Not since the steam engine has any invention disrupted business models like the Internet. Whole industries including music distribution, yellow-pages directories, landline telephones, and fax machines have been radically reordered by the digital revolution.

— John Sununu

In keeping with my theme of steam, this quote certainly is one that related directly to my past week.  What caught my attention was the term "disrupted business".

As I continue to work diligently on this capstone project, I keep seem to run up against a variety of "disruptions".  In relating this to my data collection, I ran into the issue of one entire class not taking the post assessment survey due to the snow storm and the shortened day.  Off they went to their next elective, even though I pleaded for their participation.  Now the numbers may be somewhat distorted, so I am looking to percentages.  This will certainly be noted in the analysis of the data.

This week gave me quite an education in Excel.  I feel like I have some grasp of the charting capabilities.  Thank goodness my daughter could give me some pointers.  Now hopefully this is something I can continue to remember, at least until it has another update that will DISRUPT my knowledge base.

Talk about disruptions; I lost the land line about 3 years ago and have been happily using my "dumb" phone for any telephone based communication - calls and texts.  Unfortunately this past week my communication mode was "disrupted" when the phone refused to cooperate and work at all.  I didn't even drop it!  So off I went to Sprint to get a replacement... but since I have a "grand-fathered" old plan, the store can do nothing to help me.  So back home I go to ponder how "customer service" has been disrupted by the fast growth of technology. 

Is there a reason the the word "CAN'T" is so prevalent in the interactions I seem to have when I am trying to spend money?

So after two days with no communication (the good news is there is no bad news received) I broke down and bought a new phone - still a dumb one, as it will continue to be until I feel the monthly price is right!  Now on to re-creating my contact list.  I certainly should have written down all those family & friends numbers.