the weblog of m.kelley

How To Eat Fried Blogs

Blog for the upcoming film, “How to Eat Fried Worms”. Based on one of my favorite books as a kid, I’m looking forward to seeing this.

Test document from Writely .

I’m testing Google’s Writely online word processor. It’s not bad, haven’t played with it enough to say either way. I have a strong suspicion that my work will probably block this through their filters, because of the minute possibility of someone using this to violate privacy.

It’s neat enough, that I can post to a blog from it *and* have spell check. This part is very very cool. Between Writely, Gmail, Google Spreadsheets, Calendar and Google Talk. They have a nice little online office package. Throw in Blogger and you have most of what Microsoft has been offering most companies for years: Exchange, MS Office and Sharepoint now have decent, free, and online competitors.

Talk about a revelation this morning. Look through Google’s offerings and see how close they are to the “Web OS “.

Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site – Although customization is still necessary, this series shows you the tools and techniques to get relatively complicated Web sites up and running quickly using open source tools, including Drupal, MySQL, PHP, Apache, and Eclipse technologies.

IBM showing how to use Drupal as a quick CMS. (mouth agape)

I’m about to write a huge rant about proprietary CMSs and what a huge waste in resources they are. IBM talking about an open source CMS will help a lot of businesses go with this vs. something that costs much much more.

Hospitals now offer high-speed Internet – “To me it was just a no-brainer,” said Albert Pilkington III, chief executive of Fairmont General Hospital in Fairmont, W.Va. “It puts more time in my employees’ hands and it improves the quality of service.”

Fairmont General’s system, which Pilkington expects to be online within 90 days, will include a numeric keypad that can be used for everything from choosing a movie or a video game to ordering items from the gift shop or requesting room temperature changes.

I talked to a companies about this, years ago, when I worked for a small hospital in North Georgia. The companies, at the time, were suggesting we use a WebTV to accomplish this. We balked at the idea and thought about talking to some of the same people hotels use.

In 2000, this was gonna cost us around $800k for our 180-bed facility. It’s good to see that the price has dropped a couple of hundred thousand and it’s even better that they’re using something other than a WebTV.

We wound up setting this idea aside, mainly because our finance people cut our staff from 8 to 3 and our budget from 1.2 million to about $300k. So while we were progressive, we were also severely underfunded.

* sidenote *

We even went so far with this, to have discussed it briefly with I.T. and decided to have a “patientnet” and a “corpnet”.

BetaNews | Sony Debuts Wi-Fi Music, IM Device

I’m looking for something just like this….wish it were cheaper. I’m not connected to personal email or chat while at work and would like something to use during breaks or lunch to keep up with people. I miss having a Blackberry, mainly because of the keyboard. Having IM would help too.

Leaving Microsoft – I could have stayed at Microsoft, waited for the other 85% of the company to ship their products, and then hope support for my group might be back on track again, but I didn’t want to sit around doing little to nothing until Vista, Office, and Exchange ship. It’s easier to get funding outside Microsoft than inside at the moment, so I am stepping out and doing my own thing.

While my similar experience was with a much smaller company, It’s terribly frustrating when you’re all gung-ho for a project and then can’t get anything approved. I sat for about 6 to 8 months, waiting on a company to move, until finally I just had to get out before I went insane.

The “big” boss was always wonderful, and even told me that I could do side-work from my office. She just wanted to keep me there. But when you’ve put a lot into your job, sometimes everything isn’t enough.

The biggest building site on earth | the Daily Mail

The wife’s uncle is an engineering project manager on this project. Brief little article about it but some good photos.

GetWebKit! A web browser for Windows

Needless to say, I have high hopes for this project. So far, it’s clunky, but it’s running on XP and that’s a start.

VMware Virtualization for Mac OS X

This will be very cool. Parallels has been kicking all kinds of ass, leaving VirtualPC in the dust. Now VMWare is getting into the game. This will be interesting to watch.

Sacred Cow Tipping is now available through TerraBlog’s new blog tracker. The means that SCT updated posts, will appear along side my fellow Chattabloggers on Chattablogs.

Very Cool, and much appreciated!