In order to further my education and tools that I can offer to employers, I am taking on the task learning BI.  What is BI you ask? BI stands for Business Intelligence. It is the process of taking many different types of information from a client and cleaning and organizing the data so it is usable.  From there, different tools can be built that can help the end-user better understand the information that they are looking at.  By using such tools as SQL Server Reporting Services and other such reporting tools, it is easier for the end user to look at, organize and better understand exactly what they are looking at.

This week saw the beginning and conclusion of my online class on SSAS or SQL Server Analysis Services.  I always knew SQL was a powerful tool, but now I can really appreciate what it has to offer.  Learning this week about data warehousing, setting up and deploying a cube and then using tools to show the results of the cube to end users, shows me exactly how powerful and data rich SQL can be. In a world where we are taught from a young age that data is two dimensional (rows and columns), the process of cubing shows you that data can be and is multidimensional.  Cubes have members and hierarchies.  The term hierarchies implies that there are more dimensions that can be drilled down to from the parent hierarchy.  So, if you thought you knew everything about data and you’ve never heard of cubing or SSAS, think again.

Get cubing my friends!

Here is a video on the subject:

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Please go to: http://americancensorship.org/ to learn more.

Breaking news at 10…

Erik, Dave and Ken are on a golf course. Hide your children! Lock yourselves up tightly in your storm shelters! If you don’t seek cover immediately, you may get impaled by incoming golf balls!

Here’s the evidence that yes we do, indeed golf. If that is what you would like to call it….

If you look closely you can see the ball flying by the golf cart, though a tad fuzzy, captured by Dave's Nikon L1.

I take a hack at it...The next sound you'll hear is the sickening "ploop" of dimpled ball meeting pond.

A postmortem finds that no animals were harmed in the shooting of this farce, although the trees are crying for mercy...

The result: a fun day all around.  It was probably one of the last nice, warm days we will have in a long time.

This adventure brought to you by Wilson Hauser Torisky and Associates LLC.

Peace!

There are some alternatives to having this happen, but the question is whether it would be any safer?  One major alternative, I feel is to have every car come standard with a voice to text feature.  This would be a system where you can speak to your car the words you want in the text message and it would send it when you are done.  Your car could read any text messages that come in to you.  This stops the need to look away from the road.  I believe some cars that have the Microsoft Sync technology in them can do this already. Just it needs to come standard in every car.

Do you this is a good idea? Would you use it?  Would you be willing to pay a little extra in order to have it included in the car?  Let us know your thoughts.

Why you ask?  Because I can.  I would have great network transfer speed between devices and also to the Internet with Time Warner broadband.  It would cool to know that each room has at least one connection, if not more.  I could host LAN parties and have enough network resources to do it. Possibilities are almost endless, only as far as my pocketbook will take me.

The only drawback to this plan is cost.  Besides the fact I do not have a house and would need to buy one, there is also the cost of buying all of the networking equipment needed including all of the Ethernet cabling I would have to buy and then install, either having myself install everything or pay extra to have someone do it for me.  Either way, it is going to get expensive.

If you had the money and the resources to do this, would you? What are the benefits of doing this?

Lets discuss why some ISP’s do this to their residential customers.  Mainly, ISP’s cap your connection due to the fact that they are trying to save money. Between the electricity used, the servers and their parts, data costs money, and it’s not cheap.  You need power to power the servers and their networking equipment, and parts are always needing upgraded on servers such as hard drives.  That’s not including the amount of energy and water that is needed to run the A/C units to keep all of that hardware cool.

Another reason that some people’s residential internet connection are capped is due to the fact that a lot of ISP’s are trying to keep people from getting onto torrent sites.  Torrent sites or file sharing sites, are notorious for getting end users and ISP’s in trouble because a lot of the downloadable media on these networks is subject to copyright infringement or shared illegally.  Not only is some of the content illegal to share but there is also a ton of data that goes along with using it when some torrents are multiple gigabytes in file size.

Now that you have heard some information about it, what do you think? Is capping people’s access to the Internet a good idea? If the ISP’s cap usage because of the data used, should they be putting more money into their network infrastructure to handle the demand?  Should Internet access be unrestricted no matter where you are and the plan that you have?  Please comment below.

Now that you have read this, you are undoubtedly thinking, “Did he REALLY just say that?”  Yes, I did. For starters, your child more than likely has the attention span of a flea.  The iPhone stays dedicated to what it is doing. Sure, another program or a call may come in while you’re viewing something else, but once it is complete the iPhone goes right back to what you were doing beforehand.  Your child may not.  This is effectively called multi-tasking.  You can also close unused applications on the phone to free more memory.  Sometimes in life, that is not easy for us humans to do.

Any smart phone can also sing better than you child can.  You can be driving somewhere with you child singing along to a song in the back seat, but they may not be singing the song very well.  iPhone’s play the actual music as it was recorded back to you.  This usually, but not always sounds better than a back seat serenade from your children.

I’m sure by now you are saying this guy has to be crazy. There are a lot of things humans can do that technology and iPhone’s can not.  That is undoubtedly true.  My iPhone may or may not be smarter than your child but, let this serve as a reminder to give your child every means necessary to be successful so that someday in the future my iPhone won’t be doing the job that they should be.

It is true that through more and more exposure to different simultaneous data sources that we can teach our brain to comprehend and process more and more information, but since the birth of social media, we are constantly being bombarded with advertising, tweets from many different people and Facebook messages from different people, all at the same time.  How our brain just doesn’t issue a Shutdown command when we get home every night, I will never know. I’d rather wish it would.

Let me hear from you!  At what point do you say enough is enough and close all of your social media applications down for the day?  Do you ever suffer from information overload?  Do you even think its real?  Sound off below.

Since we are all running around on a daily basis, there is a heavy emphasis on making sure the information that we tweet is meaningful and to the point.  Twitter lends itself beautifully to this because you can only post a tweet that’s 160 characters or less. It forces people to mostly be straight and direct with the ideas that they are trying to get across.

On the other hand, there are people and even some technological devices that “spam tweet.”  This is where a person sends a tweet about every little thing they do during the day.  There are also dog collars that can tweet what your dog is doing as it goes about its business during the day through your wifi connection.

So, in terms of tweeting and doing your part to not contribute to information overload, when you tweet or post anything on social media for that matter, please think as you are posting so that the information you send is clear and concise.