A favorite old saying goes, "All the world is crazy except for me and
thee, and I’ve been wondering about thee lately."

That saying kept coming to mind as I followed the lead of SuperPat
and took the OK Cupid Politics Test.
An interesting diversion, I suppose, but I refuse to grant much credibility to a
ranking system that says John Kerry is centrist and positions me somewhere around
his left eyeball, in the same quadrant as Hillary but opposite Ronald Reagan.

Any ranking system can skew its sense of reality by choosing its own center
point, and can skew responses by choosing the questions it presents. Ask about
gun control – yes, I’m much more permissive than John Kerry. But on critical
social issues like abortion, drugs, gambling (non of which is mentioned in the
survey)? John is much more persmissive than I will ever be. Private investment
vs. government control of retirement funds? I’m way above John on the permissive
chart. But why ask such a trivial question?

So, from my self-appointed happy centerpoint in the upper left quadrant of
OK Cupid’s political grid, I’ll let the rest of the world be crazy, except for
me, and perhaps, thee.

Tags: Politics
Ronald Reagan
John Kerry
Pat Patterson

Integrity: "1) Steadfast adherence to a strict moral or ethical code.
2) The quality or condition of being whole or undivided; completeness."

My oldest daughter asked me to jot down a few of my ideas about integrity.
Please let me share them with you.

As the listed definitions suggest, integrity has two critical components:

1. Mental and physical adherence to a strict moral code
2. Undivided consistency in a persons life: in thought, speech and action,
   whether public or private.

The foundation of a strict moral code enables a person to avoid the flighty
whims and consequences of popular sentiment. Jesus recommended building houses
(our lives) on foundations of rock instead of sand because strong foundations
can withstand the virtual hurricanes of opposition we experience in our lives.

The second aspect of integrity is absolute consistency between the inner and
outer self, between public performance and private behavior, between spoken
word and demonstrated action. The word Integrity comes from the same root word
as Integral and Integrated. Both these terms imply wholeness, completeness or
consistency.

Based on these two concepts, integrity denotes complete and consistent internal
and external commitment to a concrete standard of ethics and morality.

A person with integrity lives by some simple rules

1. Always do what is right, regardless of the short-term reward for doing otherwise.
2. Be willing to accept and speak the truth, even if the truth is not popular
   or what people want to hear.
3. Promise only what you can deliver. Deliver what you promise.
4. Be true to your ideals, even in the face of criticism and ridicule.

Some examples:

1. A man of integrity does not set himself up as a paragon of faith and virtue
   in the community and then go home and beat his wife.
2. A woman of integrity doesn’t promise the moon to get an order and then weasel
   out of details when it’s time to deliver.
3. A woman of integrity has the courage to turn down a business deal if underhanded,
   illegal or unethical behavior is required.
4. A man of integrity does everything within his power and more to make sure
   he delivers what he promised, even if that means enduring demeaning ridicule
   or forfeiting compensation.

So why have integrity? Isn’t it tough to live this way? Wouldn’t it be easier
to accept popular concepts of relative morality?

People of integrity engender trust, that time-tested, foundation principle
of meaningful relationships. In the end, when the chips are down, when things
are crumbling around us, people of integrity are ones people count on. They
are the ones people turn to for advice, for counsel, for solutions to tough
problems. They are ones who can be trusted.

Why? Because morality and ethics really do count. Truth is truth. Right is
right. Wrong is wrong. I’ll put my trust any day in people whose lives are rooted
in a bedrock moral code and and live in absolute consistency with that code.

Tags: Integrity

Quickly – do you know the answers to these little trivia questions?

1. How
many transistors were in the radio in the X-1 rocket plane that first broke
the sound barrier?

2. Did
Fairchild or Texas Instruments make the integrated circuits aboard the United
States’s first Explorer satellite?

3. Did
Hewlett Packard or Texas Instruments make the scientific pocket calculators
that Apollo engineers used to put a man on the moon?

The answers? All three were trick questions.

1. None. It was a tube radio.
   Chuck Yeager flew the X-1 to break the sound barrier on October
   14, 1947. The first workable transistor was made on December
   23, 1947.
2. Neither. There were no integrated circuits on the Explorer satellite when
   it went into orbit on January
   31, 1958. IC’s weren’t invented until 1959
   and not commercially available until 1961.
3. Neither. Apollo engineers used
   
   slide rules to put
   
   Neil Armstrong on the moon on July
   20, 1969. HP introduced the first scientific pocket calculator, the HP35,
   on February 1, 1972.

The moral – Don’t wait for future innovation to exercise your ingenuity, imagination and creative drive to do great things.

Tags: Transistor
Integrated Circuit
Calculator
Fairchild
Texas Instruments
Hewlett Packard
Sound Barrier
Apollo
Moon

My youngest daughter Holly loves my OpenSolaris t-shirt.

Tags:
OpenSolaris
Holly Dixon

Action: "The
causation of change by the exertion of power or a natural process."

Noel Franus’ blog,
"Reward Excellent Failures. Punish Mediocre Success," led
me to Tom Peters‘ presentation,
"Re-imagining Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age."

I’ve long admired Tom Peters’

passion. In my mind’s eye I can imagine him
on stage, leaning forward and raising his voice a bit, maybe waving his arms
as he presented slide #131, challenging the audience to "Lead the Action
Faction!"

This reminded me of two other famous quotes:

"I
never worry about action, only inaction." — Winston
Churchill

"Never
confuse motion with action." — Benjamin
Franklin

We
are here in this world to act, to do, to accomplish, to be agents of positive
change. Our actions largely determine our destiny. Peters, Churchill and Franklin
urge us all to sieze this opportunity. Or, in the simple words of the personal mottor of another of
my heros, Spencer
W. Kimball, "Do It."

Tags:
Action
Change
Tom Peters
Winston Churchill
Benjamin Franklin
Spencer W. Kimball
Noel Franus

No Need to Click Here – I’m just claiming my feed at Feedster feedster:d91cba784963bdf387714ae8ca40f5b0

A good friend of mine,

Richard Brincefield, has a vision to “promote true Global Literacy – especially the three R’s (Reading, wRiting, and aRithemtic) in the major languages of the world.”

His vision is remarkably in step with the opinions of Scott McNealy and Jonathan Schwartz as outlined in the recent Computerworld article

A Community Effort Is Needed to Eliminate the Digital Divide and Jonathan’s

blog of June 16th.

Like Scott and Jonathan, Richard is a passionate advocate of

internet-enabled education, made possible by

open source software and

inexpensive, network enabled computers.

Years before I knew of

Open Solaris, Richard was filling my mailbox with articles espousing the virtues of open source. Long before I knew of Sun’s commitment to the

Participation Age, Richard was telling me how cheap, powerful

Learning Management Systems could cooperatively enable the delivery of educational content across the world. Long before I knew about

SunRays, Richard kept pinging me each time he heard of a cheaper desktop that could provide inexpensive access to Internet-enabled education.

So Richard, I salute you! Keep up the good work. I shall always admire you as a pioneer in Internet-enabled Global Literacy.

“Chance favors the prepared mind.”
–

Louis Pasteur

I’m on vacation today, but thought you might enjoy one of my favorite quotations.

Hooray! Last Saturday, I finally found

Flickr. I’ve been searching for some easy and elegant way to share collections of photos with my family and friends. I’m really not an accomplished photographer, but I enjoy experimenting and sharing what I create. I had downloaded half a dozen different clients that attached to photo share services – from Kodak, Nikon, Canon and others. I found them all too structured or too lightweight or too commercial. What I wanted was a simple way to upload a bunch of photos so people could view them as a slide show, or just look, or download individual ones to print — all without without the constraints imposed by the run of the mill services. I had even considered writing my own.

Enter Flickr. I can’t remember where I heard of it – probably in the morass of blogging information I’ve been reading lately. But for me, it clicked.

Have you ever bought something, like a nice car, only to find out later that it had a bunch of really neat things that you hadn’t anticipated? I feel that way about Flickr. I’m still finding neat things in Flickr — offered up with a bit of sass and panache.

I like the way I can

share photos with the public – like you. And I really like the way I can share photos with friends and/or family members on a private basis. For example, without me granting you permission, you can’t see the big album of photos of my son’s high school graduation or the little album of the walk around the neighborhood with my grandson. I like that – permissions based on Identities!

Flickr has groups where I can share my photos or see what others have contributed. Or I can set up my own private or public groups. Alas, the

Identity group had only one member – so I joined and doubled the population. I haven’t figured out yet what photo to contribute.

Tags are wonderful ways for both the sharer to describe a posted photo and a sharee to find something of interest. Of course, I looked up the Identity tag. One interesting thing I found was a set of photos of identity tags for one

Russell Higgs. Quaint.

Then I discovered that if I upload each photo in native size, Flickr will automatically allow me to link to different sizes of the photo for different applications. For example, I uploaded the full image of our friendly neighborhood emu at a size of

816×1224 pixels – which you can download to make a nice little print. But the image to the left is only a web-friendly 67×100 pixels. Flickr did all the sizing for me.

There is much, much more, and I’m sure that I’ll continue to find more great stuff. Maybe you can point out some stuff you know.

I’m Flickr-ing off for now. My photos call.

Tag: Identity

Memorial Day is a holiday for Sun. And so shall it be for my blog. But please join me in paying tribute to the brave men and women who gave their lives that we might enjoy the blessings of freedom. To your courage, brave hearts!

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!” —

Patrick Henry, American Patriot (1736-1799).