How do you know your computer is doing a lot of work?  Most of the time the key indicator is hard drive heads clattering away ever so often as information is written and read from the drive. Well, as we move to 64-bit operating systems with more and more RAM and solid state hard drives the computer's operation will become virtually silent.  No longer will you know when the information is being paged out or your anti-virus software is chugging away aside from the system monitors and performance logs.  The silent laptop is kind of exciting and eerie at the same time.

The other crazy things is having a 17inch laptop with screaming specs last on battery longer than 7 hours.

I’m typing this on a little pink Acer Aspire One netbook.  Yes, I said pink.  I bought it today for my wife to use while in school.  It would only $50 at Radio Shack after signing up for a two year contract with AT&T for mobile 3G data.

Despite the fact that it is slower than my old laptop, it is a neat little toy.  It only has an 8.9” wide aspect ratio screen with a 1024x600 resolution, and it is no bigger than our portable DVD player.  In fact, in the bag it looks like a portable DVD player, only it’s metallic pink.  Barbie Doll pink.

I played with it while at work today, and it works very well.  Running XP again is a little different since some of the UI elements are still as ugly as Windows95, but with only 1GB of RAM I’m not going to install Vista on it.  It is a netbook.  Plenty of storage, but the audio isn’t all that great, it’s not meant to do much more than surf and do office stuff, but it does boot fairly quickly and it is snappy enough for me to use when I’m on call or we’re on the road.  For school and general uses that my wife needs a laptop for, we couldn’t have found a better deal.  Hey, we also get unlimited wifi access at AT&T hotspots, some of Rebecca’s favorite places to study.

The Noticer is the story about how one man can impact so many people, provide additional perspective and help an entire town through their own difficulties. Jones has in some way impacted everyone in Orange Beach, Alabama and planted seeds of wisdom in a community to help them through life's difficulties.

The book is very uplifting and at times will force out a laugh or even a tear in response to the character's situations. While each character's situation can be frustrating to the reader as a result of the narrative perspective, Jones' responsive and foresight will often bring a smile to your face or even make you laugh. While Jones is always talking about perspective the book is continuously delivering a message about everyone's ability to provide the helping hand, the listening ear and life changing perspective through seeds of wisdom. Everyone has that certain person in their past that impacted their life for the better and that relationship is a milestone in our journey, this book allows the reader to spy on those situations for several different people and situations. The book will help inspire your our internal "noticer" in an effort to change the world around you.

This week we had a re-org at work.  The changes didn’t impact many people, and no one was let go, but it did affect me.  I’m no longer a member of the Research and Diagnostics team, no longer a lead, and probably the most significant change, no longer interfacing with the customer.  I’ve been moved to the IT team as their developer to help automate our internal processes, to consolidate tasks and to ultimately help improve our security procedures and policies by allowing us to properly restrict privileges to those that should have them.

My day-to-day responsibilities, as they were in reality, aren’t changing that much.  I’m still responsible for the production environment, deployments and maintaining our products, but I no longer have to deal with the stress and frustrations from the relationships with the customer.  Which recently, have been very frustrating, since most of my interaction with the customer is after or during a big mess.  My involvement in customer tasks often meant that is was a crisis or deemed a crisis by the customer.  Moving from one upset customer to another can be very tiring, so I am looking forward to not being responsible for those issues any more.

I still do not know how to feel about all the other changes yet.  For a while, it means that I’m solely responsible for managing and maintaining our products until I get the other members of IT up to speed, which means I’ll be working more and on call all the time.  The situation isn’t a whole lot different than it was during the re-org right before I moved to cover for nights, but now my only customer is the rest of the company.

A couple of technology “changes” I’ll be learning and working on are:

• Learning and scripting in MS Powershell.
• Automating many of my previous responsibilities.
• Coding monitoring tools and plug-ins to interface with our production environment for forecasting and reliability purposes.
• Teaching IT about our services, products and architectures.
• Teaching IT basic “programming” skills in areas of scripting and thinking to help increase management and maintenance productivity.
• Documentation.

 

There are still a lot of things to iron out in the next week or two, but ultimately, two or three months in the future, I should have a personal life once again.  It felt good to remove my name from the emergency contact list and my cell phone from the distribution list after two years.

Rex is a mother's reflection on her struggle and joys as a parent of an blind and autistic boy.  Cathleen walks the reader through the hardships, the internal struggles, and joys of understanding true love and peace that hope and faith can bring, despite life's many struggles.  Rex is an autistic and blind child that has one strong connection to the world around him through music as a savant.

While not an easy book to read due too the emotionally heavy content, this is one book that I believe should be added to the required reading list of learning young adults.  The book is an instant and reaffirming acknowledgment for those that have learned what unconditional love really is.  But the book is also an opportunity for those that do not quite understand unconditional love, due to a lack of experience, to experience it through a mother's own struggle with the pains of this world and the joys of children despite the hardships and struggles that come with being a parent.

I especially recommend this book for individuals that desire to grow in areas of helps ministry.  This book will work on your empathy more than anything.

I’m releasing the first version of the AutoMute Service, which will automatically mute and unmute the sound on a Window’s computer when the session is Locked and Unlocked.  This is incredibly useful for the computer at the office when you’re listening to music on your headphones and often forget to pause or mute the music when you walk away.

More info can be found here

Wow. It's really difficult to pick a place to begin with this book!  I've had to postpone writing the review for it just so that my feelings and thoughts had time to settle and age a little bit.  This is a book that should be on everyone's reading list.  In fact, I'm adding it to my yearly reading list.  Randy Pausch's attitude and foresight into life will open up your own eyes to the cloudy perspective that so many of us have about life.  Our day-to-day routine becomes a burden and we lose sight of our purpose and what really matters in life.  This book really puts a smile on your face, despite the saddening circumstances involved in producing the book.

Randy Pausch’s purpose in his Last Lecture is to provide his friends, and most importantly, his children with the lessons that he has learned throughout his life and to also leave a little bit of himself behind for them in the future.  The lessons learned and the stories told will become a staple in people’s development in the future.

A very nice take on the world of development: http://www.javaworld.com/community/print/2537

Outlier is a great book.  It covers an unusual perspective that the individual is not the sole driver of one’s success.  The societal outliers are the result of linear progressions on inter-connected and related events.  It is a very interesting. and even entertaining read.  Definitely a must read.

As reported by Wired, researchers have found that doodling helps people remember and concentrate during those boring classes and meetings.  Really?!  Those of us that doodle didn't need a study to realize that.