Google WAVE: Swiss Army Knife O the Web

I love Swiss Army knives. I've had a series of them over the years. Along with "multi-tools" they represent the utilitarian in me best. Google Wave which, I plan on blogging quite a bit about in the future is... nearly a complete mystery... and I likes me a good mystery. It's a like the big swiss army knife with all sorts of treasures inside.. and I haven't opened them all up yet. So.. in the next few days I'll be spending some time getting to know this "thing" and sharing what I discover. So what is Google Wave? I'll spare Google's description.. which think confuses people as much as a blank sheet of paper... and say this. It's all the inner workings of chat and twitter and email and Google's applications like Maps and Search turned in to Lego bricks. Follow me. So what if you could pick up these bricks and put them together. What would you have if you stuck a chat conversation and map together? Not sure but it might look like one of those fancy real time polls they did during the last election. Or what about if you and your family was planning a weekend vacation in a WAVE chat and you snapped on a weather map brick.. kinda useful. Or if you had a really interesting question like "Do you get this blog post?" and could slap on a WAVE Yes/No/Maybe brick right here in this blog? [this space left blank for GOOGLE WAVE BRICK THINGY].

I've been hacked

All not sure when or how it happened but while looking into some technical problems with the blog, I realized at some time in the past my site www.fort-knight.com was hacked. I am in the process of changing hosting providers and will be posting to a new domain www.fortknightdispatch.com until I can get www.fort-knight.com point at my new provider. My apologies and thanks to all those who pointed out some strangeness on the blog (other than the posts).

www.fortknightdispatch.com won't be up for a while so I'll be hosting at fortknightdispatch.blogspot.com in the meantime. This is my last post for fort-knight.com for a while until I get things fixed up.

- John

New Job, New Day.

It's been a while since I've really posted anything here. There have been many reasons and one of them has been that I've been in the process of changing jobs. Anyone who has gone through this knows it can.. be a bit time consuming even when it's within the same company. That being said, I'm still working for Whirlpool Corporation but am no longer an Innovation Manager, a role that I enjoyed very much and was proud to have had for as long as I did. My new role will be in our global engineering and technology group helping develop and launch new appliances around the concept of what is being referred to as the "SmartGrid". These new appliances will be able to communicate and respond to both the needs of the household (doing appliance stuff.. cleaning, cooking, etc., saving money) as well as the power grid (saving energy, money...). More on this stuff in a later post.

I'm very excited about this new opportunity and feel good about getting a little closer to the technology while staying near to our consumers. I hope to blog more about my work as it will be more public in many ways than most of the things I've been working on over the past 8 years.

Finally.. something I can talk about. :)