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Year: 2006

Google Helper

VA hrpr.com platesWhen I received the renewal notice from the DMV for registration of my pickup truck, it noted that my current license plates were “10 or more years old” and that I should consider getting new plates. Since my old plates were starting to show their age, it seemed like a good idea to do so.

I then had to make a decision on just what kind of plates I wanted. Virgina is big on vanity plates and personalized messages Their web site has dozens of designs to choose from. After looking though the choices on their web site, I decided I woud just go with the standard issue plates and save myself $20.00 a year ($10.00 for a vanity plate and 10.00 for a personalized message). I was just about ready to click on the submit button to order the plates when I thought “well maybe I’ll compromise and spend $10.00 for a personalized message.” Continue reading “Google Helper”

Local Girl Makes Good..and Gives Back to Community

My, brother, who lives near Charleroi, PA, sent me the following via email. So I thought I’d pass it on. Make sure you link to and read the articles in the order they are shown below:

Heres’ a little background on this. Charleroi is located along the Monongahela river in southwestern Pennsylvania in an area known as the “Mon Valley.” The Mon Valley used to be a center of heavy industry such as steel and glass making, and coal mining. Since the demise of these industries in the 1960’s and 1970’s, the Mon Valley has become a depressed area in many respects. The small towns along the river that used to be quite vibrant and commercially successful have fallen on hard times.

I live in the Washington, DC area and, to the best of my knowledge, this has not gotten any coverage in our local newspapers or on TV.

Ray Noorda

Ray Noorda, the founder and first CEO of Novell passed away on 9 October 2006. His management acumen and leadership, along with the technical brilliance of Drew Major, Dale Niebaur, Kyle Powell, and Mark Hurst resulted in Novell Netware. Netware was a “Killer App” that had a profound effect on the rest of the IT industry. Netware dominated the LAN space in the late 1980’s and 1990’s.

Unfortunately, Novell was late to the game in realizing that TCP/IP was the wave of the future. They stayed too long with their IPX/SPX protocol, which is quite inefficient in environments other than high-speed LANs. As a result, the various Unix vendors, Microsoft and now Linux eventually overtook them as the major players in the network operatng system space.

But, in its time, Netware was the standard of excellence and a tribute to the “out of the box” thinking of Noorda, Major and others who developed a new technlogy that changed the way we work and think.

Johnny Can’t Write

I an read article in today’s newspaper (yes I’m one of those throwbacks who still get a real newspaper every day) about the demise of cursive handwriting. According to the article, on the 2006 SAT Exams only about 15% of the students wrote their essays using cursive handwriting. The rest printed thier essays in block letters.

The artlcle goes on to say that U.S primary schoools only spend 10 minutes or less a day teaching cursive handwriting. And, as a result, more and more students not only have poor cursive handwriiting skills, but also have problems reading handwritten cursive text.

Read more about the causes and effects of the loss of cursive writing skills here.

Meat Puppets

Guess one really does learn something new every day…or at least every few days.

There was an article in the Washington Post on Saturday, 7 October 2006 about various marketing techniques used on the Internet. The author used a term I had never encountered before…”Meat Puppet,” along with a number of other more common terms.

After reading the article, I thought about it for a while and decided that the marketing techniques the author talked about were not really unique to the Internet. They have been in use for years. Its just that the media used to deliver them has changed and the results are achieved much more rapidly than in the past.

What do you think?

The New Look

As you can see, I’ve once again changed the look of HR’s halfVAST Blog. And, at first glance, you will probably say “It’s even uglier than the previous layout.” Well think about it for a minute. Using design tools available today, even novices can produce web sites that have colorful graphics and fancy layouts. But not everyone can produce web sites that conform to standards and have a consistent loook and feel across different browsers, physical screen sizes and screen resolutions. Although this site’s outward appearance is quite ordinary, the underlying design is not.

And, if nothing else, hopefully this less than stunning layout encourages viewers to focus on the content rather than the “eye candy.”