I am enjoying the holiday week with my family so my normal blog post will be delayed a few days. Instead, here is my prayer for this day.

To a higher power, a divine being of love and light
On this day of thanks, I thank You for the good in my life
The roof over my head, the food on my table,
Time with my loved ones, my health,
Freedom from fear and my safety
In these troubling times.

Folding laundry tonight
Memories popping up as I pulled things out
A sheet, a memory of folding wet sheets at our motel
Pinning them to a clothes line under a sunny, blue sky.
Later collecting them, crisp, fresh, folding them and
Placing them in our rolling laundry basket

I'd like to share an additional way to keep up with news of people. If a person has a website there is a good chance they also have something called an RSS feed.

I'm starting with a look at teams and team building in companies. Effective teams are considered an important part of businesses yet business practices seemed designed to hobble the people who are working together. Specifically, I want to look at the assumptions people make when using these business practices. Based on my observation and anecdotal evidence, when people don't understand the assumptions of a business practice, they may apply those practices to problems that don't fit them well.

I've now completed my series about the basic functions of computers. My intent was to share information about the stack of technology that is used to perform modern computing. As part of the process I learned some new facts about the history of computers and reminded myself of the basic concepts that underly the current set of computers.

The world needs more grandmothers
(grandfathers too)
Old people with time to visit
In comfortable rooms with younger people.
Offering a cup of coffee or tea
Perhaps a shot of whiskey
Along with cookies or a slice of bread from a loaf fresh from the oven.

Operating systems are the final piece that ties everything together for a computer. An operating system manages access to hardware devices, the software programs on our computer and how we interface with them. In this article I provide a very high level overview of operating systems and how they work. I also provide my opinions on the impact operating systems have on the way we use computers.

Software languages allow people to create systems that can react to input and change the behavior of the systems. This is different from hardware that has fixed functions which cannot be changed after the system is built. Firmware is somewhere in between this, it can be updated but requires special hardware to change the code. Software languages can be changed and stored on a hard drive which make software programs easier to update.

This article provides a high level overview of software languages and the role they play in how computers work.

While numbering systems are not part of the hardware of a computer, understanding numbering systems is helpful for programming computers. This article provides some basic explanation of numbering systems and why the use of different numbering systems are helpful in understanding how computers work. A heads up, I like math and this article contains a lot of math stuff in it. If you aren't into math, feel free to skip to the section about the usefulness of numbering systems for computer programming and usage.