Category: Miscellaneous

What I Can Offer You and Your Company

A year ago I re-opened my professional consultancy and have had the pleasure of working with several local and global companies and organizations. Here’s a partial list of some of the things I can do for you:
  • Provide an honest assessment of your information technology operation
  • Offer executives a “plain English” explanation of technology
  • Provide you a motivated and expert speaker for company events and conferences
  • Personalized executive technology coaching and training
  • Help you answer the question “IT tells me everything is perfect but is it really?”
  • Offer you the cold hard facts about social media
  • Provide opinions and constructive feedback for new software and hardware initiatives
  • Help you learn more about the “cloud”, its benefits and how it can be implemented
  • Assist you in determining if your company’s data is secure

Learn more >

 

Why I didn’t Look at Your Resume

If you’re looking for a new gig or career, I wanted to share this list of hiring red flags publicly. These things to watch out for will vary by industry and company, but if you’re looking for a position at a startup, an agency, or something in the online industry, this list may help you avoid ending up in the immediate ‘no’ pile.

Read Mikael Cho’s entire article >

Your Email Says Absolutely Nothing

Here’s the sound a blind person hears when their screen reader reads your email aloud that only contains a graphical image announcing an event:

“Image, Event announcement”

Pro Tip: Don’t send email messages that have all the content in your super cool Photoshop/MSPaint graphic.

The Creative World’s Bullshit Industrial Complex

They are what philosopher Harry Frankfurt would call “bullshitters.” Those that are giving advice for the sake of giving advice, without any regard as to how it is actually implemented, if it can even be implemented at all. “It’s not important to [the bullshitter] what the world really is like,” he says in a short video documentary about the phenomenon (below). “What is important is how he’d like to represent himself.”

…

This Bullshit Industrial Complex has always existed. But thanks to the precarious economics and job prospects of the creative person, it is often in a creative’s financial interest to climb the bullshit pyramid. In the short term, it’s creating a class of (often young) creatives deluded into thinking they are doing something meaningful by sharing “advice.” Long term, it’s robbing us of a creative talent.

Read the entire story on 99U >

#TheWayToMigrate off of IBM Lotus Notes and Domino

LDC Via just released a new white paper entitled “LDC Via: a new way to migrate“. I highly recommend that you go and read the whitepaper and schedule some time with the folks at LDC Via. Tell them I sent you. If you are at IBM Connect in Orlando, it would be great to find Ben, Matt, Mark or Julian and see first hand how easy you can move your data off of IBM Lotus Notes and Domino.

Software migrations are like a divorce

Moving to another enterprise software stack is like a divorce:

  • it costs a lot of money
  • It never goes as planned
  • There will be a lot of yelling and name calling
  • It’s an emotional rollercoaster
  • Having to move out into a new “stack” is scary
  • Once it’s completed you feel great

And if you decide not to “divorce” you:

  • You will be miserable
  • There will be a lot of yelling and name calling
  • You won’t get to try out new things
  • Your users will continue to be miserable
  • You only live once

Technology and Blind Students

Here’s a video my friend Andrew Pennington, a student at the Washington State School for the Blind made:

Here is a some more information about my recent experience with Andrew while teaching at Clark College that was originally shared on Facebook:

What a wonderful day it has been. My job shadow student from the Washington State School for the Blind spent the day working with me on class prep, code examples, a tour of the campus and then spent 2 hours in my PHP class. The students in the PHP class made him feel part of the class. He also shared with the class his plans for becoming a programmer and his plans to attend WSU. He was also very witty, which for those of you who know my PHP students, fit in perfectly

Another thing that truly struck a chord with me was that he has the same visual acuity as I do. Throughout the day I kept flashing back to myself at his age.

Again, what an awesome experience it was to host him at Clark College — Vancouver, Washington today.

You can also follow Andrew on Twitter.