My Parks

Penelope Gordon’s My Parks Pinterest board I encourage everyone to create a ‘My Parks’ list – whether on a social media site such as Pinterest or Facebook or on a piece of paper – and to share that list.  Include those parks which you look forward to visiting – your parks ‘bucket list’. This is…

Big Data and SMEs

Big Data of Growing Importance to Small Businesses: SAP – Midmarket – News & Reviews – eWeek.com. 2012 June 27 What SMEs (small to medium-size enterprises) perceive will be the impact on them of Big Data: Opportunity to improve business operation efficiency Ability to boost sales Lower IT costs Improve business agility Improve customer acquisition…

IBM and CSR

Giving Time, Talent and Expertise | Citizen IBM Blog. – 2012 July 2 Teasers and highlight video for IBM’s 2011 Corporate Responsibility Report.  Also includes an introduction video by Stanley S. Litow.  Are sustainability considerations given equal weight with values of short-term shareholders, or are IBM’s CSR activities merely a patina?

Data Center Localization

2012 Sep 25 InfoWorld article connecting big data centers to big pollution.  Per the article most data centers waste 90% or more of the energy that they consume, and that their big generators are a big source of air pollution in locations such as Silicon Valley.  I think that this bolsters the case for community…

Big Data Centers

EBay’s New Data Center Will Be Powered 100 Percent by Fuel Cells – Green Retail Decisions. – 2012 June 28 EBay is building a new data center in South Jordan, Utah that will be off-grid (with a backup connection to the local grid).  The power source will be 30 natural-gas based fuel cells manufactured by…

Pollution Spin

China to US embassy: Stop telling people how bad the air is in Beijing. – CSMonitor.com. – June 18, 2012 First, a tangent: This article provides another cautionary tale of coding less than professional error messages or parameters: the Chinese did not appreciate the US Embassy’s describing Beijing air quality as ‘crazy bad’ on 2010…

Boogie Down

Alicia Bridges – I love the night life 1978 – YouTube. Seeing the musician for a song that I’ve heard (and danced to) many a time is a little odd – like seeing a movie after reading the book. Van McCoy – Do The Hustle – 1975 – YouTube. Then we have a visual where…

Succulent Tapestry

Plant Lust. Whether naturally occurring or deliberately created (for example, ‘living walls’ such as the Succulent Cube at the 2010 SF Garden Show) plants can form beautiful living tapestries.  The springtime display offered by the naturalized shrubs on the embankment of the west side of the DC Beltway (near Annandale, VA) caused me to pen…

SOA on a Cloudy Day

Long live SOA in the cloud era | Application development – InfoWorld. Andrew Oliver makes good points about the dependency of SOA strategy success on executive management support, the preference of IT departments for technology rather than strategy solutions, and the lack of cloud integration standards; but these do not logically support his argument for…