Tales from the Technoverse

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Our Annual Nationals Spring Training Pilgrimage – Day 3

March 16th, 2013 · baseball, restaurants

Today was an away game in Jupiter against the Cardinals. The Cardinals are one of the few other East Coast Florida teams, we have gone to a Jupiter game almost every year we have gone to Spring Training.

Jupiter is a just under a two-hour drive south of Viera. The desire of the Nationals to have some number of teams closer than two-hours away is one of the reasons they evidently are considering moving from Viera.

After participating in a few business-related conference calls in the morning, we drove to Roger Dean Stadium, home of the Cardinals. In the past we have taken the coastal road and stopped by a number of the very pretty beaches along the way, this time we just went down the relatively boring Route 95 drive.

It was interesting to see Spring Training tickets being scalped on the way into the stadium. Toward the end of the game they announced that the crowd, a bit over nine-thousand was the second largest crowd in the history of the stadium.

However that was about it for interesting. As usual with Spring Training games, the visiting team sends few of its regulars so the only player likely to be part of a ‘normal’ Nationals starting line-up that was there was the catcher, Kurt Suzuki. Dan Haren, slated to be the fifth starter in the five-pitcher rotation pitched five innings. After he gave up four runs in the first inning, including a lead-off homerun, the game was basically over. The Nationals lost 5-1.

Having said that, a day in the sun watching a baseball game (this time while wearing sunscreen), is not such a bad way to spend a day in March.

In the evening, we had dinner at the Bacco Wine Cafe, http://www.baccowinecafe.com/, a family run Italian Restaurant. For those of you who are in the Viera/Melbourne area I highly recommend going there. The staff, many of whom are family members, are attentive; the food really excellent; and those who were at the dinner who were wine knowledgeable (I am not) tell me the wine was really excellent.

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Nationals Spring Training Pilgrimage – Two Days Down, Two To Go

March 15th, 2013 · amarc, baseball, government, hockey, mobility, washington nationals

It is always great fun coming to Nationals Spring Training. For those of you who have never done so, I would recommend it (either for the Nationals if that is your favorite baseball team, or for whichever team is).

The weather is pretty nice, especially the further north you live, the pace is informal, the fields much smaller and intimate and the opportunity to run into players either at the game or in restaurants or similar locations much higher.

We flew down Wednesday morning.  I actually had some business to transact for our first stop.

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The Magistrate

March 3rd, 2013 · Entertainment, theatre

Last night, Ellen and I attended our first “live” event at a location different than the event itself. We had seen advertisements for these often at movie theatres, often for opera performances. This one, seen at the Shakespeare Theatre’s Harmon Hall came about almost by accident.

I received an email from the Shakespeare Theatre that John Lithgow was going to be performing in a play called “The Magistrate” Saturday evening, March 2. I am a big fan of John Lithgow and had never seen him live and even though I had never seen the play he was going to be in, I thought it would be fun. Ellen agreed to go and only then did I realize that the play was being performed in London while we would be in Washington DC. After checking with Ellen we decided to buy tickets and see what it was like.

When I was having lunch with a friend last week he mentioned that since the play would start at 8pm Washington time it was highly unlikely that it would be actually be ‘live’ in London. Well, duh (I realized).

Thus, when we got to the Harmon we were introduced to the concept of live and ‘nearly live’. So we thus were able to use our home theatre to watch a recording of a live play assuming our home theatre could seat a couple of thousand people.

As a side note, the acting was fine (what would you expect from a play done in London), John Lithgow was great (though I suspect his role would have been better served by someone a bit more ‘English’), but the play itself was only ordinary. It was a 19th century English farce, thus dealing with errors in social behavior; unlike let us say a French farce which typically deals with errors in sex.

Our conclusion was that we would probably try it again at some point since at a minimum it allowed us to see in sort of a theatre setting some performances we would otherwise rarely have a chance to see. On the other hand, perhaps I can talk Ellen into just going to a theatre run in London sometime.

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ESEM Consulting LLC

February 5th, 2013 · ESEM Consulting LLC, government business, technology

It’s great when what you do best and enjoy most are the same thing.  In my case, helping people and organizations become the best they can be really does it.

Achieving organizational and business success gives me personal pleasure and carries through to all aspects of life.

It was with this in mind that I created ESEM Consulting. My focus is to work with small-to-medium sized IT companies who want to grow their presence in the Federal marketplace. My experience is that as companies work to expand, senior staff expertise, the organizational culture, and, the strategy for business development and capture, are not ready to propel the company forward.

Using my executive level experience both inside and outside of the Federal Government, as well as my technology, management, and capture experience in small and large companies, now is my chance to do what I enjoy and to help other companies and their leadership grow to the next level.  I’ve synthesized the key elements in a one-page description of the services ESEM Consulting is offering:

ESEM Consulting 1-Page Summary

Feel free to reach out with questions or comments and do share the information with others that might benefit from our services.

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Federal News Countdown – February 1st

February 3rd, 2013 · CIO, government 2.0, technology, telework

I was, to my continual amazement, invited back again to be on the Federal news Countdown, hosted by Francis Rose, on WFED, on the AM dial at 1500.

During the show two guests go over their top three Federal news stories of the week, starting with their third most important, then their second and finally their most important story. The other guess this time was Larry Allen, http://www.allenfederal.com/. Larry is a long-time industry expert on acquisition and a good person. Having been on this particular show a number of times, this one was particularly fun to do.

It can be heard here, http://www.federalnewsradio.com/86/3215767/Federal-News-Countdown-Mobility-Section-508-update-and-sequestration-worries.

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When Is It ‘Okay’ To Hack Into A System?

January 31st, 2013 · CIO, cyber-security, technology

Recently there was a situation where a student at Dawson College in Montreal hacked into his school’s network and was expelled from the school.

What seemed like a pretty obvious and reasonable result turned out not to be so clear-cut.

Eric Chabrow wrote a column on this at govinfosecurity.com, The Ethics Behind Gray-Hat Hacking.

He asked me for my opinion, I provided some background on an incident that happened while I was the CIO at the US Department of Transportation which I felt provided some insight into the question at hand.

http://www.govinfosecurity.com/ethics-behind-gray-hat-hacking-a-5459

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Interviewed for the 29 Jan CTOvision Podcast

January 30th, 2013 · cyber-security, technology

Bob Gourley and I have put in place an informal agreement for me to participate in the CTOvision Podcasts periodically.

The focus will be relate to cybersecurity issues. The first podcast in the series was recorded  yesterday, January 29th and can be accessed here:

http://ctovision.com/2013/01/29-jan-cyber-podcast/

 

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How AFCEA Improved My Home Wireless Network

January 14th, 2013 · afcea, mobility, technology

This last Saturday I was lucky enough to attend the annual AFCEA volunteer appreciation event at FedEx field. While there Ellen and I got to meet Brian Mitchell, a very classy guy and a great former Redskin.

I also ran into an old friend from my Sun days, Dennis McLain, who continues to be one of the smartest people I ever knew. He now works at Fortress Technologies which was bought by General Dynamics and is now probably called something else. They deal with wireless technologies and in the course of the conversation, Dennis spent some time discussing channel conflicts and wireless optimization.

After the event when we got home, I thought about how our home wireless network was sometimes not as fast as we would like. SO based on the conversation with Dennis, I downloaded a network app for my Android-based Xoom and looked at the various networks that touched us and realized in fact there were a variety of areas of interference.

By changing the channels used and moving the devices around a bit to optimize the signal we were able to increase throughput quite a bit. As usual, we look to fixing customers often far more than ourselves. A big thank-you goes out to Mr. McLain.

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Washington Capitals Hockey Is Back

January 13th, 2013 · hockey

So I am happy to report for those who do not know (and for the vast majority who do not care) that the National Hockey League (NHL) will in fact have a hockey season for 2012-13.

Well, 2013 anyway, consisting of 48 games, 24 at home. The article about the Capitals schedule is here, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capitals-insider/wp/2013/01/12/capitals-schedule-released/.

A story about the Capitals being ready to play this shorter, more compressed schedule is here, http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/capitals/washington-capitals-are-ready-for-nhl-season-to-be-an-intense-sprint/2013/01/12/d4fccf02-5d16-11e2-beee-6e38f5215402_story.html.

I, of course, started the season off right by attending a Season Ticket Holder (STH) event last week at Union Jack’s in Bethesda. It originally, I suspect, was organized as were a number of similar events to make the STH feel that the club cared about them but instead became a celebration of the annouinced settlement between the NHL and the union, the National Hockey League Players Association (NHLPA).

They served wings and mozzarella sticks, all of the fried food you could ever want. When Slapshot, pictured below came by, I asked him if he would like some of my wings, to which he acted horrified (as any self-respecting avian mascot should). Thank goodness my daughters were not present …

slapshot

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Thoughts Regarding the Publishing of the Names & Addresses of Gun Owners

January 4th, 2013 · government, politics

The publishing of the names and addresses of local gunowners by the Westchester Journal News in December, http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/01/02/newspaper-decision-to-out-gun-owners-sparks-all-out-battle/, was, to put it mildly controversial. It has led to a lot of strong reactions in large part as far as I could tell driven by one’s position on the Second Amendment of the Constitution relating to the rights of citizens to own firearms.

I am not, at least in this short set of comments, taking any position regarding the Second Amendment. In the interests of complete disclosure, I do not own a gun, do not plan to buy a gun, and only fired anything when I was in basic training at Ft. Dix, many (many) years ago. I am not enough of a Constitutional expert to know whether there are enough comma’s in the Second Amendment or not.

When I was the CIO at the US Department of Transportation, there was a lot of emphasis over the protection of what we referred to as Personally Identifiable Information (PII). This was information which when released would provide sufficiently information to allow someone to be able to identify who the person was, where they lived, what and/or where their financial or health information was kept or was, and so on.

This concern lead for example to policies put in place by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) while I was in Government to decrease as much as practical the use of social security numbers to identify individuals. We invested significant resources into tracking and managing any databases which contained PII and went to great lengths to keep them protected.

It seems to me that this is the more fundamental issue associated with the request by the Westchester Journal News, and other news organizations, not the Second Amendment. The question is whether it is appropriate for the Government to release databases which contain PII which was collected for Government purposes. In general, it seems to me the answer is no except in extraordinary and explicitly authorized situations, e.g. sex offender registries come to mind as an example of an exception or other situations where laws were explicitly broken as determined in a court of law.

Otherwise the normative decision, in my opinion, should be one where privacy concerns dominate the decision process. As with the First Amendment, Freedom of Speech, these kinds of rights need to be protected especially when faced with uncomfortable situations. That is why these protections exist.

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