Dave Mancuso dot Com

Robert Heinlein once wrote a great piece call “This I Believe.”

I wrote some words I strongly believe in a reply to an interview the other day, and I thought they should be posted here. Essentially, this is my advice for other technology directors in my line of work.

” Advice for Technology Leaders

f) Finally, involve yourself and your staff with the district and involve the district with your staff. Technology is not an island unto itself, but I see many teams using their offices as bunkers and heading out only to do tech requests. Eat lunch with the staff, attend after school functions if possible. Get to know your users better and let them get to know you and your staff.”

The Apple Store in King of Prussia is soon to open (I don’t know when), but here are some pics! Thanks to O’Grady’s Powerpage for the story.

From camping the first week of our vacation. Denise really took to fishing, and the kids loved it. We only did catch and release, since that was the rule at the lake, but we had a great time.

Here’s a picture from the second week of vacation. We only camped the first week, so the second week was all day trips (we stayed with Pop-pop in Philly for several days–the kids loved it!).

This picture was taken from the Philadelphia Art Museum overlooking City Hall down the Franklin Parkway, with Alyssa and Drew.

Yep, people are suing fast food restaurants as if they are cigarette producers, as this story from MSNBC (among others) details. Now, I made many mistakes in my youth, and did many things I’m not proud of, but I realize that my misdeeds, including my fast food consumption, are my own fault, no one else’s.

Here’s my favorite quote from McDonald’s rebuttal: “We’ll proudly defend the McDonald’s hamburger,” said company spokesman Walt Riker. “It represents the most basic building blocks of the American diet.”

Does anyone else besides me laugh out loud at reading this?

And no, I’m not going to tell you the other misdeeds I performed (they would probably take too long to list anyway, and I’m not sure if the statute of limitations is over yet).

As promised, here’s the first pic of our vacation last month–Drew at our campsite early in the morning:

I’ll post more later, and see if I can put up a permanent category for these pics.

It looks like the proposed sale of Hershey Corp. is in the courts now. If you haven’t heard, Hershey Foods is largely owned by a trust. This trust operates the Milton Hershey School and also owns HERCO, the company that runs Hershey Park, etc. The trust wants to sell its controlling interest in Hershey Foods to diversify its holdings. They in effect want to sell the company. The town of Hershey is freaking out. Bascially, a new owner could close down operations in Hershey, PA, and the town would lose the character it’s had for almost 100 years. I live ten miles from Hershey, so I feel some empahty for the conflict. My take? I don’t think Milton Hershey would have approved of the trust’s actions in a million years. I think they’re violating the spirit and intention, if not the letter, of his will and wishes.

I hope it turns out OK. All good things must end, but there’s no need to rush it, right?

I’ve been using WinXP on our Wintel PCs since July, and I’ve been using Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) for a week or so now. I’m very happy with both.

I always liked Windows NT, ever since NT 3.1, and this new version is smooth and functional. I had to change the color scheme right away, though–the green and blue was awful. I really like Win2K, and XP is a nice incremental upgrade. It’s so close to being a really nice OS–they just need to focus on better usability and consistent aesthetics. It’s jarring to see WinXP windows blink into Win2K-style windows as things happen–even with Microsoft apps. It’s amazing how little Internet Explorer has changed from 2.0 and 3.0 in Windows. Mozilla is a huge improvement over IE on the Windows platform.

Jaguar is another story. XP is functional–Mac OS X is inspiring. Talk about aesthetics–this OS is all about it. Form and function are awesome. IE on the Mac is miles ahead of the Windows version, too. In fact, the Mac versions of Microsoft products continue to outshine their namesakes on Windows. This platform is exciting, and shows that Apple continues to define the computer field. The company may only have 5% market penetration, but their concepts drive 100% of the market. I can’t wait to see what’s next.

I guess you can tell which one I prefer, but actually, I do enjoy working with both. I’m just thankful that Win95 is fading, and new technology is helping me stretch my resources at work farther. I hope that .NET and OS X 10.3 continue to be technology focused and not marketing or revenue driven.

We tried out a Tandoori Chicken recipe from one of the Atkins books tonight (the one with Fran Gare). It confirmed something I’ve kind of known all along–I hate Indian food. Not to be blunt, but this stuff looked like a 3 month old’s mustard-colored diaper. Parents, you know what I mean. It didn’t actually taste that bad, but it wasn’t very inspiring, either.

It did give me an idea for an orange chicken, though. More to come.

You should probably note at this point that most of my recipes are going to be low carb Atkins recipes, as I move down to 200 lbs. again.

I want the Camper version. The new Microbus comes out in 2005, and the Camper would likely come out at the same time or one year later. I guess I have two to three years to save my shekels…..