50 degrees in January

Yesterday was sunny and 50 degrees – January 12th in Wisconsin and 50 degrees and Sunny. I took off early so I could take Lola out to the dog park to play. I was not the only person at the dog park and the talk was about the weather and how cute everyone’s dogs are. I was in North Carolina at Duke University last week where it was also warm and sunny. They were tilling the flower beds and putting in plants. All this weather makes one start to think about Spring. This is very dangerous when you live in Wisconsin. You don’t want to start up the Spring neurons until March… at the earliest. Our normal temperature for this time of year is 25 degrees. The record low for today was -24 degrees. One does not want to think about Spring in January unless one wants to to face a very long February and March.

But, I’m happy to take advantage of any 50 degree days that come my way.

Upcoming Presentations

I have a suite of upcoming presentations that are now on my calendar. Below is a list with dates, topics and times where I know them.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006 9AM Pacific Standard Time

Service Oriented Architecture on Campus. You can Oracle webinar – register here.

Wednesday, January 25, 2006 Some time between 9AM and 12:30PM Central Standard Time

Service Oriented Artchitecture – What is it and how do we get one. Presenting for the UW E-Business Consortium

March 13 – 15, 2006 EDUCAUSE Midwest Regional Conference

* Service Oriented Architecture – What is it and how doe we get one (yet again) Monday, March 13, 2006 from 2:15 PM to 3:00 PM Central
* Folksonomies and Web2.0 – Power to the people (Poster Session) Tuesday, March 14, from 1:30 – 2:30 PM.

May 10 – 12, 2006

Folksonomies and Web2.0 – Social Bookmarking and Social Discovery. The role of tags in the enterprise ) Common Solutions Group

June 27 – 28, 2006

CIC Identity Management Workshop, Indianapolis, Indiana

August 4 – 9, 2006

SOA – What is it and how are we getting one (updated) EDUCAUSE – Seminars on Academic Computings

Looking for a new Digital Camera

To be more honest – I’m looking for three new digital cameras but I will buy just one.

I have an Olympus C3030 zoom which I like quite a lot. It is a few years old. It is slow to start up and slow to fire. It does take very nice pictures but the resolution is low (3Meg) compared to today’s cameras. It is a good size for carrying around town or on hikes. But this isn’t the one I want to replace.

I would like to get a really good digital SLR like the Digital Rebel. But this also isn’t the camera I’m looking for right now.

I’m doing a lot of business travel. I would like to find a good small very packable camera. I have a 007 camera from Think Geek. This is very small and quite fun. It takes okay pictures but they are great fun to take.

There are a suite of thin form factor digital cameras. They all have tiny lenses which mean low light gathering capabilities which probably means mediocre pictures. So is there a good camera which is highly packable, travels well and takes good pictures?

I am at the Fuqua Business center at Duke University. The Architecture is gorgeous. The crowd is fun. The woods are pretty. I would like to have a camera with me that I could capture this stuff at reasonable (okay, what do I mean by that?) quality. I will not pack a Digital Rebel for these trips. I don’t even pack my Olympus but I might pack something slightly smaller. If there was a credit card factor camera that takes good pictures, I would just leave it in my laptop bag.

Printable CEO – cool but how to implement

I came across a post on Lifehacker on the Printable CEO. Printable CEO uses a set of goals which are weighted with points. You then set up your Task List based on how they align to those goals. Then you can say, “I want to accomplish 20 points of stuff this week”. You can do two big items or 20 smaller items. David Seah’s list is very business oriented.


I think this is pretty cool stuff. Especially when tied with the PocketMod idea. PocketMod’s are small booklets you make from a single 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper.

So the questions are: could we I alter the goals of Printable CEO to represent I.T. Architecture goals instead? How do we give points to those goals? How would we categorize and measure our tasks? Need to put some thought in on this.

Printable CEO – Cool but how to implement

I came across a post on Lifehacker on the Printable CEO. Printable CEO uses a set of goals which are weighted with points. You then set up your Task List based on how they align to those goals. Then you can say, “I want to accomplish 20 points of stuff this week”. You can do two big items or 20 smaller items. David Seah’s list is very business oriented.


I think this is pretty cool stuff. Especially when tied with the PocketMod idea. PocketMod’s are small booklets you make from a single 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper.

So the questions are: how can I alter the goals of Printable CEO to represent life goals instead? How do I weigh the life goals? How do you categorize and measure those tasks that are longer and life oriented? For example: Let say a life goal is to “Get In Better Shape” and say it is bound to some measure like Get In Shape for Cycling a Century in under 5 hours. If I scored that as a 10 point goal, would riding my bike to work each day count as 10 points? Is it really moving me towards that goal?

Need to put some thought in on this.

Bumper Sticker on Laptop

I’m in a meeting with Oracle. Across the way is a woman and her laptop. She has this sticker on her laptop. I’m amused:

[tag]JimPhelps, Voldemort[/tag]

Random Quotes from TV – The Hotel Room Edition

I channel surf when I’m in hotels. I always watch stuff I never watch at home. It is kinda like camping food. Things that taste great camping really suck if you make them at home.

Random quotes from surfing tonight:

From E! – “Girls like dumb guys. They’re like big dogs.”

Somethings you hear are specific to the locale – “I work in textiles and I like my job but I’m afraid it will get outsourced overseas. That’s why I went back to school.” I do have to agree with the sentiment.

Welcome to the New Year – From the Road

Welcome to 2006. I am, once again, on the road. This time I’m in North Carolina for the Common Solutions Group meeting. I was struck by the smell of the South when I left the airport this afternoon. It is interesting that places have such strong and unique scents. The deserts of Utah and Arizona smell of sage and wet sand. Denver smells thin, cool and like pine earth. The south is rich and earthy and something like mildew (don’t take that wrong – that’s just what is smells like). Imagine if we had the noses of dogs. The smells must be as stark and different to dogs and the landscape of Mars and Venus are to us.

I have business trips lined for February and March already and April too I think. I actually have had enough business travel for a while. It is exhausting and disruptive. I took two weeks off over Christmas and New Years. I made a list of “To Dos” that had built up over the past few months while I’ve been traveling. It was 15 items long. I was as busy on vacation as I am at work – okay, I did get more naps but I needed them.

I had to get up this morning at 4:45 this morning to catch my flight. It was pretty tough after sleeping in until 7:30 for the past couple of weeks. I’m now starting to get the “all-day-business-flying” blur.

I head back home of Friday. Lola and Ena will be happy to see me I’m sure. Ena does get to make hot-and-spicey tofu stir-fry when I gone. When I leave town, Lola moves down from our bedroom to sleep on the couch in my office just inside the front door. That way she will know as soon as I get home. She is always very happy to see me which is very sweet.

I have a few other things to post but I do them separately.

Welcome to the new year everyone. Hope you had a great holiday.

You know you’ve adjusted to Winiter in WI…

Ena and I have had the following three conversations recently. Thinking about these made me realize that we had adjusted to Winter in Wisconsin. (note: The current temperature is 7 degrees with a -6 degree F wind chill. It is lunch time)

(1) Saturday afternoon, me looking at thermometer. “Well. It is almost 20 degrees and it isn’t snowing too hard. I guess I’ll take the dog for a walk.”

(2) Sunday afternoon, Ena rousing me from what-ever I’m doing. “It is 22 degrees and Sunny. We should go to the dog park before it gets cold.”

(3) Ena and I this morning on hearing today’s weather forecast. Me, “2 degrees isn’t too bad if it is Sunny.” Ena, “and there isn’t a breeze. A breeze makes it cold but if there isn’t a breeze it is okay.”

Wonder what my friends from Hawaii think of such talk?

Things I have noticed when it is REALLY cold in Wisconsin:

— You get almost into work before the cold weather idle finally kicks off. Or, to put it another way. Your car’s idle is stuck on 2000 RPMs for the first 15 minutes of your drive in.

— You wait and wait for the temperature gauge needle to move off of the “C” so you can turn the heat on. When you turn the heat on, the needle goes right back down to “C” and it doesn’t move.

One final clarification – according to the last two items (the Things I have noticed when it is REALLY cold…) – today is not really cold.

While we are on XBox

Heroes pull woman from Xbox blaze | The Register
An Anglesey woman was pulled unconscious from her house by two strangers after succumbing to smoke generated by a faulty Xbox.