Remember when we broke the story about long, long, very long, time Rancho Santa Margarita city councilman/Mayor Tony Beall and his wife Jennifer Beall being found guilty of campaign finance violations? We also covered the shenanigans with her state representative puppet Laurie Davies. Who can forget her long list of…

We just had a global meeting in Scotland on climate change and how to combat it. Whatever your position on the topic is, I remember clearly as a child in the 60’s and 70’s living near Los Angeles how the sky would be brown and my lungs would hurt if…

Introduction Every day there is about three quintillion (a 3 followed by 18 zeroes) bytes of data created in this world, and only about 20% of it is structured in conventional data repositories and available to easily process. More and more often this data is stored in a Data Lake, which…

Councilwoman Carol Gamble has a long history of big words and no payoff. To give her credit, she was part of the group that got Rancho Santa Margarita turned into a city, I don’t know her exact contributions to that process but has spent the majority of the last two…

Introduction Move to the cloud they said. It will be cheaper they said. It will be faster they said. It will be easier they said. Well, it’s possible for some of those things to be true, the “easier” part, not so much. AWS is pretty famously obfuscated in the way it…

Introduction When I originally started in IT in the olden days, at the ripe old age of 19, everyone wanted older and more seasoned workers, which made it hard to get a foot in the door. As I aged and got experience across many industries and disciplines, the trend went downward…

Introduction I was lucky when I started out in IT and had a couple of exceptional managers that really understood their role as managers and how to grow a team. As I transitioned into leadership roles, those lessons served me well and I added to them. As those same years have…

In the first quarter of 2020, I had the experience of being in a short term advisory role for a company that had built a type of Linkedin product for a specific vertical market. They had done a valiant job, but it was clear that scalability was a problem and…

I’d been wanting to create a Roku channel for years but I was really put off at the idea of learning Brightscript so I just never did it until early in 2020 and I discovered the new Roku Direct Publisher functionality which lets you create a channel with relative ease…