Blogs

Recently my Carbonite back-up stopped working. Carbonite is one of the new breed of low-cost, on-line, continuous data back-up services. I have tried Mozy and Jungle Disk as well, and stick with Carbonite because I started with it, it works quietly and reliably, the control panel is simple, and its costs just $50 a year for unlimited storage.  

I have been trying to follow the problems in the new T5 terminal at Heathrow Airport. There are small project management problems and there are big ones. Ours are modest. On the scale of big, you have T5 which apparently included 400,000 hours of software development (that’s a lot of lines of code!), a full year of testing and a full year of training. Yet its open was a technology disaster.  

From the opening scene of Blade Runner, you know you are in for a more personally challenging vision of the future. Harrison Ford’s monologue interposed with messages from oversized personal billboards (“a new life awaits you…”) still come to memory first for me even after all these years. Visually alluring ads clash with the degraded city.   

I joined Goodreads this weekend. I had heard of it, but not gone down that road before.  

The 2008 Nonprofit Technology Conference reinforced my sense that at this point, it's useful to consider choices about Open Source as a continuum rather than a yes/no.   

I have been using the beta version of Firefox since last weekend. I love it! You can try it here.

The main thing I needed and that I’m experiencing is that it stays perky even with a ton  of tabbed windows open. Yes, my browsing habits include opening and keeping open lots of windows at once. Firefox has had the ability to support this for a while, but memory use grew, sluggishness crept in, and Firefox sometimes crashed.  

I'm just back from this year's NTC (Nonprofit Technology Conference) in New Orleans.  The most striking and welcome thing for me was the richness of experiences in organizing campaigns and building constituency on the web today. Lots of detailed, honest sharing of experiences in blending email, one's own web site, and the social media to accomplish meaningful goals. By social media, I mean public resources such as FaceBook, mySpace, care2, blogging, social tagging.
 

I've been thinking a lot about data integration lately. It's always been a significant and distinctive part of our approach. It was therefore a natural to contribute to Idealware's wonderful framework for evaluating data exchange programming tools for nonprofits.
 

Wayne Glynn, Jr, friend and colleague in nonprofit tech circles, died this week after a long battle with a dire form of cancer. He was forty, he was a fighter, and he was an inspiration through it all.  

I just started a data management assessment for a new client with my colleague Emily Graham. The organization uses a dizzying array of contact and process management tools from rolodex to high end commercial nonprofit CRM software. A custom-developed Microsoft Access database sits squarely in the middle.