With apologies to the late, great Prince…RIP. You’ve all heard the hype and bluster about the Cloud. As a term, I smirk about it being a “new” concept: the AT&T reps who used to call on me at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oklahoma were using it in 2000. It’s old telco jargon that’s now […]
Big Solar comes to Big Oil Country
This is very cool — my alma mater (and former employer) the University of Tulsa is installing an HUGE solar array on the roof of the Case Center in Tulsa. My Leadership Tulsa #49 colleague Jason Grunin tells me that the project will begin shortly, near the end of June. The 300-kilowatt array will belong […]
The Kids Are Alright
From earlier: I joined TU in 1990 to run the campus computer labs. Since I was still young-looking, when Bob Chappelle hired me my first task was go undercover — bring a backpack and visit all the computer labs masquerading as a student lab patron: see what the student lab workers were doing, etc. etc. It […]
The Internet comes to TU: A history
I started working in higher education IT in February of 1990, when the Internet was still the private playground of academia. Because of our computer science faculty requiring access to supercomputer sites for their research, the University of Tulsa was connected to one of the original NSFNet backbones. Our upstream provider was MIDnet in Lincoln, Nebraska […]
Ghosts of Victoria, and Vancouver
May 12, 2016: I’m in Vancouver, B.C. this week for the United Way Worldwide conference. It’s been GREAT being back in the Pacific Northwest — for all too short a stay. I haven’t been here since 1997 and it reminds me of all the ways in which it’s different than Seattle or Portland and the […]
Welcome to Marysville!
I love my neighborhood. It’s official name in Bryn Mawr, which means “high hill” in Welsh. We are almost the tallest point on Lewis Avenue; up the hill from Monte Cassino. But I always think of Bryn Mawr as really starting a few streets to the South; I informally call my little area Marysville — […]
“We have a cash flow problem”
That title is a tidbit and snippet of family lore from my Father in Law, Kenneth Gibson. He was a commercial realtor for Grover Bauer in Tulsa in the 1970s-80s, and he told me a story once about selling a commercial property for a client. The client was being a bit slow on paying him his […]
Happy Year of the Monkey!
So we’ve already covered that I’m a pack-rat where data is concerned. It’s easier to keep track of than boxes of paper, and backup tapes and the equipment to read them can fit in one box… Yesterday I exchanged Lunar New Year greetings with Hoo Kok Mun — one of my favorite student workers at TU […]
Adventures in ERP migration
August 6, 2015: Today I had a great phone call with a former colleague in the Washington State Community College system. He joined our little band of 32 IT Directors about a year after I did, and was at a similar-sized college so naturally we hit it off. It was great to reminisce and recall personalities, […]
Remembering “Challenger”
It was a day like many others in Oklahoma — sunny and warm for winter, kinda like today. I’d come home from work for lunch — I was a newbie/recent college graduate masquerading as a Mutual Fund Salesman. Not making any money, so a tuna sandwich back at the college duplex rental was still the […]