Study from Braindumps for Cert exams

When someone posts the contents of a certification exam on the Internet, is it unethical to study from it or is all fair in Love, War and Certification Exams?

Let the Great Lakes Geek know (anonymously of course) in the latest vote.

Real Programmers Write Code

In Vino Veritas - In wine there is truth.

How about In Flat Iron Veritas?

I had lunch with Aztek CEO John Hill the other day at the venerable Flat Iron Cafe and we started talking about the lack of real programming talent in may of the web 'development' firms.

That became fodder for the latest Great Lakes Geek One Minute Podcast

A Sea of Red

I always liked the old Sammy Hagar rocker called Red.

And I think about that song every year when it's time for the annual Go Red for Women event. Heart disease is the #1 killer of women and this event helps spread awareness of that fact.

Over 900 women attended the event last Friday and 99% of them wore red!

See photos of Cleveland Women in Red. Know anybody?

Cleveland Orchestra as International Business Driver

We all know that the Cleveland Orchestra is the premier international ambassador for the city.

But did you know there are direct implications to international business?

At the Rotary Club of Cleveland event last Thursday, the Club honored Franz Welser-Most and the Cleveland Orchestra with their 2011 International Service Award.

Executive Director Gray Hanson accepted the award and gave the keynote address. It was interesting to hear the affect that music piracy has to the orchestra's bottom line.

Also interesting to learn where most of the musicians come from.

But the most interesting was the story that Hanson (no relation) told about the Emperor of Japan and business in Cleveland.

Cleveland Orchestra at the Rotary of Cleveland

Record Player Marketing

I saw a cool marketing device that gets the target to listen to your company message. A firm called Grey Vancouver devised a cardboard phonograph mailer.

The principle behind a phonograph is simple so they were able to duplicate it in and mail it out.

The cardboard folds into the proper shape and a needle is already attached. A 45 RPM record is included and it has a hole so you can put a pencil in the hole and turn the record.

Very cool. It cost them $5000 to design, produce and send the 100 mailers but they got an incredible 90% response rate.

And traffic to their website grew from 50 weekly visits to over 70,000. Wow!

Least interesting day of the century

Below is the text of the latest One Minute Podcast with the Great Lakes Geek.

A programmer in the UK fed 300 million facts into a computer program that he wrote and determined that April 11, 1954 was the least interesting day since 1900. From news and events the program determined that fewer important things happened on that day than the others in the century.

In one sense that must have been a great day. The old Chinese curse says “May you live in interesting times.” Sometimes interesting is not good. It’s nice to have boring from time to time.

But when I read about the most boring day it reminded me of an old math problem. The prof would say what is the first non-interesting integer (or real number or irrational or whatever.)

We would go through the list excluding numbers. 1 is the identity, it is of course interesting. 2 is the only even prime number. 3 is prime. 4 is a square and so on. We could find something of interest for a lot of numbers.

But eventually we got to a number that we couldn’t find anything interesting about. Let’s call it X.

So we’d tell the prof that X was the first non-interesting number.

Do you see what happens next?

By virtue of X being the first non-interesting number, it becomes interesting! And the process continues.

So there may not be a lot of major events that happened on April 11, 1954 but it just got a little more interesting in my book.

Bill Clinton has a big instrument

Last Friday night, the Honorable Lojze Peterle, Member of the European Parliament and first democratically elected Prime Minister of the Republic of Slovenia, spoke in Cleveland at a Slovenian church in Collinwood.

The speech was in Slovenian but I did manage to pick up part of it.

Prime Minister Peterle told how US President Bill Clinton was from a big country so he played a big instrument - the saxophone.

He is from a small country, Slovenia, so he plays a small instrument - a harmonica. But both can make beautiful music.

He then played Beethoven's Joyful Joyful on the harmonica - really well.

Check out pics and the short video of Prime Minister Peterle.

National Broadband Policy

Blair Levin, principal architect of the National Broadband Plan, spoke at the City Club of Cleveland. His topic was "The New Table Stakes: Winning in the 21st Century"

He then joined a panel offering a local perspective on how Northeast Ohio is building toward a broadband future.

Moderator Lev Gonick, Vice President for Information Technology Services & CIO, Case Western Reserve University, led a panel consisting of:

Roy Church - President, Lorain County Community College
Bethany Dentler - Executive Director, Medina County Economic Development Corporation
Scot Rourke - President & CEO, OneCommunity

There are some glaring and problematic mistakes in our national broadband policy according to Mr. Levin. See what they are and more from the City Club Forum on Broadband

Snow and Ice Storm

Jim Evans suggested that we add "A hot member of the opposite sex . . . for extra body heat in the sleeping bag." to our list of snow storm travel preparations.

That reminded me of a true story.

In the blizzard of 1977, a co-worker and I left work downtown at 3PM and didn't get home till almost 11PM. We took our usual route - Chester - Euclid - Mayfield.

We must have helped 100 cars by pushing them out of drifts - we even directed traffic for awhile. All through University Circle and Little Italy. It was actually fun at times.

We both learned a lesson though in the first few hours of being cooped up in the car. In Hour 1 and 2 we looked at the other cars hoping to find cute girls. That was the #1 priority. We added looking for food around Hour 4 but by Hour 5 and beyond, our biggest concern was finding a bathroom!

After being stuck on Chester for 3 hours last month the same process played out - but much quicker!

Winter weather warning

The federal government has issued a travel warning due to the cold weather.

They suggest that anyone traveling in the current blizzard conditions should make sure they carry the following:

• Shovel


• Blankets or sleeping bag


• Extra clothing including hat and gloves


• 24 hours worth of food


• De-icer


• Rock salt


• Flashlight with spare batteries


• Road flares or reflective triangles


• Full spare gas can


• First aid kit


• Booster cables

I looked like an idiot on the bus this morning.

Egypt shuts down the Internet

In the latest One Minute Great Lakes Geek podcast, the Geek talks about the historic nature of Egypt's Internet shut down.

He also challenges the listener. What would you do if suddenly your connectivity was gone? Got a minute? Take a listen

Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa

At the Republic Day of India celebration last week, they put on a terrific play called Mortal Men & Women and their Immortal Words which featured historical figures such as Gandhi, MLK, Mother Teresa, Abraham Lincoln, Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Tagore.

Seeing friend Raj Pillai come out as Gandhi (shaved head and new mustache!) was wild. He was terrific - be sure to watch the short video.

But the loudest applause came at the conclusion of Pastor Kenneth Knox's powerful recreation of Martin Luther King's 'I have a Dream' speech.

It was a powerful performance by all and should be shown to school children and others throughout the world. Well done Raj and all of the other participants.

Egypt off the Internet

A picture (chart) is worth a thousand words. (Thanks ComputerWorld)

Wow!

Read details at GreatLakesGeek.com

Cleveland Sports with Dan Coughlin

I get a ton of books to review and I know all my local librarians names because I visit so much. Yes, I read a lot.

This book stands out because it is like sitting around a bar listening to a great story teller with lots of juicy inside information.

Coughlin spins stories about Muhammad Ali, Blanton Collier, Woody Hayes,Doug Dieken and dozens of other sports characters.

His chapter on Art Modell and moving the Browns is a must read - should we be vilifying Mayor Mike White instead of Art?

It was a blast to read about the old places (Hollenden House, Theatrical, etc), events (Beer Night, the Charity Game) and institutions (Plain Dealer vs Press, WHK and Gary Dee, etc.)

Read my complete review

Better yet, read Crazy, With the Papers to Prove It: Stories About the Most Unusual, Eccentric and Outlandish People I've Known in 45 Years As a Sports Journalist

The Sandbank Piano and My Thwarted Musical Career

Amy Kenneley is a terrific writer.

She was inspired by the strange appearance of a piano in the ocean outside of Miami to write an essay called The Sandbank Piano and My Thwarted Musical Career.

She tells about her own experience as a little girl with a seemingly abandoned piano.

Worth reading

Medicare

Do you know someone turning 65 or older? The first baby boomers are hitting that magical number so there is a lot of interest, and confusion!, in Medicare.

ClevelandSeniors.Com has a good primer on Medicare: Parts A, B, C and D from a Social Security specialist.

File W-2's online

If you own a business and have employees, you know the law requires you to file W-2 forms each year for them.

Depending on the size of your business and amount of time you have, that could leave you feeling like you're drowning in paperwork. But Social Security offers more than a life preserver - we offer you a way to file your W-2s without any paper at all! File your W-2s the fast, convenient, and paperless way - online.

Filing your W-2s electronically is free, fast, and secure! And there's an added bonus: when you file electronically, you receive an extra month to file because electronically filed W-2s aren't due until March 31st.

See more from the Great Lakes Geek guest column by Social Security Public Affairs Specialist Brandon P. Smith,

Bye Bye CD-ROM

SONY is closing one of its two remaining CD-ROM plants.

Future generations will have a difficult time in learning about our society because of the various outdated media they will discover - all requiring a special device to read the data.

You need to refresh your important data to new and current media.

Latest one minute Great Lakes Geek podcast

Geeks and Cooking

This is the transcript of the current One Minute with the Great Lakes Geek show.

***

What is it with geeks and cooking lately? We used to be content with over-caffeinated beverages or beer and pizza. In fact the old Microsoft Geekfests at Comdex used to advertise by promising ‘Warm Beer and Cold Pizza”. The food was not the thing.

Now I find myself reviewing a book called Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food. It’s an O’Reilly book so it’s good and the subtitle of Real Science, Great Hacks and Good Food makes it clear why I am interested in it.


I also have a box of Ghostbusters Stay Puft Caffeinated Marshmallows which are described as “The world’s finest caffeinated marshmallows.” I kid you not. You get 3 little trays that look like ice-cube trays, each holding 8 neat cubes of marshmallows – with a caffeine kick.

The marshmallows’ ingredients and consistency supposedly make them perfect for various creative cooking and science experiments. I can’t vouch for that yet but they do taste good – and have a little kick. And you have to like the “Who you gonna call - Ghostbusters” guy on the box.

Even CES wasn’t immune from the mix of tech and cooking. A device called the iGrill won the 6th Annual 2011 Bluetooth SIG Best of CES Awards for Best New Product. As the World’s First Bluetooth Cooking Thermometer for iPhone, they say it will Revolutionize the Way We Cook and give A Perfectly Cooked Steak, Every Time.

The $99 iGrill consists of:
• iGrill Thermometer with Projection Display and Probe – with easy-to-clean touch interface and multiple probe options.
• iGrill App for iPod, iPhone, & iPad - tells you status of food via Bluetooth.

Hungry yet?

This podcast was not brought to you by the Food Network. It was sponsored by the techies at Aztek. Visit aztekweb.com and talk to them about increasing your website traffic, conversions and sales.

See you next week.

Comdex, CES and tech shows after 9/11

Below is the transcript from the current One Minute with the Great Lakes Geek

---

I should be in Las Vegas. Maybe you feel that way too but for almost 20 years straight I went out to Vegas for COMDEX, the big Computer show and then CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, after Comdex died.

I got to see a lot of the most interesting people in tech at those shows – Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Peter Norton, Borland’s Philippe Khan, Intel’s Andy Grove, Gordon Eubanks of Symantec and on and on.

The crowds were ridiculously huge – one year it was over 250,000 techies jammed into Vegas. The cab lines snaked forever.

I will never forget the Comdex right after September 11, 2001. It was just a few weeks after the attack and we still didn’t know if the terrorists were planning more attacks and what the targets might be.

A lot was written that if they wanted to attack the so called decadence of the West, a la the World Trade Center, Las Vegas was the best target. One columnist wrote that the absolute perfect target for the terrorists would be to attack the Bill Gates keynote at Comdex in Las Vegas. That would send a message about the “evils” of technology, US tech companies like Microsoft and, of course, Sin City.

Despite all this many of us flew out to Vegas that year and even went to Bill Gates keynote address. Security was dramatically increased from the previous year with armed guards with dogs checking everyone out.

There were some nervous moments and Comdex, like many other trade shows, never again reached the crowds that it once had. The show was dead a few years later.

Part of that is because the technology lets us handle much of the trade show business virtually but there is still part that can be traced back to 9/11.

CES has captured much of the crowds of Comdex, especially as the computer industry gets more consumer oriented.

I didn’t make it to Vegas for CES this year but when I see the ubiquitous news blurbs about the crowds and new gadgets I can’t help but remember that one trip in 2001 when several thousand of us sat in the hall with one eye watching Bill Gates and the other looking for the nearest emergency exit.