Clay Burt's home on the web. aka Clayton Burt, Edgar Burt and Hey You!

by Clay Burt on April 30, 2013 Leave a Comment

Hard drive crashes are great!

Now before you call the men in the little white jackets and see me break into a rendition of “They’re coming to take me away, HaHa!” please know that I really don’t think hard drive crashes are great…

Hard drive crashes suck if you’re not prepared – be ready

Hard drive that crashed

My hard drive on my pc at home really did crash last week, but luckily I had noticed some odd behavior a while back and had been backing up important stuff like pictures, videos and taxes. It still sucked when I got the blue screen BIOS boot failure and tried everything to get it back to no avail.

New Hard Drive

I bought a new hard drive, installed Windows 7 and since then I’ve been installing patches, printers, wifi, etc. It has consumed all of my normal home “work” time so I haven’t posted the last couple of days and I am doing this from my daughters laptop while itunes runs on my pc trying to recover music and podcasts.

A couple of good things about it are:

I get a bigger hard drive
Patching a new os and reinstalling programs take a lot of time, most of which is just waiting…

Waiting on patches really isn’t a good thing either, but in my case it allowed me quiet time to organize my thoughts on the Oracle SOA and Business Intelligence project and since the prototype review is today it worked out perfectly to give me some planning time for the rest of the project which goes another 6 months for this phase.

It also allowed me to change around my development plan to include some training, some architectural guidance, and most importantly, some hands on BI and SOA stuff I want to accomplish this year. I’ve always believed that you are responsible for your own career development and your manager should only be there to open doors and help you think through your goals with a corporate perspective and luckily I have that at Southern Company where I spend my days…

I hope you have the same perspective and make your own choices and if you don’t, start today. Come back tomorrow and tell me what choices you made today to improve your own tomorrow.

Filed Under: 30 day challenge Tagged With: 30 Day Challenge, Business Intelligence, Goals, Self Improvement

by Clay Burt on April 26, 2013 1 Comment

Business Intelligence progress update

Things have been moving on the Business Intelligence front!

The project prototype for the SOA solution is progressing nicely.
The dweebi.com site is resolving and has WordPress installed along with a couple plugins and a theme framework.
We had some great ideas on the logo
Ordered the logo – can’t wait to see what the fiver artist creates
Created a content strategy with a posting schedule and assigned tasks

Short update today because it has been a very long week and I am going home.

See you tomorrow.

Filed Under: 30 day challenge, Business Intelligence Tagged With: 30 Day Challenge, Business Intelligence, Fiver.com

by Clay Burt on April 26, 2013

Please excuse the Daddy moment

Daughters and Dads

For those of you who know me, you know that I am a fairly private person. You know that I love to work out by lifting heavy things and that I really enjoy technology, but you also know that my true passion is my daughters…

Incredigirls

I have two wonderful girls and if you follow me on Facebook you know that [Read more…]

Filed Under: 30 day challenge, Personal Tagged With: Dad, Daughter, Sporty Girl, Swim, Volleyball

by Clay Burt on April 24, 2013 5 Comments

Business Intelligence. Really?

After my Take Action Tuesday “Make Changes” post I decided to keep the daily actionable items going.

I continued with my health and wellness actions by eating right and working out and then running two miles. Great way to start the day. That takes care of the body part.

Now for the mind!

I am always trying to learn new things and since I work in IT I get that opportunity more than most. Since I wanted to accomplish a few things I thought what better way to get it done than incorporate it into my work life.

I am currently leading a strategic, long term project which involves Oracle SOA Suite and eventually OBIEE which is Oracle’s Business Intelligence tool. Since I am ramping up on [Read more…]

Filed Under: 30 day challenge, Business Intelligence, WordPress Tagged With: 30 Day Challenge, Business Intelligence, Goals, Learning, Technology

by Clay Burt on April 23, 2013

Be yourself! Make changes!

Be Yourself. Make Changes!

I saw a quote today and immediately thought of how I tell my girls to CHOOSE how to respond to people, comments, situations in life… Trust me, it helps keep you sane, or at least it does for me.

Be Yourself, but first Know Yourself

Then I thought about the quote some more and realized it was on a much broader scale and scope than I thought. Here it is:

You are the way you are because that’s the way you want to be.
If you really wanted to be any different, you would be in the process of changing right now.

Stop and think about it for the next few seconds or minutes.

Now, what did it mean to you? Are you happy with your health, weight, job, spouse, children and [Read more…]

Filed Under: 30 day challenge, Fitness, Personal Tagged With: Fitness, Goals, Health, Self Improvement

by Clay Burt on December 19, 2011 Leave a Comment

Red Solo Cup

I hate to admit this, but I really like the Red Solo Cup song by Toby Keith. I know I shouldn’t, but every time it comes on I have to smile and sing along… what more can you ask from a song?

Evidently I’m not the only one as I saw it was in the top songs list… won’t last long, but for the next several parties you attend I bet it is played… a lot…

I attended a Christmas party this last weekend and it came on and at least half the people started singing along – the other half had no clue what the song was so it was pretty entertaining to watch.

New Year’s Eve will probably be the culmination of the Red Solo Cup trend with 99 percent of the world singing along to it right before and after “Auld Lang Syne”, you know, the song everyone hears and sings to at midnight… “Should old acquaintance be forgot…”

Well, anyway – hope you have a great holiday season, a wonderful Christmas and a full red solo cup on New Year’s Eve!

Filed Under: Personal

by Clay Burt on December 15, 2011 Leave a Comment

HP ALM Performance Testing

Back in the ATL doing some training for HP ALM Performance testing.

Pretty good stuff – haven’t seen it since it was WinRunner/LoadRunner back in the day.

Getting into the fun stuff tomorrow – scripting/automation/etc – fun if you are a geek I guess, but I’ll take that.

BTW, hit me up on FB if you know anyone looking for some part time stuff over the holidays – @Daxko is trying to pick up some people. My cousin and another friend work there and I’ve known many people from there over the years..

Back to the grind… Later.

Filed Under: Application life cycle, Tech

by Clay Burt on November 22, 2011 Leave a Comment

John Maxwell’s 5 Levels of Leadership

The John Maxwell 5 Levels of Leadership training last week the the Emory Conference Center in Atlanta was a one day brain dump exercise of an entire book… and I liked it!

The levels idea was pretty simplistic, but in reality it does work that way. The levels are:

Position
Permission
Production
People Development
Pinnacle

“Position” is the obvious one where a company gives you a role and people have to follow your direction because of the position… think supervisors, leads, shift manager, etc.

What follows after position is basically a natural progression of leadership, or at least that is what you would think. But most people don’t think about leadership so they really miss the boat in many relationships.

If you take the time to evaluate yourself and your relationships with others you will see some natural progressions and some that seem to have stalled. You know that some of those that have stalled could really benefit you and your company if you were able to take it to the next level. Recognize it. Work on it. It is worth it. This book gives you some pretty good tools to do just that.

Another aspect that I really like is the understanding that you can be at different levels of leadership with different people in different situations at different times… Wow, that was a lot. Pretty obvious when you stop to think about it, but that would require you to think and act differently… sorry, I couldn’t help myself!

I’ve known very few people I’ve even thought were close to level 5 leaders, but the discussion of John Wooden near the end of the book is a great read. Would have loved to have been coached by, led or even just known such a remarkable man.

Filed Under: Books and Articles, Featured Tagged With: John Maxwell, Leadership

by Clay Burt on November 16, 2011 2 Comments

HP ALM Sprinter

Back in the HP ALM training today and going over Sprinter which is the automated testing tool for manual tests. Pretty cool functionality.

I really like the smart defect feature as a developer because you can see the exact steps the tester took to get to the defect and the screen capture, annotation, and markup will allow more information to be conveyed than just a simple “it’s broke” and “the screen doesn’t look right” or other defect language.

There is also a defect reminder that I think would be very useful when you aren’t quite sure there is a defect or you need to verify that there is something wrong… happens more than you might think.

Using the subtitles feature also gives you much more screen real estate and seems to have the most common controls readily available. Finally some features to optimize testing built in!

Here are a couple of screen shots you might find interesting.

HP ALM Sprinter Toolbox Run Control and Step Details

HP ALM Sprinter subtitles feature

HP ALM Sprinter Smart Defect Reminder

Filed Under: Application life cycle Tagged With: HP ALM, Technology

by Clay Burt on November 15, 2011 Leave a Comment

HP ALM Training Class

In the ATL this week for HP ALM training.

Very interesting tool that is the evolution of the old “x..runner” apps that I used in previous positions. The focus right now is on the testing portion… I am not a tester per se, but any good developer should understand testing and any good tester should understand development.

Since I manage IT projects I have to understand the tools and options available to the teams. The tool we used prior to this one was decent, but didn’t look like it had evolved much in a decade.

HP appears to have really thought through how they implemented this product. The proof is in the pudding, but from a training perspective you can usually tell if a product is usable or if it is just bad. Nice so far. I like the full integration from requirements, testing, automation, defects and more. They don’t feel like bolted together pieces…

Here are a couple screen shots from the first day of training… much cooler stuff in the test flows and what they are calling Sprinter today, but I haven’t taken the time to screen shot anything yet. If you are interested feel free to ping me and we can discuss.

HP ALM Test Center Release Progress

HP ALM Test Center Requirements Analysis

HP ALM Test Center Release Master Plan