Month: January 2014

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Design Education Innovation Milwaukee Reading Technology

Tableau your data!

Dan Murray was the keynote speaker at the March Milwaukee Tableau User’s Group and discussed his new book Tableau Your Data! I was lucky enough to win a raffle for one of the books and Dan was kind enough to sign.
tableau your dataLook forward to diving into Tableau dashboards by tapping into an Oracle data warehouse and Google Analytics data.

Clearly this type of Business Intelligence tool has been gaining ground among data report writers, supervisors and even C-level executives.

Today the impact of interactive data visualizations cannot be overstated as a key driver of tablets that have become a key tool in business today. As the growth of Big Data continues to impact analysis across all organizations it is more important than ever before to establish data stories in dashboards.

As business embraces mobile devices even further into their enterprise the growth of Tableau will continue. They have a hot product that is growing rapidly and seems to have no ceiling.

Categories
Education Reading

Latest read: Bobby Orr – My story

Bobby Orr was my favorite athlete in my childhood growing up in Toledo Ohio. My father watched CBC broadcasts of NHL games and they are some of my earliest recollections of sports. I kinda learned about Bobby and the Boston Bruins from my Dad.

Bobby Orr

His first year playing in Boston was also the year I was born. My knowledge of his skills as a player came later in his career. I recalled later in life learning that my father worked for Storer Broadcasting‘s WSPD-TV station in Toledo. In 1973 Storer purchased the Boston Bruins and the Boston Garden.

After Storer purchased the Bruins my parents went to Boston and my Dad returned home with an official Bruins press kit featuring black and white photos of the team and every player. It was like striking hockey gold for a kid who played hockey in the back yard and on the cement streets around my neighborhood.

Without the internet and cable television it was very rare for me to see the Boston Bruins play on television growing up less than an hour from Detroit, unless it was broadcast with Harry Neale and Ron MacLean.

My interest in hockey began to wain when Bobby left Boston for Chicago while I had just turned ten years old. I remain a Bruins fan but was sorry to see him retire after missing so many years with his bad left knee. By this time I was playing basketball, having never played organized ice hockey and was following Dr. J and the Sixers.  Funny how my Dad played high school basketball with Dr. J’s teammate Steve Mix. My hometown hockey team the Toledo Goaldiggers had a pretty good player for two years as well — Mike Eruzione, yea that Mike Eruzione.

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Categories
Education Reading Vietnam War

Latest read: A Spartan Game

Merriam-Webster defines Spartan as a person of great courage and self-discipline and A Spartan Game The Life and Loss of Don Holleder is just about a perfect story of such a person.  Yet I find it somewhat difficult to share how immense Don’s life was today. Many heroes on the gridiron and battlefield have been lost to our collective memory simply because HDTV, the internet and social media did not exist in the 1940s.

a spartan gameSince the 9/11 attacks only a handful of professional athletes have chosen to serve our country. Pat Tillman, the former Arizona Cardinal defensive back turned down a multi-million dollar NFL contact extension to enlist in the Army only to be killed under questionable circumstances in Afghanistan.

If you found Pat’s story compelling then A Spartan Game reveals how Don Holleder played and lived on a much higher stratosphere. Pat was killed two years after leaving the NFL. Don Holleder was killed 11 years after leaving West Point but within three months of arriving in Vietnam.

The early chapters of A Spartan Game reveals Don’s family history, his extended background and amazing success playing high school football and basketball in Rochester New York. His high school team actually traveled to my hometown of Toledo Ohio in the early 1950s to play Toledo Central Catholic in basketball. I was surprised to read so many Catholic schools in the 1940s and ’50s traveled extensively throughout the country. Don was an extraordinarily gifted athlete and he excelled in football.

Don was expecting to attend Notre Dame on a football scholarship but something changed his life. After his senior football season but before he graduated Don’s father died suddenly. His father never told Don he wished for his son to attend West Point. It was only after his father’s wishes were revealed by his mother that Don focused solely on attending West Point.

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