Don Sheppard
I'm a veteran Blogging Idoller who also does consulting for a living. I began my career as a railway data communications engineer and also spent a considerable amount of time on ISO standards development. After working for a bank, I took up the consulting challenge, and I still find it challenging! I try to keep in touch with a lot of IT topics but I'm usually doing things that involve service management and ITIL. I use both an iPhone and a Blackberry, still print a lot of paper, and I own a green OLPC (one Laptop Per Child) but I haven't found much use for it! I'll probably get an iPAD. I'm starting to get interested in networking history, so I guess I'm starting to look backwards as well as forwards!
Posts by Don Sheppard
Blogging Idle – Year 3 Fades to Black
May 6, 2010 - 11:44 pm
Posted in - General Info | 3 comments
Ok. There’s still tomorrow before the Blog Idol contest officially closes, but I’m not sure I’ll be at my desk much tomorrow, so I’m waving and saying “au revoir” tonight while I have the energy.
This year the contest has taught me how hard blogging can be when the ideas aren’t flowing, the time is scarce [...]
Apple in the News – 1 Million Sold
May 5, 2010 - 10:33 pm
Posted in - General Info | 1 comment
I think its pretty impressive that Apple has sold 1 million iPads already and they aren’t even on sale in Canada yet!
Makes me think about the logistics of planning, building, distributing and supporting so many devices all of a sudden. Its really quite something to think about how to organize all of this! congratulations to [...]
Time Travel
May 5, 2010 - 10:18 pm
Posted in - General Info | 1 comment
Couldn’t resist pointing out this news item…….
Stephen Hawking has apparently suggested that time travel will someday happen, but we’ll only go in a forward direction.
Perhaps someday all our discussions about clouds, mobility, iPhones and iPads will seem pretty tame in comarison to the really big paradigm shift this will cause. Everything is relative!
ISO JTC1/SC38 – Standards head for the Clouds
May 5, 2010 - 9:59 pm
Posted in - General Info | No comments
In my April 4th post on Open Services Infrastructure I noted that there standards work was beginning in ISO on Clouds. So, before the Blog Idol site shuts down for another year, I thought I had better provide an update.
There is indeed a new standards effort starting up. Its called ISO JTC1/SC38 – Distributed Application [...]
A New iPad Has Arrived
May 1, 2010 - 3:41 pm
Posted in - General Info | No comments
Ok. Not really new. I got multiple emails the other day to announce that the iPad with Wi-Fi and 3G is now available. Only in Canada, you say? No, not likely! Maybe we’ll get both models at the same time!
This brings up the question: which one should I buy, if and when we are able buy any [...]
HP in the Palm of Your Hand
April 30, 2010 - 11:16 am
Posted in - General Info | 4 comments
Ok. Where did all the BlogIdollers that comment on smartphone announcements get to? I can’t believe I am the first to post on this topic! I read it in CNET News on the 28th – two whole days ago.
There’s lots of questions aren’t there? $1.2 Billion for a company many thought was fading out gradually. [...]
Patterns in Network Architecture (Re-visited)
April 26, 2010 - 12:46 am
Posted in - General Info | No comments
Ok. Just in case anyone notices, I’m stealing one of my posts from Blog Idol 2009 – dated April 27, 2009 to be exact. Last year, I had just read a new book about network architectures and layers……..I think it’s worth repeating!
Quote:
I just thought I’d follow on with a favourite topics….networks and communications…..before the contest [...]
How Do You Remember?
April 18, 2010 - 4:18 pm
Posted in 5 Social Enabler?, 6 Cool Tech, Misc | No comments
Just a quick question for a sunny afternoon…..I don’t really want to be here in front of my computer so its short!
How do you remember all of the software and services (social, cloud, photo, mucic, etc.) that you’ve downloaded, signed up to, installed, etc.? If you have multiple clouds, how do you know where everything [...]
Paradigm Shifts, Role Models, and Life in the IT Fast Lane
April 14, 2010 - 9:32 pm
Posted in 5 Social Enabler?, 6 Cool Tech | 2 comments
Just watched Shane’s Blogging Idol Role Model video post and it got me thinking….which is sometimes dangerous. We all talk about how business and IT should be more aligned, and yet I wonder how aligned Twitter, Facebook , Blogspot, Wordpress, and the many other systems and servers were when they started up. Was “social networking” a [...]
Cool Tech, But Never Perfect
April 7, 2010 - 3:16 pm
Posted in 1 Mobile Revolution, 5 Social Enabler?, 6 Cool Tech | 2 comments
Here’s a question for you – what makes something become “cool tech” in the BlogIdol sense of the word?
Do some or all of these choices fit the model for Cool Tech:
Brand new and pretty ?
Neat functions, even if only games ?
Over-hyped in the press ?
Made by Apple ?
Inexpensive and readily available ?
I’ve been coming to [...]
Open Services Infrastructure
April 4, 2010 - 2:17 pm
Tags: Clouds, Openness, OSI
Posted in 2 Defining the Cloud, 5 Social Enabler?, Misc | No comments
The word “open” was in the 1980s used in much the same way that “cloud” is now an IT rallying cry – at that time, openness was a call for action to improve technology, it was a vision for a new generation of networks and systems, it was a set of requirements for interoperability and [...]
Cloudy Day on the Cloud Front
March 28, 2010 - 11:19 pm
Posted in 2 Defining the Cloud | 3 comments
We’ve been asking “what is the definition of a cloud” for several years now. Possibly there’s a large group of you that think its already well-defined. I remember blogging about the security of clouds in BlogIdol 1. So I looked to see if there were standards being developed, and guess what, there are!
The following is [...]
Reducing the Cost of IT
March 24, 2010 - 11:53 pm
Posted in - General Info, Misc | No comments
The past few weeks I’ve been busy trying to identify ways to reduce IT costs, especially for software. You may ask: why worry about something that isn’t the largest budget item, or you may say we don’t need to because we’re over the recession hump. But people are still looking for ways to reduce costs [...]
Who Will Be Blogging Idol V3.0 ?
March 16, 2010 - 2:49 am
Posted in - General Info, Misc | 1 comment
I see there’s some very enthusiastic people in the contest this year – lots of practicing happening, for sure.
I’m back for the third time, mainly because they changed the rules this year. I found last year a bit intimidating, to say the least. I look forward to the coming weeks and hope that I won’t [...]
