Minnesota is known for its “unofficial” state bird, the mosquito. One thing nice about Portland. No bugs!! It is so nice to walk around town, the woods, anywhere and not be bothered by mosquitos. People out here don’t even know what bug spray is. Wood ticks and deer ticks aren’t as much of an issue either. Just awesome!
Now, I am from Minnesota originally. I drove over that bridge 3 days before it collapsed. It sucks, its a bad thing for the state, for the people involved, and for everyone who passed or is injured. It is a very sad situation that no one should have to go through.
What does the bridge collapsing have to do with IT? Well. It is a disaster. And like IT disaster scenarios, it gets the same “Oh my god we need to fix this” after the fact treatment.
MN Gov. Pawlenty announced an immediate emergency round of inspections of all of the state’s bridges, starting with the three that have the same structure as the crumbled Minneapolis span. Other Gov’s are having their bridges inspected in their states. People are running around going crazy about inspecting bridges that 3 days ago they could care less about. – What gives?
Really? Lets do something after the fact. The bottom line is that these kind of action plans should have been set up beforehand. Just like in IT. Backups is a good example. No one says or does anything or wants to spend any money on backups. Then one day, the server crashes and everyone loses their files and email. I will bet money the next day there is a huge budget and people running around like idiots getting a backup plan in action.
Where were those people before hand? We know that stuff needs to be backed up. We know that bridges need to be inspected. WTF are we doing? If we know the possible problems, and we know how we can prevent them, then why do we let things slide. Where is the accountability?
The government needs to step up. People that are leaders/decision makers need to step up. And if something does go awry, they need to take responsibility for what happened. Wether it is a bridge that fell, or a server that crashed, or any other disaster scenario.
Just randomly by accident, I typed in a search in Google, and accidentally put an apostrophe in front of the word. On the results, I noticed something was wacked, the top search bar was missing. I tried this for multiple keywords. Not sure if this always happened or if it is just a little bug.
try it: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%27test
Seems to work fine in Firefox, but IE7 the top search box, logo, are missing. Weird
Went up to Mt. Tabor Park this afternoon, walked around. I guess it is a dormant volcano, which is cool. Named after the real Mt. Tabor that is like 6 miles east. Pretty nice place. If I had an EVDO card, I probably would take my laptop up there for an afternoon.
Anyways, here are some pics:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/scaleovenstove/sets/72157601132152317/
Last week, Heidi and I went to The Veranda Lounge at the Pioneer Place Theatre in St. Cloud. The Half Steps were singing. I pulled out the digital camera and recorded them singing “That’s Amore” (think: Dean Martin).
After traveling this week, it has become really more apparent that technology plays a major role in the whole traveling process, as well as family interaction. Now I know there are the old schooler’s out there that will be like, phhh, you don’t need technology to do anything. I am not saying that, I am just saying it can make it easier, maybe a little better. Also, there are some things that bring people together (think of a Grandfather and Grandson fixing a car) – well, these same type of things are now the norm, but over technology (replace car with computer or cell phone – and the Grandson teaching the Grandfather).
Over the last 10 days or so, this is what I have seen.
MySpace: First, I hate MySpace. But tons of people are on it, and you can reconnect with old friends and people you know. A while back an ex-girlfriend of mine who I haven’t talked to in like 10 years contacted me on MySpace. We started talking, emailing, IM’ing, and then last weekend we went out for a beer and around, which was odd, but good. Thing is, this probably would never happened without MySpace.
Facebook: Same as MySpace – just different groups of people. Easy to update your status of what you are doing, plus message friends and plan things. I used this to find out about some people being out one night that I wanted to see, and ended up seeing them. Another thing, people find out when you break up with someone if you have that set on Facebook, which leads to people talking to you, asking you to hang, etc. Also, my boss and I figured out that Nickelback was playing because of iLike, on a day I was in town, and we decided to go. Which leads to the next thing…
Craigslist: To get the tickets for the concert, he used Craigslist. We ended up getting floor tickets, for cheap. We saw some people at the show we knew, and they paid almost double.
Twitter: here is a great one. As you are doing things, tweet it, and your friends can know what’s going on. Adds to your “Life Stream”. I used this to track cool things that were happening, as well as keep up on friends back in Portland, and other tech tweets (I knew what was going on at the TechCrunch party in CA from tweets and twittergrams).
Digital Cameras: No brainer here. Taking picture of cool things on a trip. Using your cell phone or a regular camera, either way, you can get cool photos, which then you can upload to..
Flickr/Picasa Web Albums, et al: Good way to show your pictures off to friends and family.
Online Flight Check In: I used this twice, the way out, and back. Print off your boarding pass, choose your seats. Pretty easy and saves some time at the airport.
Maps and Locations: Use this to get to the airport, and around. local.live.com though – you know how I feel about Google maps.
Texts/Texting: – another no brainer. Text your friends and family instead of calling.
Instant Messaging: another good thing, especially if you can do it from your phone, or reply to text’s to someone’s IM (AOL and MSN allow this). just another way to keep in touch and plan things
Cell Phones: – wikipedia, emails, photos, videos – you can use cell phones these days to do a ton. Look up stuff on wikipedia, get directions, movie times, its your contacts and calendar, alarm clock – everything
Laptops: – need this for traveling. Get on wifi spots, VPN into work, check your email, read blogs, etc.
Helping family technology wise – ok here is how the family fits in. Every time I come home, everyone in my family has some new computer or cell phone or something they can’t figure out and I end up helping, which leads to conversation, bonding, getting together, going out after (let’s go get some beer), etc. My grandpa got a new Sony Ericsson walkman phone and needed some guidance getting it going for example.
Online family tree – started this on Geni.com about a month ago. Reconnect with family, figure out what is going on, before you go home.
Scheduling/Calendars: if you use outlook, or any other online calendar you can access, then good. You can really maximize your time using calendars, and get alerts on upcoming appointments, etc/
YouTube: upload your Nickelback videos, duh! (I do have some of a great acapella group I saw in St. Cloud too!)
Blogs: you can also write to your blog to keep people in the loop. Track your flight, and just know you are OK once you land. BTW, I am on NWA 597 on the way back if you want to track me!
I am sure there is a ton more, but this is a good starting list. I figure this post is also a good way to give some details into what I did on the trip. I obviously did more, but its a good start. I will post up some pictures/videos once I get back to PDX (I am in the MSP airport right now, drinking a beer :))
Stumbled across a pretty cool site the other day, Walk Score (https://www.redfin.com/how-walk-score-works) – you put in your address and it gives you back a score between 0 and 100 about how good your location is to walk around to other places nearby. I got a 94/100 – pretty good!
Here is my walkscore link:
http://www.walkscore.com/get-score.shtml?street=2190+W.+Burnside+St&loc=97210&go=Go
I have been in Minnesota since Saturday night. Like being back, but for some reason I miss PDX. Many stories though already and it is only Tuesday. Will blog more later. I need to go do the Dance of the Manatee…
Many changes happening. Some good, some great, some just, changes. Who moved my cheese? 🙂
Wow, so anyway’s, I have been trying out the new RealPlayer (http://www.real.com) and it is pretty sweet. I don’t use it to play anything, but what it does add is a little thing in your browser to download YouTube videos, and other flash videos, directly to your computer. Awesome!
Also installed SongBird – by Mozilla. It is actually based on the Firefox code base. Reason why it is so sweet? It “plays the web”. You goto a site with mp3’s in it, and it shows which ones, you can play them, download them to your local library, etc. It is pretty sweet, great feature. As far as a player? Not sure yet, it is 0.98 version, I want to see version 1.0
I am at the PDX airport right now waiting for my flight, NW 598 – if you are bored today, use Google Earth and track my flight! (I have blogged about this before) Heading back to MN for the week, 21st-29th. Should be a good time. Going to Nickelback on Monday, hanging with friends the rest of the week, heading up the Iron Range at the end of the week. My dad finally got high speed, wow, 2007…
Oh BTW – was at the pub in the airport, sitting next to Cameron Diaz, pretty crazy!
See you in Central Standard Time!
Tonight I walked on down the block to the Portland Blogger Dinner at Jive Software. Pretty cool. Jive is nice, Wii, 360, beer on tap in the break room… the work on a product called ClearSpace – collaboration software written in Java.
It was a good get together, met some cool people. I added some pictures up on flickr as well
http://www.flickr.com/photos/scaleovenstove/sets/72157600915176106/
Some bigger bloggers where there, Jeremiah Owyang and Robert Scoble, and Josh Bancroft from Intel, all very nice people. Good times, can’t wait till the next one!
Of course, the topics of the night were Facebook, Twitter, and the iPhone…
Steve Novoselac's Blog 