White House suspends some fed IT project funding

White House suspends some fed IT project funding

Take Me out to the Ballgame

I went to a Colorado Rockies game last night.  A warm spring evening in Coors stadium is a great way to celebrate the coming of Summer in the Rockies. 

Some time between the first pitch and the expected Home Run by number 99 Manny Ramirez that sealed the game for the Dodgers, I noticed that there was a lot going on outside of the game.  I remember going to a game in Toronto several years ago where it was noted that the first digital cell phone (PCS as it was called at the time) call was made.  It seemed to usher in a new world where you could talk to anyone when you wanted to.

There were a few people making miscellaneous calls from the seats around us in the left field bleachers, but most of the activities were taking place with people supplementing conversations with periodic texting.  It takes some getting used to, but clearly people outside of the game experience were either involved remotely or other topics were being worked out over the text message network from the stands.

As more of the stadiums’ namesake was consumed, the fans grew louder and more emotional.  Although not enough to change the outcome of the came, participation came in a lot of shapes and sizes.  There was some relationship building taking place before our eyes as well as perhaps some minor embarrassing moments that would be pointed out later since they were captured on the ever present camera’s that accompany most all of the texting devices in use around us.

As my son and I left the stadium and headed for the light rail, the area around the stadium transitioned from those leaving town to those arriving.  With late night act ivies being nudged into place via some very quick thumbs, people were connecting with communities in person, close by, and perhaps sometimes in other states, or even countries.

While the sporting event was fun, for many it was only a stop along a more connected lifestyle that tries to balance being there and connecting with those who are not

TEDxDU

This is a presentation that I enjoyed from

Neal Foard: Cheering for the Wrong Team

TEDxDU

I talks about how important some of the unsung heros of our world are

Rules Easy - Not Breaking Hard

I notice my weight today is inching up.  I will spare you the details but the number is not good.  I did exercise on the elliptical this morning and several other times in the last week.  I continue to set new peak numbers and then move them back a bit.  I saw the news item on a blog post that the worlds greatest loser had lost over 50% of his body weight on the show.  Pretty simple rules.  Exercise more and eat less.  Funny that so many of us have problems executing these simple rules

You know A lot of projects are like this.  I have seen projects with simple rules and sometimes not so simple rules.  Most of the time, the projects with simple rules assume some type of adult behavior and reasonable judgment.  There is less to remember and by removing the ambiguity of rules that try and take in both the normal cases and the strange and unusual cases, there is more likelihood that the rules will be applied as intended.  Judgment may come into play, but once you actually talk to someone about what they were thinking, the number of times when you just can not support their judgment goes down dramatically,

Coaching people around what the shared objectives are and putting in place some simple rules that allow judgment to be applied is far less work than unsuccessfully attempting to think of all of the outliers.  This also allows the rules to be a more flexible and an easier to apply reference point than rules that require extensive study, written documentation and memory work to apply.

Back to my personal weight goals.  Eat like I want to have a more healthy lifestyle and get some exercise.  Now that I know what do do I can move from planning to execution

Back in the Blog life again

I just started reading a book on becoming a trust agent. See the link on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Trust-Agents-Influence-Improve-Reputation/dp/0470743085/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top This book has some interesting stories and information about the changes that become possible when you post items on a web site via a blog twitter or other form of social media. 

The analogy of telling a joke is used to describe how you can connect with people who are not part of the original experience through the later review of your postings.  I think that my person dilemma has been that I did not want to post any content that was not “good enough” for public consumption.  This book will give me confidence that it is probably unrealistic to think that I will be a particularly good blogger at first.  The paradox is that to become better, I have to just get started and improve with practice.

The tools that are available have also been improving while I was thinking about blogging and have become easier to use.  This post is being written with Microsoft Live Writer for example, although the straight we editors that are available are also very usable.  My only disappointment to date with this tool is that it does not seem to connect easily to Drupal

Since I have begun to experiment with some Drupal content creation on http://don.drupalgardens.com/blog# this would have been a handy feature.  I did a quick search and saw that I was not the only one that had identified this short coming but I do not want to take the time to jump perform any complex configuration right now.  Plenty of time to improve but as this book has encourage, It is time to get started