Thank You For Your Service
I heard my name called…
“Would Mr. Tyler Hannan please join us on stage.”
and the people collected in the room stifled giggles.
Today was a unique experience.
Today, my father, Stephen Hannan retired after 42 years of Federal service. 3 of those on active duty (in Vietnam) and 39 working in various roles at the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver.
During a ceremony, much like you would expect from a military organization…with appropriate pomp, a fair bit of circumstance, and the sort of traditionalist approach that I find both compelling and comforting…I heard several individuals speak about the impact my father has had on their lives.
And I wept.
But Tyler, you may ask, “Why did this room stifle giggles?”.
Evidently when children are called on stage to receive their “child certificates” they tend to be of the 3-5 year old variety, clinging tightly to the hand of their mid-20s, or early 30s, parents who are retiring from active duty . They don’t stand at a height greater than anyone on the stage…looking as I did (image at the end of this post).
And I wept.
I know Steve Hannan.
I know him as a husband to my mother.
I know him as father.
I know him as father-in-law to my wife.
I know him as grandfather to my daughters.
I know him as a man who is kind…a man who is passionate about justice…a man who loves widely…a mans who weeps openly…a man who is trustworthy…a man whom I desire to emulate.
Today, I was honoured to see him from the perspective of Director of Staff of ARPC…as friend to those enlisted, those in the reserves, to civilians, and to the presently retired.
And, in their praise…their handshakes…their eyes…I saw my father.
I speak, at length — to anyone who will listen — about the importance of authenticity. I am blessed to have a model for authentic living in my life.
ARPC describes its mission, in part, as “serving generations of airmen”. Congratulations Mr. Hannan, you have served the mission well…both at home and abroad. Thank you for your service to our country during Vietnam.
You have retired from the mission of serving generations of airmen…but are, hereby, assigned to serving generations of Hannans. Little miss Aoife, and her big sister Gabriella, will be better humans for their time with you.
Entering the WayBack Machine (or why you should always record public presentations)
One of the interesting things about having been a spokesperson/evangelist/technical marketing person/etc for so many years is that I have lost count of the number of presentations I’ve given. It is, by now, easily in the hundreds.
And, unfortunately, I have few examples of these presentations in video format.
Why, you may ask?
A combination of reasons:
- sensitive nature of discussions/sessions
- meetups aren’t often filmed
The sad result is that finding speaking samples, is surprisingly difficult. Yes, I’ve used slideshare…but again, only for non-sensitive content.
So, as I pondered this conundrum, and realized the importance of archived speaking engagement (visual or otherwise)…I did happen upon some prior examples.
The point, however, is that for the community of speakers whom I know…VIDEO YOURSELF…setup a camera, it is not only useful for your records, it is useful for your practice.
Here are a few presentations, video or otherwise, i was able to find…
Finovate 2008
I’m unable to embed…but in 2008, I gave a presentation at Finovate Startup demoing the IP Commerce Platform.
That presentation is here.
As an aside, check the mullet. Yes, it was on purpose.
Microsoft ISV Payments Training
At one point, the ISV evangelism team wanted a 3-part webinar series on the concept of payments. The links below were the outcome.
Understanding Electronic Commerce
GeekTool: Implementation Detail
As I stated in my last post, entitled Geektool (clever title, I know). I have now settled upon a workflow that I found both attractive and beneficial.
In this post, I will enumerate the “how” of my implementation.
First of all, nearly all of the implementations are simple unix commands. There are a few situations, the weather implementation in particular, where I want to be able to change cities with relative ease. To that end, I have pulled the script out of the GeekTool UI and into a .bash script that is called from the geeklet.
I won’t spend any time on GeekTool implementation…there are a variety of quality resources online to help with that.
In theory, I could simply uploaded a set of exported geeklets to this post and let you play to your heart’s content. In practice, however, this proves problematic. Your background may not be the same as mine…Your resolution set differently…Your textual color or format preferences different…etc.
It is worth noting that many of the scripts originated somewhere in the wilds of the internet. I simply re-used, updated, edited, as necessary. I invite you to do the same.
If you are reading this via the .rss feed I apologize…all syntax highlighting is server side.
Without further ado: