When the floor refinishers came and took up the carpet and brought our upstairs hardwood floors back to life, they accidentally burned out my old 1990s alarm system. But I wasn’t mad — I’d been thinking about replacing it anyway. We haven’t had it monitored in awhile, but I liked having one. Even just to…
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What do Police Departments and Public Schools have in common? In 2020 they’ve both been forced to reckon with situations that question their legitimate, organizational authority. One over perceived systemic racism and safety (Black Lives Matter) and the other over COVID-19: how to engage with stakeholders, how to share information, and (allegedly) safeguard the personal…
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Not long ago, I bought myself a Scott’s reel push mower. I’ve always wanted one, and I found one for $20 at our Habitat for Humanity Re:Store. It looked new, but had zero grease in the gears and wasn’t properly set up. One side wasn’t tight enough to cut grass. Many people older than me…
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I’ve been reading a bit about the 200 viruses that are known collectively as “the common cold.” Three or four of those are coronaviruses, the latest of which science believes jumped to humans approximately 10,000 years ago (~8,000 BCE). They estimate the world population then was between 1-10 Million. The upper end is the current…
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Today the Tulsa World published an Opinion piece by me that I called “Hamilton Summer.” A Summer of deep-diving into the history and scholarship of the musical “Hamilton” made me think about how hard (and fragile) American democracy is. You can read the Tulsa World article here. Enjoy, and if you’re looking for IT Management…
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August 23, 2020 Make no mistake; the COVID-19 pandemic is expensive. In a macroeconomic sense: world economies sputter along in low speed, needing fewer of this and that means fewer people employed, making fewer dollars, and national and world GDP not nearly as robust as before. No doubt the world we go back to will…
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For years as an IT diagnostician, my most sought-after skill was being able to know someone’s mind (and thus their technology needs) well enough to anticipate needs, or at the least being able to translate needs into something I can deliver. Later as an IT Director and V-P, when onboarding beginner Tier 1 tech support…
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In 2018 I attended a United Way Finance, Talent, & Technology conference in Houston, TX. Being the sort of personal branding/marketing savvy person that I am, I posted extensively about the event on our new corporate Facebook site before I got there. So it should have been no surprise that at lunch on the first…
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March 27, 2020 A week ago today I went into the hospital for what turned out to be appendicitis. While I was waiting for my CT scan that morning, my appendix burst. I got out Tuesday this week with a boatload of heavy antibiotics to clean out all the sepsis from my blood, etc. If…
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Note: I started this post in late February 2020, before the pandemic lockdown, to remind and describe how companies have “pivoted” (hate that term) in the past due to societal mandates. Now I finally went back, post-surgery, to finish it… See the “Mad Men”-esque image above. Where’s your organization’s secretarial pool? Not long ago (my…
