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Showing posts from September 14, 2008

Expidite the expidited

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I am headed to the passport office this AM to get a new passport. I didn't have time to do the expidited renewal after getting back from Japan. So I made an special expiditing appointment with the passport folks in Atlanta. I am glad I only have to drive into Atlanta, not fly up to NY or Washington DC. It seems I have had to do some expiditing everytime I have renewed my passport. Passports are good for 10 years. When you get a new passport it is a time to ponder where you will be and what the passport will look like in 10 years. The pic belows shows the wear on my now cancelled passport. it was a 50 page book (the extra pages version) and 46 pages are fully used. Many countries require 3 empty pages to enter their country. So, I got full use of the larger size passport. If you need more pages, you send the passport in and they will "sew-in" more pages. The thickest passport I ever saw was at the Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan border. A truck driver I saw had a Uzbekistan passpo...
The conference is going well. I will be flying back to NY on Thursday. Santa Fe is nice. It turns out the solar panel can get damaged by not having water in it when it exposed to the sun. It gets that hot. "Hot-Liquid Solar" energy is here. It is everywhere else in the world, why not the US? Energy is energy. I saw this moose sculpture getting loaded onto a truck this morning. I was a bit jealous. I have hauled some weird stuff with my truck over the years, but nothing quite like what this guy was towing with his truck.
I am in Santa Fe New Mexico for most of this week for the Center for Information Development (CIDM) conference. This is where I hob nob with all the Technical Information Development movers and shakers from large corporations. The conference is always good. I was reflecting on what has changed in the last five years in this area and it is quite staggering. 5 years ago most participants were musing about information component management systems. Now everyone has one. It is a way of life today, DITA, XML. Then there is the emergence of new problems of integration with SOA, content ownership, and communications between collaborators. It is nice to have respect from large intrepid businesses in the area on content development management.