Ron Dimon asked me, why is 'How?' the most important question. I posted 'The most important question is 'how' on my Facebook page. So how and when am I going to publish what's going on behind that? I can't answer that directly because I've been admonished by my brother's advice which is not to tell people what you're going to do, but do something and then tell people what you did. So I'm telling you now how I responded to Ron.
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Well, here's the context. I got notified by about.me that my profile was getting some hits. So marginally interested in that avenue of publicity, I went to check out the site. It turns out that they've added new functionality - something called 'Backstory' in which you basically turn about.me into some artistically satisfying version of LinkedIn. Redundant perhaps, but there's always another possible spin and audience. (And I'm upping my Twitter presence finally).
So I muddled around it and though I could at least put together a quote. But what I wanted to say, I haven't heard anyone quite say. It has to do with my theory of 'information thermodynamics' which goes a little something like this. "Knowledge, like matter, cannot be created or destroyed without the expenditure of energy. However like radioactive matter, knowledge does have a half-life which sputters away its substance." Not a very moving quote but pretty much what I have discovered. But the emphasis is on the energy required to sustain high levels of knowledge. IE just because a certain population knows something doesn't mean they will always retain and use that knowledge. All this is to counter the common concept of "The genie is out of the bottle". Yeah well the wind can blow the genie away. It always needs to be sheltered.
That line of thinking reminded me of the things I think are the most fascinating things existing in the world today. 1. Nuclear fusion & weapon systems, 2. Cryptography & Spycraft 3. Actuarial Economics & financial instruments. All of which are very knowledge intensive and difficult to understand. Which led me to the final matter of what is the most important thing to know about those three subject areas which have world shaping consequences. It seems quite evident to me that most everybody knows, what, who, when, where and why of all three of these - but only a select few know how.
Having spent many years in the BI world, I jumped over the fence from an Oracle loyalist (more or less) to DevOps, Cloud and Open Source about 4 years ago. We are way ahead of the market, but we're learning a lot of How. Once other people figure out their whys and whens, we'll still know the how, and that will keep us in business.
I've missed ODTUG since Monterrey and thought about when I might stop doing and start talking about what Ive been doing, but I'm still fascinated by the How. But I will be in Vegas for AWS Invent. The 'publishing' is just me talking. For now.
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BTW If you see me in Vegas or anytime, ask me about VZ115. It's a great proof of what makes us at Full360 world-class.
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