Wedding 25.0 (A Knowledge Collaboration!)

Northern Life

This will be my only post this week … no engineering stuff … no Web 2.0 information, because Molly and I have achieved Wedding 25.0 ! This new love sharing application will be released to the general public on Wednesday, May 21st (our 25th Wedding Anniversary)!

How does one define Wedding 25.0? Here is my answer …

In 25 years of marriage I have only worn one piece of jewelry, my wedding ring. In those 25 years I’ve only taken off my ring three times. Once on my wedding night, to read the inscriptions with my bride … once on my 15th wedding anniversary when Molly and I renewed our vows and wanted to show our children the inscriptions … and once with my wife at a jewelry store to have the ring shined up. The final occasion was a mistake … as this banged up ring has never ceased to glow.  It did not need buffing!

Our celebration starts this evening when our children take us out to dinner, and tomorrow Molly and I are escaping to our beloved North Shore of Lake Superior.

I invite you to watch this short four minute video which I created for my bride, Molly. It takes the Hoeg family quickly through 25 years of life! If you are so inclined, please leave Molly and me a comment. Molly will not be aware of this blog post till after I preview the video for her and the kids at dinner!

An addendum … the kids fooled us! The restaurant was full of friends reaching back to grade school!

(click upon the photo for an expanded view)
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Dandelion Love – Why a Weed?!

Northern Life

It’s Saturday, and with it … heavy thoughts for the human mind. While doing a 19 mile training run in preparation for Grandma’s Marathon, I came across this field of dandelions (see my photo). When your brain is in never, never land … during extreme exercise … I thought … why is a dandelion considered a weed, while a poppy is known as a flower? I thought the blanket of yellow leading down to Medicine Lake was gorgeous! Via Google Images, I found a red carpet of poppy’s for comparison. You decide! Click either thumbnail for an expanded view.
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Sichuan, China Earthquake Relief: Rebuilding Schools – Helping Children

China

As many of you know, I have am involved with building schools in rural China. Last month, I was even a keynote speaker at the China Tomorrow Education Foundation (CTEF) annual benefit dinner. If you’ve seen news reports on the devastation in the Sichuan region … including collapsed schools, you will understand that the need for help is huge.  Thankfully, as far as we know, none of our schools collapsed. My foundation (registered 501c charity in the USA) is trying to help out.  Here is a quote from our president’s message:

"CTEF has been helping school children and renovating school buildings in rural China since 2001. Even before the earthquake, CTEF had been working with enthusiastic local volunteers on school renovation projects in Sichuan’s Beichuan and Yilong counties. We are committed to using 100% of the Earthquake Relief Fund to rebuild schools and communities and help school children who have suffered from this tragedy. "

Learn more, and consider donating. My plans include a trip to China later this Fall. I will report back on our efforts via this blog.

You may also wish to visit National Public Radio’s Chengdu Diary. NPR actually has a team of reporters in Chengdu. They were preparing for a special week of China coverage that had been planned for next week.

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Managing Your Most Important Asset: Knowledge

Uncategorized

My alma matter, Dartmouth (albeit Tuck … my MBA is from elsewhere) has an excellent podcast, Information as a Strategic Asset. Just this weekend I presented at Minnebar 2008; my topic was social search within the enterprise. What are you doing to leverage that knowledge?  Can you imagine querying external Google, but securely receiving both internal and external results? I can!

Remember, information and knowledge comes from people. Some additional research on the Dartmouth web site brought me to this white paper, Web 2.0 and the Corporation (pdf). The information and comments are from an executive roundtable co-hosted by IBM and Tuck last year (CIOs and other senior execs from 3M, BT Group, JPMorgan Chase, Cisco, DISA, Eastman Chemical, IBM, ING, Ogilvy, and Time Warner Cable). Some companies get it … some don’t.  Which camp are you in?

Finally, here is a photo of me presenting at Minnebar 2008. I was doing a lighting demo on the Engineering Learning Wiki. My thanks to Luke Frankl and his camera! He also caught this nerd in the front row of seats at the very end of Minnebar 2008… using his Nokia N800 tablet! You may wish to read my other Minnebar 2008 post.

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Minnebar 2008: Geeks 1 Minnesota Fishing Opener 0

Uncategorized

Today is a national holiday in Minnesota, Fishing Opener. When one survives another bitter Winter here in the Land of 10,000 Lakes (actually 15,000+, but we’re modest), the need for some outdoor fun is HUGE. Yet, this geek / fisherman is attending, along with 400 other nerds on a Saturday, Minnebar 2008.

If you’ve never attended an "unconference" (Wikipedia link), you need to get with it! Earlier today I personally presented on Social Search in the Corporate Environment. Later I attended a session on using mashups in the enterprise … and this afternoon I am looking forward to the "lightning rod demos".  Anyone may demo, but with an extreme time limit (3 minutes??). If you want to learn about tens of new ideas quickly, this is a great deal.

Finally I just attended the State of the State: Technology in Minnesota. We may not be Silicon Valley (who cares?), but we have our own start-up success stories. This panel responded to questions about what is takes to create a vibrant development community here in Minnesota.

While most of you will not care about the answer to this question (Minnesota development community), the key takeaway from a barcamp is the phenomenal interaction among attendees. Attend a barcamp in your local area.

In fact … information can just flow in to a person. While creating this post Adam Des Autels stopped by to chat. He had attended my session this morning, and knew of my love of intelligent RSS. His recommendation was to check out a new RSS aggregator that uses fuzzy logic to improve you results … sounds very neat.  I’ve taken an initial look at PARTicls, and it deserves a thorough review. Time to attend another session!

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