Living in Tulsa recently has brought me face-to-face with how quickly we revert to the herd mentality, particularly when we find ourselves in an information-poor environment. With amazing speed we will tacitly accept “truth” from very tenuous sources, and spread it around like manure to feed and grow further mania. I’m speaking of course about…
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08/30/2016: Since I’m all about lowering one’s energy consumption (within reason), our rent home came with a lovely mercury-filled “slider” thermostat, circa 1995. For our first month it seems the thing was a blunt instrument — running way too much and keeping us dashing back and forth to raise or lower it. PSO tells me…
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Permit me a momentary rant, which may anger some folks… If you’re healthy, and not an invalid…don’t have a Doctor’s note or in other ways not able to walk briskly for a half hour at a time…then you should mow your own lawn. You’ve heard of the “broken windows” theory? Which states essentially that a…
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Last week we completed (mostly) our move from our house of 15+ years to a new rental in South Tulsa. Too many reasons to go into detail as to why — the thing I’m talking about now is DESIGN and how when it’s absent, you notice it. Background: our house in Midtown Tulsa was built…
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Stories abound about ways in which the Internet has been a disruptor to business and the status quo. Back in the early 90s I got to witness the carnage and bloodshed firsthand at the University of Tulsa. As I said in the About…History is written by the victors, and the folks who were the high…
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One of my interests is architecture and urban design, so allow me to introduce you to two little books by Witold Rybczynski… Between Home: A Short History of an Idea and City Life, you can’t go wrong. If you’re like me and love older homes and former streetcar neighborhoods, Home will explain much about why we…
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With apologies to the late, great Prince…RIP. You’ve all heard the hype and bluster about the Cloud. As a term, I smirk about it being a “new” concept: the AT&T reps who used to call on me at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oklahoma were using it in 2000. It’s old telco jargon that’s now…
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This is very cool — my alma mater (and former employer) the University of Tulsa is installing an HUGE solar array on the roof of the Case Center in Tulsa. My Leadership Tulsa #49 colleague Jason Grunin tells me that the project will begin shortly, near the end of June. The 300-kilowatt array will belong…
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From earlier: I joined TU in 1990 to run the campus computer labs. Since I was still young-looking, when Bob Chappelle hired me my first task was go undercover — bring a backpack and visit all the computer labs masquerading as a student lab patron: see what the student lab workers were doing, etc. etc. It…
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I started working in higher education IT in February of 1990, when the Internet was still the private playground of academia. Because of our computer science faculty requiring access to supercomputer sites for their research, the University of Tulsa was connected to one of the original NSFNet backbones. Our upstream provider was MIDnet in Lincoln, Nebraska…