Month: November 2009

I’m In Love With Mr Clean Magic Erasers

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I haven’t blogged about this yet but I was cleaning the house today and had to break out the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser to get some crayon off of one of Tyler’s chairs where he colors. Barbara, you were right they are great at taking crayon off of the plastic chairs.  Any way, I took the chair into the kitchen and saw the kitchen sink which has always been a little on the brown side even though it is supposed to be white.  I did a few quick wipes and instantly the water around it turned brown.  I scrubbed with it some more and the more I scrubbed the more white the sink got.  My old house had tile floors in the main entry way and all of the way back to the kitchen.  The magic erasers are great at cleaning the grout between the tile.  I’ve also used the erasers on the shower floor and they work wonders there as well.  So hopefully you don’t just take my word for it, go out and pick some up today!  After all they don’t call him Mr. Clean for nothing!

Creative Barcodes

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creativeBarCodes
http://www.thedieline.com/blog/2009/11/unique-japanese-barcodes.html

Anyone who knows me knows that I am fascinated with barcodes.  I’ve had some ideas in the past; some for what I do for a living and some for personal business ventures.  Barcodes are amazingly powerful yet very simplistic.  Evidently a design agency in Japan is doing some interesting things with tweaking the design of their barcodes which I loved.

San Francisco 11-14-09

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We went to San Francisco yesterday and started things off right by going to Taylor’s which has awesome burgers and sweet potato fries. We surprised our birthday boy at the Motown Madness musical.  Motown isn’t my favorite music in the world but I mentioned before going in that as long as I’m not the one singing I’m sure I’ll enjoy it.  Little did I know almost half way through the musical they would pull me up on stage to sing and dance.  Let me tell you I put up a good fight to try and keep from going on stage but the crowd was applauding so what can you really do at that point.

As you can see I have some awesome moves and even decided to do a move out of turn.  Yeah I’m the dweeb who turns when nobody else turns!  We got some of it on iPhone video which isn’t the greatest quality but you aren’t supposed to record in the theater so we are lucky we got what we have.

Then after they humiliated me the first time after intermission they came back for more by asking “hey where did that guy from Livermore go?”.  They came and made me stand up again and ask what my name is.  They said they have never had someone so shy come up on stage so they decided to keep after me.  They then asked who was sitting next to me and pulled her up so we could slow dance in front of everyone in the theater.  For a wallflower like me it made me turn bright red I’m sure but I kept smiling and tried to make the most of it.

After the musical we went to North Beach for some italian food and decided on Tony’s Pizza.  We didn’t know it at the time but it was Tony Pizzano’s restaurant who is the world pizza making champion.  Tony was there and we sat right next to the kitchen so we were able to get a few exchanges in with him.  Tony was really nice to us and made sure everything was good.  We then went to the Mark Hopkins Hotel to see the birthday boy’s hotel room which was very nice.  We went up to the Top of the Mark in a sweatshirt and tennis shoes but for the most part they were nice about letting us quickly look around.  We then went to get some coffee and then headed back to BART.  It was a really nice day, even if I did make a fool of myself.

I’m not sure if I have blogged about this yet but I have my own way of measuring the success of a day.  I say if you will remember the day on your death bed it was a good day.  So many days pass us by and we simply live them day to day not really making the most of them.  I can tell you yesterday was a death bed day!

OK here is the first video of me getting moved to the center of the stage because they were worried about me running off.  I’m in the middle of the stage which is good because one of the singers blocks me most of the time.

Oh and last but certainly not least, here is me turning when nobody else turned.  I rule at this if you can’t tell.  Oh and a little singing.

60 Minutes: Cyber Crime

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CBS 60 Minutes: Cyber War: Sabotaging the System 1:2
CBS 60 Minutes: Cyber War: Sabotaging the System 2:2

I keep talking about this with everyone so I might as well include it on my blog because evidently nobody seems to watch 60 Minutes these days which is a shame.  I love the segments they do and it is funny because when I was a child I used to despise it because I saw the infamous ticking clock which meant Monday morning and school was not too far away.   Cyber warfare fascinates me, I literally sat through the episode just glued to the TV.  It is hacker meets pirate meets James Bond meets ninja meets…OK you get the point.  I actually liked it so much I showed it to someone and sat through it twice.  Let me know what you think.

New Evan Pictures

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My sister sent some new pictures of my nephew Evan this afternoon.

Cisco Communications

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I went to Cisco’s headquarters yesterday in San Jose for a CMMA event to talk about what they are doing with their communications.  We met with Margaret Smith Cisco’s Collaboration Specialist and Abby Smith Cisco’s Director of Employee Communications.  I was able to see telepresence for the first time which was very interesting.  You really do feel like you are in the same meeting room as the person in the other location (could be anywhere in the world).  After seeing telepresence I am further convinced that our educational system will be completely changed in the next 10 years.  I can’t imagine us continuing to have large expensive universities when you can literally sit directly in front of a television and feel like you are in the same room as your professor and other students.  Below are my notes from the visit.

Abby Smith – Director of Employee Communications

  • Cisco’s Corporate Communications Organizational Overview:
    • Employee Communications
    • Investor Relations
    • CXO Communications
    • Public/Analyst/Community Relations
    • Communications Architecture
    • Strategy and Integration
    • New Media
    • Asian Pacific Communications
  • News@Cisco is their media portal
    • Single site for Cisco Community and Social Media
    • Newsroom.cisco.com
    • 350+ RSS Feeds
    • Where the public can go to get news about Cisco
    • Social Networking (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
    • 650,000 hits quarterly on the site
  • Twitter
    • @Padmasree (Cisco CTO)
    • 500,000 + followers
  • Cisco has a social media communications policy
  • CEC – Cisco Employee Connection (Cisco’s Intranet)
    • Executive video blogs, discussion forums
    • CEC articles
    • Management Central
    • Pulse Surveys – how is the culture, what are you feeling etc, how
  • John Chambers, the CEO has a video blog of what is on his mind on the CEC.  Employees said “I’ve never had a conversation with John so having him give me a personal message each month is amazing.” It also helps to save money on video production costs.
  • They did their first virtual company meeting on August 23, 2007
  • Their Communications Department has ~250 employees
  • Cisco TelePresence Overview
    • Cisco TelePresence – life-like in-person video collaboration
    • Unified communications – video calling, WebEx, and interopability
    • Desktop video streaming – video broadcasts to desktop PCs
    • Digital signage – networked video signage
    • Video surveillance – IP-based video surveillance
    • Can support up to 48 segments (65” plasma and a camera)
    • Integrates with Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook.
    • Their telepresence (“TP”) is 1080P resolution.  Spatial audio which provides virtually an in-person experience
  • Why did Cisco get into the video space?
    • The problem
      • More than 60% of communication is non-verbal
      • Current collaborative technology doesn’t allow for clarity, interaction of face-to-face
      • Scalability, productivity trade-off
  • Rules of Telepresence
    • Experience the meeting, not the technology
    • Life size and high-resolution to discern body language
    • Guarantee everyone a seat at the table

Sounds like in the later part of 2010 look for consumer telepresence from Cisco

Cisco’s enterprise telepresence requires 14 mbps up and down