And then, this morning I was talking to my wife about some tragedy and her concluding comment was, “It is what it is”. This phrase is getting around a bit. It is today’s version of “sh*t happens”, “as if”, “you go girl” and the ambiquous “Not!”.

I don’t want to go all Andy Rooney on you, but it seems that there is a purpose in all this phrasing. Some defense mechanism that helps us cope with our collective human foibles. If I had studied psychology in college instead of philosophy and theology I could probably tell you what that underlying purpose is, but since I didn’t I don’t know. Instead I will tell you a story.

A week ago The Cleaner was trying to find an engineer for a project. The project was to last two months. It required a very specific, highly technical skill set. We had the skill set on staff, but the engineer was committed to another project that started the same day. The two month project was for a high profile government customer. The high profile customer begged us to free up our qualified engineer. The Scheduler worked tirelessly to change almost every engineer’s project to accommodate this important customer. As The Wolf said in Pulp Fiction, “That’s thirty minutes away; I’ll be there in ten”.

The schedules were completely changed by late Thursday night. The project started the next Monday morning. Travel arrangements were re-done. Fences were mended. The Scheduler was ecstatic. Monday afternoon the important customer called him and said, “We don’t need your guy after all”. The Scheduler was professional about it, but clearly in a mood to use his catchphrase. He asked if he could call the important customer and say something impolitic. I decided to play Manager and call myself. The customer was semi-apologetic. He did say that they might need our engineer the next Monday if things didn’t work out. I said, “Sure, and monkeys might fly out of my b*tt”.

I participated in a throw down between Microsoft, UNIX (variety Solaris) and open source proponents (me) for a customer in DC last month. It was a very young crowd except for yours truly. Young and disturbingly nice.

It was all over in half a day. At the end, everyone shook hands and promised to keep in touch. I could have sworn I saw the Sun guy going off to lunch with the Softies (and the lion lay down with the lamb).

I was ticked off. There was no blood on the floor. No one raised their voice to contradict anyone else’s position. There was no passion. Normally I can be counted on to raise the temperature a bit. Everyone was so darn nice in front of the customer that the best I could muster was a few guffaws and some general throat clearing.

Seven years ago I was involved in a major rollout of a UNIX based application at a state government agency. The Microsoft crowd was so incensed that management had chosen a UNIX solution; they took one of the application vendor’s salespeople hostage and barricaded themselves in the server room. OK…they didn’t really do that, but they were very upset. So upset that they refused all attempts to implement the new application. Two years and many millions of dollars later the agency was forced to throw out the application and buy a Microsoft compatible product.

Now that was passion. And a waste of taxpayers money. I was on the UNIX team, so my dog lost that hunt. Still…I admired the MS team. They won. They won and they rubbed it in our face. They laughed at us in the cafeteria. How come nobody does that anymore? Are these twenty-something wanna-be gangsta hip-hop loving engineers just a bunch of wimps?

Why do customers want a consultant onsite? I am sure Webster’s or Wikipedia have neat little definitions that would help illuminate this subject. I have a standing policy that no blog shall be researched, so this subject is unknowable from a reference standpoint.

Consultants encourage customers to make paradigm shifts and consider the outflows resulting from the inputs. They know how many trillions of dollars will be spent on storage by the year 2013 and the top 3 reasons why CIO’s are implementing ERP. A Consultant can pick up the tab for an expensive dinner (and charge it back). He or she can order french wine as easily as a domestic pinot noir.

An Engineer has dirty hands from uncrating servers and pulling cables. He or she wants to implement Linux in the data center because MS has to be rebooted every week. The Engineer knows where the best barbecue place is and orders everything including socks and underwear online. I like engineers. I don’t dislike consultants.

Let me ask you a question…if you were stranded on a desert island with one person (and you had already ordered the wine) who would you count on to help you survive, the engineer or the consultant?

The premise of Cult of the Amateur is that me and my ilk are taking jobs away from legitimate writers, downloading music at the expense of the artists and even worse reviewing movies and books that we have absolutely no business commenting on (oops). By the way this last weekend my wife and I saw Stardust, the movie adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s fantasy novel. It was very well done (oops again).

It is hard to know where to start with Keen’s elitist nonsense (I have no right to that opinion). Keen believes that Web 2.0 is the root of all evil, but I am not sure why. Apparently he never got the memo about the “democratization” of information. Or if he did get the memo he thought it was so poorly written that he threw it away.

I will just comment on one of his early rants in the book about Wikipedia. He said there was a lot of bad information on Wikipedia. Keen contrasted that to Encyclopedia Britannica, professional newspaper reporters, etc. I have read so much bad information in newspapers and in magazines that I am literally typing with one hand at this moment and scratching my head with the other hand.

I referenced Wikipedia twice today. The first time to check a few definitions for a network analysis I was working on and the second time to get an overview of top secret government security clearances. I know enough about both topics to feel confident that the info was accurate enough for my purposes. I will not be downloading blueprints for a nuclear reactor from Wiki…on the other hand; I have no plans to build a nuclear reactor.

After reading all but the last chapter my amateur opinion of Cult of the Amateur is that Andrew Keen wants to be provocative…just like the bloggers he hate.

I used this world beater when it was StarOffice. Somebody in Germany in the mid-1980s thought MS Office needed some open source competition. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems during the summer of 1999 and StarOffice 5.2 was released in June of 2000. I used it for the first time in July of 2000. It was awful.

Those are the modules you can download for FREE! Whch is a huge price difference over MS Office unless you live in China, where MS Office costs like $1.00.

I used the StarOffice presentation tool in 2000 to create a presentation for delivery at a Sun Microsystems conference. I thought that was very open of me. What a disaster. It was buggy as heck. Half the time it would not open.

Last week I made a presentation in Pheonix to a customer migrating from Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I downloaded OpenOffice in 15 minutes and I was creating my Impress presentation immediately. I actually enjoyed it more than that dreadful Redmond product called Powerpoint. The customer and the Red Hat sales rep in the room thought it was a nice touch as well.

I don’t like to do too many commercials, but give it a fair chance. Go to openoffice.org and download the package. If I was starting a small business today I would use it in a heartbeat (that’s very quick if you didn’t know). Trust me, OpenOffice really doesn’t suck.

The Dillon Marina rented speed boats and pontoons using clipboards and paper forms. I had called the day before to reserve a time. The person who answered the phone failed to transfer our data to a bulletin board. We got the boat anyway, but it was left to poor pathetic humans to remember to post our info.

The Ranch at Keystone golf course was a little better. They accepted an automated on line reservation.

I am sure the lack of technology is a price issue. To automate the jeep rental process, they have two choices, build it or rent it. If the jeep rental company built their own, they would need hardware, software and somebody to maintain it full or part time. At the low end the intial investment would be $25k. The labor would be expensive…$25k part time, $50k full time. Looking at their low-end operation, I am certain that would be a difficult investment. They may not know that there are outsourced options. A small business could outsource the whole thing for $2k a month. Even that might cause a cash flow problem.

If they rent five jeeps a day for 28 days, seven months a year and the average rental is $225.00 per day…they are grossing $220,500 a year. Costs before the two principles pay themselves are probably half of gross. They might make $50k a year each before taxes. I hope they have other ventures going. You can’t sleep in a tent in Breckenridge for $50k a year.

Technology is going to have to get a lot cheaper before it makes sense for many small businesses. And I mean a lot cheaper. The jeep rental company could justify a $5k investment; five times cheaper. The good news is that costs will get to that price point. The bad news is that the lower price point will put a lot of tech companies out of business.

Important stuff, but not something we talk about every day.

This led to discussion about the wonders of MS Vista. The customer said that they had found 35 incompatibilities between their existing software and Vista. That’s probably an unfair number to lay at the door of Microsoft. Vista has been available to developers for a long time. My guess is that many of those 35 incompatibilities were either old products no longer supported by the vendor or there was some other technical issue looming in the background.

I have a home network that supports both XP and Vista PC’s. I had to upgrade the firmware in the wireless router to get it to play nice (most of the time) with both operating systems. I could probably find 35 incompatibilities between the software on my youngest son’s computer and Vista. I doubt that Deer Hunter 2001 edition will be upgraded to Vista anytime soon.

I wonder what Bill Gates does about the incompatibilities (I am really getting tired of typing this word, how do you turn on the auto complete function in Office?) at his home? Do you suppose he is even aware that Joe IT Lunch Bucket wrestles with incomp…(I am not spelling this word any more)? I vote no. Mr. Gates is too busy saving the world…a noble calling. Meanwhile we in the IT community are too busy upgrading our third party software and hardware to play nice with Vista.

I want a toilet seat that heats up when you sit down on it and that’s not going to happen either.

My solution would be to get rid of all data. This whole computer thing was a big mistake. Let’s go back to face-to-face communication. The airline industry could use the help. And the old-fashioned phone companies. No Voice-Over-IP…that is digital data and we will just get back into storing it again.

If you want to store your phone calls, get an answering machine. I like the pnuematic tubes they used to move documents back and forth in the movie Brazil. Very trendy.

When did we get so obsessed with all of these data management layers? It’s just a bunch of zeros and ones. What is the worst thing that could happen if itunes loses my music files or Amazon loses my order? I am trying to figure out the worse case scenario so I can write a book…it’s no where near the potential death and destruction that comes from wrestling an alligator or skydiving.

Granted, I would not have a job if customers didn’t want all of this data protection.

A. I live in Colorado in a bomb shelter.

Q. What is the significance of second life? It seems to be another social networking site with the graphics and interface of an MMORPG. That's all very nice, but who would spend $1500 to buy a virtual island (unless they are wealthy and eccentric)? Do you think it will impact technology or social networking for the average person? I don't see that happening but I'd like to know if anyone does.

A. I would peg IBM’s investment in Second Life somewhere north of $1 million. That is chump change to them, but real money for the site. Who knows which site or technology will grab the audience? I have been gung ho about Second Life’s virtual conferencing capabiltiy…then just yesterday a colleague was describing a new virtual conferencing technology that sounds even better!

Q. Perhaps you could describe the "smart card" in more detail. Is it a universal credit/payment card? Or a government issued identity card that can work as a signature, passport, drivers license, etc?

A. Perhaps you could do your own research.

Q’s. Being split from your family doesn't sound too fun. But if you happen to work more than you live anyway, being in a place where you don't feel like you are missing anything could be nice. I hope Mr. Pink plans to retire early and use that "premium" to do something to make up for lost time.
So for some, is it worth missing out on your family and social life in order to make a few extra dollars? Nice breakdown of the pay scale, it really puts this into perspective.
I'd say missing out on time with the wife/family isn't really worth the money. Hopefully Mr. Pink can come back to the States and adjust to the difference in income.

A. I can think of two reasons why you might leave spouse and family for a job in another country. If you served in the military and you come out with debt and no chance of buying a house in the foreseeable future, maybe a couple of shifts in Kuwait sound OK. At least you could save some money. And what about the thousands of illegal immigrants who come from Mexico into the U.S. each year? Obviously, it is a better deal for them then working at home.

Q. Use technology to get away from technology...this brings another thought to mind: How many people just say that they have limited access to their email or phone simply as a means of screening their messages? Otherwise saying "if I feel like responding to you then I will, but if I don't respond then just know that I am busy" when in actuality they are checking all of their messages and just picking and choosing who gets a response. I wonder!

A. I will respond to your posting when I have more time.

Q. I had a brick phone! Man, those were the days.

A. Man, I am glad you added the word “phone” after brick. For a minute there man you sounded like Cheech and Chong. Those were the day’s man!

Keep ‘em coming man!

Second Life is a little weird; especially the stat about 60% of the users being men and 70% of the Avatars being women.

Anaheim was up on Detroit 3-0 in a series close out game. We still hate Detroit in Denver even though Claude Lemuiex, Patrick Roy and Valerie Kaminsky are long gone.

Our assumption going in was that the “medium shelf” Margarita’s @ Corona Mexicano would be watered down. We were wrong.

The best way to migrate data from an old storage array to a new storage array is as follows: First, apply Symantec (Veritas) Volume Manager to the old array. Encapsulate the disk. Mirror the disk. Once the mirror is complete, break the mirror. Un-encapsulate the disk. No charge for the above, but margarita’s were $8.95.

Our observation was that the tide does not come in and go out on a regular basis. In Science class the teacher told me it followed the lunar cycles. I always thought the moon was a long ways away to be affecting the beachfront. To my discerning “medium shelf” eyes it appeared to be ebbing and flowing.

Read The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers. It is a great mix of magic, sci-fi and fantasy. Oh, and Stardust, the Neil Gaiman book, is coming soon to the Cine-plex.

Our flight home was late. By the time we got back to Denver we were dead.

My unscientific survey suggests that VMWare is currently tied for the most hyped technology on the planet with…I don’t know, but the answer is in some ridiculously expensive report entitled Gartner Identifies Most Hyped Technologies. Anyway, it’s hyped.

VMWare is a sort of virtual machine. It emulates an Intel-based PC in much the same way there are emulators for other machines. It passes instructions straight to the CPU for execution with no intervening translation, so it is a little bit faster. We use it in our lab at DLT. We use it for training and simulating complex network environments.

So, what’s my real answer…what is the real skinny on VMWare? Are you sitting down? Here it goes. Do you like snapshots?

VMWare has a pretty cool snapshot feature. You can setup your virtual machine the way you want to and take a snapshot of the setup. That’s great except us data management types have been doing that for years with Symantec, Network Appliance and others. I like the emulation features, but I am not ready to crown VMWare as product of the year just yet. It is a very nice product, with very good capabilities depending on your needs. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Say no more, say no more.

I got the hang of it in short order and was soon teleporting to nightclubs, parks and most interestingly of all…islands created and run by some of the top tech companies in the world. We’re talking Cisco, IBM, Sun and lots more. The Geek Squad has an area. Sears has a store. Why in the world would IBM create multiple sites on Second Life? My extensive lack of research suggests the following reasons: they want to anticipate the next myspace, facebook or youtube. There are now 6 million people (and chickens) signed up for Second Life. It is already a vastly superior experience to today’s boring Power Point driven webinar. Go to Sun Microsystems island and sit in on a presentation. You can interact directly with other attendees.

You can buy land on Second Life. I own 512 square meters of land. You can buy an entire island. It’s cheap. You convert real world money into Linden Dollars, named after the creators at Linden Labs.

Yes, there is some rough stuff on Second Life. There are R rated areas. If you go into it with the understanding that you are working with a web browser…it shouldn’t surprise you that there are a variety of experiences on Second Life. There are a variety of experiences all over the world wide web.

I have no idea where this thing is going. It could flame out in a few years or grow like crazy. I am impressed with the roster of corporations that already have a significant presence on Second Life. I have seen the lite.

We also knew that, for NetDirector to be acceptable in environments with some of these folks present, there had to be a way for them to use NetDirector but still be able to configure manually. For quite some time, we wondered if it was even possible to accommodate both types of users - in one camp, those who are new to Linux and open source and so really want a nice user inter-face and, also in this camp, those who may be comfortable doing things manually, but who’s networks are growing faster (often *much* faster) than is the number of SysAdmins. In the other camp, the folks who, if stranded on a deserted island, would choose death before using a GUI to order a glass of water.

Then it hit us - why not put a button in the NetDirector main configuration screen titled “Edit Config File,” which, when clicked, brings up the flat file for the service the user is managing? The screenshot to the left show’s this for Samba. The nice thing about this compromise is that, once you’ve implemented NetDirector, everyone on the IT team can use one tool that lets them manage their Linux (and Solaris) boxes in the way that’s most comfortable for them - no judg-ments. If you want a point-and-click way to set up a new Samba share across several branch of-fice servers, you got it. If it’s just as fast for you to do it manually and then copy and paste the new config, that works, too. In both cases, NetDirector’s embedded database does the revision control for you, so if something goes wrong, getting back to the previous state is a click away. And, in both cases, you can schedule the change to take effect in the future with the drop down calendar.

With this as background, you’ll understand why when I read Jason Brooks' retrospective on his review of RHEL 5 in eWeek, I just had to pipe up (I guess I’m opinionated, too). Jason de-scribes an exchange with a reader who thinks that Jason’s desire for good GUI tools in RHEL is misplaced. I think Jason does a nice job describing the need for a balance between GUI and CLI - something we put into practice with NetDirector. And so I posted a comment to this effect on Jason's blog. You can read his article and my post here. So, if you’re opinionated, too, why not add your 2 cents?

http://blogs.eweek.com/brooks/content/was_i_too_tough_on_rhel.html#comments

Greg Wallace
EMU Software

Speaking of tech shows, I used to love Comdex. It was the only general purpose IT show I would go to. The feel of the crowd and the energy in the hall in the 1990’s was phenomenal. The massive displays of the HP’s and IBM’s of the world were interesting, but I used to love to see a crappy booth thrown together by some small Midwestern entrepreneur peddling a new-fangled database. Those were the days.

It would make a great Paul Harvey “Rest of the Story” segment to say that the small Midwestern entrepreneur created a new database that became wildly popular. Most of the time the “Rest of the Story” was crappy booth, crappy software. Great show though.

If you go to the Comdex website there is discussion about re-starting the show. In the meantime the shows owner, CMP, is pushing a bunch of Interop conferences (never been). BTW - Am I the only one that thinks CMP is taking over the world one publication, website and show at a time?

Maybe nobody wants one. That’s because there is no room in the world’s wallets and purses for another card. My favorite coffee shop has a customer loyalty card. So does my second favorite. My wife has 43 cards in her extended purse and we turn most of the card offers down. These are the essentials. If there was one universal smart card for every transaction, purses and wallets would be non-existent. No Brighton’s, no Coach. Sure, there would be fraud. There is fraud now.

We wouldn’t need currency or coins. The savings would be enough to do serious damage to real problems like hunger and disease. So we are back to the Big Brother scenario. It’s the only one I can think of that would resonate with enough people to kill the smart card. The smart card would not be the first step towards a totalitarian society. There have already been lots of totalitarian societies in human history. The smart card would not concentrate power into the hands of the few to oppress the many. That happened a long time ago. We are still here. Meanwhile…I found my Priority Club card for Holiday Inn and my Starwood Preferred Guest card for Westin and an expired $10 off coupon for Carrabba’s Italian Grill, but no Marriott card.