Scott M. Fulton, III @SMFulton3@qoto.org

Hello to all my new followers, and my sincere thanks to my former Data Center Knowledge colleague, and my very good friend, Christine Hall @BrideOfLinux for finding something about me worth following.

It's at a time like this on a Friday night a little over a week from #Christmas, one week after being laid off, that one comes to one's realization that we in the tech content business may spend more time concentrating on tech, at the expense of the people behind it. Technology isn't a product that people just reproduce from a template, and that fewer people would only reproduce slightly more slowly. Technology is an expression, a medium not only for artistry but that is artistry. Reduce the size of your choir by half, and you don't only lose its volume - you sacrifice a degree of its harmony.

A lot of really good artists find themselves unemployed this season, many of them laid off from my old company along with me. While some journalists lament the sudden termination of their Twitter - a loss I pre-emptively assumed for myself without lament - the real story is here. Technology is lesser today than it was a few weeks ago.

-Scott "I Had a Numeral in Their Name Before They Did" Fulton III

For anyone presently managing communications for the #JoeBiden #WhiteHouse or the Biden #political #campaign: If you're scouting out Mastodon to determine whether it's a viable option for publishing or broadcasting official messages, consider this: Host your own #MastodonInstance. Let the fact that you're hosting it, serve as verification for the accounts that use it. That will make it much harder for anyone to successfully impersonate your official accounts. I'm sure there are #MastodonAdmin folks here who could help you out with details.

For those #StarTrek Twitter refugees who may never have seen Bill Krause's work, this isn't a 3D mesh you're looking at. It's the work of a master shipbuilder. And if you think he's just a fan... If you've seen the Picard Season 3 trailer, you've seen the forthcoming USS Titan-A. That's an Admiral Buck design. https://greatderelict.libsyn.com/designing-the-uss-titan-a-with-admiral-buck

Here's a Preview of Coming Attractions for folks considering taking the dive and hiring me for something: If your company is only capable of describing itself metaphorically, and is only comfortable with cloaking itself in a shroud of verbiage salad, you're not going to like me very much.

I'll use @Neo4j as an example, even though that company just laid me off, because I still love the people there, and I still am an advocate for its key product: In my time there, I always advised the company to state what Neo4j is and what it does, plainly, up front.

Thus: The Neo4j #graphdatabase is a system that embeds into the database itself the information about relationships and properties of data elements, that you would have to use predicate logic and math to obtain using a relational database. You can see those embedded relationships as a graph, and thus you can design the relationships yourself by drawing a graph. As a result, queries of huge quantities of data only take marginally more time to process, than queries of small bundles of data.

There. Was that so difficult?

If what you're saying about your product or service within the first 50 words does not include a function that has a clear and measurable impact upon the people or companies that would use it, I don't want to see or hear it. In other words, if you are so uncomfortable with the value of your own product that the only words you can get onto a page are something like, "We enable synergies that maximize the value of collaborative decisions and optimize the service delivery experience," then you're actually afraid people will see your product as too plain or ordinary.

Look at your own customers: the canners of soup, the manufacturers of tape measures, the sellers of soap. Tell me _they're_ as afraid of being perceived as ordinary, as you are. No, they present themselves as products with established and unchallenged value. That should be your goal. Your #contentstrategy begins with simply identifying yourself and your product.

-Scott "Sick to Death of Synergy Experiences" Fulton III

Okay, let's see if this works, folks. I've migrated my #mastodon account from masto.ai to qoto.org (Question Others to Teach Ourselves). I liked the basic concept of the server as it presented itself. And I had absolutely nothing against masto.ai, and wish it well (who knows, if this experiment doesn't work, I may migrate back).

But here's the thing: After being laid off for Christmas, I felt like breaking a barrier. Folks who know me well, or at least well enough (which may be only partially) know I do not work well in confined spaces. Even 500 characters for me is confined space. I actually had to practice the art of tweeting in a few hundred characters, and I do about as well with that format as I would do with souffles. I don't do small. Okay, besides my height, I don't do small.

So here I am on a new server with a character limit of 65,536, which may as well be Delphi (my online home in the 1980s). At least this will give me the space to share with you what I think, in something more closely resembling the way I think it. Hopefully you don't flee in droves.

Scott "Can Resume Signing His Work with a Signature Longer than the Average Tweet" Fulton III