Mike’s Digital Laboratory

From Wisdom Commons:

Wisdom is the thoughtful interplay of purpose and virtue in our lives. It is the ability to discern what is true, right, important or lasting and to act in keeping with this knowledge.

In many traditions, wisdom is seen as a blend of compassion and knowledge which are shaped into tangible action through the practice of other virtues. Together, knowledge and compassion give us the ability to perceive things as they really are, to care deeply, and to act in ways that serve the well-being of that which we cherish.

We grow toward wisdom only with patience and practice. Wisdom takes a lifetime of cultivation. If we seek wisdom, insights emerge that guide our day to day actions. Over time, these small particulars accumulate as our unique contribution to the world.

Careers are important, but having a hobby as a creative outlet may even be more so, you never know they can even lead to a second career.  This will never pay the rent but in my case I’m happy to show some of my work at the upcoming RWS Showcase: April 2, 2011 at CP Rochester. Probably the most satisfying part of all this is that the pieces I create are all original designs and functional works of art that will be given to others to enjoy.

(And oh by the way don’t you love how artists come up with sexy sounding descriptions for what’s really just funny looking furniture. 

Fresh from the center of the universe comes the New Tech Post.   Content includes a focused mix of posts covering business, mobile, social media and  technology.  Thanks for the tip John, I’ll be adding this to my rss feed reader shortly.

Learning physics shouldn’t be boring, especially if you’re a high school student. Here’s some  Parkour Physics from Melanie.

Body Maintenance Precision Training, what better way to kick off the new year.  Confession: I’m a 50 year old software engineer.  I sit on my butt a lot and I’m sadly out of shape. So! It’s off to the gym. But man, this  place is different than most.  How many physical trainer’s do you meet on any trip to the gym that have a Phd, and can tell you the precise neurological and physiological implications of every move you make.   Art DiAntonio is once such guy.  I recommend you pay a visit. (and read his blog)

But wait there’s more, one of several reasons I’ve begun going to this gym 2-3 times a week is because last summer I really messed up my shoulder (rotator cuff.) Joanne Panzarella to the rescue. (Thanks Joanne!)   Weekly visits:   PT with Joanne and then off to the next room to Listen to Coach D’s amazing direction. A month or so of this and I’m already feeling significant improvement.

I’ve got my club pass and am ready to bolt out of the office as soon as I can to head to this years Rochester International Jazz Festival. Club passes have long since sold out, but you can still pay at the door to get into most events.  There are also a lot of free events, so check the schedule and look for me on Jazz street.

Tonight in particular I’m looking forward to seeing Mose Allison at Kilbourn Hall and the Oberg / Petrescu quartet at the Nordic Jazz series (at Lutheran church.) And as many other events as I can slip into.  The great thing about the club passes is that you can hit 4, 5 sometimes 6 events in an evening. If you didn’t get one this year make sure you get one early next year.  Compared with paying at the door they pay for themselves in a couple of evenings, so it’s a really good deal.

On another exciting note  there are two new venues this year,  I’m amazed at how this festival grows bigger and better every year.  The Rochester Club is right on east avenue and is easy walking distance from most of the other venues.  Also the Abilene – Roots & Americana Stage is new over by liberty pole way, and should easily be worked into an evenings plan as it is a quick walk from Harro East or The Lutheran Church. Confused? just check out the new map, it’s all there. Oh, and there is also a really nice mobile festival guide for your iphone, or other mobile device.

Earth Hour approaches.

“On Earth Hour hundreds of millions of people around the world will come together to call for action on climate change by doing something quite simple—turning off their lights for one hour. The movement symbolizes that by working together, each of us can make a positive impact in this fight, protecting our future and that of future generations. Learn more about how Earth Hour began, what we’ve accomplished, and what is in store for 2010.

Participation is easy. By flipping off your lights on March 27th at 8:30 p.m. local time you will be making the switch to a cleaner, more secure nation and prosperous America.”

At Pictometry we have created a video of the images of Haiti that we donated to the GIS Corp in order to support the relief effort.

“Within days of the earthquake in Haiti, Pictometry captured more than 45,000 aerial oblique images of the damage in the capital city of Port au Prince and its surrounding area. The imagery was then donated to URISA’s volunteer GIS Corps to assist with the recovery efforts.”

Next Wednesday, (Feb 3, 2010) I’ll participating in another webinar with the folks at Earley & Associates. This time I’ll be discussing three important aspects you might want to consider if you are bringing Social Media Tools into your organizations. It’s easy to get lost in the many cool, whiz bang features that are available, but I feel it is important not loose sight of what I’ll call three aspects or dimensions of participatory activity in social media;

• Restricted vs. freedom to publish content with content metadata.
• Restricted vs. freedom to identify audience and method of notifications.
• Restricted vs. freedom to connect with people via groups, relationships, followers and so on.

Think of these as continuous dimensions on an X, Y and Z axis.  Where do you see your intranet tools in this space?  Where would you like them to be?  These are some of the questions I’ll be exploring next week.  Hope you’ll join me.

If you happen to be attending Enterprise DataWorld conference this March then I’d recommend attending this session by John Biderman and Cameron McLean.  John and Cam are sure to tell an interesting tale of how they’ve wrangled Semantic MediaWiki into harvesting a world of MetaData from one of their legacy relational databases and made it organized, accessible,  annotatable, and well… in a word wikified.

” We were given an imperative from our business leaders to provide a friendlier and more collaborative front end on our metadata…

… This in turn led us to MediaWiki and the rich and diverse array of add-ons developed by the Open Source community, particularly its semantic extensions.”

I was happy to play a small part in this project last summer.   I suppose I was more of kibitzer than anything else, but It was enjoyable to solve a few problems for the team as well as get an inside look into this very interesting project.