Athenaverse

Athenaverse.com is now an Information Management blog

Music: The Highwaymen
Mood: ready

Athenaverse.com has been around in some form since 2000. Over the course of athenaverse.com's long and interesting life, it has served many purposes: a site for my currently defunct film and video production company, a hosting service for a variety of interesting sites, and since 2004, has mainly served as a personal blog that has occasionally sparked to life every few months.

I'd like to announce a new direction for the Athenaverse. I recently completed my first year of the Information Management graduate program at the University of Washington. It has been a wonderful experience and I look forward to starting my professional career in this field. What is information management? That is a great question and one of the many topics that I will talk about as I begin this new incarnation of the Athenaverse.

As of August 16, 2010, Athenaverse.com is an information management blog. After a year of studying this subject, I am ready to talk intelligently about this subject. Not to worry, old school fans! I will still occasionally talk about my how my writing career is going and post links to my freelance articles. For the most part, however, I will use this space to talk about information management topics that I find interesting.

I hope that you will enjoy this new phase of the Athenaverse's long and interesting life.
Thanks,
-Brian

santo26 on 08.16.10 @ 01:24 PM EST [link]

Nothing Like New Doctor Who, Part I

Music: new Doctor Who theme
Mood: sad

santo26 on 04.06.10 @ 01:43 PM EST [link]

21st Century Viking: Government overreached with monkey tree fine

Here's a link to my latest column for the Ballard News-Tribune about a tree that was cut down in my neighborhood. The reaction by the City of Seattle and the neighbors have led me to start considering what is the proper role of government in our lives.

santo26 on 03.05.10 @ 06:52 PM EST [link]

Federal CIO Vivek Kundra Visits University of Washington

Federal CIO Vivek Kundra

Federal CIO Vivek Kundra Visits University of Washington
by Brian Le Blanc

On Thursday, March 4, 2010, Vivek Kundra, the Obama Administration’s Chief Information Officer spoke on the campus of the University of Washington about the technology gap across the federal government. He delivered a presentation entitled: “Making Government Work: Closing the Technology Gap to Deliver for the American People.” The talk, which was sponsored by the Evans School of Public Affairs, touched upon a lot of areas for those who are interested in information management and the Obama Administration’s long-term plans to reform the way the federal government delivers services to the citizens.

Kundra’s stop at UW was part of a West Coast tour that took him to Silicon Valley where he visited officials at Google and Apple, and San Francisco, where he met with Mayor Gavin Newsom. While in Seattle, Kundra met with officials at Microsoft and Amazon. Kundra informed the audience that the federal government is the largest purchasers of IT on the planet and that his job is to manage this 79.4 billion dollar portfolio. Despite all of this investment, Kundra pointed out there is a “technology gap” in the federal government due to waste and inefficiency. Kundra wants to cut the wasteful spending and change how people interact with the federal government.

Kundra said that the Obama Administration’s goals in this area is to cut waste, improve performance and deliver better service, enable an open, transparent & participatory government and secure our computing environment. Some of the ways Kundra has been trying to accomplish this is by shifting shift over to cloud computing, leveraging mobile computing services and allowing programmers rather than government agencies to create effective apps. Kundra said he wants to put “American people at the center of the design rather than the bureaucracies themselves.”

Two of the visible aspects of these ideas are http://www.apps.gov and http://www.data.gov. Apps.gov is the federal cloud computing services hub and Data.gov provides access to government datasets as part of the Open Government Directive, which required that all federal agencies make high-value datasets available within 45 days. One of the datasets released by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has already been used to create a website http://flyontime.us, that checks average flight times between airports. While still in their infancy, these sites are tangible signs that President Obama’s campaign promise of a more open and transparent government is making progress and the possibility in savings and innovation that could arise.

View the video of his talk hosted at the Evans School website.

X-Posted to the MSIM 2011 Blog.

santo26 on 03.05.10 @ 06:44 PM EST [link]

#148:Sawin's Pond and Taxonomy

Music: Amy Winehouse
Mood: busy

Longtime readers of this space and the Athenaeum know of my longstanding interest in Sawin's Pond and its attendant watershed in Watertown, MA, but new readers (I know you're out there!) may not. In 2003, I wrote a report on the history of Sawin's and Williams Ponds and presented my findings to the Watertown Conservation Commission in addition to writing an op-ed piece that appeared in the Watertown TAB-Press. When I moved away from the Boston area in 2004, my efforts to see Sawin's and Williams Ponds and Sawin's Pond Brook cleaned up went by the wayside, but it seems that the long struggle to remediate the site has been taken up again.

An Eagle-eyed reader on the beat in Watertown (thanks, Rich!) have informed me that Paul Hatzilliades, son of Max, the owner of Sawin's and Williams Ponds, has created a website appropriately called sawinspond.com, started a Wikipedia entry, has been the subject of a recent (December 2009) story in the TAB-Press about the cleanup/lack thereof and wrote a letter to the editor as well.

So the questions you might be asking are:
Q: You live in Seattle now; why do you care?
A: This is where I grew up and it want to see it cleaned up.

Q: You live in Seattle now; how can you/should you engage in local politics in a community you no longer live in?
A: I think that due to my research and my desire to see a solution found, I have a lot to contribute, but there is a reason why nothing has been done for so many years. Will it be different this time?

I am going to contact the people I know in Watertown who are involved in this situation and see what is going on. I will also give my assessment of the situation up to this point as well in a future post, but the best place to start if you're new to this is my 2003 Report on Sawin's and Williams Ponds.

Another interesting thing that I have encountered wading into this issue again (pun intended) is that if you do an internet search of "Sawin's Pond," the material I have written pops up. If you type in "Sawins Pond," a while other set of material pops up, including the Hatzilliades's site and the recent article. My decision to include the apostrophe created all sorts of taxonomic consequences that I find fascinating and will elaborate on further as well. Hopefully, this article was tempting enough that I will follow up on it and you will read it!


santo26 on 02.05.10 @ 02:08 PM EST [link]

#147: Reflections On The Athenaeum V. 1.0, 11/12/2003-9/4/2008

Music: Benny Goodman
Mood: doing homework/nostalgic

Well, the athenaverse has made it into its second decade and I haven't posted in two months. What's my excuse this time? Stuff, the most important of which is school. Speaking of school, for my taxonomy class, my midterm/final/70% of my grade is to find a website with enough information items and reclassify it. I have proposed working on the Athenaeum not only because it has enough information objects to be useful for this project, but once I redo the taxonomy, I can theoretically implement it on the website. The other thing it has going for it is that it is currently inactive. It went across the sky in a blaze of glory. It was so much fun when we got going and we had active posters and readers- well, there only seemed to be 6 of them, and they all were guys, and they all knew each other, but occasionally we got some outside readers, I think. For awhile there, I honestly thought we could eventually become the new FARK or BoingBoing. It kinda petered out after I moved to LA, but awiggins and I kept posting once in awhile, and the most recent post was by yours truly was in September 2008 and involved a quote from Senator Barack Obama.

Now that the dream is over, it is good to look back on it. The Athenaeum, as constituted, is a time capsule for my friends and I from back in the day. It is a snapshot of the stuff that we thought was interesting, our thoughts on it, and even our flame wars. This was back before the days of Facebook and Friendster and whatnot, when we (I mean, the inestimable prof_booty and awiggins) had to make the site from scratch. It will be good to fix it up and make it presentable again instead of making it a magnet for web-crawling poker nonsense comment-bots while learning a bit about taxonomy as well.

In a nod to the Athenaeum of yore, here's the most disturbing links I found today:
Director of National Intelligence Says It's OK for Government to Kill Americans If They're Terrorists from ABC News
Woman's Cells Were Used To Make Important Cell Line Without Her Consent from New York Times



santo26 on 02.03.10 @ 09:31 PM EST [link]

#146: So How's The Book Goin'?

Music: Booker T. & the MG's

Q: How is the book going?
A: I finished editing the manuscript in September before classes began. Other than correcting punctuation and spelling mistakes, I am finished. At some point, you just have to say, you know what, it's finished. If I tinker with this book any further, I will be like George Lucas with "Star Wars." I'm glad I did because getting used to going to school plus a ton of life changes including leaving my job and moving sure ate into my editing time. Before school began, I also researched literary agents who specialize in science fiction and came up with my top 5, and selected the one I will contact first. I got these names out of a quite useful book called the Guide to Literary Agents. It is put out annually by Writer's Digest, and the last few editions have been written by a guy named Chuck Sambuchino who writes the Guide to Literary Agents blog that I found while preparing this. While I didn't check it out too deeply yet , it looks very informative. I have the 2008 edition of the Guide and have found that the information even in a slightly out-of-date, dog-eared copy is still quite useful. The thing is that the book is a great starting point, but you have to do the internet legwork yourself, do some background research on the agent, make sure their contact info is still current, and most importantly, that they are interested in representing the genre you are writing in.

I need to buckle down and get my query letter together. I have an old friend that is looking to become a literary agent who said she would look at my letter and I have been remiss in getting it done and sent out to her. Thanks again, and I will send it to you ASAP!

I also realized I need to get my name out there and generate more interest in this blog. I need to get with the facebook, linkedin, etc. times! Hopefully that will come with the remodel.

santo26 on 12.01.09 @ 02:32 PM EST [link]

#145:A New Direction For The Athenaverse?

Music: classical
Mood: starting new things

Another month has begun and I have some ideas for the direction the athenaverse will be taking. I am finishing up my first quarter as a graduate student in Information Management. I have been reading some interesting stuff and a classmate of mine has set up an information management-related blog for our cohort called MSIM 2011 that I shall be contributing to regularly once I get my act together. I shall be posting here and there, and hopefully everywhere about information. In addition, I will start applying the HTML skills I have been learning this quarter on the athenaverse layout as well. Don't worry I'll keep posting links to my articles as they appear and talking about my quest to get my book published. It looks like I will have content aplenty quite soon!

santo26 on 12.01.09 @ 02:09 PM EST [link]

#144: 21st Century Viking: Answering McGinn’s three questions

Music: internet jazz radio

Here is the link to my latest 21st Century Viking article entitled Answering McGinn’s three questions. The Mayor-Elect of Seattle, Mike McGinn, set out a youtube video asking anyone who was interested to answer three questions. This was my first 21st Century Viking post in over a month, so I wanted to ease back into it.
Why so long in between posts? Well, I guess the short answer would be that I didn't know grad school would be so hard. I mean, I heard it was going to be a switch but nothing could really prepare me for it. A lot of stuff in my life went up in the air, and in the process, I realized that the 21st Century Viking is one of the things that I wanted to keep. My old job, however, was not one of them. :-)

Honestly, right now I should be doing my work, and that work involves some freelance writing. I'm a writer now! I've been doing a lot of homework lately too, but I wanted to post this link and let you know that since I left my old job, I have so much more energy and I want to put some of that back into the athenaverse again, along with my new and improved HMTL skills. See you soon.
santo26 on 11.23.09 @ 08:38 PM EST [link]