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…
Author: Penelope Gordon
Mark Skilton
Mark Skilton touched the Olympic Torch as it crossed through Solihull High Street (in England) on July 1st, 2012.
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…
Sponsored Street Art?
Philadelphia Museum of Art – On View : Current Exhibitions. Does a protest song become merely a song when “the man” pays for it? Is graffiti art still legitimate when it’s created for a gallery showing? And likewise should the public art installation currently on view on the exterior of the Philadelphia Museum of Art…
Scientific management and Cloud
What is scientific management? definition and meaning. The theory of scientific management can be applied to cloud management – in particular the notion of basing wages on productivity (in the factories the productivity measurement was the piece-rate) instead of hours worked.
Photography Tips
From a column by Anne Burke in the July 2012 issue of Via magazine: “In direct sunlight, use forced-flash mode to eliminate facial shadows”. Have the camera ready before you ask people to pose. If your (digital) camera has an action photo option (an option to take photos so long as the button is pressed),…