slightly out of phrase ॐ: employers

Showing posts with label employers. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 16, 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.

Friday, October 11, 2013

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.

Friday, October 4, 2013

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>

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

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.

Monday, September 23, 2013

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.

Thursday, August 29, 2013

Target Audience, Color Pallet, and Sociological Response

Target Audience

Identifying a target audience is vitally important to determine that basis of content on a web page. A target audience might be children 2-10 and parents, in the case of DisneyJunior. A broad target audience might be United States Veterans of all ages and genders as in the case of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Target audiences can be extremely specific as in the case of Olay as they are marketing to the demographic of women 15-40, with their anti-aging products and beauty skin care lines. My target audience is the governing body for acceptance into the Penn State Graduate Program, and to capture the attention of potential future employers.

Color Pallet and Sociological Responce

Personally the color of deep ocean water before a storm is one of my all time favorite colors. It is impossible to capture in photographs and hard to describe without first hand experience. The color is a deep royal blue with this rich gray hue to it and my recollection of it always manifests with thoughts of all the other mariners that have seen those waters and kept their course knowing that trouble could be over the next wave. It speaks depths to me about character, fortitude, and heritage.

However, without an understanding of how people are emotionally connected to colors using my favorite color could be damaging to the traffic on my site. Because human thought is not simple nor linear, there are many aspects to social engineering and sociology that have to be taken into account when designing a multimedia product. The first connection to emotion and color that needs to be discussed is how culture in a whole may view a color. For example, in his autobiography Chuck Yeager tells a story about being stationed in Pakistan and working to help with issues regarding reducing STD’s in the area. He attempted to address the issue by trying to give out condoms to the local population. All of the condoms were white, to some this is no big deal, however to the Muslims and other Pakistanis in the area, white is the color of purity. To use a white condom during pre-marital sex is a social taboo. To remedy this issue Yeager and his wife got colored condoms shipped in country and the local population began using them. Listed below is a chart of common colors and their associations taken from aboutsociology.com

Color

Positives

Negatives

Red

Passion, strength, energy, fire, love, sex, excitement, speed, heat, leadership, masculinity, power

Danger, fire, blood, war, anger, revolution, radicalism, aggression, stop

Blue

Seas, skies, stability, peace, unity, harmony, tranquility, calmness, coolness, confidence, water, ice, loyalty, conservatism, dependability, cleanliness, technology, winter

Depression, coldness, obscenity, conservatism, technology, ice, winter

Green

Nature, spring, fertility, youth, environment, wealth, money (US), good luck, vigor, generosity, go, grass

Inexperience, envy, misfortune, jealousy, money, illness, greed

Yellow

Sunlight, joy, happiness, optimism, idealism, wealth (gold), summer, hope, air

Cowardice, illness (quarantine), hazards, dishonesty, avarice

Purple

Elegance, sensuality, spirituality, creativity, wealth, royalty, nobility, ceremony, mystery, wisdom, enlightenment

Cruelty, arrogance, mourning, profanity, exaggeration, confusion

Orange

Energy, balance, heat, fire, enthusiasm, flamboyance, playfulness

Warning, danger, fire

White

Reverence, purity, snow, peace, innocence, cleanliness, simplicity, security, humility, marriage, sterility, winter

Coldness, sterility, clinical, surrender, cowardice, fearfulness, winter

Black

Power, sophistication, formality, elegance, wealth, mystery, style

Evil, death, fear, anonymity, anger, sadness, remorse, mourning, unhappiness, mystery

Various cultures see color differently. In India, blue is associated with Krishna (a very positive association), green with Islam, red with purity (used as a wedding color) and brown with mourning. In most Asian cultures, yellow is the imperial color with many of the same cultural associations as purple has in the west. In China, red is symbolic of celebration, luck and prosperity; white is symbolic of mourning and death, while green hats mean a man’s wife is cheating on him. In Europe colors are more strongly associated with political parties than they are in the U.S. In many countries black is synonymous with conservatism, red with socialism, while brown is still immediately associated with the Nazis. Many believe that blue is universally the best color as it has the most positive and fewest negative cultural associations across various cultures…

Another interesting part to color is that not only do cultures see representations of color meanings differently but they also have a different perspective on color completely.

“…cultures have different terms for colors, and may also assign some color names to slightly different parts of the spectrum, or have a different color ontology: for instance, the Japanese color aoi can be interpreted as meaning something between the Western color terms of "blue" and "green": green is regarded as a shade of aoi. more…”

With all of this in mind we are able to take a good look at what we should actually do with color in our websites. Fortunately, there is a good accepted practice that applies to a lot of things in life: everything in moderation. Ways that I could incorporate my favorite color in my site could include within my logo, in the font of my pages, or as an accent to some part of the interface. In reality, the possibilities are endless as long as you are consistent and subtle with your color pallet.

Color	Positives	Negatives
Red	Passion, strength, energy, fire, love, sex, excitement, speed, heat, leadership, masculinity, power	Danger, fire, blood, war, anger, revolution, radicalism, aggression, stop
Blue	Seas, skies, stability, peace, unity, harmony, tranquility, calmness, coolness, confidence, water, ice, loyalty, conservatism, dependability, cleanliness, technology, winter	Depression, coldness, obscenity, conservatism, technology, ice, winter
Green	Nature, spring, fertility, youth, environment, wealth, money (US), good luck, vigor, generosity, go, grass	Inexperience, envy, misfortune, jealousy, money, illness, greed
Yellow	Sunlight, joy, happiness, optimism, idealism, wealth (gold), summer, hope, air	Cowardice, illness (quarantine), hazards, dishonesty, avarice
Purple	Elegance, sensuality, spirituality, creativity, wealth, royalty, nobility, ceremony, mystery, wisdom, enlightenment	Cruelty, arrogance, mourning, profanity, exaggeration, confusion
Orange	Energy, balance, heat, fire, enthusiasm, flamboyance, playfulness	Warning, danger, fire
White	Reverence, purity, snow, peace, innocence, cleanliness, simplicity, security, humility, marriage, sterility, winter	Coldness, sterility, clinical, surrender, cowardice, fearfulness, winter
Black	Power, sophistication, formality, elegance, wealth, mystery, style	Evil, death, fear, anonymity, anger, sadness, remorse, mourning, unhappiness, mystery