Puzzle Solving and Corporate Culture
There's a new tradition at MetroStar Systems. It started when someone left a 1000-piece Christmas puzzle in the lunch room at MetroStar's headquarters in Reston, VA. It quickly became a collaborative effort with many employees participating in solving the puzzle. Now, it's simply become expected that when one puzzle is solved, a new one will soon magically appear in the lunch room.

Playing With Microsoft Surface
Microsoft Surface is a new, horizontally-positioned multi-touch computer first introduced in 2007. Through a combination of software and hardware, it features gesture recognition capabilities that allow multiple people to use it at the same time. I had a chance to play with a Microsoft Surface at work, and I have to admit that it was pretty cool.

Is Hulu Just a Glorified Tivo?
There's a paradigm shift that's impacting the entertainment industry, and it's already changing how, when and where we watch television shows and movies. For example, I watch most of my movies and television shows on my Mac laptop, either via a download from my Tivo, a show on Hulu.com, a DVD or a downloaded video. Despite this, I don't think the entertainment industry is evolving fast enough, and I think they run the risk of alienating customers (me being one of them, of course).

A Costly Calculation
I find myself singularly unimpressed by the technical competence of the world's financial market. I recently purchased plane tickets for an international flight and was surprised to see a $50 "transaction fee" on my bill from British Airways. Admittedly, I live in the United States and I was buying tickets from a British carrier, but still, a $50 charge for an automated electronic calculation that converts dollars to pounds? I understand that credit card companies are now doing the same thing. The problem that I have with this is that there's no intrinsic cost associated with the transaction — no time involved, no physical goods changing hands, no people involved. It's just plain and simple digital robbery.

A Little Inspiration
I'm always designing things, mostly software programs in one of a couple different languages. When you spend a lot of time doing the same things, it's easy to slip into a rut without realizing it. Something that I find useful to combat this is to look at interesting designs in other totally unrelated fields.

The Online Office
My team at MetroStar systems is trying to do something a little different. We're trying to do everything digital. Everything that the team does should be sharable online. Find out more about our experiment in team collaboration.

Happy July 4th, 2009!
Somebody sent me an email with this picture. I thought it summed up the meaning of July 4th by juxtaposing celebratory fireworks with the graves of the many soldiers who made our freedoms and way of life possible.

New Version of KeenerTech is Now Live
A new version of KeenerTech.com, designated as Version 3, is now live! KeenerTech.com is now a Rails 2.2.2 site, replacing the previous version which was an ASP.NET site. Additionally, the site is now hosted with WebFaction on a Linux system instead of being hosted on a Windows-based system. Most of the differences are internal, where the web site functions much more smoothly than before, with content management facilities far in advance of what the old version had. Visually, the biggest difference is that the web pages are wider, allowing more scope for the content.

It's all functioning pretty well, although I'll probably still be working out a few kinks for the next few days.

Pop Quiz: Why Does Verizon Suck?
The graphic below shows my download and upload speeds in megabytes per second from Verizon FIOS. Can anybody guess why I think Verizon's FIOS service sucks? At least for me, anyway. Hint: I'm paying for the 20/5 plan, which means I should get 20 Mbps download speed and 5 Mbps for the upload speed.

2007 Web Design Survey
The prominent web design site, A List Apart just published their 2007 survey of web design professionals. Find out more about their results.

Glasgow Airport SUV Crash
It's eerie watching TV and seeing today's terrorist SUV crash at Glasgow Airport. I've spent a lot of time at Glasgow Airport, and the scene was instantly recognizable to me. In fact I was there just a little over a month ago.

Secrets of the Great Pyramid Revealed
An architect reveals his theories regarding the construction of the Great Pyramid of Khufu via a 3-D animated presentation on the web. Very cool stuff!

What Is an Expert?
What does it mean to be an expert in a technological field such as web development?

How to Have a Web Site Outage
Sometimes, no matter what kind of backup plans and recovery plans you come up with, you still end up with an unexpected outage. Here's one lovely scenario that I recently encountered.

On Being a Rails Expert
There's been a lot of hype lately about a new technology called Ruby on Rails. What does it really take to be a Rails expert?

Harnessing the Power of XML For Your Business
There's a lot of hype about the usefulness of XML. This article cuts through the hype and explains some of the major advantages that XML offers for businesses.

Overly Secure?
Security is a good thing...usually. But sometimes you can take security too far.

Software Testing: A Forgotten Art
Solid testing is one of the hidden ingredients of successful web sites. This article on software testing as it applies to web sites and web-based applications was created for a small web consulting company.

Let's Go Orbital
Learn about a new class of web site that's sure to change our understanding of real estate, satellite imagery and privacy.

Extreme Short Stories
The November 2006 issue of Wired Magazine includes an interesting feature on extremely short stories. Specifically, they asked a bunch of writers to come up with striking "stories" in only 6 words. Well, this sounded like a fun exercise, so I decided to try my hand at it.

The Horatio Factor
A different perspective on the controversy surrounding the Horatio Alger Street Fair in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Horatio Alger Jr. was the prolific 19th-century author whose "rags to riches" stories helped popularize the American Dream.