The 3 (or so) faces of I.T.

As previously mentioned here, I did some network upgrades over the course of the holidays which were actually just completed  on Thursday morning (1/5/17, or 5.1.17 outside of North America), The end result is a faster SOHO network. The work is not quite yet done, but so far the end users are not gathering up tar, chicken feathers and kindling....

I ran into an interesting topic with our older son, Big D.  While we were hooking up various computers on the Steam Link, Mr T and I noted that Big D's box had the greatest lag on the network with the exception of my little corner- and my corner was expected. A quick analysis of his situation revealed a simple answer: of all of the known segments of the network, he was at the end of what I can determine is the longest piece of copper in the house. The problem is the location of his PC. Due to our upgrades, I have a spare switch that I could add and create a new segment, but I'm not certain that it would be beneficial.

Of course, this conundrum got me to thinking about I.T. from a higher level. Normally, when most of us (who are in some sort of business) think of I.T. ("information technology"), we generally think of our local I.T. person or the voice on the other end of the phone at the help desk. I'd like you to expand your I.T. horizons for a moment and consider what Dr. Sheldon Cooper might intellectually view I.T. as.

On the one hand, they are there to take care of your systems- computers, mice, printers.

On another level, they might fix your connectivity issues- basically, network problems.

A little deeper- they might even be able to deal with your data issues- backup and restore.

Finally, at my level (SOHO), I do that for everyone, plus ensure uptime, backups and data integrity.

At the SOHO level, one needs not only provide backup, but justify the cost of backup- as well as support the backup. Mind you. I'm not complaining. One problem a SOHO I.T. person shares with his or her counterparts in the business world is making a business case for a capital expenditure- in other words, "Do we really need this shiny gadget?"

Additionally, I (as a data-driven fellow) need storage. Just as a reminder, the unifying theme of this blog is data. I've lost metric **** (French- *****), German (********), Slavic languages (*****) tons of data due to recent crashes.I'm hoping that our new NAS (network attached storage) with 2x3TB HHDs will ameliorate this situation.

Finally, as Sir Richard Starkey once quipped, "I've got blisters on me fingers!" I don't really, but I always try to throw in what I hope is a clever little segue near the end of the blog.

I'm certain that I've mentioned in at least a few blogs that I'm not in the habit of making New Year's Resolutions... have no fear, I'm not changing. However, the convenience of January 1st as a sort of milepost of Life is something which is not to be wasted. With the network fairly squared away, I now have time to do some programming/coding.

Before I go any further, "programming" and  "coding" are the same thing in this context. With my discovery of  things like STEM, the Hour of Code and the Maker Movement, I was once "back in the game" of something I had experimented with- only to discard decades ago.

Out first computer was a Commodore Colt, an XT compatible machine. One day, I discovered that I could make programs in a language called GW BASIC. Having a bit of experience with BASIC, I found a book on GW-BASIC and tried my hand at programming.  I don't recall exactly what the problem was, but the author(s) were so cavalier and asinine in their assumptions about their target audience (that would be folks wanting to learn GW BASIC) that they made a BOATload (where B=S, L=H, A=I and D=T) of assumptions, which made their book useless. Thanks to these dweeb losers, it took me over 20 years to get back to programming.

However, I eventually came back to programming, and in 2017 I hope to become familiar with Visual Basic 2015. Thanks to a free Microsoft version of of Visual Studio Community, I have access to Visual Basic 2015, as well as a few other programming languages. We'll see how it goes.

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.

Hello, 2015 (belatedly)

Well, better late than never, I suppose.

2015 has been for a few months, and I'm FINALLY getting down to publishing my first blog of the New Year.

Ha, ha- I actually wrote that in December of 2014- this is an indicator of how my year has been going so far.

I've written and rewritten the beginning of this blog several times, and for some reason I've never gotten past this paragraph. So far, 2015 has been the Year of Twitter for me, and not the year of Blog.

I've had a Twitter account for some time (@cjoelharrison) but hadn't been really active there. Jennifer had gotten started there sometime after I had, and currently has nearly 400 followers. Mind you, we don't compete at this online stuff (we really don't- its just not in us to!), I think that sometime around the New Year, though, I decided to make my Twitter account a more viable part of my "personal branding" strategy. I've focused my feed on the following: #data, #coding, #tech and #faith. And while I think this blog will still be an important of my "personal branding" strategy", I think Twitter will have a more prominent place in that strategy, simply because of its immediacy. After all, even though the blog is often a work of love and art (at least in my eyes), my Twitter feed is a work of NOW!, thanks in no small part to my smartphone.

Another huge draw of Twitter is its immediacy.With a blog, one develops a following. I've got to say my blog has really blown me away with its reach: in the space of a year, I managed to garner readers on six continents. In roughly a month on Twitter, though, I went from approximately 50 followers to a hundred. The interesting thing about the growth process is this: a typical blog takes ~3 hours to produce. This includes coming up with an idea for the blog, as well as the writing and possible inclusion of pictures. Then, even after the editing that goes on during the writing process, it needs to be proofed. Finally, it is published. With Twitter, I have very little original content- I'm more of a conduit for other content... I find something that's already been e-published, and merely retweet it for anyone who might find that particular hashtag interesting. Since I've followed this plan, my little corner of the twittersphere has expanded considerably.

That's all for now. Data is (yet again!) on hold, although I've been devoting some time to learning Python. 2015 is shaping up to be a fun year!