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.
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!)
1959 TCU grad Bob Schieffer will be hosting his annual Symposium, titled: “Obama and the Press: Is the media doing its job?”
Panelists scheduled to attend:
David Brooks, of the New York Times
Gwen Ifill, author of “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama” (also moderator and managing editor of PBS’ Washington Week
Andrea Mitchell, chief foreign affairs correspondent for NBC News
Mark Shields, nationally syndicated columnist and commentator on PBS’ Newshour with Jim Lehrer
That’s a pretty bad-ass lineup of journalistic luminaries! I wonder if I can get them all into Scat Jazz Lounge after the Symposium? I’ll bet Andrea Mitchell could drink my buddy Steve under the table. 
I mean, duh! It’s because they dress all slutty and stuff. If they would only dress more modestly, they’d be “…individuals worthy of deep-seated respect and honor from men.”
Or at least that’s what Deliverance Bible Church’s pastor opined in Wednesday’s TCU Daily Skiff.
Here’s the interesting bit — Pastor Weatherford preaches for/at a church that not only accepts, but RELISHES being so-called “outcasts,” (which, based on the pictures on their website, means the tattooed/pierced/all-black-clothed/mullet/mohawk/punk/hot-rod crowd, not ACTUAL outcasts like orphans/immigrants/the poor/lepers/AIDS patients/non-white people). I’m sure he’s experienced his fair share of being judged based on his appearance by his peers in the evangelical community, yet he has no qualms about doing the exact same thing to 54% of his fellow students at TCU.
My favorite part is where he pulls the old “I’m rubber, you’re glue” trick and blames his own issues with lust and “impure” thoughts on the women (or rather the bodies of the women) he’s lusting about and objectifying. Then he brings it full-circle and blames the fact that he even needs to school us on this topic on the women’s liberation movement; the go-to bogey-uhhh-”person” for evangelicals caught in a vexing moral quandary about women.
Is this really the school of thought in mainstream churches, or is Weatherford’s column just a particularly egregious example of the tortured logic evangelicals will go to to justify their continued attempts to subjugate women?
Note: I linked to the TCU Chapter of the Tri-Delta sorority for illustration purposes only — I am in no way implying that these young women are dressed or behave in a “slutty” manner. I merely wanted to give an example of how the typical female student at TCU dresses, which I thought was nicely illustrated on that page. Maybe the average female TCU student doesn’t bend over quite so much when they’re in a group photo, but I think you get the point.
Finally proving that they’re one of the most under-rated teams in the country, and are deserving of BCS membership, the TCU Horned Frogs defeated the Boise State Broncos last night 17-16 in what will likely be one of the best bowl games this year.
“Epic” is a word that’s thrown around too much in sports, particularly in football, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that this game was epic, much like the TCU/Utah game. Except this time the finish came out as it should have.
Hey Jerry Jones! You want a great college game for your new stadium next year? How about TCU vs. Utah again? Or a TCU vs. Oklahoma rematch? It’s pretty douchebaggy that you would completely turn your back on the state that’s given you so much by not even hosting Texas teams for the first college game in your new stadium in freakin’ TEXAS, particularly when there are so many good programs to choose from here.
I know you’ve all been wondering where the hell I’ve been lately. The sad truth is that I’ve just been too busy with work and trying to get things set up in the background at Panther City Media to write much of anything for either site.
I also got a new job this week, which I will be starting at on the 19th. I’ve been hired as an Apple Systems Administrator at TCU. That’s really nice, because I can ride my bike to work! I’m really excited to get started, and it looks like it’ll be a great environment, based on my interactions with the staff there so far.
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