the code and you can let WordPress do it for you in most cases. I have been quite successful with that, but honestly, even if the whole WordPress upgrade failed all I would have to do is clear off the whole site and do the 5 minute installation again to get my WordPress back up and running. Then I’d have to find and add my template, install the plug-ins and it would be back to the way it was….. minus the content (which is the most important and time consuming part of course). I would be willing to bet that less than 25% of all WordPress users have their content actually backed up, but that is fodder for another post. The bit I want to point out here is the difficulty of some plug-ins and the services they use. After I backed up the database so I wouldn’t lose my content, I went to the Plug-Ins page in the Admin console and selected the check boxes for all the Plug-Ins and the option to Upgrade, then hit Apply. It showed me which plug-ins had upgrades and allowed me to check those and Apply the upgrades again. Simple huh? Well, not really. After doing the upgrade, I noticed that it said it couldn’t contact my URL shortener. I tried to do so manually for Cli.gs and got an “Unable to connect” message from Firefox. In poking around it turns out that Cli.gs (the first shortner in my plug-in, WordPress to Twitter, had shut down. I figure I would change to bit.li, but when I did and edited the settings they didn’t seem to change. So I uninstalled the plug-in, upgraded to WordPress 3.0, tried another plug-in to Tweet from my Blog, but didn’t like it. I then reinstalled WordPress to Twitter, got an account on bit.li, retrieved my API key, entered my account and the API key in the plug-in settings in WordPress and tested the functionality to see if it worked. Whew, all that (roughly two hours total or maybe a bit more) to do an upgrade on a Blog that already worked (well mostly, though the links on my Tweets had been broken for about a half a year). I guess the point is that even simple technology is not so simple when you really get right down to it. I can hardly wait for both SaaS and Cloud Computing to trickle down to the SMB and single entrepreneur/user. Hopefully then the economies of scale will make it cheap enough for someone else on the cloud side of the equation to manage all this and let the user use the software for the real purpose that they chose it for in the first place. Imagine a cloud service that holds all your data, handles all your backups and upgrades seamlessly and is available 99.9% of the time (that is three nines in data center parlance which means only 14.6 hours downtime a year on average – I would suspect that the average user has much more than that generally). This will take a couple of major changes in computing and the internet in that to really rolls this out to SMB and individuals much higher and more reliable bandwidth must be available to everyone. In addition that internet access must be ubiquitous and freely available everywhere or almost everywhere. If users are going to be separated from their applications and data then access to those must be available almost everywhere and at almost no cost. If and when Google rolls out its gigabit network in some lucky city that will be a big first step. I can’t wait, but I don’t think it is going to be soon. Two to five years is my bet. This is the first in a series of posts on how I fixed the fueling problems in my biodiesel truck. The truck has over 200,000 miles, but the previous owner installed a relatively new engine. Unfortunately, the truck has not run well for quite a long while now. It will start, but it seems to get air bubbles from somewhere in the fueling system and after a short while, under load it just cuts out. Then you have to bleed the fuel filter and it will start again. I have always run regular diesel fuel in the front tank of a two tank setup and biodiesel or WVO in the back tank. The truck came to me that way and the previous owner had run it this way and supplied me with a nice pump and set of filters with the truck when I purchased it. My friend Whitey checked out the fuel lines and such while I was away in Mexico working and he and I removed the front tank only to find that the intake foot had deteriorated inside the tank and the tank was rusted through in one place and totally gunked up and in danger of rusting through in several others. Mike and I consulted and decided that it needed four things: 1. a new fuel tank 2. Flouroelastomer tubing (Viton) suitable for immersion in a fuel tank 3. a lift pump and 4. new pickup feet for the fuel tank. The metal parts of the pickup and the fuel level sending unit were reusable so we will augment those. Below are the sources for these not too easy to find parts. I figured that if someone finds my site and post I should save them some time and effort in finding the right parts.
I will follow this with more precise technical specifications and pictures of before, the work being done and after. I hadn’t heard much about the ACORN story in months after hearing that Congress shut the organization down, but California Attorney General Jerry Brown investigated what now turns out to be a right wing publicity stunt and Brown recently released the unedited tapes. These unedited tapes of the supposed exposé of ACORN by James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles from Andrew Breitbart’s Web site that were pushed by Fox News Channel for six months clearly show that all the allegations of ACORN’s nefarious deeds were fabrications and outright lies. In this clip Rachel Maddow usese the unedited tapes released by California Attorney General Jerry Brown of O’Keefe and Giles’s visits to ACORN offices in the state to illustrate the vast gulf between the conservative version of the “scandal” and reality.
I recently ran across this advertisement for a job with the description of minimum requirements. HR and recruiting hacks and managers who don’t understand what their technical employees actually do are at it again asking for qualifications that cannot exist. The are using buzz words they don’t understand and encouraging dishonesty in the hiring process. Basically they are asking for something that is impossible to deliver so they are encouraging job seekers to lie. ——– Original Message ——–
We are seeking a System Analyst – San Antonio, Tx Minimum Requirements: Though we have had hosted applications, On-Demand and SaaS for much of the 2000′s, none of these really qualify as “cloud computing”. The job description below is asking for a MINIMUM of 4 years doing migration of IT (not apps) to a cloud! I suppose someone who has experience migrating a company to Sales Force or some other SaaS application like Callidus On-Demand might qualify, but that was actually never “cloud computing” unless you define all on demand hosted and SaaS as “cloud computing”. Unless you are a technical guru you must understand a bit of the background and history of cloud computing to see why this is so wrong.
I remember during the Internet bubble from 1999 to 2001 when Linux, Java and open source had been around for about 5 years and I was reading ads for jobs requiring 10 or 15 years of Linux and Java experience and certifications. To clarify it a bit more, at the time experienced Unix hands were highly qualified to administer Linux and had probably used Linux at home quite a bit, but didn’t bother to get the newly available Linux certs. Only newbies who didn’t have Unix experience since you couldn’t get production Linux experience got the certs. At that point there were no Java certifications and these qualifications ruled out programmers with 20 years experience using C or C++, but only two or three years with Java. Thus, there was almost no one in the world qualified to run a production Linux system or build a Java application and apply for these jobs without lying. It was similar to demanding an MCSE for a position supporting PCs used to be in the early days when much of the MCSE information in the tests was just plain incorrect. Just goes to show you that you have to understand what the person in the job does to have a clue in hiring. Would you want to work for an organization that had this little understanding of the technologies or what you would actually be doing in the job and didn’t know or care that they were promoting dishonesty? What do you think about this situation? |
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