All:
Hey.
Birthday’s a good day to take a breather. So I am. Just today.
It’s also a good day to take a quick look back at the year gone by. Especially if, like me , you were born in late autumn, and will be too damn busy in the coming weeks to take another break till Christmas hits, and everybody will be doing their wrap-ups, and it all becomes just too much.
Too much is exactly what I’m avoiding today, which is a Novemberly one all right, outside my window: overcast, chill, rain, bare trees. Feels like home for a transplanted Michigan boy like me. The calm of gray light and soft sofa.
This personal blog is nearing the end of its fourth year. You’ve probably noticed that I’ve slacked off on the tech postings. In case you were wondering, I’ve moved most, but not all, of my tech musings to the Forrester Information and Knowledge Management blog, where I’m one of many. Rather than confuse the industry regarding what Jim Kobielus’ real position is on this or that, I’ve kept my personal blog tech blather to just the marginal, silly, tangential, and self-indulgent—and to re-postings of my Network World columns.
Here, for the record, are links to my Forrester blog posts, from latest to earliest:
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November 2008
Obama’s Information Agenda....What is It and Is There A Role for BI?
October 2008
Governance Risk Compliance Agenda....Critical in Turbulent Economy, But Conspicuously Missing from IBM’s IOD Go-To-Market Message
Extreme Affordability at the Data Warehouse? Teradata? Really?
Tactile user-built micro-analytics...OLAP and BI for the next generation...and for the aging Baby Boomer generation
September 2008
Agenda Politics -- Information Shifts The Balance Of Policy And Influence In Any Organization
Oracle Soars Into Petabyte Stratosphere, Puts HP-Powered Grid Storage At The Heart Of Its New High-End DW Appliance
Oracle Virtualizes DBMS And DW Into Amazon's Cloud
Federation Supplements The Data Warehouse - Not Either/Or, Never Was
The New Paradigm Of In-Database Cloud Analytics, And Google’s Role As Catalyst
August 2008
Database Virtualization Could Induce I&KM Vertigo
July 2008
Microsoft Acquiring DATAllegro, Rebooting Data Warehousing Appliance Strategy, And Triggering Industry Consolidation
OLAP's Cube Is Crumbling Around The Edges
June 2008
No posts in June.
May 2008
Analytic Databases Power BI Boom
April 2008
Teradata Goes Appliance, Officially
The Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) — Defined, Refined, Evolving With The Times
CEP For Real-Time BI: Vendor Announcement Events Come In Threes, Apparently
March 2008
Competitive Business Intelligence, Harnessed Through Collaboration And CEP, Harvested Across The Cloud
Oh No, Not Another 2.0 -- Database 2.0? Data Warehousing In The Cloud!
February 2008
Complex Decisions Driven, But Not Overtaken, By Events
Complex Events, Simple Experiences
Complex Event Processing (CEP) For I&KM — Mouthfuls, Morsels, And Meaningful, Manageable, Multifaceted Streams of Real-Time Intelligence
IBM Expands IOD Portfolio, Perhaps To The Bursting Point
January 2008
Data Warehousing Appliances: Growing Bigger Than A Breadbox, Softer Than The Bread
BI's New Frontiers In 2008 And Beyond
Everything That Happens In The Enterprise Software Market Affects BI
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I noticed that I’ve published 15 poems on my blog this year. Interesting how those just sprung up, after having put it all on relative hiatus for the past few years. Basically, it all sprung up to have content to stick in my personal blog till I figure out the next thread. If you scroll back over the past 4 years in this blog, I started by riding the news cycle, in terms of offering opinions triggered by stories I read in the IT press. Then, there was a long period where I rode the “me cycle,” in terms of doing long multi-post rambling discussions on whatever tech topics came into my head, or topics I developed in my freelance IT writing jobs, or tech topics that I’d developed positions on previously in my analyst gigs that I still had ideas I needed to share with the world.
This year has seen a bit of all that, plus the poems, which I started developing late in my 30s to have an outlet for stray thoughts and to distract me in the late 90s/early 00s from the sometimes overwhelming task of writing books on workflow, doing my freelance articles, having a full-time job, and having a family.
Someday I’ll publish it all, hopefully, in book form. But mostly, it’s just to amuse. Of the recent ones, I’m particularly fond of “Charles Schulz’s ‘Kids’” (inspired by David Michaelis’ biography of the cartoonist—the first stanza of that poem is a direct rejoinder to a Peanuts cartoon from the mid-60s—look it up); “U.S. Pres. Barry H. ("Rocky") Obama, Jr. (D)” (inspired by an actual sticker on my sliding glass door in back, but written a month before the election, in Seattle, 6:30am, at Pike Place Market, standing on a concrete baluster with Starbucks coffee in hand, looking out over Puget Sound, knowing what’s coming); “Crunchy Analytic” (inspired by Kristina Kerr of Microsoft—hey Kristina, I told you I’d mention you--and composed in my head during dinner with Microsoft during their BI show in Seattle last month); “Wane and Wax” (inspired by a Cocteau Twins song); “Music and Music Accessories” (inspired by a piano player in the lounge at the Fairmont Chateau Laurier in Ottawa during the IBM Cognos analyst summit two months ago); “Talk Toxins” (a yoga breathing/relaxation/disengagement poem that also anticipated the recent panic and has helped me stay centered); “Bill Gates’ ‘Retirement’” (a ten-stanza triple-haiku, like the Schulz piece; it rode both the news cycle and the me cycle; like the Schulz piece, was actually a mediation on marriage, and also on the span of 50 years; like today’s poem, which they both foreshadowed); “Menhir” (for Elizabeth Aliman, my recently departed mother-in-law, and also for Jean Elizabeth Hoff Kobielus, my beloved mother who left this world almost 40 years ago); the Las Vegas poems from early June (especially “Center of Conventions Exhibitions Conferences and Expositions,” because it captures the essential spatial geometry of the huge interior public spaces that have been one of the primary settings for my career since the mid-80s, and which, like airports and business hotels, tend to blur in my dreams into each other).
Because I dream in space. And my mind processes information geometrically, and tangibly. Hence “Crunchy Analytic.”
Jim
