January 29, 2009
Dear Everyone:
Our youngest sister, “Alice”, the baby of the
family, turns 50 this Sunday.
It’s official:
There’s no turning back.
We’re all getting old.
Which, as George Burns pointed out, isn’t so bad when you consider the
alternative.
Last Saturday, I got a message on my phone machine
from someone on the Reunion Committee for my high school,
Lake Oswego
High School (LOHS). They had
succeeded in tracking me down, at least to the extent of a phone number.
The message gave me the web address (www.lohs69.com)
that I could go to and “register” and mentioned a classmate that I
actually remember. The
Want to have fun?
Ask someone under the age of 30 what a
stenographer is.
Don’t be surprised if they guess, “Some kind of
dinosaur?”
I guess that’s not far off.
Stenographers and
typists have gone the way of the
buggy whip.
Now everyone short of top executives all answer their own phones
and type their own communications (i.e.,
email.)
A lot has changed in the past 20 years, thanks
mostly to computers.
Anyway.
Earlier this month our manager announced that all
of us in Information Management Consulting are going to be trainers of
all things SharePoint.
SharePoint, as you may recall, is Microsoft’s new “collaboration
platform”, and the service of choice here at Company.
I’m already one of two people who deliver “SharePoint
Foundations”, which is for beginners end users.
Week after next, I’ll be delivering
“Train-the-Trainer” training in SharePoint Foundations to a whole flock
of my co-workers. So I’m up
to my armpits in documentation on how to be a trainer.
SharePoint Foundations is just the beginning.
In fact, it’s a prerequisite for the next course, “SharePoint for
Power Users”. The name is a
bit of a misnomer. You may
know everything you need to know to be a “Power User”, but if you don’t
have the permissions on a site, you can’t do a lot of the things they
teach you. It’s kind of like
having a driver’s license, but no car.
Two more classes that are still being developed are
SharePoint Site Collection Administration and SharePoint Design.
These would be for the “Super Power Users” and “Super-Duper Power
Users”.
Definitely fun times ahead.
Movies…
When a studio thinks a movie has a chance at an
Oscar, they tend to release the movie late in the year.
Oscar voters (a very limited group of people) are suspected of
having short memories. So
the movies are released in October through December in a “limited
engagement”. This means the
movies are playing in “select theaters” to qualify for Academy Award
consideration.
Once the nominations are announced, those movies
are suddenly playing somewhere near you.
Such is the case with
Milk,
which came out (no pun intended) last year and probably won’t be around
too much longer. However, if
it wins
Best Picture, the studio will give a broader release to soak up
more money.
Milk is a
dramatization of the life of
Harvey Milk, who was a
City Supervisor in
San Francisco in the late 1970s.
It’s also a portrait of
The movie follows Harvey Milk from his 40s, when he
leaves New York to live in San Francisco.
He looks like a hippie, but an older hippie, who buys a camera
store that quickly becomes a neighborhood hangout.
He was, in a sense, the right guy in the right
place at the right time to become the first openly gay candidate to be
voted into a major political office.
Later, he would become the wrong guy in the wrong place at the
wrong time.
Josh Brolin, who played
George W. Bush in his
last
film, plays Dan White, another City Supervisor who sometimes
collaborates, sometimes clashes with Milk (and others.)
Ultimately, White goes out of control and murders Mayor
George
Moscone and Harvey Milk.
Although the movie portrays White as deliberately
going after Milk, in his own words, during his confession, he stated
that he came across Milk quite by accident and shot him because “he
smirked at me.” White’s
attorney did a “Hail Mary” attempt to portray his client as suffering
from “diminished capacity” due to a diet too rich in sugar.
The press dubbed it, “The Twinkie Defense”.
In reality, the prosecution, having the confession
and, literally, the smoking gun, thought they had a
slam dunk and didn’t
put forward much of a case.
Ultimately, the jury found White “not guilty” of premeditated murder,
but did find him guilty of manslaughter.
When word got out about the verdict, the city
erupted overnight in what became known as “The White Night Riots.”
A co-worker of mine, who lived in the city at the time, described
watching someone stuff a rag into the gas tank of a parked car and light
it on fire. The co-worker
wisely left the area.
I’m not giving anything away here about the movie.
If you want to see
Sean Penn and Josh Brolin earn their Oscars,
go find Milk before it gets
away. Take hankies with you.
Good movie.
Love, as always,
Pete
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