As I pause to ponder the significance of Memorial Day, I can almost hear the haunting strains of Taps being played by a lone bugler, a solemn salute to one of our fallen heroes.

I treasure human freedom as I treasure life itself. I consider freedom to think, speak and act central to the human experience. So those who give their lives, in act of ultimate sacrifice, to preserve the freedom I love, will always have my deepest respect.

My heroes, today I salute you!

Technorati Tags: Memorial Day,
Taps

My brother in law, Jeff Redd, pointed out some incredible mural artwork by Eric Grohe. Here is one example. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Eric Grohe

Somehow I feel that I’m way behind the times, but today I completed my first Sudoku puzzle. I tried to solve a puzzle to easy the boredom on my last airline flight, but made a mistake somewhere. This afternoon I printed out a puzzle from WebSudoku.com and brute-forced my way to a solution. Could become addictive!

Technorati Tags: Sudoku

Congratulations to Andrea Cravens, one of our great Identity Technical Specialists, who gave birth to twin sons, Lucas and Dylan, on May 3rd. Mother and boys are doing just fine. Andrea gave me permission to share this wonderful photo.

You done good, Andrea!

Technorati Tags:
Sun Microsystems,
Twins

My son, David, just showed me an interesting website he recently created for the New Sheridan Hotel in Telluride, Colorado. An interesting tidbit was how he used AJAX to display alternate internal views of the hotel guest rooms. When you click on the guest room selector boxes at the bottom of the page, you will see AJAX at work, providing photos and decriptions of the different guest rooms, without refreshing the whole page.

The inventors of Java Script and XML should be proud!

Technorati Tags: AJAX,
New Sheridan Hotel,
David Dixon

If you are anything like me, you always have a list of good things you can do that stretches way beyond the limits of your available time. Choosing which of the many tasks to accomplish is a big challenge.

Steven R. Covey gives this advice: “There always will be items on your “to do” list. The trick is to figure out which are priorities. You must first attend to what’s both urgent and important. But to be truly effective you should spend as much time as possible doing important things that aren’t urgent. Otherwise, you can spend all day in the thick of thin things.”

I like that phrase, “the thick of thin things.” It conjures up visions of intense action with no real purpose – kind of like a dog chasing its tail, or like our cow that figured out how to suck all the milk out of her udder – leaving nothing for us to sell.

Every once in a while, I need to sit back, re-evaluate my long list, and check for “thin things” that can be safely discarded in favor of activities that will have more lasting value. I don’t always make the right choices, and too often find myself engulfed in triviality, but then I sit back, think of thick and thin things, and try again.

By the way, I’m old enough that when I went to BYU, Steve Covey was just a popular teacher on campus, not the superstar consultant and author we know today. The first book of his I read (back in the early 1970’s) was entitled, The Spiritual Roots of Human Relations. Highly recommended.

Technorati Tags:
Stephen R. Covey,
Time Management

We Sun folks on the internal Phoenix office mailing list received this email from our admin this morning:

“Hi all. I was asked to put out a poll to the office concerning the typewriter. Please give me your opinion on either removing it from the office or do you think it is needed?”

Typewriter? I didn’t realize we still had one.

My colleague Mark Mulligan responded:

“If you keep it in the lobby, you need to create a placard with the date the thing was manufactured, the era it was used, who invented it, etc. Then also place similar items next to it with corresponding placards: an abacus, wheel, flint stone, etc.”

“I am also very big on dioramas–maybe a shoebox depicting a1950’s nuclear houshold getting their first typewriter.”

This reminded me of an event, many years ago. My oldest son was six years old when he saw a typewriter for the first time and said, “What is that?”

I explained, “It’s something like your computer …”

At that moment, I realized that the typewriter/computer paradigm had completely reversed. When I was young, a computer teletypewriter was explained to me as being “like a typewriter …”

Perspective certainly changes with time.

Now, does anyone want to discuss how my old slide rule is “something like your calculator …?”

Oh! I got a response from that, too:

“Ah, but the slide rule is much more versatile than a calculator, being able to solve complex computations with only 2 moving parts! Unfortunately requires practice and skill being analog rather than digital.”

Thanks, Timothy McFadden, for rembering the elegance of the venerable slip stick.

Technorati Tags: Typewriter,
Computer
Paradigm Shift

My colleague Jonathan Gershater tells how his Dad saved money and time by adopting OpenOffice. Congratulations, Dad, for avoiding payment of the Microsoft ransom by taking the road less travelled!

And congratulations to Jonathan for his cute kids.

Technorati Tags: Open Office

I am trying out another blogging client, Performancing, that works as a Firefox extension. We’ll see how it works compared to
Bloggar, which I have been using for some time.

Well, it looks like I’ll stay with Bloggar. Performancing completely mishandled the title. Oh, well.

Technorati Tags: Performancing, Firefox, Blog

Doc Searls pointed to this very entertaining page.

I wonder if Sun will buy me a Mac?

Technorati Tags:
Sun Microsystems,
AppleComputer