Category: Technology

Categories
Business Life Technology

Onward 2012

2011 was a crazy year.

  • Lived with grandparents for one-and-a-half months
  • Bought our first house (and moved into it)
  • Ran three 5Ks (one with Laura, which was amazing)
  • Painted most of the rooms in the house
  • Mowed a lot of lawn (then watched it all die)
  • Birth of our second son, Levi John
  • Jamis’s second birthday
  • Celebrated 5 years of marriage
  • Set up my first real, permanent home office
  • Started up my personal business again
  • Helped with harvest on the farm
  • Pushed out the first major website revision for MLC since 2005
  • A lot of traveling to and from Wisconsin to visit the best in-laws ever
  • Lots of other stuff

That’s just the stuff I can remember.

Laura and I have both said we are looking forward to a 2012 that is a little bit less crazy, and a little more settled than we have ever had. We’ve only lived in one other place for more than 9 months (I think that is the correct amount of time), and we will be celebrating one year in our house on Valentine’s Day. That’s an accomplishment for us. It is also comforting to know that this house is the only one Levi has known, and the one that Jamis has stayed in the longest as well.

Even Molly likes it (I think).

So onward to 2012! Here are some things I’m hoping to accomplish this coming year (the first batch comes from Resolutions over at We Are Martens):

  • Drink less pop (this is a recurring one for me … )
  • Replace all of the water piping in the house
  • Grow my personal business 50%
  • Get better at doing work outside
  • Walk more (and to more places)
  • Replace bulbs in the house when the burn out (right away)
  • Do more little things for my wife
  • Finally incorporate Deck78 (after killing Replosion when we moved to WI)
  • Learn how to program (that’s kind of vague)
  • Speak at two conferences or meetings (did one in 2011)
  • Get a better backup system in place at home
  • Build Laura the photography website she has been asking about
  • Start and finish the website for the MVL Lightning Dance Team
  • Pitch new websites to four new clients
  • Continue helping people learn how to incorporate technology into their lives
  • Lots of other stuff

I’m excited for what 2012 is going to bring. For the first time in a long while I feel like I have a better handle on my state of mind and am more settled and ready/able to take on new things.

Onward 2012!

Categories
Life Technology

Breaking a Twitter Habit

Drawing inspiration from Mr. Hess once again, I’m going to try breaking a bad (read: terrible) Twitter habit that I have had since Tweetie for Mac (now Twitter for Mac) was release a long time ago.

I’m going to relegate my Twitter consumption to my mobile devices.

I’ve deleted Twitter for Mac from the work iMac and my MacBook Pro and will no longer have them open during the day when I am working. When I want to catch up on Twitter, I have two options: iPhone or iPad.

Well overdue on my end.

Categories
Technology

Getting Rid of Gurus

I was browsing over at Slashdot when I stumbled upon an article at InfoWorld title “The four fallacies of IT metrics” by Bob Lewis. Go ahead and take a read, i think there is a lot of good thoughts in it about the dangers of metrics and especially applying them incorrectly.

In the resulting comment thread at Slashdot, I stumbled upon a comment by nahdude812. It is rather lengthy and tells the tale of a company where they start ridding themselves of expensive gurus because the systems are running smoothly and instead replace them with support contracts. These companies then pat themselves on their “backs” for saving money and still having a working system … for a while. It’s a good read, so head on over and take a look yourself.

The term “guru” has many meanings, but in this instance I think it focuses mainly on extremely competent people who have two things (along with other skills):

  1. deep knowledge of the technology being used
  2. deep knowledge of how said technology is being used in the organization

I’m painting in very broad strokes here.

The danger of getting rid of these people in favor of support contracts will not always be readily visible, but I think that a “day of reckoning” will come at some point when something breaks and needs to be fixed and it can’t be quickly because no one is there with the needed knowledge (or perhaps the one person who does have it is on vacation and you got rid of the other two people). Even in those times, you might pat yourself on the back for getting it fixed, but having the “guru” there might have resulted in a faster, cheaper, better fix along with finding and fixing the underlying problem.

I’m preaching to the choir here, but I think there is a need for organizations to do two things for their IT departments:

  1. allow your IT department to hire “gurus”
  2. allow your IT department to retain said “gurus”

Then, as a department, IT needs to document everything possible.

I’m terrible at the last part.

Categories
Business Technology

Internet Explorer to (Finally?) Auto Update

Ryan Gavin over at Exploring IE has announced that Internet Explorer is going to auto update from this point forward.

Can I get a huge “FINALLY” from the choir!

I think this is a great thing for users and the web development community and will become even more so that farther in our rear-view mirror Windows XP becomes. There are two issues that remain, however:

  1. Windows XP still can only update to Internet Explorer 8
  2. Enterprises and IT outfits can opt-out

A great step in the right direction, but we can still be held back by enterprise users. It might be a needed concession, but still a concession.

Categories
Business Technology

Homegrown Solutions: Coming back?

I had a quick post over at System Volume. Feel free to read it. Not a lot of added commentary over there, but I think it is an interesting article in light of the economic realities of today.

The past decade brought about a swath of IT outsourcing not just to other countries, but to other vendors. What if there would be pushback against this, a culture shift that aims to bring back in-house IT and development expertise in order to create more nimble companies who can tailor their offerings to the needs of the company? Would this lead to an increase in higher-paying IT jobs here, or would it have the opposite effect by creating, at first, a glut of new positions, leading to a glut of new candidates which would then weaken the overall market?

It is also interesting to think about what this could mean for open source. What if instead of spending money on proprietary vendor solutions, a company would hire a developer and then give back to the open source community those parts which are not business critical? Does centralization always mean higher efficiency?

Lots of questions and I have no answers. It is fun to think about, though.