One of the first major shared events I remember was the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981-I’d just come home from high school, the TV was on and the President had just been shot.  As a sophomore in high school, this moment seized me as I tried to understand just what that would mean and why someone would try to do such a thing.

January 28, 1986, 11:39 a.m. EST was another event that emerges from my memory.  I was in Chicago at college, New Testament Greek class in particular, and we had taken time out to watch the launch of the space shuttle Challenger.  Little did we know that we would spend time pondering the brevity of our own lives in light of what started as a hope for the future in space exploration.

9/11/01 is also one of those times of memory.  I was at work.  I remember the renovations going on in my office and the return of a former employee as my new Network Administrator.  It was a day that turned from light to dark.  It was a terrible event for the families who experienced loss and devastation.  It was a sobering event for all of us as Americans.  A bubble of naivete’ burst and the subtle sense of being an invincible American disappeared from my psyche.

And so our shared memories go…whether decades removed or recent events, they force us to reflect together on what’s happened in the history of our own lives.  So as you hear the stories from this day, reflect on where you were 9/11/01 and let others know your story (or share your comments below).  It may just bring you a little closer to yourself and others as well.

UPDATE 9/12/09, 9:08PM – The Boston Globe’s Big Picture blog helps us by Remembering September 11th … in pictures

President Obama speaks to the nation's children

Tonight, I watched the speech with my kids.  The oldest two listened to the President’s words with quiet attention.  When it was over, I asked them what they thought.  They were very positive and recalled pieces that were relevant to the challenges they’ve faced in school.  “Work hard,” “Don’t give up,” “Failure can teach me to succeed,” and “Obey your teacher” are just some of the parts that stood out to them.  I saw a lot of smiles as I watched them listen to the President talk directly to them.  It was definitely a teachable moment and one that soon won’t quickly be forgotten.

I’m looking forward to watching Obama’s speech with my kids for many reasons and I will list four here:

1)  He is our president, a man whom we are to respect whether we agree with him or not.  Our culture continues to denigrate authority and encourage cynicism.  When I listen and dialog with people, especially leaders, I may not always agree with what they say but I will treat them with respect and listen.  This is one way I can demonstrate my care for my fellow men and women, no matter their station in life.

2)  The years I’ve spent as a father raising my children have formed their hearts and minds.  No speech can ever take that away and I’m bewildered at the fear and paranoia of those who see his words as a threat.

3)  His speech is an opportunity to continue to educate my children.  When an important figure speaks, it is an opportunity to discuss what he or she says.  We do this with historical figures and their ideas and I will do this tomorrow as history is being made in our time.  Discussing President Obama’s speech will be a fresh occasion to talk about the values and priorities of life with my children.

4)  A pastor who has influenced me greatly posted a prayer that he has been praying.  It offers a perspective that helps me get my eyes off myself in circumstances like this and places them rightly on what is the best for others.  Here is the first paragraph…Father, the condition of our schools and families is so broken that nothing seems to be working, especially for the poor in our urban centers. Help our president to have the courage to use his amazing place of influence to speak into this situation in such a way that boys and girls would take their studies seriously and put school above sport and homework above hiphop and graduation above gangs. (John Piper, I Hope My Daughter Hears the President’s Speech, Desiring God blog) Amen.

And so I look forward to Tuesday and the thoughts our President wants to share with my kids.

UPDATE @1:55pm: Now you can read the speech for yourself parents

Books: To scan or not to scan, that is the question

If you have been following the Tech news in recent days, you’ve seen a lot of give and take over Google Book Search and the forthcoming Google Book Search Copyright Class Action Settlement.   Some say having Google only as our digital librarian is a mistake and forebodes an Orwellian future.  Some are focused on the absence of privacy and anonymity provisions in the settlement while still others think Google Book Search is just plain unusable, especially for scholars.  On the other side, some have offered praise for Google’s efforts.  I personally have found much to appreciate in Google Books like the tip shared here on building and searching your own library.

But I’m interested mostly in statements by Lawrence Lessig in a talk which he gave at Harvard a little over a month ago.  I’m placing the video of his talk below because I think it’s helpful to hear a thoughtful person speak about the topic in a very balanced and “big picture” way (even if he is an admitted Gore-a-phile).  His view is that the settlement is progress. But in the end, it is not enough or perhaps even, the wrong kind of progress.  What we need is an “ecology change” or in my interpretation of his words, our whole environment and starting point of addressing the various interests involved needs to change.  Our culture now is an obsessive permission culture which inhibits an ecology of access to digital media.  Libraries in the physical world operate in an ecology of access (I can access and read a whole copyrighted book for free) but in the digital world, complex legal and administrative barriers threaten to make online access to books more akin to a digital bookstore rather than a library.   To approach this viably long term, we need find a balance between the “commercial life” of a work and the “beyond commercial life” of a work.  Further and right-headed progress will take  humility, openness to experimentation and addressing our “democracy crisis.”  This last bit is where he turns to Congress (a replaced Congress) to enact laws that guide us in this direction.

Overall, he presents a helpful framework in a wonderful presentation but I question if the political/legal solution can be anything other than short term.  Long term solutions, it seems to me, will require the persuasion and cultivation of  hearts and minds to live and breathe a new ecology of access.   Time, education and the experience of  the advantages that digital access brings to patrons of books will be allies in the evolution of the ecology of access we need.

Please watch the main presentation which is about 30 minutes:  The Google Book Search Settlement:  Static Good, Dynamic Bad? by Lawrence Lessig

UPDATE @ 9:00AM: Yesterday afternoon, Inside Google Books, the blog from Google about their service, posted an update about privacy and the settlement which will continue the conversation around these issues.  Today, the opt-out opportunity expires for publishers and authors.  Also, please note that this settlement has not been finally approved and it appears the courts may have this for a while.

UPDATE @ 10:02AM: Interesting CNN article on Library 2.0 in light of our changing times; also, Welcome to the library. Say goodbye to the books…hmm

Much Ado About Nothing by Kenneth Branaugh

But let’s be clear on today’s outage-it wasn’t down hard.  If you used IMAP or POP3, no problem.  As a Gmail user, my IMAP phone app worked quite nicely, thank you very much.  What was down was the web front end to the service, not the entire service.  So it was really only a partial outage.  Officially, we don’t know what happened yet but Google will let us know as much as we need to know when it’s time.  I’m good with that, especially since I don’t have to fix the problems attached to the outage.  It’s the risk of outsourcing but also the benefit of such.

As a CTO, I get to think about the future…technologies we should adopt, others we should avoid.  Cloud computing as a wave of the future is something that is very much on my mind these days.  Outsourcing our Exchange servers to Gmail is one of those potential moves.  But wouldn’t I be risking downtime and putting a “business critical app” in the jeopardy of not being available?  Certainly one can argue the downside of making such a move and that seems to get a lot of play in the tech blogs and press.  But I’m more interested in gaining some real perspective from overlooked questions.

1)  What is my real hard $$ loss if my e-mail becomes inaccessible?  It’s not a real-time medium!  How many e-mails lay unread or without responses by my employees each and everyday anyway?  Does business actually stop without e-mail in most places today?  Like the Internet, an effective business routes around an outage by other means of communication.  No real hard dollar losses can be shown in the majority of instances, I advocate.  We find other technological ways of coping.

2)  What mitigating steps have I taken to assure offline access to e-mail when it is down?  If you are using Exchange, you should be using Offline Storage mode.  If Google, how about Offline access with Google Gears or the enterprise syncing client with Outlook?  All your mail is available, searchable, actionable.  These steps taking most of the sting from any disruption.

3)  What money have I saved by outsourcing to Google?  If I’m doing Microsoft Exchange myself, I’m more than an administrator if I’m in a small or medium business.  I’m engineering restores when databases go down and need recovery.  I’m doing daily backup if something critical is deleted.  I’m filtering and managing spam and antivirus products to keep everything safe, especially clients.  I’m managing some off-site disaster recovery in case a DR scenario comes into play.  Bottom line:  I’m spending a lot of time and money on technology and support which can be more efficiently handled by outsourcing to a third party like Google.  I’ve run the numbers and the results are compelling to consider this first step into cloud computing.

I could go on about why Google and not hosted Exchange. I know I could talk security and privacy but there are two sides to those discussions as well.  But for all of these, I’ll let them sit for now and just say…in my world, the Gmail event of this day was truly much ado about nothing. (My apologies to Shakespeare)

UPDATE:  11:33AM

Google apologized for yesterday’s outage, read here.  Please note that it wasn’t the server guys per se at Google with the problem, it was the network guys-routers=network/load balancing.  Anyone can have problems and if you are human, you will.  Thanks Google!

UPDATE:  7:27PM

Another article has appeared with Google’s take on the outage, noting that they treat it as a “Big Deal” to have the outage.  And why wouldn’t they?  They have SLAs they want to meet otherwise it does cost them.  But I like the reference in the article to the power company.  What happens when the power goes out?  Isn’t it “mission critical?”  We’ve had the unfortunate circumstance of a building-wide outage in power for an hour and a half several months ago.  Now we could run our own generator and have someone monitor/maintain it but at what cost? Is it really worth the benefit?  Most people’s work could wait until the next day.  All that said, nothing has 100% uptime and we as workers have adapted to work around outages when they occur.  So downtime happens.  No need to diss the cloud or Google.

So I was blown away this morning when a co-worker said he didn’t know who Scrooge is. I mean, come on, what cave do you have to live in to not know this. Surely this should be a standard classic to read in high school. Why is this so outrageous? There should be a common cultural heritage by growing up in America and it’s disappearing. That’s what makes it sad. Meantime, get up to speed yourself by checking out the Charles Dicken’s classic A Christmas Carol from the library or reading it online. Or at least watch a video version, preferably starring George C. Scott or Patrick Stewart. Even the Muppets know what Scrooge is all about…