The-Asterisk

I am currently reading the book " Enough: True Measures of Money, Business and Life " by John C. Bogle, the founder of the Vanguard Mutual Fund family. It is a very good book and comes highly recommended by Tom Peters , but lest you think this blog post is about the book, it is not... It is a quick blurb about how much stuff is enough. Last week, I had a small water line that feeds my refrigerator ice maker burst at my cabin. I was not there when it happened and it was about 4 days before it was discovered. Wow, does water ever seek its own level! First, it got on the wood floor, then under the wood floor, then under the tar paper over the subfloor and then when that was full, it just cascaded down walls and ducts into the basement where it repeated the scenario until it finally found a way to get outside. Once it was discovered, we got the ServiceMaster people out there with blowers and dehumidifiers, and generally got most of the obvious water cleared out in about a day. ...

Headline in today's local paper " BP's rosy spill plan vs. the grim reality " reflects a feeling that I have had for a number of years. It talks about how BP said they could suck up most of the 20 million barrels of oil, but the oil is now covering over 3,300 square miles. About how the blowout would have "no adverse impact" on marine animals, but it obviously has. And about how the blowout site was too far offshore to necessitate shore cleanup concerns, but the reality is that the currents are spreading the oil to the shores to the north and east as well as potentially to the eastern coast of the US. Please note that this is not a BP bashing post. There is enough of that from other bloggers and from the White House. This is a post about 'settled science'. Don't get me wrong. I love science. I am constantly amazed at the new products and services we get every day because of advances in science. But the untold secret is the fact that for every adv...

With apologies to Joni Mitchell. I am sure that someone else has used this metaphor before, but I haven't seen it, so I am going to claim it as original thought... While cruising at 38,000 feet on my way to the Kaseya Connect User Conference in Las Vegas, I am looking out at beautiful, fluffy clouds. I don't know if they are Cumulus, Nimbus, Cirrus or a combination thereof. They just look pretty and innocent. From the ground however, it could be a whole different story. It might be a thunderstorm dumping unneeded rain on saturated ground causing flooding and destruction, or it could be the same storm dumping millions of gallons of water onto parched crops, saving thousands of people from thirst and starvation. The clouds could also be an annoying drizzle on a family picnic, or they could be providing blessed shade from a blistering sun. My point is that as we move into cloud computing, every business and every IT service provider will see the same thing in myriad ways; some goo...