A Great Man Remembered...

He was a mentor to me and my colleagues - he taught me a great deal in the short amount of time I got spend with him. He was taken from us far too soon after a long hard fought battle with cancer. We're all at a loss because you meant so much to us and touched us all and while we haven't worked together for some time I'll personally miss walking into your office and shaking your hand everyday. It wasn't a big deal but you were the type of guy that would let me or anyone else whom you worked with barge into your office to vent, gain advice, or simply shoot the proverbial "breeze". I'll also, miss our Friday and Monday meetings to "strategize" about who to play or to pick up off waivers for our fantasy football team (people laughed when we picked up Brett Farve in '09 and we laughed all the way to the playoffs)...or just goofing around between calls with partners and customers.

You made what marginal success I had during our time together largely possible because you would sit and coach me on call after call until I actually sounded like I knew what I was talking about and I love you for that! I especially enjoyed our first meeting during my interview with you before joining the company...Scott said, "Whatever Clint asks you be honest...and if he asks you to have a drink; do it". And I'll tell you can't buy that kind of outlook and perspective on life because its priceless and rubs off on everybody around no matter how the day was going you go talk to Clint and immediately feel better.

We all have tough shoes to fill as we pick each other and cope with losing you; my goal is to do my best to make people feel as ease and good about themselves as you did for us!

Clint, God has called you home brother and for that I'm thankful because I know that I'll get to see you again. Until then, Rest In Peace and may God lift your family, friends and colleagues up in his grace as we work at dealing with the loss of man whom we all loved dearly.

God Bless You.

Next steps...

So now that I've whined a bit lets talk about how we roll into the next role. I've been looking various options in the market place and have landed on some interesting developments. First not many of you know this but I'm a bit geeky, well you know that, but I think if you knew me personally you didn't know of my love for learning technologies. Early in my career I had the opportunity to work for a leader in live learning solutions that has since gotten acquired but fostered in me; this long term desire to take what I've learned selling and apply it to teaching and content development. My life goal is to park in public sector gig making technology decisions about this very topic when I get a few more gray hairs or it falls (both are starting more, LOL).

Anyway, I'm excited to at these possibilities and look forward to the coming weeks and look forward to sharing more as decisions are made down the line. Having said all that I'm a spiritual guy and everything happens for a reason so I may come back with more of the same but the opportunity to be talking fulfilling dreams now is pretty awesome. So...until more about this, I won't speak about it...I'd like to get back to blogging about helping people so hit me up in the social sphere (presumably Twitter) and let me know what you want to discuss!

We can chat about anything we aren't the ThinkTank for nothing!

It's been way too long...

Hey there,

So after a long hiatus I found myself where I was 2 years ago when I established this blog...looking for work. A lot has happened since then, my wife and I had a another child ( a girl, just turned 1), I graduated from school (finally.), and I got chewed up a bit from life's changes and challenges but I'm still here!

Quick catch up; I decided to change career paths and stay in "Start-up Land" pursuing a role more as an sales guy but focused on partner recruiting and enablement...Needless to say I've had a little bad luck both companies made executive and business strategy changes and I found myself back at the unemployment line. I was taken back by the last two years but that hasn't changed my focus which is to still be a guy that can do whatever it takes to helps his company be successful period.

All that being said I'm playing to strengths this go around and may shy away - at least for now from "Start-up Land"; so I can get back to basics and being consistently successful. Stay tuned, changes are coming!

Peace, love, and chicken grease!
-Geophrey

How to conquer FAT32 in Windows

Hey Guys, sorry it's been quiet but its because I've been splitting time between the more important things like family, work, and school. Which leaves less time for things like random babble here and video games lol. I'm recently enrolled in a digital imaging class that requires me to use Photoshop cs4 on Mac; well not all Mac's can read external hard drives that are formatted NTFS. From my understanding Snow Leopard will be the first but don't quote me on that as I'm not an Apple guy.

Anywho Windows doesn't allow you to format external memory in FAT32 beyond 30GBS that means any drive exceeding this amount will error out upon formatting attempt. Moreover Windows 7 doesn't even offer a FAT32 options, mainly because it's old as hell and quite honestly a bad way to store your data. So what's the solution for a person with HDD that exceeds this amount. Here's a few:

1. Get a new smaller HDD (umm no)
2. Find a friend with a Mac and format it there or at the school lab (possibly)
3. Buy an Apple HDD that already comes FAT32 (not me I don't got the $$$ for that)
4. GOOGLE it!

Well I chose number 4 and with very little skill, mostly being able to follow directions, and a white belt in Linux-based Ubuntu; I overcame the problem and have a FAT32-based external HDD that is 150 GB.

How'd I get there? Well tune in and I'll provide all the juicy details in the coming post!

Peace, Love, and Chicken Grease

-GG

I'M BACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So I can officially say I've been in my own little hibernation but I'm back and plan to be back as much as I can providing all sorts of random nonsense mostly tech related or as technical as I can make it.

Where have I been?
No people this wasn't a pause on life it was life taking over my time to blog. Back in July I proclaimed to set out (with a great team) to co-found and launch a company that provides a unique approach to something very traditional since the dawn of the "dot com" era: Web Design. Since then we've launched our site and have finalized our packaged solutions and our company from this day forward shall be known as Bold Universe.

About Bold
Bold Universe is a collaborative solutions provider that is about providing our clients with a solution that solves their digital presence dilemma. What is a "digital presence"? It's a term we use since it's not just about web 2.x or 3.x, social media, community, print, logo, leader head, or even tradeshow equipment. It's about all of that being provided by the level of expertise that isn't always found at one-stop boutique agency. At Bold our commitment is to leverage our network of solution providers to join us in executing on your success.

Check us out we're happy to evaluate your digital presence and offer feedback as to how BOLD it can go!

What's next
Honestly more of the same; with the launch of Bold Universe in conjunction with my day-to-day at a great virtualization solution firm Desktone, I'm keeping pretty busy...oh I forgot to mention my wife and I are expecting our 2nd child, a girl. We are very excited!

While 2009 started off bumpy it closed out quite awesomely as I look forward to providing great information in the coming posts in 2010, on all topics but let's be honest I'm a bit of geek so I'll probably always almost be chatting about the latest tech stuff.

Peace, love, and chicken grease
-GG

Proclamation: Doing my own thing!

So after being home and spending time with the family; I’m taking this opportunity to really decide what I want to do.  And while I’ve interviewed and made great contacts with companies out there I haven’t found something that newly challenges me and makes me as passionate as my first gig did with Centra Software so many years ago.

If there’s an opportunity like that I’ve yet to find it and believe it or not people are hiring.  But I’m at a juncture in my career where I feel like I need to put up or shut up.  Many people in my life have always said, “I can’t wait to see where that kid is when he’s 35 yrs old”.  Well I can tell you if I keep in the regular “rigah-ma-role”,  I’ll be someone in middle management at a mid-size company not in control of my destiny.

With that said; I’m taking these years experience and this diverse background to begin to implement and launch a few projects and businesses that are core to my skills and passion.  I’ve been fortunate to be in great company with these ventures so I’m really excited to see what we can do.

I’m telling you all because like any good grass roots operation we’ll need your help getting the word out and who knows maybe we can do something for you too!  No problem is too small or large will be something you’ll hear preached from the onset!  So god bless all of you and stay tuned for some exciting stuff coming from us!

Peace, love, chicken grease!

GG

Is Twitter really ready for prime time?

So now after the likes of Oprah and Ellen and many other stars are adopting it's use we should take a step back and ask ourselves is Twitter ready for prime time? Plagued with inconsistent page loads and widget display errors I got to take a step back and think about the media coverage this little handy tool gets and while I understand press is press; I'm not so sure I'm convinced this product is ready for likes of mainstream adoption.

Many people know about it at this point; but for those who don't. Twitter is a social media application that allows you to provide near real-time updates to a group of connections they call followers. The updates can be as meaningful or meaningless as you like them and people can subsequently reply to them if they follow you. I like to view Twitter as a great messaging engine that connects all of my friends across all communication mediums (Email, IM, PC/Mac, Mobiles, etc) to see what I'm up to or blabbing about at a particular point in time in 140 characters or less of course. If you are looking for a great new way to connect and communicate with people in conjunction with sites like Facebook and LinkedIn I recommend checking it out and feel free to follow me @here.

Now, back to the original question; is it ready for the mainstream "fame" it's been getting? For me, I say it's not quite; for a couple a reasons. While it's a free consumer application its up-time and availability is only "near-decent" when you access it thru 3rd party applications (digsby, tweetdeck, twhirl, etc) that leverage the Twitter API's to connect users to the messaging engine. But when you attempt to perform your updates directly from the Twitter website page loads are lethargic at best and once the page loads it often does load properly prompting to refresh the page.

So what's wrong? I'm not sure since I don't work for Twitter I can only speculate but I tend to be pretty good judge of things and if I had to put on my troubleshooting hat and play armchair tech ops manager, I'd say it's a combination of two things. The application is still fairly immature and is accessed by a user base that growing by the millions each week and its possible both the code and the infrastructure (the systems that support the application) aren't configured to handle that capacity. To me, it operates like a beta (prototype) buggy product. what's sad about this is that it's not even an installed application it's web-based; I tell you my mobile phone is running an alpha (pre-prototype) version of Windows Mobile 6.5 that's more predictable then the service experiences I've had with Twitter especially now that everyone in Hollywood and Athlete-land is using it to tell their fans when they are taking their next shower or dump.

Isn't this company like Facebook and kicking around tons of venture-backed funds? Come on people invest a little make the application work the way we all know it should; stop running on that T1 pipe and man up to a T3. Invest in more developer resources to fix the issues at the application level. I shouldn't have to install a "Twitter-based" status client like the applications mentioned above to use your web browser-based application. Unless that's how you figured out how to finally monetize your business model is buy licensing your API to these 3rd party vendors.

Ok, I'm done ranting and will close-out by saying while it's obvious Twitter has some issues it still is an little application that I like to refer to as my universal messaging application. With many users adopting it and with mainstream coverage Twitter may be the first of the big 3 consumer-based social media applications to "break the code" and have a real revenue model that may prove as the much DNA for its sister companies to get the space out of the hump and make some serious dough. The first company is usually the name for that market, Google, Microsoft, Oracle all figured it out first and gobbled up the rest Twitter may do the same if Facebook doesn't do it first.

Time will tell.

Peace, love, and chicken grease.
-GG