Origin of establishing Thanksgiving Day

Did you know that many American leaders were involved in establishing our American day of thanksgiving?  This included George Washington, the prodding upon many presidents by Sarah Hale, a proclamation on Oct 3, 1863 by President Lincoln to set aside the last Thursday of November, and finally in 1941, Congress permanently established the fourth Thursday of each November as a national holiday.

Too much information available?

I am a perpetual learner. I love being a sponge of information. But lately I am thinking that I have too much information available for my own reasonable consumption.



I want to be a continuously better project manager, so a read this blog, read that article, subscribe to this RSS feed, and so on. I want to be a better resource manager of people, so then I do the same thing. I am curious about many newer technology tools and how they can be to my advantage, how to better use social media, and on, and on, and on....  It is never about mastering the subject, but rather better understanding and insight.  It used to be big stacks of magazines and also some books besides my reading chair, but now we are in the electronic age.


Finally, in the past few days I have found that it is nearing the point of out of control. Time to pursue the purging process. What do I really need to follow / What can I purge?

Cloud Computing: Collaboration, sharing, data storage and backups

I am in another of my investigative modes.  The current topic is further pursuit of 'the cloud'.

 Via on-the-job I have utilized a few cloud based collaboration tools. Most specifically, we used Central Desktop and exploited it in the data sharing mode. I utilized it extensively in my project management activities for file sharing, status report sharing, and other related events. Business procedures were also integrated. It was great not clogging up email systems with large attachments. Early work experimented with BaseCamp, but its simplistic model just did not have enough juice. Cloud concepts also allowed quick startup without investments in big box solutions such as Microsoft and IBM.



Presently I have progressed to also now looking at the concept of data storage and backups, as well as other related benefits such as multiple pc independence, at the personal home usage level.  For a few years now I have utilized Google Docs on a limited basis - specific purpose. Coming after many years of caution and traditional I/T experience, I finally have opened my vision further. Dedicated external hard drives backup solutions and the portability of thumb drives are attractive. They still have limiting physical factors however.

My new strategy is pursing targeted local subfolder structures, and specific frequently changed files, of hopeful smaller size, where cloud storage and cloud backups could more easily of benefit and justification.  Here are some of the solutions I am pursuing and investigating right now.

• DropBox

• SugarSync

• Evernote: PC and Android

• GoogleDocs

• Mozy (its on my list to look into)

• Central Desktop - for personal use