Brian Nipper

In the 1997 summer blockbuster "Men in Black" the two main characters, played by Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, discussed the capabilities of groups of people and individuals. Will Smith's character suggested that it would be safe to tell the entire earth about Aliens, saying "people are smart..." they can handle it. Tommy Lee's character responds "a person is smart, people are dumb..." which implies that while a person is capable, but as a whole people are not. In general I tend to disagree with the idea that the majority of people are dumb, stupid or some other negative quality. I strongly believe that the vast majority of people are very capable and given the right circumstance they are able to surprise, delight and in general exceed most expectations. However, keeping in mind that the "squeaky wheel gets the oil" or in other words the most vocal people get the attention, it seems for some reason that the most vocal people also tend t

One principle in development that can NEVER be stated enough is "Keep It Stupid Simple" (or Keep It Simple Stupid or Keep It Super Simple). In any case, this development principle can be used in many aspects of life, but obviously it can be used when working with every day computer tasks. One task that most people perform is keeping notes about various "things". Sometimes when people start to get lots of notes they think they should try and get some fancy program or a spreadsheet or even specialized software for keeping track of all these notes. However, I've found that the simplest solution is still the best, Notepad. Notepad has been around since the days of Windows 3.x and I'm sure that even in the DOS days people would keep notes using EDIT (a dos command to edit a file). Even as I being moving more and more of my electronic tasks onto my smartphone I've found that the simple "notepad" like app that came with my phone has become extremel

I had the opportunity to attend a meeting wherein the presenter discussed all of the amazing ways that SharePoint 2010 was going to solve all the problems of the company I work for. I work at a company that is made up of 1,000s of employees across most of the globe, and as I listed to how facet search and managed metadata where going to resolve communication and collaboration problems I begin asking myself what is the underlying problem that plagues the company I work at and how is SharePoint going to resolve this problem. Thinking of how most problems boil down to communication issues I realized that while the company I work at (a middle of the road financial institution) is not the "biggest" company by any means it does the the "big" problem, that is, the company is made up of a lot of people. When ever you have an organization, be it government, company or even a family, as the organization grows the issues it faces in keeping everyone in the group "on the s

Recently I've decided to pick up a new programming language. My reasons are mostly not wanting to be hacking away at legacy code for another 5 years. I've already started to realize that in my young programming career I'm already getting behind the curve in the programming world. In any case I decided to work with a few colleagues on a side project, not that we have a project per se, just a few general ideas and a desire to make things. Part of our goal with this project is to learn various aspects of newer technologies, Pearl, Python, GIT, Tornado, etc. At first I was under the impression that learning these various language/technologies would not require me to change my default OS Windows (currently split between windows 7 on my desktop and windows XP on my laptop). However, even being comfortable with the command line on windows I was finding that as I read various sites discussing approach and technique for these newer tools I was feeling like a second cla

I just purchased the  Cisco Valet  and I have to say I love it. It took about 10 minutes to turn off my computer, unhook my current router and cable modem and then place the valet into the loop. After getting everything booted up... I was done. The valet earns it's name. It auto-assigned a unique name (at least unique to my area) and a random password (probably not something that couldn't be determined, but unique enough). As an added bonus it includes a segment for guests. Another added bonus is the nice little auto-config USB key that provides instant setup for any devices which you wish to connect to the non-guest segment of the wireless network. For instance the somewhat "old" laptop that I'm writing this post on (Dell Latitude D510) which has built in WiFi was connected within just a few minutes. All in all an excellent $90 at Target and a product that I would recommend.

As I begin taking up writing again, for the third time (sighing a little to myself)... I've realized something about the way my head works. When presented with a specific task my mind will race to form a solution. When I'm present with a problem I can't seem to stop coming up with ways to solve it. When I'm given a problem at work more often than not the problem has a very small scope, often the scope of the problem at work is along the lines of accepting information/data in one area, processing/modifying said data and then saving/sending data to another area. Now when presented with a problem that can be defined with such narrow terms it is easy for me to think of quite a few different wasy of solving the problem, then when going through these various options there are often inherit sets of advantages and limitations for each solution and it becomes a simple matter of disscusing the these pros and cons with the interested parties and refining the requirements of the so