December 27, 2025 I can think of lots of examples when I have opened up a device to find elegant design embedded within. My espresso machine, for example. The Italian designers working in the 1960s and 70s did not have the luxury of computers or integrated circuits, so they built cool little things like flowmeters…
September 4, 2025 I’ll admit it: I’m a Star Trek fan. But not a hardcore, “go to the conventions” style fan. Over the years, I’ve watched The Original Series (TOS), The Next Generation (TNG), a bit of Voyager, Discovery, and lately, Enterprise. Never DS9, which is a flaw in me, I’ve been told. Thanks to…
August 4, 2025 Recently, I penned an opinion piece in the Tulsa World on the ways in which America is throwing away one of its most cost-effective methods of persuasion on the world stage: soft power. The Tulsa World version (limited to 600 words) is here. This came from a discussion I had with my…
August 5, 2025 In the early days of the Internet, I was helping my friend Steve Jones do research on a book that grew to be “The Internet for Educators and Homeschoolers.” One of the things that came out back then was all the ways groups were trying to solve “last mile” problems, and in…
May 27, 2025 In the positive serendipity that sometimes happens on the Internet, I recently ran across Bill Martiner’s Twilight Journal. I strongly recommend you find the time to visit and slowly, deliberately, read as he documents his journey with ALS. You may recall my own father had ALS and left us way too early,…
May 25, 2025 As a choir singer, I’m a Bass. I’ve told my fellow Bass singers in church that a certain number of us must always show up, because we’re the anchor. Not to take anything away from our friends in the other ranges, but if we’re absent, the depth and resonance suffer. As a…
January 29, 2025 We have some dear friends in Tulsa who, over the years have lived in at least 8 houses. Maybe more — I might have lost a couple when we were out of town in the 90s. The average is probably around once every 5 years. They’re not house-flippers, just people who seem…
In our lives and careers, no one makes it alone. Everyone has colleagues and mentors who generously give their time to help make us better people. This is why I seek to pay it forward with my teams and colleagues because I was given so much. I recently remembered my late colleague, Barbara Horgan, who…
September 24, 2024 “The New World forgets everything The Old World forgets nothing.” I FINALLY finished my summer reading project. Whew. “The Rediscovery of America” by Yale professor Ned Blackhawk, is not a light, summer beach read. It’s a large, textbook-sized tome (with 100 pages of notes!) that presents an in-depth picture of what happened…
He’s talking about phones — again. A cautionary tale of technical outcomes and incomplete information. Strap in… Recently my team and I completed a long-overdue VoIP project, spurred on by building a new 60,000-square-foot addition and needing something more modern than a copper-based, expensive PRI system (from 2001 maybe?) with proprietary VoIP clients grafted on…