KLOUT

It would seem that there are even analytics on people. Klout is a data analytics tool that rates People on their social media (sm) presence. I currently am at a 46 our of 100, but most of my social media activity is from the past 3 months.

 Erie Brewing Company who has a great beer, has little to no web presence. Some minor modifications to their  Facebook, Twitter and own company web page could significantly increase not only their presence but their revenue streams. A few hours of work a week could yield major dividends.  Simple things like direct and rapid responses to tweets and status could draw big follower ship on sm. Here is a  post from me on their Twitter:

@ErieBrewingCo Are you guys brewing anything for Turkey Day? #seasonal #localbeer #brewers #beer
— Tim May (@shoelesstim) October 28, 2013

If all goes well their Virtual Assistant (VA) is getting a notification on their phone or device and formulating a response. I will comment that response when I get it.

In the past year I have had extremely positive response from @Jockey, @Sterilite_Corp, and @GrandTrunkGoods. All I did is tweet my complaint and within hours their VA got back with me and arranged a positive experience with their products and brand. These are three companies that I will spend money with again.

 Other companies that I have contacted with simple tweets have not acknowledged them at all making me wonder if they even understand the purpose of sm.

These simple factors can have a massive and damaging impact on business because weather they want to admit it their Klout displays how accessible their business is in the sm world. Social Media drives business now, not the other way around.

@shoelesstim Not sure yet! May do something exclusive for the brewery for the tasting room! Keep you posted!

— Erie Brewing Company (@ErieBrewingCo) October 29, 2013

Community Service

Items 

• garbage
• soup
• clothes
• beds
• good deeds
• sense of community
• giving back

All great things, and I encourage people to give back. Unfortunately, personally I don't have a large heart to give up my time. 

Its not that I don't care. I do care, and i am deeply vested in Erie, and the surrounding communities. 

I think i have earned the right to say no. 

Let me explain before people get the wrong idea. On September 26, 2001, days after September 11th, I joined the Navy. Not because of problems in my own life but because I already felt a requirement to serve. As a high school student I talked about service in the military as something that every able bodied man should do. My patriotism is exceptional. I am proud of all the great things we have accomplished in our 200+ years of freedom, recently we have made some stupid decisions but thats not the point. 

Fast forward (a phrase that will soon have no relevance) to 2013, July 23 to be precise, my contract with the Navy ended much to my disappointment. After almost 12 years in the Navy learning what is is to be a sailor, man, husband, and father the end had come. The Navy in their wisdom decided that I was no longer needed (downsizing is everywhere). 

That greater than a decade of time spend defending peoples right to judge, loathe, believe, and do whatever they want was worth it. I have a sense of entitlement regarding my time. I am going to spend it in the manner in which i have been unable for so long. I know that I will be judged by some but I KNOW what I have contributed to this great nation. 

Stingy some may say, but I have my satisfaction and thats enough for me to know that I have served my community, and that box has been checked more then mosts.

Cyclical Evolution, Power Costs

Many things come into and fall out of fashion on a regular basis, some might say that there is a cyclical pattern to these trends. Daisy dukes, tie died, and bell bottoms, have come and gone and come and gone again, but trends in fashion are completely different from trends in technology. Bag Phones, 512k RAM and 800 Mb Hard Drives aren't on the list of things to make a come back.

Centralized computing however, is. In the pioneer days of computing everything was hosted on your organizations main frame. These computing behemoths, with massive processing and storage, were a centralized computer that would rival my 2007 Macbook.   Servers hosted terminals all over the infrastructure, allowing users to slice out parts of the power to do their work. As hardware became cheaper it was proliferated out to users more or less indiscriminately. This shift  can be seen from the movie TRON to the movie Hackers. As such terminal based computing all but vanished (hat tipped to Gates, Woz, Jobs and the like). 

Enter 1998: VM Ware, a virtually (yes, I did) unheard of company selling a great piece of tech. computing with in computing. Virtualizing platforms on anything from workstations to dedicated servers. This paradigm shift is making its way into organizations across the globe. It is becoming common place for organizations to restructure their infrastructure to only hold their computing on server and place Multi Layer Thin Clients (terminals) at each users desk.  

The other advantage to centralizing is power cost reduction, both with regard to servers and workstations. If you are able to reduce the power consumption of you server stack by say 10% you also reduce the load on your HVAC reducing over all power consumption in your facilities. If this is implemented infrastructure wide you can have massive gains both in resource management and utilities cost. In the long run everyone likes to save money.

Cascading Style Sheets

Cascading Style Sheets

give me the ability to do wonderful things in HTML anytime all the time with so much possibility its a but crazy

there are all sorts of things that I can do with a css document

however its hard to explain these things

so i chose to show you instead

Cascading style as you can see is really just the ability to take formatting and place it n a readily available format for all of your pages instead of on each sheet, it reduces overhead and increases cohesion in a site.  Gone are the days of copy pasting your style on every sheet of your site, now all you have to do is link the style sheet to your page and bang presto you have instant style...  for some maybe.

For a clearer understanding of how powerful CSS is check out the CSS Zen Garden

Sven

Sven, tall gangly, ill-fit, crafter of ill phrased speech.

From the Swedish lake country on the earth colony of Marth, Sven is currently, as usual between employers. His unfortunate lack of employment is this time fortunately not his fault. His first few weeks at Olaf's Tacheon Drive Repair Shop were good. He was just starting his first accelerator cowling repair job, when Michael came by for lunch. Sometime during his sanctioned 20 minute, turned 3 hour, break the shop had been reduced to glass and ash. The officer at the barricades wouldn't even let Sven look for his favorite hat. He'd had that hat for 10 years it was his favorite, the rustic steel blast visor he had bought of that walking carpet had been with him what felt like a lifetime.



Todays creative writing exercise in my English Lit Class.

Have you had enough INFOgraphics and the wiggle effect.

'Big Data' doesn't just mean increasing the font size.

Something about this seems relevant to social media....  however, I cant seem to figure it out.  It will come to me...

This world is a great wiggle-effect. The clouds are wiggling. The waters are wiggling. The clouds are wiggling, bouncing. People— but people are always trying to straighten things out. You see, we live in a rectangular box, all the time; everything is straightened out. Wherever you look around in nature you find things often straightened out. They’re always trying to put things in boxes. Those boxes are classified. Words are made from some boxes. But the real world is wiggly. Now when you have a wiggle like a cloud, how much wiggle is a wiggle? Well, you have to draw the line somewhere, so people come to sorts of agreements about how much of a wiggle is a wiggle; that is to say a “thing.” One wiggle. Always reduce one wiggle to sub wiggles, or see it as a subordinate wiggle of a bigger wiggle, but there’s no fixed rule about it.

- British philosopher Alan Watts

The Body Tag

The <body> tag is used to hold the content of a web page. This tag is probably the most important and least talked about tag in all of web design. Without it you can not display any of your design.

<body>

all displayed design must fall with in these two tags

without them your site is useless

without your site they are useless

body can't do design with out it

</body>

Facebook ReOrginization

In the ever changing landscape of social media, people now have one more thing to mind. The scrutiny being paid to Facebook (fb) is something that should not be taken lightly. With media, law enforcement, and the corporate world taking a vested interest in the content of fb, users should be careful with whats in their profile.

Denver man fired for complaining about work on Facebook is just the first Google search result that I found when I searched: facebook fired profile. It probably wouldn't take much for me to find various specific examples relating to other corporate issues, crime, or media saturation when it comes to the fb arena.

I know that my fb is different than most because my wife and I share a page. She is the business end of our fb and I occasionally reconnect with old friend or whatnot. A redesign for us would not be required. Most of our content is boring parenting stuff. If I had to do anything it would be to de-friend a few people that are obnoxious, but besides that theres not much on our fb that I'm not proud of.