Pintrest...

I have to say, Pintrest is probably my least favorite social media venue. Mainly because there is not a lot of controls, the content is spotty, and its repetitive.

The problem with its content is this. Its user built and driven. Whats wrong with that, Tim, you might ask. because it is an outlet that is predominantly used by women (ok so thats unfair), in reality theres not a lot of attention to detail. If I were to put up a link of a rain barrel like this:

I would make sure like I have here to link the crediting source and to have some kind of a comment for this item...

However the problem that I have is that some of the time when i click on a link it I get this:

Where there is no link or amplifying information. Realistically its a large visual search tool but instead of drawing information into it people are posting things which to me seems to be the reason for its spotty information.

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

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.

Value Proposition, the selling yourself argument...

Value Proposition 

Its essential to break down somethings into relevant pieces, a value proposition for example is a great thing to dissected into the If, Then argument. In this case I have displayed the argument below:

If:
Consider that you were a organization in need of training or development, what kind of a person would you be looking for? 

• Capable
• Motivated
• Passionate
• Relevant
• Experienced
• Articulate
• Versatile 

All of these might be just words, however when applied to a person they portray an individual who has real down stream experience with front end consumers, in house training environments, rapidly changing and diverse platforms, multiple organization models and leadership structures. An individual who has a passion for data validation, security both digital and physical, and maximum up time. 

Then:
After 12 years of serving our country in some of the most extreme environments, learning how to rapidly assess the needs of each platform and user requirement, I have developed a skill set that has prepared me for the relatively stress free environment of graduate school. 

 I have proposed a specific skill set and a persons traits, with a possible outcome. I did all of this with out begging or the popular, "Hi my name is Tim and I want to attend your graduate school."

IFTTT

While we are on the topic of if then statements, I have discovered IFTTT thru lynda.com. IFTTT takes approximately 40 social media sites and ties them together with simple if this then that statements in a minimalist and simple graphical interface. This allows a user to attack social media from all sides with tweets, Facebook posts, images, videos, and blogs simultaneously. Its powerful.

Beautiful Day

Today is beautiful. Forty's this morning, a crisp clear sky. 

Unfortunately more violence here at home this week. 

http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/17/us/navy-yard-shooting-knowns-unknowns/index.html

My fear is that this is simply a distraction from the presidents failure with the Syria situation. I pray that these killing are not a political tool. 

While I do enjoy my classes I was extremely irritated today with my English Literature professor. On two separate occasions while discussing Angela Carter's "Snow Child" with the class, she incorrectly cited events in the two page story. This drove the dialogue down a different assumption path than the facts  were indicating. 

The story is Angela Carter's prose on the fairy tail of Snow White. Her thoughts seem to indicate that women are valued only as sexual tools and are devoid of any real substance. However, the hour we spent discussing the minuscule text seemed to lead us around the central point without actually discussing it.  

When the professor made her second incorrect statement I interjected that she had the details incorrect. She responded with, "that is what the text says."  I was more than happy to read directly from the text. 

The Count picked up the rose, bowed and handed it to his wife; when she touched it, she dropped it. 

'It bites!' She said. 

The professor was trying to insinuate that the countess refused to accept the rose. But clearly the text says the she takes possession of the rose even though the rose hurts her. The professor asked me what I thought Angela Carter was trying to indicate with my supposed difference without any sort of correction or acceptance of the information that I presented. My only real concern was accuracy to the original text, without any concern with the fine intricacies of this specific point.  We then spent five minutes discussing the countesses lack of or acceptance of the rose. I am so baffled as to the intentions of this class and its direction. Onward and upward. I'll pass this class regardless.