Freelancers Blues: The thought that at any given moment, at any given day, you could be working.
-Francis Gulotta

Recently I discovered Room to Read. It's a global non profit started by an ex-marketing director of Microsoft that creates schools and libraries in third world countries. It's run like a profitable business and expanding like one too. They're opening more libraries a day then Starbucks or McDonalds can open stores.

As of their last quarter their stats are;

1. Schools 1,450
2. Libraries 12,522
3. Books Published 591
4. Books Distributed 10 million
5. Girls' Edu…

"Design is about supplying Intent." -John Hockenberry's Dad

Thisshort talkhas had a profound change in my thought patterns.

Download mp4

I can't imagine that the big screens are that helpful, but they are cool.

A friend of mine recently made some really nice personal business cards on moo.com. Crazy nice printing, nice thick stock, large high quality photo, double sided. I feel like Patrick Bateman just thinking about it.

I decided to make a wish a reality, so I got some for my team.

We can write ticket numbers on the back in silver sharpie and leave them on peoples desk when we're looking for them. Eventually I'm going to run a technological strike te…

From my few years of working in a NOC I've seen a lot of stupid behaviors from devices in regards to monitoring and notifications. Here's my current list of gripes.

I wish your app, monitoring product and/or device would take the following list into consideration when you decide to add SNMP Notification (trap) support.

1. You probably don't need more then one custom trap. A few different traps for different types of notifications is fine. 30,000 di…

As you may know I work in a Network Operation Center or as my business card says "THE NOC". What is life like in the NOC?

My team is responsible for monitoring a large number of hardware devices (Are they working? Did something break? Is it fixed?), servers (Are they responding? How's their storage? Is something trying to kill it?) applications (Is it running? Why did it crash? Can it start up again?), and business processes (Did these jobs fail?…

Go watch Martin Scorsese's "Hugo" based off the book "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" by Brian Selznick. Don't however watch any trailers or pay attention to any advertising. Whoever was in charge of marketing this movie screwed it up royally. I hadn't seen the trailers, and now that I've seen them I can say, "Don't watch them!". They are misleading and give away important plot points.

Other non-spoiling things I learned about Hugo from it's market…

Good umbrellas are rare. Today I was coveting the BLUNT MINI. An umbrella that will probably never break and satisfies my inner engineer. It's designed to have a low wind profile, mitigate the risk of poking people in the eye, and distribute stress across it's structure. It doesn't look half bad either.

The problem with nice umbrellas are they cost a lot. The BLUNT Mini is $80 and I'll probably leave it somewhere before it breaks. I'd have to go…

I've been reading a lot about Richard Feynman lately. I found this breathtaking. I love how this man looks at the world. It makes me so happy.

A project called The Feynman Series produced 5 videos. My favorite are below.

Beauty

Honours

Curiosity

I was listening to some dam fine journalism the other day.

Don't see the player? Try their website. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/430/very-tough-love

Ira Glass of This American Life spent a few weeks in Glynn County, Georgia investigating a "drug court" that seems to have the power to legally imprison people without oversight, for indefinite amounts of time and relatively small charges. In the show's two acts he touched o…

(This post is for all you freelancers out there.)

I got work consulting right out of college. I quit school. It was more giving up spending mtoney on something I wasn't happy with than not wanting an education. (Not to speak ill of Rowan University, but I wasn't happy in the middle of nowhere New Jersey.) When I came home I figured I'd straighten myself out and go back to school elsewhere. My godfather had plans for me in the meantime.

He figured…

Herd these little guys on my way home the other day. No idea what kind of birds they are but they sure are loud. Good thing they're cute. They hung around a while and flew off.

I saw them visit the next day too.

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/roborooter/5264526835/

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