No, not a picture this time — my hotel room isn’t as good as it was in January for Macworld — just a quick note on perspective and a little bit of introspection on what it is I’m doing here.
I’ve been flipping through the handouts that came in my SWAG bag, and I don’t know if I’ve seen so many buzzwords collected in one place, ever. The enterprise tech market seems to be a roiling sea of companies all trying to simultaneously cannibalize each other’s sales while forming groups to work together for interoperability. My impression so far is that they’re all run by marketers looking for the “next big thing.”
How about this for a “next big thing”? Make products that make my life TRULY easier. I don’t know for sure what exactly I mean by that, I’m still new to the space, but I can’t imagine that every mid-sized company needs yet another “dashboard” to help manage their “private cloud.” I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that there might be fewer than 500 companies (most regularly listed in a particular edition of Fortune magazine, I’d guess) that truly need something like that. Is that tiny market worth all the trouble you go to trying to reach it?
Anyway, I’m here to absorb all of it that I can, which means that I’ll have to figure out a way to translate buzzwords into something that is actually useful in my environment. I’ll also need to sift through all the cruft on the show floor for the truly informative and helpful info. Even for a guy who’s pretty good at BS detection like myself, this is a daunting task.
Nevertheless, I’m excited to be here, and I’m looking forward to learning more about this technology. I think it’ll be really useful to me in the future, and I hope that I can put the knowledge I gain to good use for TCU.
i’m going to have to order one. Yeah, I REALLY shouldn’t spend the money, but I truly believe that this is the future of the “printed” word. And I’ve always been an early adopter…
I’ve been thinking a lot about business and the economy lately. Like, macro-level stuff, not everyday operations thoughts. Also thinking about culture (American culture in particular) and how it affects the business climate and our economy.
Been having a lot of thoughts as well on technology — as you probably know, I’m a pretty big fan of technology. I’m tired of “technology for technology’s sake,” though. Planned obsolescence, stuff like that.
Mostly I’ve been thinking about how I’m going to use my degree in Geography (with minor in Environmental Science) once I’ve completed it.
More fleshed out thoughts on this once finals are over and I’ve had time to decompress.
The TCU Sustainable Futures Group is sponsoring a conference called “Urban Futures: Utilizing Green Technologies” this Thursday from 4PM until 7:30PM at the Omni Hotel in downtown Fort Worth.
Registration is $50 at the door, or $35 if you register online in advance. TCU students are now going to be allowed in for free, but Faculty and Staff will be charged $15.
Admission gets you free valet parking for your Prius (or your F350 Super Duty), beverages, and hors d’ oeuvres. There will be a cash bar, so if you want to get green around the gills while talking green tech, bring a grip of green. (I’M SO SICK OF “GREEN” EVERYTHING!)
Ever since the USGBC introduced the LEED standard for green building, there have been naysayers and skeptics.
First it was the builders and real estate developers who said that people didn’t care about all that “green” BS, they just wanted the least expensive building they could get. (Or, conversely, the most building they could get for the least amount of money.)
More recently there have been catcalls from the traditionalist movement that green buildings are ugly and therefore inherently unsustainable because they’re “unlovable.” (I wonder how you quantify lovability?)
Now that “green” has become mainstream, the loudest complaints about LEED are coming from people who say that it doesn’t go far enough, or that it’s just a marketing tool or system for racking up points based on the unconsidered application of “gizmo green” technology.
I’m more bothered by the latter groups than the former. While it’s good that there be healthy debate and I’m all for criticism of LEED on the basis that it is too easy to game or that its standards are too vague, I wonder if this kind of scorched-Earth dismissal of LEED isn’t more harmful to the sustainability movement than its intended target.
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You may have seen my post last Friday about the best places to get some nature in FW. Well, I took my own advice Saturday morning and headed out to Tandy Hills Natural Area to go for a hike and some fresh air.
While we were there, we ran into Don Young and Jenny Conn from the Friends of Tandy Hills, and they introduced me to the crew led by Michelle Villafranca, of the city’s Urban Forestry department. (I met Michelle last year when Jenna volunteered to help our neighborhood tree program get free trees from the city for planting in the easement along the street.)
Michelle described the work they were doing, which is that they’re going through the Natural Area and clearing out invasive and non-native tree species so that the grasses can recover and native plants can have a chance to gain some strength.
Too many of the trees you see when you go out there are invasive species — often something used as an ornamental plant in landscaping that’s escaped and started to reproduce like crazy in our wild areas.
The difference between the last time I was there and how some areas look now is amazing! It may not be immediately obvious, but imagine this area being choked with small trees, all competing for scarce light and also choking out native species. Now there’s room for the grass to grow again!
Hundreds or thousands of years ago, this kind of mechanized labor wouldn’t have been necessary. Lightning strikes and droughts would have burned out small trees before they had a chance to establish themselves, and the grasses that make up the prairie would recover more quickly, keeping things in balance. Since we immediately put out any fires today, even in wilderness areas, those natural processes don’t take place, and areas like this become forever changed. Thanks to Don and his passion, we’re finally starting to see the order of things set right.
Seriously — All through the campaign I recognized the next path of spin or rhetoric a day or two before the campaigns started spouting it, and would share that with my wife, or comment on another blog about it.
Lately I’ve been saying that the solution to the energy “crisis” isn’t centralized power generation using renewable sources; the answer is distributed, small-scale production, close to where the energy is used.
I’m not sure if Amory Lovins is reading my mind or not, but he says the same thing (basically) in this post on the Freakonomics Blog.
How do I monetize my apparent clairvoyance? I want a job where I get to think about stuff and make predictions every day…
It looks like someone over at the Fort Worth Real Estate Blog has some issues with W&C. Methinks maybe they have issues with our commenters and maybe can’t tell the difference between editorial content and comments.
Anyway, here’s a comment that I wanted to leave (but couldn’t, due to their commenting system being hosed up) in response to their most recent post about something they didn’t like on W&C — something that I think they’re misinterpreting or reading into Steve’s post on injection wells.
Thanks for the link!
I’m sorry if you think that we at West and Clear are ungrateful for any kind of commercial investment in Fort Worth. I can assure you that exactly the opposite is true — we want Fort Worth to succeed and grow, but we want it to be smart and reasoned growth, taking into account more than just the financial benefits.
I’m not interested in rebutting your comments point by point, except to say this:
If you only look at Barnett Shale activity from the economic perspective, then yes, it has certainly been a good thing in the short term. But the true leaders in this City should be looking at the LONG term and how ALL of the drilling activities will affect things. It’s unacceptable to just push risks off onto future generations so that we (by “we” I mean a small number of people, myself included) can make a few bucks today. What happens when all those wells are drilled and the thousands of jobs are gone, off to another “play”? The same thing that happened to places like Ranger and countless other towns in West and central Texas that prospered during the oil boom in the early 20th Century, albeit on a smaller scale. The Barnett Shale may be tiding us over during the greater economic downturn, but is it preparing us for the coming rebound? I don’t think so.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about sustainability. I realize that “sustainability” is a VERY broad concept, and that’s why I’ve been thinking so much about it, because I’m really good at big picture things and not so good at detailed, incremental things.
Anyway, expect more posts on this topic over the coming months.
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