The Colonel's Forum

I've been spending too much time on other online communication sites lately. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, they all serve their place. Where they fail is in substance. It's all immediate blips of information that almost encourage you to have a short attention span. Sometimes, I need more than a quick post. Today is one of those days. If you know me, you know that politics is one of my passions. I love to follow it, and I love to talk about it, with everyone. I don't care if you're a crazy militia man or a pot smoking hippie, I want to hear your opinion. This, to me, is one of the most critical things we can do to sustain this country - talk to each other, ESPECIALLY when we disagree. You won't always change my mind, and I won't always change yours, that's not the point. The point is to hear as many perspectives as you can, and together with you own knowledge and values, form an informed opinion. On what? Anything. Everything. I am genuinely astonished to thi

I read a great opinion piece today by David Frum, a former adviser to "W." Frum is a really smart guy, and a great example of something that still baffles me about W's Presidency, which is "how can anyone surrounded by brilliant minds like Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, and others make so many dumb decisions? There was something about the culture he had in the White House that turned smart people into morons. I just hope Obama fumigated before moving in to get rid of it. Frum's article makes a point I've been quietly screaming for years - the loud people in Congress who claim to be "conservative" "Republicans" are neither one. In fact, I think they've ruined both terms. These loud mouths just landed a debt deal that will do absolutely nothing to actually solve our debt problems, and in fact is very likely to make our economy worse before it gets better. Here's a great quote from the article: " Only about one-third of Re

Decided I'd better updated my blog before Google decided I'm no longer using it. Perhaps the fact that I've gone so long without updating here means that I'm getting my social media fix through other means - I have been using Twitter more and of course Facebook. Part of it is certainly that I've become super busy at work since I transferred jobs at the start of this year. I'm now working in HP's TS consulting group as a cloud strategist. Sounds silly, and cloud computing is one of the most overused buzz-words in existence at the moment. I'm betting that cloud computing really is going to change the way people look at IT, and the conversations I've been having with our customers this year seem to confirm this. The biggest change in my personal life was a move to downtown Lexington. We love this town, and we found that we were spending so much of our time downtown we might as well move there. Plus we had a four bedroom house, which was a bit mor