Who is this Guy?

My name is Markus Beamer. I was born in Tacoma Washington but was raised in Columbia South Carolina. I come from a family of 4 boys and 2 girls and thus am used to a very hectic environment. “Never a dull moment” is certainly the motto for our home growing up. That’s probably why 11 years ago I turned to technology for a career, “Never a dull moment” sums up its progress quite nicely.

During my college years, at the College of Charleston, my first exploration into technology was as a web developer for a software licensing firm. I started out typing HTML and Javascript into a simple notepad window. Through the years I touched upon CSS, Java, Visual Basic, PHP, mySQL, Photoshop, Access, Oracle and MS SQL Server in that exact order. However, I find it quite amusing that to this day when I want to write a bit of code I reach for my notepad application first…no matter the language. Needless to say, I found a love in technology. No matter how much I knew, I never was bored, as something new was but a day away. Change was always going to come.

Of course change can come when you grow the family. Currently my family is in Charlotte North Carolina. I am the lucky husband to one fine lady and the proud father of two rambunctious boys. I am happy to say that my household carries on the tradition of “Never a dull moment”. My oldest son is crazy for electronics and all things technical. My youngest son is definitely the outdoor, rough and tumble kinda fella. They both attract their fair share of friends and our house has become the “neighborhood” house. (much to my wife’s dismay!)

I currently work at Bank of America as a Business Process Consultant. When asked, I tell friends and family that my role is to help “leadership” make the best use of technology and in truth this is what I do. However the role affords me much more than that, I am at a crucial nexus where the needs, desires and ambitions of the business meet the calculations, formulas and algorithms of technology. It’s a great place to be and I don’t think I’ll change it for some time to come.

But...

At times one gets bored with the day to day. It is in those times that I turn to my hobby of game building. Like most hobbies it is silly yet fulfilling. I build small games that can be played in a browser; my specialty is to build them with JavaScript so they do not require any plug-ins or downloads to play. Sometimes the games are role based, sometimes they are card based, other times they are …different. I have been doing this since 1999. I laugh when I think of the number of games I have written and thrown by the wayside (at last count 24). But that is what a hobby is…a wasted time that allows the mind, body and soul to reset.

I hope that having learned a little more about me, you will reach out and shake my hand. I am always happy to meet new folks.

BDPA Charlotte Chapter President Elect

On Tuesday, 11/17, I was elected as Charlotte Chapter’s President Elect for 2010 and 2011. My first thoughts were around the amount of work that needs to get done. And there is a lot of work that needs to get done.

I have been with the Charlotte chapter for upwards of 8 years. Over the years I have meet many good passionate people through BDPA, participated in numerous events and seen many great things come out of the BDPA chapters.

The upcoming Charlotte President, Julius Clark, has a host of great ideas, projects and people that he is bringing with him into his administration. I want the members, both locally and nationally, to be comfortable with sharing their honest opinions and assessments of what we will be putting into motion.

As President Elect my role requires that I keep track and participate in almost every facet of the local chapter. However a few of my personal goals are to ensure the following takes place during my session:

• Focus on the long term viability of each project
• Track the day to day progress of our initiatives
• Ensure that we are receiving feedback on our initiatives
• Foster a sense of membership and family for all members involved

I am very much looking forward to my time in a leadership role with the Charlotte Chapter.

If you have any questions, comments or concerns please reach out to me.

Thank You for your Trust,

Markus Beamer

What Are Your Feet Trying to Tell Me?

For those that may not know, I like to play poker. I think I'm pretty good at it. I like to play poker because contrary to what you may believe poker, is 70% reading people and 30% playing cards.

I recently read a book called "Read'em and Reap". It's an FBI interrogator's guide to understanding the instinctual moves that people make, specifically how it pertains to the Poker tables. Reading "tells" is what us poker players call it. But reading tells is done in almost every aspect of my life. Anyway, I strongly suggest you read this if you are into poker in any way or are interested in understanding body language.

One interesting fact: Did you know that your feet are the most "honest" part of your body. Your face is the least truthful. Information like this can be used outside of the poker room.

For example: Say you're having a conversation with someone and can't quite tell if they're actually getting it. Look at their feet. If thy're pointed directly at you, the person is engaged and listening and most likely right with you.

However if the feet are at a diagonal, or worse yet pointed away, they are not into the conversation and quite likely want to get out of it.

On the same thought, have you ever walked up to a conversation and wanted to participate but felt shut out? Try aligning your feet with everyone. For some reason you'll be swept right into the mix.

We do a lot of this instinctively, but knowing when to do it purposefully can be a powerful thing.

So get out there and let your feet tell the world all about you.

Holding Up Your End of a Conversation

or better titled...Teaching a 10 year old to talk.


How does one hold a meaning full conversation with a 10 year old? Most parents can relate to what I went through last night. As I broached a bone of contention between my son and myself I saw his immediate reaction. Body stiffens, huffing and puffing, muttering under his breath, a few tears and some large sighs. I could see that we were not going any where fast.

The first step was to get him committed to being engaged in the conversations. I resorted to a "carrot" of sorts. "Son, if you talk to Mom and I for 30 min, I'll let you stay up an extra hour tonight...but we have to have a meaning full conversations about this"

It was almost comical. He immediately stopped huffing, sat for a minute then turned and quite calmly said "OK". The next thirty minutes where eye opening for all of us.

Step One complete: Get the other party invested and involved.

I proceeded to explain a key concept to almost any conversation to him. "You know where are talking here and we both have different ideas about this problem. You have to start assuming that neither one of us is right or wrong. "

"But you guys are adults and I have to listen to what you say"

"Yes, We are your parents and when we tell you to do something you have to do it."

"However, right now we are having a conversations, we want to understand your point of view and we want you to understand ours. For this conversation we will try not to give you any thing to do"

"OK"

I explained to him that he had to sit up straight and say what he really felt. He did not need to shout, cry or plead as we were allready intently listening to what he said.

One of the recurring themes was interruptions. It was at this point that I learned something that I should have already known. We both tended to interrupt one another as we "verbally spared" around a particular point.

My son found this disturbing as when I interrupted him he felt that he had to defer to me and let me speak, thus shutting his thoughts out.

At certain points He in turn would interrupt my speech as he would attack my arguments. Unfortunately he would do this before I laid out the entire picture so he would miss points in my argument. This lead to a cycle where he would not understand something but I could not finish the thought to explain it to him.

I helped him understand that he had to let the other person finish thier thoughts. If he wanted to address a particular part of what was said, he simply had to repeat that part and then state why he thought it was wrong.

All in all, I found it very interesting and I think the three of us learned a lot about ourselves and each other.

If you have a young child in your house I suggest that you also sit down and teach them the valueable lesson of holding up thier end of a conversation.

rpgCardz.com

I did some major enhancements to a game that has been sitting on the back burner for quite a while.

I remember when I first worked on this game, it took me about 2 days to write and I wanted to make something quick and addictive to play.

I guess I succeeded as I wasted about 2 hours last night trying to get my "Rare" cardz.

What a time waster.

http://www.rpgcardz.com

Visual Resume

A Visual Resume...for those who might be interested.

A friend of mine got me into "Visualization Techniques" this would be my first effort.

Charlotte BDPA - President Elect for 2010

Hello, my name is Markus Beamer. I have been nominated for the 2010 President Elect position within the local Charlotte chapter of the BDPA. I look forward to getting your help in securing this position.

A little about my history with BDPA, I have been involved with the Charlotte chapter for the past 8 years, particularly with the High School Computer Competition (HSCC). I have assisted and trained over 200 youths in the Charlotte area during that time. I am extremely happy to say that during each of those years Charlotte has taken at least 5 youths to the National Competition.

During my time with the Charlotte chapter I have always been a confidant for the president and vice president of the organization. This year I took an extended step of becoming the VP of Strategy for the local chapter. Both roles have given me a unique perspective on the workings of the local chapter.

As for my agenda during my presidency, I believe that the local chapter needs to re-solidify its foundation. I have a simple plan to do this.

• First, find the right people. This is where it all starts. My first action will be to setup a process to find passionate people in the area who are willing to contribute to leading people from “the class room to the board room”.

• Second, set standards. Once we have the right people gathered and we decided on a course of action. My job will be to ensure that we setup a “process” for each project we work on. This will ensure that in future years the local chapter can continue on the successes of our prior work.

• Finally, ensure a line of succession. The final item I will focus on is ensuring that the local chapter of BDPA has a viable group of candidates that can provide solid leadership and continuation of our successes.

While doing the 3 actions above, we must keep the mantra of BDPA in mind “From the Classroom to the Boardroom”. My underlying goal is to see that the Charlotte chapter is able to create a systematic process for delivering this chain of movement. Starting with those teenage youths learning new technology and ending with those of you who may be sitting on the edge of boardrooms.

Finally, I leave you with this thought. The Charlotte chapter is in a time of re-birth. We know that rebuilding is needed. The chapter has become a boulder of potential at rest. My only hope is to nudge the boulder. If we can make it move the first foot, the second foot will be easier. If we can get it to roll a mile, it will roll forever.

And why do we do it? Because one day we will want to look back with pride in our hearts and a smile on our face from the good that we caused.

My High School Programmers

On August 7th, 2009, 3 freshman and 2 sophomore students from Charlotte, NC faced a field of programmers. They made up the youngest team of African American students that competed in this years Annual BDPA High School Computer Competition. Regardless of age they had intentions of winning and they represented Charlotte very well, placing in the top 10 teams nation wide.

They had committed the last 8 months worth of Saturdays to training and learning. Some did not now the very basics of web development when they started. On that day they were tasked with building a professional website using only the most basic of tools, but they had their wits about them.

They were asked to build a venture capitalist site, where companies could track monetary request and ROI on the request. And they were asked to build it in 7 hours.

Today, I can say that I am especially proud of these five Charlotte youths. Their accomplishment was no mean feat considering that the field of competition was selected from over 1,000 students and many other teams featured senior high school students.

Every year the BDPA, Black Data Processing Association, holds the national HSCC program in a different city. Every year between 20 and 30 teams come from all over the United States to compete. And every year the local Charlotte BDPA chapter has opened its class to any rising high school student who is willing to listen and learn about technology. From these young students, 5 are selected to compete in the regional or national competition. This years national competition was held in Raleigh North Carolina.

This year the national competition gave out the assignment to the students. It required that they build a venture capital website. On this site a company could request funds and track the requests. In addition to this users of the site could calculate a ROI on the investment. They were allowed no tools other than Notepad and Textpad and their own creative skills.

They were asked to build the site in 7 hours. This is a testament to their talent as I know some professionals who would be hard pressed to provide results in this amount of time.

For those of you who do not know, each year we, the local BDPA chapter, operate a learning class where we teach rising high school students how to build .NET web pages. We have students of all levels walk into our classroom, some having little to no computer experience, some having programmed for years. Regardless of their level of expertise, it is the programs responsibility to see that they walk out having learned a little more about technology.

The BDPA's mantra is "From the Classroom to the Boardroom", the Charlotte chapter strives to provide exactly this.

In previous years multiple HSCC students have gone on to internships within software development groups in the local area WHILE THEY WERE IN HIGH SCHOOL. Winners of the national competition will recieve scholarships to schools of thier choice. And this year BDPA and affiliates provided a full 4 year paid scholarship for an HSCC students from Columbia, SC. We follow through with these students progress as thier professional careers develop.

If you have a student that is interested in the program, we encourage them to come to our classes. They being the weekend after the Superbowl. The sessions are not expensive. Find out more by visiting, http://www.bdpa-charlotte.org

If you are interested in helping this program, in any way, please reach out to me. Someone reached out to you when you were younger, you should be returning the favor. It makes you feel good!

CIFS, SANS and NAS for the Non-Techie

How to explain a CIFS, SANS and NAS to a non-techical person...

Be forewarned a lot is lost in translation, but I think I have the majority of it correct. Do your own research if it is that important. This was quickly written with a humorous mind.


CIFS are the next generation of SMB protocols. To understand a CIFS one must first understand SMB.

SMB is a way for networked machines (computers and printers) to talk and share files with one another. If a computer has SMB "turned on" it will periodically shout out on the network that it is available and ready. This is known as broadcasting. It provides a nice way for computers to find each other.

Think of a dark basketball gym, you and a few friends are standing in the dark and you have to find each other. You do this by shouting till you can find the one you want to talk to.

This works fine, until your friend list gets a little long, say 21 people. Suddenly you notice that when you shout it's hard to hear the reply amongst all the other shouts.

This is what happens with SMB when you have more than 20 machines on the network. It gets worse as you add more machines. There are ways around the problem, but usually the solution is not elegant.

Being the solution finders that we are, we (programmers) thought there had to be a better way. Thus CIFS was born. It was like SMB, think shouting in the dark, but had a number of features that made it easier, think flash lights and fire. Well maybe not fire.

The rules of CIFS live within a Microsoft application called SMB 2.0. The most interesting tool/addon that CIFS provides is the ability to share its file system and structure with other machines that could understand it.

Enter the SAN

Though you might be told differently, SANS are large dumping grounds for data. Anyone with proper access and authentication can dump a file in the playground. Anyone (or thing) with proper access could pickup the file and do things with it. The coolest thing about a SAN is that you can have multiple machines pick up the file at the same time, you can copy the data multiple times, you can backup a SAN while it is being used. All these things that make your system admin's life a lot easier.

Usually, though not all the time, SANS also have a plug and play feature to them. Plug and play sounds cool, but all that means is you can think of it as a flash drive. Except that the flash drive can be as big as a house. Very handy when your fortune 500 financial server dies and you have to move all the data to the next one.

SANS come in handy when you have 300 machines responsible for handing out the same document to a few million folks. Mostly cause you only have to store the document in one location.

SANs also come in handy when your not quiet sure how much data you will need to save. You can give a group of computers one SAN and say hey you can only save a few 1,000 GB of data in this SAN, I know you have to share but at least it's more than the silly 20 GB on your hard drive. Plus...well you can share your iTunes with everyone in the office. Oh that made you sit up huh.

Continuing...A SAN sits on it's own machine/computer that handles all of the a fore mentioned coolness. Using CIFS, or SMB 2.0, or as some folks call it Samba, allows the SAN to shout to other machines that it is available. The SAN can also hand out it's file structure, you can think of this as a Map of where and how to get to all of its goodness.

This communication is where CIFS comes into play. It easily allows all of the goodness of SANS to go cross network and enables multiple machines to easily access and consume data from the SANS.


As an FYI a NAS and a SAN provide similar to the same function but with different technical implementations. Personally, I think it ironic that one spells the other backwards; this suggests that one solution is worse than the other. If you had to buy one, I'd by a NAS...but that is a different subject.

The Snow Day - From the mind of a 6 year old

I write this in hopes that my two sons will read as they get older. Maybe it will help them understand the quirkiness of their father. I hope it puts a smile on your face boys. I love you both. Be Aware: Dad (me) has a faulty memory so while some things may not be factually acurate, this is how I remember them.

I was born in January and grew up in Tacoma Washington, a town near Seattle. At that time, and probably to this day, it snows a good bit. On my fifth or sixth birthday, lets just make it easier and say it was my sixth, we had a pretty good snow storm blow through.

It was the kind of day that a kid loves. Snowing outside, not a lot of wind, the snow is the soft kind that makes great snowmen and provides just the right amount of cushion to jump off the front porch. Which, by the way, I was forbidden to do but being six and knowing Mom was always wrong I did it anyway.

Mom kept the hot cocoa coming, so I remember alternating between the running in the snow and sipping hot brew at the fireplace. The easy life of a kid.

At the time my father was in the army but was on leave so was home. This was a highly unusual event, but made for a great day even better. Because as all six-year-olds know, when Dad is home all rules are open for new interpretation.

Dad and I spent the better part of the morning building a snowman. I gotta say Dad knew what he was doing. This snowman must have been 6 feet tall and about 4 feet wide at the base. We actually carved arms out of some icy snow and put them on thing. It come out pretty muscular and hulky looking. I remember being a tad bit frightend as it was so very very big. Remember I was six so I was still coming to grips with how tall adults were. (Side Note: Do you remember in 1st grade, how big the 5th graders seemed...giants they were. Or maybe that was just me.)

As I was saying before, it was my birthday and we had our little family celibration in the living room. After the cake my mom wipped a bed sheet off of my present, which was sitting in the corner. HOLY MOLY, I had gotten a Green Machine.

Now, let me enlighten you as some of the newer generation may not know what this awe-inspiring vechicular man-child toy is all about. Back in the day, big wheels were the state of the art way to travel for a six year old. (I still think they should be, but times change). A big wheel is like a tricylce except it has a huge wheel in front and was a low rider...sort of.

Well, the Green Machine, was the cadalliac of Big Wheels. Green and slick, it did not have a true wheel, instead you used these levers to spin the beast left and right. It was as tall as or bigger then me, and I could bareley touch the peddles. It was great for donuts and drifting though.

Now my Mom and Dad were never well off, so Mom had gotten a used one from the thrift store. (remind me to tell you some of my thrift store stories). So yeah, it was a little used. But hey this beautifull, speed demon of a machine was MINE and mine alone.

About 10 seconds after the un-vieling I was out the door. Now, use your imagination and paint a picture for yourself...Your looking at a street, covered in about 2 feet of snow. The side walks are sholved, but some of the snow has melted on them so thier pretty slick. We also lived on a pretty good sized hill. The hill stretched about 5 blocks and was probley at a 20+ degree angle. We were about 75% up the hill, so there is a long way down.

I'm slipping and sliding all over the side walk, my Dad's trying to show me how the levers work, but I won't stop peddling so he can't quite show me what I need to know. But I'm a clever kid so eventully I think I have the hang of it. Sorta.

I think at this point Dad got a little disgusted and figures he would let me do my own things. He goes to play with my younger siblings.

I in my infinite wizdom as a six year old, think that all I need is some momentum. Speed and momentum and then this Green Machine has to go stright.

So I push this thing, which is almost as big as me, up the hill about a block. Now this is the part that I remember most vividly about this day. I'm sitting on this thing, I can barely see over the levers and the wheel. I'm in the middle of the sidewalk and I'm looking down the street. The sidewalk looks like some type of roller coaster. A dark, icy wet rollercoaster ... with snow bumpers on the side to keep me on the track. At this point I begin to have second doubts.

But then I see my Dad, he's just noticed that I'm not "in the yard". He turns and yells "Markus", this startles me a bit, I lift my feet and ....... we ........ are ......... OFF!!!!

Fast and faster, At T minus 4 seconds I'm going to fast to bail out. I grab a lever. The beast scoots towards the road. Dad runs out waving at me to stay out the road. I pull the other level. The beast scoots toward the yard. I'm thinking "nice, this might work"...then I glance stright and realize that the sidewalks goes on for about 3 blocks, an eternity, and it is .....all .... down... hill!

A moment of panic sets in...I grab both levers and pull at the same time. The beast of a machine goes into a spin, throwing me out like a snowball shoot from a sling. I hit the snow bank and kinda... sorta... launch over it. Only to see the 6 foot tall GIANT CHILD EATING SNOWMAN looking to eat me. Screaming, I face-plant into it's enourmous stomache.

Dad's running over, but slips and falls and I guess he nudges the snowman because at this point it's arms fall off. Suddenly it wasn't quite so scary a snowman.

I remember laughing a lot, Dad not so much.

I don't know what happend to the Green Machine.

But to this day, I love the snow and I love birthdays.