Five Components

Design and Change Management

Over my career, I have developed a few strongly-held design beliefs, and one came up in conversation recently, during a spirited discussion on minimal quality requirements for a[ny] data mart. I hold that the data copied from source to destination must be provably correct and complete with little effort. When agile-ly rolling staged deliverables into production, I may not have all the attributes in place for full flexibility of drill down, but if you have [say] 1248 records in the…

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It’s Design, not Decorating

A few months ago, I read Dan Pink's book, A Whole New Mind. Excellent stuff, with echoes in his video What Really Motivates Us? (check it out here), and it introduced me to the idea of "right mind thinking". I've had a great respect for and interest in Architecture over the years, and have watched with great fascination (and a bit of jealousy) as my daughter progresses through her Interior Design studies at the University of Cincinnati (she's the quote…

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What Really Motivates Us? Insights for your Tech Team

Over the last month or so, a large number of authors in my RSS reader called attention to Dan Pink's 'Drive' video ... httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc Props to Cool Infographics (home of the Caffeine Poster!) with the post that introduced me to the video. Key insight from Randy Krum: is this a video? A well done presentation? Or another innovative infographic? Global Nerdy (a site with style and substance - content does not match the title!) calls out that this idea has…

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More Amazing Social Media Statistics

A follow-on from my last post; speaking of interesting Social Media statistics ... would you believe ... If Facebook were a country, it would be the world's 4th largest 80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees In 2009, Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices 25% of search results for the world's Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content Pretty amazing stuff…

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Lost Weekend: Troubleshooting a MySQL Installation

Spurred on by Blogger's decision to stop supporting FTP for publishing blogs, I have finally started the long process to implement a WordPress blog - hosted by myself, not Wordpress.com. To be fair, I am making this longer than it necessarily needs to be, but I am continuing my efforts to maintain a comprehensive Admin guide for all of my development efforts - configuring servers, installing software, etc. Needless to say, this adds overhead and time, but it's worth the…

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