Tales from the Technoverse

Commentary on social networking, technology, movies, society, and random musings

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Ch-ch-ch Changes, or Why I Decided to Join Powertek Corporation

February 22nd, 2010 · government business

I recently accepted a position to serve as the Chief Operating Officer at Powertek Corporation (www.powertekcorporation.com). Powertek is an 8(a) woman-owned small business involved with all aspects of information technology, including business engineering and program management. Nancy Scott, President and CEO, and Samar Ghadry, Executive Vice-President, are both talented and delightful leaders I look forward to supporting.  The staff they have put together is bright, hardworking, and creative.

Despite my decision to move, CSC, the company I am leaving, continues to be a  great place to work  with committed and talented employees, many of whom have become friends over the last year. So why did I leave? [Read more →]

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Superman Doomsday

February 12th, 2010 · Entertainment, Firefly

I finished Superman Doomsday, http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/superman_doomsday/, this morning.

This was an animated cartoon based on the series where DC killed off Superman in the early 1990’s. At the time, it cause quite a reaction, getting coverage in the national and even international press. Millions of readers who had never read comics, bought copies.

While I had religiously read lots of comics when  young, by 1992, under the pressure of pretending to be adult, I had stopped. Thus I never read the original series.

Evidently throughout the 90’s there were attempts to turn this series into a movie; it almost got off the ground with of all people Nicolas Cage scheduled to star as Superman with Tim Burton directing. The mind boggles at what might have been the result, however it was never made.

Instead a direct to DVD animated cartoon was released in 2007, it was this that I got from Netflix.

I thought it was pretty good. It was interesting watching the story of how the original comics were created. A number of the people got pretty teary about some of the scenes in the comics when Superman died. Don’t tell my daughters, but so did I a little bit when watching the cartoon.

If you ever read Superman comics, I would recommend renting it. It brought many fond memories.

AND as an added bonus, Adam Baldwin, who played Jayne in the Firefly TV series, was the voice talent for Superman.

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Social Media and Open Government – My Presentation

February 11th, 2010 · cyber-security, government 2.0, presentations

I was honored to be invited to speak at the Potomac Forum’s conference held February 3-4 at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC, “Planning and Implementing Social Media and Open Government Strategy and Efforts: What Executives and Managers Need to Know”, http://www.potomacforum.org/.

I discussed two topics under the topic of Bringing Governance, Performance Management, and IT Together.

[Read more →]

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The Big Bang Theory Hearts Firefly

February 9th, 2010 · 2009 china solar eclipse, Entertainment, Firefly, government business, movies, Serenity, travel

For those who knew me when I was the CIO at the US Department of Transportation, you will know that I held a monthly lunch with a small band of fans of both the TV show Firefly, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_(TV_series), and the movie Serenity, http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/serenity/.

For references to this, see the end of the interview I gave for the DotGov Buzz, http://www.usa.gov/Federal_Employees/USA_Buzz/Newsletter_0522.html#dotgovspotlight, and the reference from a column in Federal Computer Week, written by then rising star Chris Dorobek, http://fcw.com/Articles/2007/09/16/Circuit_633659049783559373.aspx.

I even ran into Firefly fans when in China this last summer when we went to see a solar eclipse, https://www.ourownlittlecorner.com/2009/07/21/serenity-on-the-yangtze/. [Read more →]

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DISA and Open-Source

January 26th, 2010 · government 2.0

In an earlier post, I talked about the radio show Countdown hosted by Francis Rose on WFED at 2pm Friday’s. The deal was that Francis would have three people select their top Government-related stories of the week and present them in sort of a Casey Kasem 3-2-1 countdown.

I was on January 15th, you can listen to the entire show that week at http://www.wfed.com/index.php?nid=17&sid=1865007.

In this post, I wanted to briefly touch on the second of the two articles I discussed, DISA expands access to ProjectForge cloud environment, http://gcn.com/articles/2010/01/13/disa-projectforge-collaboration.aspx.

The article illustrates the greater comfort level that Government has with using open-source software produced by non-Governmental organizations. While not explicitly mentioned, this increased involvement is leading to open-source development going the other direction; being produced by Government and then placed into the greater community. [Read more →]

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Transparency

January 22nd, 2010 · government 2.0

On January 15th, I was part of a panel for the Countdown show hosted by Francis Rose on WFED, 1500 AM, here in Washington DC.

The premise of the panel is that every Friday, Francis asks three people from the ‘community’ to each select three news stories having something to do with the Federal Government. I selected three Information Technology related stories.

You can hear the panel which consisted of myself, Jon Desenberg, President of the Performance Institute, and Jeff Sural, a former DHS Deputy Assistant Secretary, and now of Alston and Bird at:

http://www.wfed.com/index.php?nid=17&sid=1865007 [Read more →]

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Hockey Weekend in Hershey and Washington

January 19th, 2010 · hockey

This last weekend Ellen acquiesced to my winter hockey obsession.

We spent Saturday in Hershey PA. That night we saw the Hershey Bears, http://www.hersheybears.com/,  wallop the Wilkes Barre/Scranton Penguins 7-2. And we then returned to Washington Sunday in time to watch the Capitals beat the Philadelphia Flyers 5-3. [Read more →]

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Buffalo Bob, Howdy Doody, and Hilton Head Island

January 10th, 2010 · Entertainment, travel

Periodically my wife, Ellen, and I go to visit Ellen’s parents in Hilton Head, South Carolina. Every time we visit I am reminded how lucky I was to not just to marry Ellen but also to marry into such a wonderful family. I have learned much about my professional life and how to behave like an adult, something I recognize is always a bit out of reach for me, from both David and Barbara Elow. And to top it off their relationship with my two daughters which has only deepened over the years is such a pleasure to experience.

In addition, there are always great things to do and see and learn about when we visit Hilton Head and the area around it, as we did this last weekend, January 9th and 10th. [Read more →]

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Technologies to Watch in 2010

December 15th, 2009 · government 2.0, government business, sensors

Recently Wyatt Kash, the Editor in Chief for both Government Computer News and Defense Systems, wrote me a note saying that GCN was working on an article about technologies to watch in 2010 and that he wanted my two cents.

Naturally I had more than two cents worth of thoughts about the issue and most likely my take was so orthogonal to what they were working on that it ended up being of marginal utility.

On the other hand, it gave me an excuse to think about the topic and allowed me to fill out another blog post. With Wyatt’s permission, the rest of the entry is what I sent to him in response to his request. [Read more →]

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Final Version of SCADA Presentation

December 9th, 2009 · cyber-security, government 2.0, government business, scada, sensors

This is the final version of the SCADA presentation I made yesterday at the Security SCADA Summit, http://www.iqpc.com/Event.aspx?id=223390.

Secure SCADA – Dec 2009 a

The presentation consists of two parts.

Part I was prepared by me and talks about the economic basis associated with the impact of the Internet, wanders through a number of topics I like to kick around (‘from earth centered to sun centered to nothing centered and what that means for Enterprise Architecture’, my thought that everything is a cloud, …), and touches on what the Government is thinking about regarding security.

Part II is a subset of what Rus Records, a fellow CSC’er, prepared which provided some thoughts on the state of SCADA systems in the Chemical, Energy, and Natural Resources areas (what CSC refers to as CENR).

I hope to expand on a number of these topics in future blog entries.

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