Why host my own?
August 26th, 2009 (Tech)
Social websites open the door for anyone to easily place their content online. This is great as it eases the barrier to entry, but think with me for a few minutes about the implications.
What if it goes down?
We have all seen Twitter’s growing pains over the past couple of years. As people are beginning to rely on Twitter more and more as a source of news, this becomes a bigger issue. It was interesting to watch a few weeks ago when one user’s (Cyxymu) Facebook, LiveJournal, Twitter and YouTube accounts were DDOSed and to…
The Incremental Web
August 16th, 2009 (Tech)So, this is not an original thought of mine, but I thought it was interesting anyway. I was listening to This Week in Google (TWiG) and the panel brought up an interesting article by Anil Dash that proposed the idea that online trends work because they are incremental and the learning curve is weekend-project sized. He brought up a couple of other points, but I thought those two were the most interesting.
Baby Steps…
If you think about it, it takes most people a long time to catch on to new technologies. Google in…
Chapter 5 – n00bs
July 29th, 2009 (Story)Business at Explorer Micro was booming. People were ordering PII’s and PIII’s from us faster than we could build them. There was a stack of paper 3 feet thick underneath the printer of unfulfilled customer orders. People were flocking to the internet to find the best prices on computers and we had them. What we were losing on margins, we were making up for with volume. It was time to hire some more employees to catch up.
Of course, the best and easiest way to find a new hire is to ask your current employees if they know of anyone…
The Grace and Truth Paradox
July 26th, 2009 (Books)
The Grace and Truth Paradox by Randy Alcorn was given to me (and a copy to each of my siblings) by my Dad last Christmas. I had picked it up a number of times and read bits and pieces of it, but finally decided to read the whole thing through as I’ve been trying to get back into regular reading by picking a book to read each month. It’s a short read at 92 small pages and has a balance of anecdotes, truth about well, grace and truth and scripture to back it up.
The ideas…
Creative or Technical?
July 20th, 2009 (Culture, Tech)I spend a lot of time on the computer. My job requires me to be in front of a computer for 8 hours a day. When I get home, in addition to online bill payments, blogging, catching up on news feeds, Twitter posts and Facebook, I often spend time working on web (or design or programming) projects here and there and watching online content (much more choice than TV). Besides all of the time-wasting stuff (ahem….Facebook), when it comes down to working on a computer, you can really take 2 very different approaches:
- Technical: Programming, development, IT/Network management, etc…
…
These are a few of my favorite expressions.
July 15th, 2009 (Culture)
New words are created every day in the English language. If you think about it, there are endless combinations of words that can be made out of the 26 letters in the alphabet because there is no restriction on the number of letters that can be in a word and the letters can be repeated. Hence, the number of permutations of letters in our alphabet is 26!/(26-infinity)! = ?? (OK, basically it equals an infinite number of words). Now, my math teacher would have berated me for not using “grows large without bounds” instead of “infinity” – fortunately, this…
Why you should pay attention to cloud computing.
July 6th, 2009 (Culture, Tech)Have you heard of cloud computing? Sure you have. Do you use Gmail? That’s cloud computing. Anytime data is stored somewhere “on the internet” or a computation is done without using your local computer…that’s cloud computing.
So, why should you care about this term that has popped up recently for describing a service that has been around in one form or another for quite a few years now? Well, it’s more than just a new word…it’s a way of thinking about how we store data, about what kind of computers we purchase in the future, about how we scale applications,…
