In today’s society, we have many modern technologies: cellphones, the Internet, meat-flavoured alternatives, artificial turf, and – my personal favourites – running water and deodorant. While the concept of running water and deodorant may not be new to most people in Canadian society, it remains a mystery to some of those who are either newly-arrived or wilfully-ignorant. Possibly both.
Communication: How much, how often, and to whom?
I wrote this as a discussion starter on LinkedIn and figured I might as well put it here, with a few minor edits and expansion on ideas:
With small, short-term projects involving and/or affecting a limited number of stakeholders, communication of progress and change is fairly straight-forward. If communication takes a bit of a backseat chances are you can remedy that with a quick email or phonecall. However, with large, long-term projects like a core systems replacement, communication has to be aimed at different groups with varying levels of detail and possibly at different intervals.
Why Technology Should Not Drive Business Change
I’ve seen instances where a Business will look to replace its legacy systems but falls short in terms of properly articulating why this is desired. When you talk to stakeholders, the drivers that tend to emerge are that the systems are old, aren’t flexible enough, and/or aren’t able to be maintained for much longer. These are all valid reasons but fail to address the underlying motive behind replacing legacy systems: the Business is looking to change and can’t do that given its current technical constraints.
Wisdom comes from being old, right?
On Thursday, May 13, 2010, I had all four of my wisdom teeth extracted. Fortunately, all were straight and erupted through the gum (as opposed to impacting other teeth and buried) which meant I only required local freezing instead of being put under. Good work, wisdom teeth, you saved me a thousand dollars in the process of costing me nine hundred.
Get The Flu: It’ll Save Your Life
Get the flu. No, not the flu shot, the flu. Go make out with that sick person who insists on coming into your office brimming with disease. Stop washing your hands and reach out to as many people as you can with those dirty little digits. Grab onto grandma and hold her extra close when she gives you a big hug that leaves you smelling of lavender and B.O. The next time someone sneezes, take as deep a breath as possible and see if you can position yourself with your mouth open in case they have one or two more to fire out.
How are the children?
My dad wrote a letter to the Edmonton Journal which was published on September 15, 2009. I’m republishing it here because I couldn’t agree more with what he’s said – nice work, Dad!
The Masai tribe in Africa was considered to be one of the most fearsome and intelligent. Their traditional greeting was, “Kasserian ingera” which means, “and how are the children?” Even warriors without children would reply, “All the children are well,” meaning that their priorities of caring for the young and maintaining their society were in place.
Shaw Plays Victim of Evil CRTC
This month I looked at my latest cable/internet bill and was surprised by a nice increase in the amount owing. At first I thought I’d been late on my last payment. Nope, that wasn’t it so what could it be? I did some investigation and found Shaw has passed along a tax imposed by the CRTC as part of the Local Programming Improvement Fund (LPIF). What’s interesting is that the CRTC said the following regarding the tax: