The real message of Christmas for me, as a Christian, is the creator becoming part of the creation. The story can be found this time of year in many carols and the treasured, time-honored tales. It’s all based on what we know from history of that culture and what’s recorded in the Scriptures […]

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McDonalds is really wanting to get in on the coffee game. How do I know? All the local stores are doing “Free Lattes” all day on Friday. Free? Can you imagine if your local Starbucks had free Lattes? The police would have to direct traffic in front of the stores. We stopped to […]

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My iMac does this crazy thing where the desktop gets all kinds of “quilted” patterns on the screen. I’ve had it in the store and they can’t find anything. Of course they want to restore the OS and other mess. Isn’t this why I bought a Mac? Turns out tons of […]

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Apple is what is wrong with the iPhone. Apple tightly controls several aspects of the phone. The software development interfaces don’t allow you to access some of the core data on the phone. This means you won’t find a great replacement calendar in the App Store. In addition, Apple also does […]

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You’ve heard the old saying about “Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” right? I think we know that’s not true, but it’s also wrong when it comes to buzzwords in the Enterprise. Want to see your corporate leadership and legal department run to the hills and […]

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I recently updated my iPhone to the latest 2.1 release. There were a lot of improvements, but the one that interested me the most were improvements to the radio. I live in a cellular dead zone - I get a bar once and a while which is just enough to annoy me. […]

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AT&T launched the iPhone last year. Despite some severe limitations (slower network, no easy way to install apps) the platform took off like a rocket. Now with the ability to install apps (from a managed distribution channel) and fast network support it would seem the iPhone has become the killer smartphone device. […]

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My local Dominos finally started offering online ordering. Why order pizza online? I like to view what the specials are, see what things I can add, and get the family requests figured out without a stressed-out teenage employee on the other end of the phone. We’ve ordered Pizza Hut online for years, […]

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As I’ve started to follow my co-worker’s life data feeds (blogs, twitter, facebook) I find myself enjoying people at another level. Someone who was just “another person” on that “weekly call” is now a person that did something interesting, or just had a baby, or ___________.
Think of the opportunities, and the scary things.

Your former […]

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Need Proof?

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I recently had an interesting problem. I kept getting warnings from my router about a 3rd party router being connected. You might say, “How does your router warn you?” While browsing the web my router would force a redirect to a web page (hosted by the router’s web server) instructing me that a […]

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Session One was a loser. Automation of MDA to J2EE (TS-7466). While a potentially interesting topic it wasn’t apparent from the description that this was basically a vendor demonstration. Those things should somehow be noted better. Every five years I sit through (as a skeptic) and listen to the model driven […]

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The day started out with a keynote from Oracle. Some interesting stuff. The mentality of Oracle hasn’t changed much over the years. They provide an IDE, runtimes, database integration that is very seamless but hopelessly proprietary. It’s all “standards based” meaning where they use standard plumbing and interfaces. However the […]

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The keynote had the typical stuff, music, dancing, and of course the infamous t-shirt catapult. I was happy to have one bounce of a Sun rep, hit my coffee, and land at my feet. The main keynote theme hit a few interesting items. Probably the most interesting was the JavaFX demo where they had […]

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Ever feel like you are wearing the corporate version of a “kick-me” sign? I’ve found it very interesting dealing with the legal/management concerns some companies have about concepts like blogging. Most companies have knowledge management tools that allow for searching, searchable repositories (often web accessible), and gads of Intranet pages created by goodness-knows-what […]

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I like a lot of your products! I want to like your coffee.

Comes in fun cans
Less than $8/lb average
Quite a few varieties
Quick and easy (minutes from home).

It just seems stale to me. I’ve tried a few cans over the last year. The aroma when opening a coffee container says a […]

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Apple has great commercials. The PC/Mac guy ads are always good for a laugh. Here’s one if case you haven’t seen them.

I recently got an iMac, 20″ LCD screen. I’ve mostly liked it. I’ve had problems with some of the graphics I created for my friend Steve’s website. The top […]

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I’ve had a lot of practice at this, and I’m still not very good at it. Is it the quality of the foam or pouring technique issue? We had our friends Brian and Angela over this Sunday and I made a couple of lattes. One was “abstract art”, the other a “scorpion” […]

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Well… I finally took the plunge. I bought a refurb Garmin 550 from buy.com for $179. I’ve wanted one for my wife, and for when we travel - but I also wanted one for bluetooth phone integration (as a speakerphone). The price point was always $350 or more - more than I […]

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Social networking tools are becoming a commodity. Look at the script panel of any Internet hosting company and you’ll see blogging tools, interactive content management systems, wikis, and more. There are also a host of free software service sites. Blogger.com and wordpress.com are just a couple examples in the blog space. […]

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