A brand new book by Mike Thompson, called The Organizational Champion hits the shelves nationwide this Friday, June 5th.  Mike is the CEO of the company I work for, SVI. So, needless to say, we are all very excited about the release.

There is a lot going on online around the book as well.  We have a podcast, forums, a site called ChampEm.com where you can tell the world about your Champions and a lot more. Head over to www.organizationalchampions.com to check it all out and let me know what you think. I am part of the team who has worked diligently to put all of it together.

January 26-28, 2009 Northwest Arkansas Ice Storm Pictures.

Northwest Arkansas is only now just getting back up to speed after the enormous ice storm that hit the area a couple of weeks ago.

I found these pictures by a storm chaser of the effects of the ice storm. They are amazing. Thanks @ederdn on Twitter for the link.

We were lucky at our house. We had power a lot of the time. We did lose power for two 12-hour stretches, but those were both pretty much during the day time so it wasn’t really that bad.

We have friends who were out for over a week.

I went down to the Gulf Coast to help out after Katrina hit and things here were not to dissimilar. Now, we didn’t have nearly the problems that New Orleans had, but in the out-lying areas around New Orleans the damage was similar to what we experienced.

Trees down. Electric trucks from all over the U.S. working hard to get power back up. This was a full-blown emergency.

Now that the ice is gone, we are faced with forests of fractured trees. It is going to take a couple of summers for the trees to fully rebound. Looking out at the trees, nearly every tree I see has lost at least one or more of its main branches.  It’s eerie to have clear site of the sky where once there were branches.  It feels naked.

Well, it is done. Now we can get back to the real news like which rehab Britney is in and up to the minute news on the last strikingly beautiful white girl who recently disappeared. (Can you tell that I am not enamored with our news situation here in the US?)

But a few of thoughts have come to mind now that the dust is starting to settle.

Thought #1

What would our world look like if McCain had gotten the nod back in 2000 rather than George W. Bush? I don’t have an answer to that question right off the bat, but it is indeed interesting to think about. What do you bet we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq? I am sure we would still be having troubles in the economy due to normal undulations and cycles in the market but would it be this dire? I don’t know. One thing I am pretty sure of is I bet our standing in the world community would be better than it is right now.

Thought #2

A lot is on the shoulders of Barack Obama right now. The hopes and dreams, fairly or unfairly, rest squarely on his shoulders. He did ask for it after all.

There are many who have pointed out his relative lack of experience. Two years from now we will have a much clearer understanding on how that plays out, but that is something to keep an eye on.

Thought #3

I am growing exceedingly tired of the media’s portrayal of the South as being exclusively racist. I take extreme exception with that. Yes, there are racists in the south, but the fact that black men and women find it hard to hail a taxi in New York City proves that we haven’t cornered the market in that area. I think the bigger reason that McCain won the day in the South was the evangelical vote. Church is big in the South. I would bet there are way more conservative Christians than there are out and out racists in the South, and it seems to me that that is the real reason for the vote count down here.

My biggest outrage of the coverage on CNN last night was when one of the pundits called the south “The Confederate States”. Rarely does something make my blood boil, but that was an unfair stereotype and seemed driven by ignorance. We, as a country, have made great strides in righting the atrocities of our past, and name-calling and finger-pointing needs to stop, and stop now. We have a long way to go, but man have we come a long way, and rhetoric like what I saw on CNN last night only slows the progress. CNN don’t bring that lady back!

I will be watching with great interest at Barack Obama’s first 100 days in office. It will be very interesting to see what he does to set the tone for his first term in office. Has he learned from Clinton’s mistake in going to far, to fast? We will see.

Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t remark on John McCain’s speech. It was one of the most gracious and hopeful concession speeches I have ever heard. My opinion of John McCain has only grown. He is an exceptional man, and too bad we didn’t have him as president these last eight years. Unfortunately for him, it was simply time for us as a country to have change. Timing is everything, and he got swept under that bus.

I don’t blog politics much, and I don’t think I will much in the future, but last night’s election was historic and a giant step forward in moving our country forward in the area of race. Hard work lies ahead for Barack Obama, Godspeed and good luck. If nothing else, it is good to let the other side see if they can do any better.

I have lived in Northwest Arkansas for 36 years, and in that time I have experienced the remnants of many hurricanes as they dissipate into tame rain showers. Last night, was the first time I can remember where we experienced anything hurricane like.

Hurricane Ike hit Galveston and Houston with some ferocity. There were reports of inland flooding and wind damage, what you would expect from a hurricane making landfall. As soon as Ike was ashore, it almost immediately turned northeast and sped towards Arkansas. It only took 24 hours for the center of Ike to get from the Houston area to Northwest Arkansas.

Like I said before, I have experienced many hurricane remnants so I thought nothing of Ike moving through. I viewed weather reports warning of high sustained winds with a considerably large grain of salt. But sure enough, I awoke at 1:00 AM to the sound of sustained howling winds.

In the NWA, we are used to thunderstorms moving through. They often have high winds. Last night was different. The winds started at 1:00 and didn’t stop. It was constant. I am sure it was a mere hint of what they experienced on the coast, but wow.

At 2:00 AM, I was awakened by the clicking sound of every electronic and electric device in my house shutting off. The electricity has never been knocked out by the remnants of a hurricane, but last night, my electricity was out for two hours.

This morning we got our first chance to see the damage, and sure enough, there are a number of limbs down and leaves everywhere. I was in southern Louisiana just three weeks after Katrina a few years ago to help in the cleanup effort. NWA looks nothing like that, but again I can’t remember ever having any damage from hurricane remnants.

It was a noteworthy storm.

Yeah, so this kinda sounds like a problem…

FAA computer problems cause flight delays – CNN.com.

This is a case of Little Brother catching an officer in a dangerous lapse in judgment.  In the George Orwell classic, 1984, we see a world where the government has placed cameras everywhere to surveil its people.  The government was known as “Big Brother”.  Well in this day of cameras in the hand of nearly every citizen, police and those in more powerful positions have to be careful and make better choices, or they just might find themselves on YouTube and then behind a desk.

Adobes Lightroom 2 beta broadens editing horizons | Underexposed – CNET News.com

CNET is reporting that the next version of Adobe Lightroom will give photogs greater editing capability within Lightroom. In the first version of Lightroom, if you needed to adjust a photo it was an all or nothing deal. All changes were global. We couldn’t adjust the light levels in just one part of the photo. In order to do that, we had to open the photo in Photoshop and mask it off and on and on. This was definitely do-able, but it was an extra step which slowed down the overall photo editing job.

The next version of Light room will allow you to use a brush and adjust portions of a photograph. That is extremely handy and will speed up the work flow markedly. Time is money and the faster you can edit, the more money you make.

I had skipped the first version of Lightroom, sticking to my CS2 workflow because it worked. I am going to take a harder look at Lightroom 2.0 when it comes out.

I can’t believe that I never hear anyone talking about sharing interesting news links via Google Reader. It is such an easy thing to do and it doesn’t add that much overhead to your news reading regimen. Google Reader is an online RSS aggregation site. That means that through Google Reader, you can subscribe to sites that you go to and get notification when new content is produced. Cool stuff.

I have subscribed to a number of sites, some news, some sports, but mostly tech related. As I scroll through the stories, I look for interesting content. When I find something that piques my interest enough to read it, I share it. That creates an RSS stream of news that I find interesting. That has value. I go through the news and cull out the boring stories.

I will admit that my choices are highly biased by my tastes and what I think is important, but I would find it interesting to subscribe to friends news feeds just to get a glimpse into what they think is important.

Google Reader makes this so easy that I am stupefied that this isn’t something that more people do. We share our thoughts on blogs. We share our thoughts and location on twitter. Heck, we share everything. Why hasn’t news sharing taken off more.

I know Del.icio.us, the bookmarking website has been around for a long time, but I could never get into how it works. It has always seemed like an extra step. Besides, it was created before the explosion of RSS-ified content.

I went to Del.icio.us earlier today to see if there was a way to combine my RSS feed of news in Del.icio.us and couldn’t find it. It would be great if I could wire my Google reader feed to create Del.icio.us links, but I can’t make that happen.

Right now I am only following one news feed, and that’s Steve Gillmor. He shares news in fits and starts, but it is incredibly interesting to see what he finds interesting.

I am looking for more news feeds to read.
Robert Scoble?
Jason Calacanis?
Veronica Belmont?

There are a ton of feeds I and others would read. Why hasn’t this blown up?

If you like what I write about on this blog, and are interested to see what news items I find interesting, check out my Google Reader news RSS feed. Subscribe to it in Google Reader or the RSS aggregator of your choice. If you aren’t an RSS maven don’t fear. You can also see what I am reading on my Google Reader Shared Items page.

Yesterday, I finally decided how and when I would use Google Readers “share” function. Google Reader allows you to click a link called “share” that will make a list of news items that you find interesting. That list automatically creates a page and an RSS feed that others can subscribe to.

I have been using the share function on a hit and miss basis for well over a year now, but I didn’t have any rules.  Now I do.  From now on, if I take the time to actually read a story, I will share it.  Simple.  That means if the subject matter of a news story or blog entry piques my interest, then it is good enough to share.

How does that effect you?  Well I can be your source of sorted geek news.  Subscribe to my feed in your aggregator, and then maybe we can discuss the news of the day.