Laurence Hart joins Alfresco. Great guy, brought a lot of value to AIIM, expect he will bring a lot of value to Alfresco and looking forward to seeing his impact there.

Facebook publishes first Global Government Requests Report. Not liking the fact that US stuff has to be reported in ranges due to "national security" restrictions. Yes, my use of "scare quotes" is intentional - having had a top secret clearance in the past, I know that a substantial amount of stuff relating to national security and classification is done to protect reputations, not citizens.

My favorite food porn channel EpicMealTime is back with the Inside-Out Burrito Burrito. Oh, and they have a cookbook out too. As always may not be 100% safe for work and is definitely 100% not PC.

Super Mario Brothers Parkour in real life. I'd love to do this except I'd be terminally broken about 3 sec. in. :) Via Wired.

Math Experts Split the Check. I'm a liberal arts major and I still followed it - and found it pretty funny.

Lifehacker: The Pros & Cons of Working While Working Out. Regular readers will know that I have a walking desk (i.e. treadmill with a plank to support my laptop) and I typically use it 4-5 days/week for 1-4 hours/day depending on motivation and pain levels. I set mine at 6% slope and 2.4 mph and I can do everything work-related except take conference calls (natch) or do finely-grained graphics work.

Sharegate (SharePoint migration vendor): Migrate to Office 365 – Planning File Share and SharePoint migration to SharePoint Online.

ACEDS: Lawyer expelled for five years for telling client to despoil social media content. The article covers a lot of the usual suspects re: social including generation gaps but to me this is absolutely positively not even close to something that's arguable. If you are in discovery, don't delete stuff that could be relevant. Not social, not emails, not semaphore flags, nada. This is especially true with social because it's so easy to screw up the getting rid of evidence bit. Sigh.

On a related note, if your legal staff and other employees don't get that social could be evidence just like anything else, please call me and I will be happy to train them for a ridiculous amount of money - but much less than the losses noted in the article!

Political rant - age of majority

Was just having a discussion with someone about two topics you'd think would have nothing in common: the drinking age and the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The crux of the discussion was not the merits of either or - rather, it was the distinct disdain with which we treat adults in the U.S. depending on context.

What I mean by that is that we generally treat 18 as the age of majority. In most jurisdictions, under most circumstances, your 18th birthday marks you as an adult. You can vote, courtesy of the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. You can enlist in the armed forces without your parents' consent - and if you are male, you are required to sign up with Selective Service(!). You can get married without your parents' consent. You can buy cigarettes and other tobacco products. You can enter into contracts legally. You can be called to serve on a jury. You can buy a firearm (though handgun purchases often require higher ages depending on jurisdiction). You are tried as an adult regardless of the crime. And so on.

Yet these same men and women cannot buy liquor in any state in the U.S. for three more years. Again: you can get married and join the Marines at 18, but you can't have a beer on either occasion.

And here's where the ACA came in. The ACA allows you to keep your "children" on your insurance plan until they reach 26. Even if they are married. Even if they no longer live with you. Even if they are no longer a dependent. Even if they are no longer students. The stated reasons for this - job turbulence and/or adequate coverage during college - are unimpressive; after all, these "children" can't stay on their parents' car insurance or tax returns just because they don't have a job or adequate income. But the issue to me is that it continues the infantilization of adults, allowing them to delay adulthood or regress from it in a way that seems to me to be very unhealthy to society over time.

So: what is to be done? While I am normally very much a small-l libertarian, I do think the time has come for a Constitutional amendment to define the age of majority. Insofar as the 26th Amendment already guarantees the right to vote to be 18, 18 seems like the most appropriate number to pick.

I know the immediate response to my recommendation: "Not all 18-year-olds are mature enough to do X". I know this because it was the reason for raising the drinking age in the 80s and 90s. It's the reason cited for handgun purchase restrictions. And some states support higher ages of majority in certain contexts. But that "child" is mature enough to marry, vote, and serve in the military? Really?

Fine: let's repeal the 26th Amendment and set a new age of majority of....what? 20? 21? 25? 30? I am old enough that I don't actually care what the age is. But to me if you are adult enough to do the things I listed at the start of this rant, you are an adult. If you're not an adult for the purposes of drinking, you shouldn't be an adult for the purpose of marrying or smoking or voting.

What do you think? If you want to engage, don't give me a simplistic answer like "drinking is different" or "that's the way it's always been" or "it ain't broken so let's not fix it." Tell me why adults can't be adults in every facet of their lives at the same point - and make clear why other restrictions are somehow more adult than marriage, contracts, and military service.

Content Analyst Company: Seven Ways Concept-Based Auto Categorization Tames Big Data. Interesting point about how auto categorization in the form of predictive coding is already accepted in two highly compliance- and risk-oriented industries: US intelligence and e-discovery.

Via Lifehacker: Make 20 cheap, healthy meals from pantry staples with this chart. Buy it as a poster from the designer, Cressida Bell, here.

Forgot to post walking desk yest: 1:30, 3.6 miles, 645 cal. Hoping for a much longer day today as I engage quality control for some stuff we're about to publish.

The surprising ages of the Founding Fathers on July 4, 1776. This puts my career into sobering perspective.

The Guardian: Google: Gmail users shouldn't expect email privacy. This will not end well for Google.

Busy day today so not much time for blogs/twitter/etc. Did spend a goodly chunk of it on my walking desk though with a final tally of 3:22 elapsed, 8.1 miles, and 1450 calories burned. I always keep it at a 2.4 mph pace and 6% slope these days.

Ray Wang's Personal Log: The Sad State of the Industry Analyst business and the Need for a Code of Ethics.  I wish frankly that he'd named names but the entire article is good and important regardless. Ray Wang is another blogger you really need to follow and Constellation's always doing interesting stuff.

Update: Original is here I think, and includes lots of interesting comments.

Joe Shepley asserts that you can't do records management in SharePoint. Very provocative post but I'd argue that most if his argument relates to enteprise RM regardless of system. That said, you really need to read the comments. There are a lot of them but they are very good; there are quite a few vendor comments and they are likewise highly informative and not "sales-y".

Update: Mimi Dionne posted a thoughtful response on CMSWire that led to another lengthy set of comments that you'd also do well to ready.

And if you're not reading Joe's blog and Mimi's CMSWire posts regularly, you're doing it wrong.

Northern Arizona University to provide competency-based transcripts. I think there is some real "there" there with regards to how many of us do our credentialing.

Really liked the heat from the Ass Kickin Habanero popcorn - much hotter than the Sriracha popcorn for which I had such high hopes. The Sriracha popcorn was OK but just couldn't put out the heat. Gonna try the Ass Kickin Chile Lime popcorn tomorrow.

NetworkWorld: Why We Are Disabling Reputation Settings in SharePoint 2013 Discussion Lists. Interesting comparison between ratings (likes, they like em) and reputation (dislike for a variety of reasons).

Document Strategy Forum call for presentations is open through September 16. Conference is scheduled for May 13-15, 2014 in Greenwich, CT.

Health update: Major back pain this week - 4 Motrin pushes it down to bearable, but only just, and I am aware that that dosage (or any really) presents substantial issues. Flexeril and Percocet don't touch it at all without doses strong enough to knock me out. Starting to get shooting pains down legs as well, meaning it may be time to see my local sawbones again. In the meantime walking desk will likely be at a minimum. Sigh.

Wow. Xerox copies might alter numbers, text in documents. I'm sure they're not the only ones that might have this issue.

CMSWire: The Value & Future of SharePoint On-Premises.

CMSWire: SharePoint is Dead - Long Live Office 365.

American Banker Bank Technology News: Compliance roadmap for proposed social media rules for banks.

Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics (SCCE) releases 2014 "Corporate Scandal Calendars". I love the idea of this as a source for making the case in YOUR organization for better information governance.

In San Jose's Clash of the Titans, Microsoft Beats Google. The interesting part of this story to me is not MSFT vs. GOOG, but rather that a city the size of San Jose is moving firmly to the cloud.

It's too late at night for me to find all the other large institutions/cities/agencies/corporations/etc. that are doing so as well, but chalk this up as yet one more example of what I believe to be an irreversible tide and one that information managers of all stripes need to be prepared to address when, not if, it comes to their organization.

Too busy for many posts today. Walking desk tho: 2:30, 6.0 miles, 1068 calories. More posts later or over the weekend in between work stuff.

CMSWire: Yes, SharePoint is scalable enough for large enterprise ECM.

My next mud run: the 2013 Warrior Dash Colorado on Aug 17.