Tacoma Means Business on Business Matters

During the month of December I am featured on the program Business Matters talking about "word clouds" in the Tacoma Means Business segment.  In this segment, I am particularly ill dressed and my hair is quite disheveled.  My fault of course as I took time off from a rather busy week of classes, work and family activity to record the segment.

I generally do three to four segments a sitting, so I believe I am representing myself as somewhat slovenly for the months of Oct through December.  I just wrapped up four more last week so at least I will be in a nice jacket with a reasonable hair situation four the first third of 2015.

I started doing the segment back when it was called Economic Gardening about five years ago.  They changed the name when it became clear that too many people thought it was a gardening segment.  I can imagine viewers writing in to complain about the decided lack of plants.  At that time it was on a rotating basis with other industry experts.  In all I have probably recorded about 35 or more segments to date thanks to producer David Gordon putting up with my winging it half the time.

What is funny is that I never have thought about it much, other than I enjoy doing them, but when I was younger there was nothing more that I wanted than to be a television reporter.  My first few years of working were with KIRO television in the news room as a floor director/chyron operator.  I then went to the film room (yes, we would run film to be shown on television and I would trim down the movies and shows to fit the time period) and eventually worked for PM Magazine for a while.  My first company out of college was a video production company before I changed careers and went into the field of software and application development.

At this point I am simply happy to be able to do what I love.  Teaching, connecting people, organizing conferences and entrepreneurial events, raising a family and occasionally showing up on Channel 12 in the South Sound on Business Matters, hosted by Mike Wark.

Opening of the Tacoma Art Museums Newest Wing

It is just a stunning November day in Tacoma and after grading a few mid-terms I decided to head out over the to the opening of Tacoma Art Museum's new wing which was housing the Art of the American West: The Haub Family Collection.  But first, I had to find it.

I was hopeful that this kindly prospector might be able to help me get my bearings.  Even, though it was clear to me from the sign post that the seasonal Polar Rink would be open over at Tollefson Plaza the remaining destinations seemed more like upcoming attractions.  He looked up from his gold pan and stared.  Finally he said "blue cross" or "blue blanket" or "blue blanket cross". and went back to work.

Then I spotted it.

On the exterior of what was in fact the new wing of the museum was an installation, which on closer examination was stacks of blue blankets crossing each other and attaching themselves to the wall.

I entered into the Tacoma Art Museum after being given a wristband which would allow me entrance to the Haub Collection at 12:30pm.  I grabbed one of the free mini cupcakes and tossed it back like a shot of whiskey.  With a little time to spare I went through other exhibit halls.

I found a group of Daffodil Princesses who had undoubtedly come for the very same opening I was attending.

I entered the gallery at 12:30 and it was fascinating to me and the many others who had come to the opening.

There were many stunning pieces in bronze, in watercolor and in oil.

As I left, knowing I would return again, I noticed the princesses having trouble with their vehicle, so I stopped to help before heading along my way.

Microsoft Development Once Again Comes to Campus

Last year I met Jeremy Foster from Microsoft and asked him if he could come down to the Institute of Technology and do a presentation on mobile application development on the Windows mobile phone platform.  We decided on a "brown bag".  Brown bags are one hour presentations given during lunch for whoever is interested in sitting in.

We didn't know what to expect but it went very well.  Forty five students attended, and all of them had intelligent questions and enthusiastic discussion between attendees and presenters.  So much so that Jeremy and I agreed to bring him back for a longer period of hands on work with mobile development which ended up being the "Build a Mobile App in a Day" event that was attended by about 200 students and members of the community.

Now we have the third visit and this time we are covering multiple platforms for development including Azure, mobile apps, web development and more.

I just kept it to student invites with a couple special outsiders brought in, and the attendance is easily over 120 for the day.  Once again, great technology discussion, development and execution being demonstrated on campus.

The presentation slides can be found at aka.ms/uwt

Say Hello to the Savannah Plant

My office plant is 21 years old.  I know this because it is the same age as my oldest daughter Savannah, with whom it shares a name.  My daughter had the name first of course, and I didn't name the plant until a few months later.

When my wife had our first child, I did not want to bring flowers to her room because at the time I was worried about her allergies.  Instead I brought a baby plant in a very small container.  The drive home with the human baby in the back of the car was nerve racking to me and like first time fathers, I was a bit overprotective.

Not so with the plant.  It came home with us along with the balloons and flowers and other well wishing items in a box or possibly even in the trunk of the car.  It sat in our home for a while before I eventually took it with me to my office in Pioneer Square, Seattle.  There is sat by my desk, in many ways ignored.  It started to grow its trunk, a spindly little thing.  Then one day I came back from lunch and found it doubled over, unable to stand up due to dehydration.

I was going to toss it.  I had more pressing concerns like running a company then worrying about being an abusive plant owner.  Erin, one of the project managers would occasionally tsk tsk me and water it, but that was about the only care it got.

So I was about to chuck it when the irrational me stopped me.  "This is the plant you brought your wife when you had your first born child!  This is "The Savannah Plant!".

Don't name your plants.

Someone in the office had gone for Chinese food and had brought back some chopsticks.  I took a string, propped up the plant and tied the chopsticks to the trunk to stabilize it.  Then I watered it thoroughly.  I was impressed with how after only a couple of days of care it began to show some strength. 

I kept that plant with me and it began to grow taller than I expected it.  For goodness sake it started to look more like a tree.  The closest thing I have found to identifying it is a ponytail palm.  Pretty soon it was about three feet tall and took up a bit of space in my office.  I had to change the container to a bigger more accommodating size twice over.

Then I took it back home with me when the company was sold and I moved on.  I placed it in my home office where it continued to grow, but with an uneven amount of sun and a lot of bulk.

I would keep turning it as it grew toward the window light, and it lost many of the lower branches.  I knew I couldn't plant it outside but it was looking pathetic with only a few palm leaves on the top.  It had reached around seven feet in height.  The final straw came when someone noticed the spiders making there home in the few branches at the top and even in the trunk below.

That Fall, around ten years ago I lost the argument with myself.  Savannah plant or not, it had to go.  Like ripping off a band aid, I jumped from my desk and grabbed it by the trunk (avoiding the spiders).  I roughly carried it out with me out through the back yard.  I swung it hard enough to dislodge the current pot it resided in, I broke it in half and chucked it onto the pile of yard waste, trimmings and broken tree branches that would wait until Spring before being hauled off.

I stayed away from the bone yard by the side of the house that Winter, and it wasn't until Spring that I borrowed the truck to haul the materials away.

When I turned the corner of the house with the intent of cleaning out the side yard I had to stop and look for a few minutes.  The broken trunk of the tree remained bare, but from the root ball the plant had continued to grow.  It looked a bit like it did when I first brought it to the hospital on Oct 15th, 1993.

I went into the garage and found a suitable pot for it's size.  I replanted it and took it to my first office at the University of Washington Tacoma.  It has had two transplants since then.

It is back to four feet tall and probably needs a new pot.

"What is the Married Name of my Middle Sister" and the Virtual Scavenger Hunt

About 10 years ago I was thinking of how to create an assignment that was both an examination of search tools and hopefully a lot of fun.  I also wanted to open their eyes to how much personal information was available on the web.  So for my class Living and Working in a Virtual World I put together a virtual scavenger hunt.  Back in 2007 I wrote about it here on this blog.

I have been conducting the hunt once or twice every year since, depending on when I am scheduled to teach the course.  Each year, as search technologies and specialized sites such as Redfin, Expedia, Amazon and Facebook further dominate our lives, the items on the list have gotten easier to find and retrieve.  And as for personal information, the default seems to be that it is freely given without any worry.

Where once the hunt would take an entire class period, with only one third of the items found by much the participating teams, it now takes only about one hour for several of the teams to find them all.

And I have tried to make them more difficult.  Some are items from the first hunt, which by virtue of being dated have become more difficult to find.  But there is one in particular that I want to mention.

Item number 19 on this years hunt reads.  "What is the married name of my middle sister?"

Think about that.  These students only know me as their professor, with only my name and affiliation with the university as a starting point.  They need to be able to find out about my family, the order in which they were born and who they married.  All in about 5 minutes, as it is the last item on the list.

Remember when "What is your mothers maiden name?" was a common password check?

This year of the ten teams participating, four gave me the married name of my youngest sister and two gave me the name of my eldest, with only one team succeeding in finding the married name of the middle sister.

You may not be shocked, you may be concerned, but for the most part, in the present day you should at least be aware.

Intellectual Exchanges in the Course of One Day

Yesterday was a great day to be busy.  When I am not busy I sometimes wonder if I am missing something.  On the other hand, some days are so busy that you need a little time to digest the information and decide on which components you need to act on and which you simply had the pleasure of listening to.


The morning started with the set up for Weds 1 Million Cups Tacoma entrepreneurial meet up.  Now on its 20th week since the initiative was launched, we fill the Swiss with energetic business folks ready to learn from a South Sound presenter and figure out where they can help in the economic growth of the presenting company and the South Sound as a whole.

Bob Masterson from the Center for Commercialization (C4C) discussed the steps necessary to take solutions born from research through to licensing and application in businesses.  There were a good 50 people who came to listen and ask questions, but I could not stay until the end as I needed to head off to my class and introduce our guest speaker author Erik Hanberg from Side X Side Creative. 

Erik kept the class of 32 freshman, sophomore, junior and senior students intrigued with his story of exploring opportunities that have presented themselves through the evolution of the web.  From using new technologies to build the components to running a community theater, to web sites that both purposefully and accidentally have gained wide exposure to his foray into the online publishing world he provided insight and encouragement.

I then had to run over to the Center for Data Science where Girish Srinivasan, Clinical Solutions Leader at Samsung Electronics, gave a brief intro into Samsung's foray into the medical business. He'll also discussed his work on readmission risk prediction using CT imaging.

To cap the day off, I attended the 2014-15 Stadium High School Daffodil Princess selection where my daughter returned from her freshman year at UW to pass along the duties she had been carrying out over the last year.

Busy day.

Thanks to A Historically Strong Advisory Board

As I mentioned in my last post, the Institute of Technology at the UWT has come a long way in the last 15 years.  Today, following our usual advisory board meeting in the morning, which introduced four new advisory board members, we held a celebratory lunch for those board members past and present.  It was an informal event meant to recognize how their guidance and work helped to create the successes of today.

One of the inaugural AB members, in an ex-officio capacity, is Congressman Adam Smith.  He kicked things off  with a few words and some recollections of our earlier years, as well as a nod to the needs of a qualified work force that we are filling today.


During lunch, several Institute students who were members of the university's Grey Hat Goup joined the discussion on how best to progress with new programs, new centers and potentially a new name.  Afterwards they acted as campus guides, bring everyone to the Center for Data Science to view some of the current projects that graduate students and faculty are working on. 

Projects included healthcare costs prediction applications, logistical and transport systems, social media evaluation tools and large scale data analysis of academic performance of secondary schools.

 

Fifteen Years and a Lot of Changes at the Institute of Technology

If you count from the first class enrolled in the Computer Science and Systems program at the University of Washington Tacoma then we would be entering our fifteenth year. If you want to count only the years after the legislation acted to create a polytechnic (located on the UWT campus with a state wide mission) it is only thirteen years old.

But those thirteen years have been quite a roller coaster. It is hard enough to get the kind of funding that helped to launch the Institute at any time, but in the years after the dot.com fallout it would have been impossible. Instead, it was legislated into being when the pain created by the dearth of computer scientists, information technology professionals and engineers was at its worst and the voice of industry was at its loudest. THEN came the economic downturn in the tech sector known as bursting of the dot.com bubble.

And for a few years it made the growth and establishment of the Institutes original vision a difficult proposition. For several years many universities cut back on CS programs or closed them all together. The Institute for its part, held study. However that was not the trajectory originally intended. The truth is that the need for these professionals never went away. Even in the down years with the tech company washout and larger companies reducing their workforce, more positions were opening than were being lost.

Offshoring, which still goes on and has its place, was never the solution to a well educated, available work force on site at the workplace. And the rebound came first slowly, and then with a full head of steam. Amazon continued to grow, social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest took off. Google went public and Microsoft, Adobe, Real Networks continue to produce. Major manufacturing companies such as Boeing and Paccar continue to hire large numbers of technology professionals. To add to that, a new field has become increasingly prominent and important to all organizations. Information Assurance and Cybersecurity.

The last three years have seen the Institute of Technology grow at the rate it was first intended, with around 25% growth in student population year to year. We have over 700 students at
the Junior, Senior and Graduate level in five programs. We have two established Centers of research. We are likely to see more programs added and additional centers created in the next few years.

Mike Monroe, COO of the WTIA, recently wrote about his visit last week to the campus.

http://www.washingtontechnology.org/uw-tacoma-whats-all-the-buzz-about/ 

Here is to another fifteen years.

The Opening of the Prairie Line Trail on the UWT Campus

Yesterday marked the opening of the Prairie Line Trail on the campus of the University of Washington Tacoma.  Congressman Derek Kilmer, Regent Herb Simon, Interim Chancellor Kenyon Chan and many other members of Tacoma and the South Puget Sound community were on hand.

The UWT campus has always been a beautiful one, with its own distinctive character.  The buildings are a mixture of old and new, with the oldest of them the beneficiaries of a historic preservation.  The old warehouses of the terminus of the transcontinental railroad once housed buildings such as Birmingham Block and West Coast Grocery.  Now they house classes and faculty offices for a multitude of academic programs.  You can earn your Computer Engineering degree while sitting in Birmingham Hay and Seed.
 

With designs from landscape architects PLACE Studio, LLC, the project has transformed the 80ft wide rail corridor through campus into a vibrant new open space.  In the earlier part of the day, when the fence first came down and the sun was shining, I took this picture with my phone.

The trail itself carries on the campus tradition of historical preservation and introduces sustainability and ecological urban design as well.  The original tracks that carried the railway engines down to the waterfront remain.  Where Abraham Lincoln once participated in a ribbon cutting, another ribbon cutting took place over one hundred and twenty years later.

The 15th South Sound Technology Conference to be Held March 14th, 2014

It is that time of the year.

March 14th, 2014 in William Philip Hall we will be holding the 15th Annual South Sound Technology Conference.  The event will begin at 9:00 and go until 3:00 o'clock with a great mix of speaker and panels covering the biggest trends and impact of technology and technology solutions to the South Puget Sound area.

Two scheduled tracks will cover similar topics to the last couple of years because the impact has not been waning.  One will cover information assurance and cybersecurity and the other will over how we manage and gain knowledge from the massive amount of data we are collecting.

Currently on the roster is a panel overview of the security tech audits that were conducted by Masters of Cybersecurity and Leadership graduates on several local organizations and utilities, as well as a panel discussing the breach at Target and the advent of insurance policies that cover cybercrimes.

On the big data front there will be presentations and discussions on refining predictions of consumer behavior through social network analysis and crossing my fingers for a guest speaker announcing a big project launch.

www.southsoundtechconference.com