evolution creations

So one of the biggest changes that has occurred this year is the number of companies that are going “green”. But what irritates me beyond all reason is the fact that going green doesn’t have a standardized meaning and utilization amongst all parties. For instance, I think that companies can achieve a more green status by:

1. Making use of ecologically friendly servers, i.e. servers that have lower power utilization and green manufacturing processes. In searching not that many companies have invested in this type of technology for their servers–it is my guess that people would consider servers to be like any other electronic hardware, turn it on and it works without any regard for how it works or what consumption is made on the post side of things, or what can be done to improve things on the pre and production side of things. My hats off to Dell for starting this, and I would say that I am looking for other companies to also follow suit.
1. Dell
2. Now that you are running green servers, you can utilize virtualization to reduce the over-all foot print of your server infrastructure to consolidate systems that can share hardware. Obviously you will have systems that cannot share hardware, such as database servers or web-servers, but if you are a small to medium size business, you can probably share things like your Active Directory server or LDAP server and email server on the same box. Also you can put virtual servers for your demo environments or staging environments on the same server. Potentially 4+ servers on one piece of hardware. Companies are leary to go to virtualization in their production environments, but when we consider how much of the server is being used at any given time, having more than 1 server hardware for these types of situations is a bit of an over kill if you ask me. I know from experience, that companies look to servers are a dime a dozen, instead of looking at ways that they can be consolidated or utilized in better balance, i.e. moving services from server to server and combining them with other services that have a better balance in server resources so the two services aren’t always fighting for processor time or RAM, etc.
3. Companies typically have different type of employee’s with different requirements in terms of hardware. But one thing that I haven’t seem occur that often is virtual workstations. This can be achieved by using hardware solutions, such as the solution offered by companies like NComputing. What’s really interesting about this type of solution, is when you put it into a contact center environment, where you have agents working at different times and maybe at different stations, the solution offered by NComputing offers both the portability that a user can move to any workstation (to play my own devils advocate, you can also achieve this by using network services on most major OS systems) but also you can reduce the over-all footprint of your hardware, as the need to have a workstation, monitor, keyboard, and mouse is reduced to just a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Also when it comes to the workstation footprint, you can have several agents share one physical computer, and this makes it easier to both manage the OS and users, as well as reducing power consumption, ability to have user’s plug in their own devices, such as USB or Firewire devices, and because you may pair agents on nodes based on their work schedules, you can balance the load on the servers to maximize your over-all productivity and resource availability. Ideally you want the systems to be working at 50% all the time (or higher), instead of having drastic peaks and valleys or periods where the system is just sitting there at 99% idle.
4. LCD’s vs CRT’s. With the reduced cost of LCD’s nowadays, companies should be getting rid of those bulky old CRT monitors and replacing them with Energy Star, high efficiency LCD screens. That is just the first part of the puzzle. The second part is more of a behavioral change, that is to change the behavior of each employee to make sure that they turn OFF their monitor at the end of the day. How many times have I been one of the last out of the office, and I walk by desk after desk where their monitors are left rendering the screen saver or some other silly thing. It’s a major change I grant you that, but if user’s do not get into the habit of being green themselves, then it is a single sided effort that rests on the companies shoulders unnecessarily.

In addition to the technology changes, companies should also make changes such as:

- Eliminate non-biodegradable cups and invest in getting employee’s reusable cups (microwavable) for their hot beverages, and water bottles for their cold beverages. This could also be an opportunity to slap the company logo on a few more things, as employee’s are generally open to getting more company labeled stuff, especially the free kind.

Granted these are simple things and there are tons more, but I think going through these types of exercises will only help to create a standard so that if a company saids that it is a green company, there is a lot of visibility as to what that means.

So today we went to see National Treasure: Book of Secrets, and I have to say I was not disappointed at all! I am a huge fan of this saga, and the second installation of National Treasure I would recommend for all who enjoyed the first one. A few things to point out. First, if you are looking for the sequel to be better than the first–don’t go see this movie. There are certainly aspects of this movie that are better than the first, but the story line in the first was obviously a lot more complex and complete. The story also provides intrigue and mystery, which isn’t to say that the second installment didn’t have that, but the story line isn’t as deeply ingrained in our history as the first. The Knights Templar is a myth that we think of when we think of the Arc of the Convanet or the Crusades, or Salamons Temple, etc. John Wilks Booth shooting Abe Lincoln and there being a mystery of a city of gold, sort of further into fiction than the first book.

Also I was expecting the story line involving Gates and his girlfriend to start up from where it left off–let’s face it they left it off fairly picture perfect, but there were additional rocky roads that were left that needed to be filled in.

Finally, we look at Poole, Gates’s side-kick of sorts, at the end of the first installment, was promised by Gates that if there was another treasure that altered the history of the world, that he would be able to determine the finders fee. In the second installment Gates mother is seen organizing the archeological expedition on the city of gold, but there isn’t anything about a finders fee or the reward, only that Poole gets his car back as an offer from the President of the United States.

All in all, a great story, but this is left wide open for a sequel as there is the mysterious page 47 in the Book of Secrets that Gates takes a picture of, and the President asks about at the very end. What does this all mean. I was thinking about this, and supposed that it might have to do with the assassination of James Garfield and the acts of Chester Author as the vice-president and perhaps to uncover the plot that Author used in conjunction with the Stalwart party to have Garfield assassinated. While the story is plausable, there isn’t a treasure necessarily. Perhaps the third installation will revolve around the gold at Fort Knox or something along those lines.

As we get closer to the holiday and the end of another year, I think to myself all the things that have happened in the past year, and what we should be all thankful for. I don’t think that we get the time necessarily as people to consider what we have and what we have worked towards. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why we always are seeking the next goal or objective, because we don’t have the talents or skills in place as ordinary people to look at things in terms of the here and now. What is it that we typically hear from the enlightened ones–that is to not know what is in your future, but to know what is in your past and present. It’s sort of this idea of self-actualization that leads to a better understanding of yourself, and ultimately can enable someone to progress forward.

I think this past year has been a year of challenges and growth. I look at myself and the people around me, and I see that there are some that have fallen behind, some that have excelled forward, and others still who have remained where they are in terms of growth and over-all wellbeing. We use the term wellbeing and we automatically assume that this means a health related wellbeing, something that can be measured through your temperature, or observed through a microscope, but instead wellbeing is more of a general state of things. It is to say that there is balance in what you do, where the various pulls within your life are not disproportionately distributed, but instead are in a balanced state that would be nicely visualized via a ying-yang symbol.

Symbols have for a long time represented what we feel or want to mean, but do not seem to have the words to describe it. In actuality, I think that as robust that our language is, we are still not at a point where we can fully describe in words what we feel. Perhaps this is why we are still battling the seemingless never-ending challenges of coding artificial intelligence. If we can’t adequately describe things in the real-world, who’s to say that we have the facilities to be able to do so virtually or in a way that will bring life to something that was created from nothing. When we talk about symbols, we look at things like the heart, or symbols of a crucifix, these are universally representative of things that we feel or believe, but do not have a complex explaination behind them. To each the symbols can mean and represent themselves as different things, and ultimately their meaning and the way that they impact our lives will also be different.

So to this end, I must say that I am fully geared up and ready to go to the first screening of National Treasure: Book of Secrets! I know, that long philosophical debate, and how can I lead up to a movie! In all actuality, I find myself being drawn to movies like this, because it doesn’t try to explain something to it’s fullest or make you believe that what they are showing you is true, but instead the idea or the thought that something larger, bigger, or more complex than what we are use to exists out there in the world today, and we probably walk by it 100 times a day and never realized it’s existence.

To finally to end this post, I do want to say, that my first drafts of my book will soon be available in bits and pieces as I work to complete it. I find myself in a state where I don’t know what to take on as a new life challenge, but I have always been drawn to the idea that writing something, creating something that others find engaging or interesting, would always be something that I am interested in, so we will see where this takes us!