SME-sense

As a person who this summer left the ranks of support for projects, I have a constant and urgent need for SME (subject matter expert) information. In general, I have received a lot of help from a lot of people to come close to succeeding. I'm not a newbie - I'm in my 50th yr of IT.

In that short time since I rotated, it appears to me that we are succeeding on the ability of team members to get their jobs done in spite of the system. There is a lot of information stored between team members ears and much information stored on servers. There is no knowledgebase that pulls it all together. Text search as a technology is, if I remember rightly, about about 5 decades old. Without information organization - a publishing event - one is constantly searching for what which someone else just searched for.

Silos of information have high local optimization of information storage, retrieval and usage. When tearing them down, there needs to be a replacement for the local community.

Going back to the movie Roots, when Alex Hailey found his ancestor in the memory of a local "library" resource, he wrote down the bits and pieces he wanted. Unless others did the same, it was lost when the resource died. Recording the memory would make it serially reusable. Publishing it, in the true sense, requires it to be organized - a rewarding task that only pays off other than in the short term.

border whining

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/09/28/mexican-lawmakers-say-worsening-mexico-violence-returning-criminals/?test=latestnews

back to a mother load - ISO9000

flaming hoops and the Third Axle Alternative

on modesty

The most important conversations, briefings, meeting, and lectures you will ever have will be those you hold with yourself in the privacy of your own mind. - Denis Waitley

fine whine from Adams, not Sam

I am willing you should call this the Age of Frivolity, as you do,
and would not object if you had named it the Age of Folly, Vice, Frenzy,
Brutality, Daemons, Bonaparte, Tom Paine, or the Age of the Burning Brand from
the Bottomless Pit, or anything but the Age of Reason. I know not whether any
man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs or the
last thirty years than Tom Paine. There can no severer satyr on the age. For
such a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf,
never before in any age of the world was suffered by the poltroonery of mankind,
to run through such a career of mischief. Call it then the Age of Paine. -
John Adams comment on the title of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason
[tell us how you really feel, John]

attitude

notice the close reasoning

the counter argument

In any computer language, scripting or not, statements mimic human speech to the extent that they have a label (a noun), a command name (verb) and arguments (predicates).

In that computer application know as TSO (Time sharing option) which IBM has offered on its mainframes that use the operating systems OS/MVT, SVS (aka OS/VS1), MVS (aka OS/VS2) and now zOS since the middle 1970s, LOGIN is a command at the READY prompt which signons off the current userid and prepares to allow a new access session.

Take a deep breath, hold it, let it out slowly, and get over it.

Calvin and Hobbes pov

Somos el cuerpo de Cristo

U.S. Catholic has helped Latinos claim their rightful place in the church. Part of a series on U.S. Catholic's 75th anniversary.

There's been a "three-stage Hispanic Awakening," Father Virgilio Elizondo told U.S. Catholic magazine in an October 1981 interview. In the first stage, this country's leading Latino theologian explained, Hispanics were just not accepted. They "were kept out, and they were told that even though they may have been in the present-day United States long before the U.S. immigrated to them, they don't belong here."

In the second stage, Elizondo said, "our people wanted . . . to forget Spanish, change their names, change their religion. Even though some people pretty well succeeded in Americanization, they were still not fully accepted. No matter how well they made it, they were still considered ‘the other,' and that was the beginning of the third stage.

"Now we realize the images of U.S. pluralism: E pluribus unum. We know that we can be fully American without losing our heritage, our religion, or our language. We can continue using our language as the most concrete and deep way of expressing our being."

At the time of the interview, Elizondo was president of San Antonio's Mexican American Cultural Center, the country's premier training ground for Hispanic ministry, which he had founded nine years earlier. In 1983 he would publish his groundbreaking book Galilean Journey: The Mexican American Promise (Orbis), in which he developed his theology of mestizaje, using the Hispanic mingling of cultures, ethnicities, and races as its core theme.

Responding to the resentment that other American Catholics expressed then--and continue to express today--about Hispanics keeping their language and cultural identity, Elizondo explained, "Difference doesn't mean inequality. We want to participate in the way of life of the United States, but we do not want to have to be apologetic about who we are or why we do things the way that we do them."

The growing importance of Hispanics in the U.S. Catholic Church has come as no big surprise to the publishers of this magazine, the Claretians. Since first arriving in San Antonio in 1902, the Claretian Missionaries have been dedicated to ministering to the spiritual and social needs of Hispanic Catholics in the United States.

In 1989 they combined their expertises in Hispanic ministry and in publishing to launch the Hispanic Ministry Resource Center. Under the leadership of its director, Carmen Aguinaco, this branch of Claretian Publications has been a pioneer in producing original, culturally appropriate bilingual publications and products for the Hispanic Catholic market.

Aguinaco, who today serves as the president of the National Catholic Council for Hispanic Ministry, also assists U.S. Catholic as a contributing editor, helping the magazine cover developments in Hispanic ministry as well as include Hispanic voices.

Though usually soft-spoken, Aguinaco minces no words when it comes to Hispanic concerns. In a July 2000 Sounding Board article she called non-Hispanic Catholics to repent of their attitude of "tolerance" toward their Hispanic brothers and sisters in faith: "Tolerance is almost like saying: ‘I don't understand your values or your culture. I don't like you, but, because I am a big person . . . I will tolerate you.' It is condescending and annoying to people on the receiving end. And by encouraging complacency . . . it breeds indifference. It leaves the dominant culture as dominant and only grudgingly makes room for the different."

When it comes to the church, Aguinaco argued, the concept of mere tolerance is preposterous. "Could a heart ever ‘tolerate' a leg? Or a finger tolerate a liver? . . . There are no aliens or guests in the Body of Christ. The Body of Christ was not originally Anglo-with Italians, Hispanics, Asians, or African Americans later transplanted to be rejected or accepted by the host organism. They belong there."

- Meinrad Scherer-Emunds is the executive editor of U.S. Catholic. This article is the sixth in a series to celebrate the 75th anniversary of USCatholic, appearing in the June 2010 issue (Vol. 75, No. 6, page 51). original

as lovely as a tree

It has happened again. This time the other next-door neighbor is cutting down trees. "trimming" consisted of removing all branches from the lower 80% of the tree.

The only good thing I can say is that the tree leans toward their property. I wonder how long it takes for a tree to die under these circumstances.

Preaching to bishops

Preaching to bishops, is like farting at skunks. You'll win some battles, but lose the war. - a long-dead churchman q.Thomas Lynch Commonweal ©2010Jan15 CXXXVII.1

post-racial

say what?

Chris Matthews

stimulus

http://www.bvblackspin.com/2010/01/28/chris-matthews-msnbc-i-forgot-obama-was-black-for-an-hour/?icid=mainhtmlws-main-ndl1link3http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bvblackspin.com%2F2010%2F01%2F28%2Fchris-matthews-msnbc-i-forgot-obama-was-black-for-an-hour%2F

response

Dear Dr Watkins

I don't own a TV so I see CM only on the TV in the breakroom at work. Personally I would prefer a real news channel like Bloomberg than msnbc.

And no one has ever called me a liberal.

But I think I want to defend CM. Like many whites he is ill at ease when discussing race. Since blacks, like whites, are a very diverse group, it is difficult to know what to say at times that will not offend. He was projecting the joy he felt at the possibility of a post-racial nation onto his political persona.

At my workplace, we have a mix of races and nationalities. At my office, the highest ranking person was a black woman until she retired after having a stroke. The next level down, a white male retired early, leaving another white male and a black male.

During the campaign, there was some felt but not well articulated tension between the races. Since the election, none is evident.

As a white male, I can tell you it is not appreciated when race is always brought to the table. There are issues that are non-racial.

Dr K

the votes are in

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/12/30/the-top-15-winners-and-losers-of-2009/

resurrection?

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/01/16/the-popes-newspaper-goes-pop/

the new compassion

kicking someone while their down

outrageous

http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/investing/the-401-k-sucker-punch/19310100/

best of the worst media 2009

or is it worst of the worst