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

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.

Photoshop Tool

The channel is probably the best tool in Photoshop, the ability to stack images on top of each other and use them to create your final piece is probably one of the stand out features of Photoshop.

From the Adobe web help portal:
About channels

Channels are grayscale images that store different types of information:

• Color information channels are created automatically when you open a new image. The image’s color mode determines the number of color channels created. For example, an RGB image has a channel for each color (red, green, and blue) plus a composite channel used for editing the image.
• Alpha channels store selections as grayscale images. You can add alpha channels to create and store masks, which let you manipulate or protect parts of an image. (See About masks and alpha channels.)
• Spot color channels specify additional plates for printing with spot color inks. (See About spot colors.)
  An image can have up to 56 channels. All new channels have the same dimensions and number of pixels as the original image.
  The file size required for a channel depends on the pixel information in the channel. Certain file formats, including TIFF and Photoshop formats, compress channel information and can save space. The size of an uncompressed file, including alpha channels and layers, appears as the right-most value in the status bar at the bottom of the window when you choose Document Sizes from the pop‑up menu.
  Note: As long as you save a file in a format supporting the image’s color mode, the color channels are preserved. Alpha channels are preserved only when you save a file in Photoshop, PDF, TIFF, PSB, or raw formats. DCS 2.0 format preserves only spot channels. Saving in other formats may cause channel information to be discarded.

Basically what this tells us is that you can break your image into 56 distinct parts and use them to create different effects with each subtle portion of your design. Which in turn opens a huge level of possible creativity.

Start layering your ideas to create something new.

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.