Seriously

This is my once-a-year (or so) foray into politics. Just skip it if you are fatigued about that whole mess. Trust me, I completely understand. These posts afford me a sort of cleansing (exorcism) of political thoughts (demons) from my system. In that respect, they are sort of like an enema.

After completing a 2.5 mile run on the trail where the James River crossed the Blue Ridge Parkway, I plopped down at this sweet picnic area right on the river banks. I was armed with a couple of fresh peaches bought from a roadside stand outside of Buena Vista, VA, a couple of bottles of water, and a printout of the PDF of the Paul Ryan Plan – check that,  I mean The Path to Prosperity: Restoring America’s Promise Plan.

I realize that I just painted a weird (and in some respects, absurd) picture. I basically had the entire park to myself surrounded by all this natural beauty, sitting at this picnic table, scarfing down some delicious fresh fruit, and rehydrating with some H20. What in the world was I doing with a printout of the Ryan Plan?

Blue Ridge Parkway

There are so many good things about Netflix. My personal experience is that the Internet streaming just works and combined with my Sony BDP-N460 provides a very pleasing viewing and listening experience.  The variety of the content available for instant streaming is quite good – I very rarely use the actual Disc Rental portion of my subscription. Lately I find myself binging on the titles in the Documentaries genre, visiting (and in some cases revisiting) the works of American documentarian Ken Burns.

Over the last several months I have gotten through the Jazz and Baseball anthologies and recently completed Burns’ 2009 take on the National Parks entitled: The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.

While I personally wouldn’t rank this as Burns’ best effort, the six part film is beautifully shot and there are more than a few poignant moments of pure Burns’ magic. Burns traces the history of the parks from the 1870s and chronicles the pioneers that were the driving forces behind the creation and development of the National Parks Service. I was woefully ignorant about much of this history before watching the series. While I was vaguely aware of the roles that John Muir (founder of the Sierra Club) and Teddy Roosevelt played in all of this, I hadn’t even heard of central figures such as Stephen Mather and Horace Albright.

What’s In a Name Anyways?

The company has a lot of strengths – the ability to name products has never been one of them however. Certainly the subject matter has something to do with that. There is only so much that even the most creative product managers can do given the nature of middleware and systems management software. It is just inherently boring stuff.

Before the product is given its official external name by TPTB, it usually has a code name attached to it so that everyone working on the project has a convenient label to apply to product artifacts and design materials. Many times the code names make more sense than the official name (to the developers at least). By the time the official product name is christened, sometimes you are left wondering what those folks doing the naming are smoking.