At DLT we have a chief scheduler for all professional service and consulting projects. We call him “The Cleaner” after The Harvey Keitel character, “The Wolf” in the movie Pulp Fiction.
Continue reading "Why It is what it is" »
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How come nobody is cursing or throwing things?
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.
Continue reading "No Passion" »
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A customer asked me to send our very best consultant to his site to troubleshoot a software problem.
Continue reading "Brother Can You Paradigm" »
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When I was finshed reading Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen I was left with a single thought…he hate me.
Continue reading "He Hate Me" »
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Great news for us open sorcerers…OpenOffice is OK now!
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.
Continue reading "OpenOffice Doesn’t Suck Anymore!" »
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We went to Breckenridge and did a lot of family activities in the mountains. I was struck by how non-pervasive…non-universal…well, there are lots of places that still don’t use new-fangled, computer based, automated technology. It’s fun to work with the largest IT enterprises in the world every day, but it is also fun to see how the common folk do things.
Continue reading "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" »
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This morning I was talking to a customer about an obscure set of protocols and routines known as an Application Program Interface (API).
Continue reading "What Would Bill Gates Do?" »
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A customer wants to backup, replicate, de-dupe and encrypt their data without a significant performance hit. They also want seamless storage management, volume management, network management and endpoint security.
Continue reading "Wish List" »
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Here are my answers and comments to some questions and comments you have posted online in response to various weblogs.
Continue reading "Right back at you" »
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Pete Smith and I finished up early at a customer site this week in Newport Beach, CA. It seemed right to hit the Corona Mexicano Bar (& Grill we heard). It was happy hour. We were thirsty. The following is what you talk about at 6pm on a Tuesday night in Newport Beach when you’re done.
Continue reading "Things to do in Newport Beach when you’re done" »
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A customer asked me yesterday what I thought of VMWare. I do not get paid for smart aleck answers, unless you count this blog and my work on radio for whosyourdata.
Continue reading "A nod is as good as a wink to a blind man" »
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This blog is about a religious conversion. A few weeks ago I experienced the wonders of Second Life @ www.secondlife.com. I would now like to be the first blogger in the universe to comment on the experience (trust me; no one has blogged this yet).
Continue reading "First Life, Second Chance" »
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This morning a colleague called and asked if I thought the upcoming Symantec Vision conference in Las Vegas was worth attending. I have been to six Vision conferences and I will be at this years as well. I gave my friend a resounding Yes. Symantec has so many products and so much technology on the table the conference is a great way to get up to speed on their offerings.
Continue reading "The Best Tech Show in the World" »
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I am staying at a Marriott hotel this week and I can’t find my customer loyalty card that earns me free nights and upgrades. What happened to the universal smart card? I went to a seminar in the 1980’s that promised it was just around the corner. I just looked around the corner…it aint there. Was it the civil libertarians who killed the smart card? Maybe I am confusing that with the electric car. Why would a civil libertarian care if there were electric cars? Supposedly the smart card will usher in the dreaded Big Brother Orwell thing. The problem with that argument… 1984 was a book. It’s not real. It never happened. The only freedom we have lost is convenience.
Continue reading "Smart Cards, Coffee Cards" »
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Random thought of the day: on a recent Sopranos episode Tony Soprano called message boards, chit-chat sites. I loved that.
Continue reading "How Much Do You Really Make?" »
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A good friend of mine travels frequently for business. He has a laptop and a blackberry for email and cell phone access. Whenever he travels he changes his email and voicemail messages to state that while he is traveling he will have “limited access to email and phone messages, but will endeavor to return your call upon his return”!
Continue reading "Don’t call me while I am traveling" »
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A customer asked me why Brand X software was so buggy. I told him that if the computer industry waited until all software was de-bugged before release, we would never have released NT, Exchange, Windows Server 2003 or Vista.
Continue reading "Bugs, Gnats, Wasps and Killer Bees" »
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The State of Virginia is doing a great thing. They are pushing one of the nation’s most comprehensive telecommuting policies. I read their complete report from my home high above the city of Denver, Colorado, with a beautiful view of the Rocky Mountains out my window. A small plate of gruyere cheese and crackers was on the desk and a smooth glass of Sauvignon Blanc was nearby. The wine offered just a hint of the wild grasses of France. My smoking jacket was on the settee. As I finished the report I noticed it was time to take a break and enjoy the Cohiba given to me by a friend from a recent visit to Cuba. Not bad for 10 a.m. on a Wednesday morning.
Continue reading "I am more productive than you are" »
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Avid readers of this blog (thanks Mom) know that I think the whole Y2K thing was a bit hyped. However, the real deal is upon us. In one of those late night top secret sessions that Congress is famous for, they had the audacity to move up the date for daylight savings time. They did this without consulting the geek patrol. Next Sunday night, March 11 we will experience what can go awry when mere computer programmers are allowed to manipulate the very future of the planet.
Continue reading "Beware DSTY07 is fast approaching!" »
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OK. This really torks me off. Normally I am a very calm and reasonable person, open to many viewpoints and ideas. A colleague whom I shall call “Ben” (his real name) was preparing a presentation for a military/intel customer regarding open systems and open source software. He was going to talk about Linux and insisted throughout our conversation on calling it “Lye-nix”. When I called him on his pronunciation he informed me that the matter was “in dispute”.
Continue reading "How not to sound like you know what you are talking about" »
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One of our engineers was at a customer site recently. He observed a young engineer who worked for the customer “monitoring” the network on one screen while he played Warhammer: Mark of Chaos on a second monitor (it was 2 in the morning, give the guy a break).
Continue reading "Isha nash-veh Vuhlkansu - pontal na'sochya (Star Date 5943)" »
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Saturday night I was enjoying a glass of wine with my wife during intermission at one of those big Broadway musical revivals. A former colleague and customer, whom I had not seen in eight years walked up. We will call him “Dave” (his real name). “Dave” and I had worked on a $50 million Y2K upgrade for a Fortune 500 company.
Continue reading "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to an Upgrade" »
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This time of year our engineering group spends a lot of time in the classroom updating our technical expertise and learning new things. Every time one of our engineers achieves a new level of technical certification or expertise, we celebrate. What few outsiders realize is that the tech industry is run by a secret cabal of old timers (I am not eligible yet) who have a unique way of celebrating a new engineers first major technical certification.
Continue reading "Stranger in a strange land" »
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Every time we hire a new engineer, I warn them about the Dreaded Wednesday Lunch. Our engineers go onsite a couple of hundred times a year for short periods of time to various customer sites. We go to military bases, financial service firms, document shipping companies and many others.
Continue reading "The Dreaded Wednesday Lunch" »
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Last week I presented the concept of a SAN to a customer. No, I am not going to tell you what those letters stand for. If you don’t know, you should probably go to tmz.com and read the latest misadventures of Britney and Paris. This is a serious technical blog. It assumes that the reader is intelligent and well informed.
Continue reading "The Boss who was better than a sleeping pill." »
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I made the above statement to a Deputy CIO who runs the technology division for a significant part of the military industrial complex. OK...I actually said “maybe they will leave you alone” not “shut up”, but the title quote seems much more blog like.
His problem is email. The powers that be insist that their email be available 24x7. The Deputy CIO knows that their ancient infrastructure that includes 25 year old technology and stuff they bought yesterday, can’t support round the clock availability.
Continue reading "Tell them how much it will cost and maybe they will shut up." »
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On Wednesday, December 20, 2006 the foothills outside of Denver, Colorado received up to 48” of snow. Hundreds of thousands of people were unable to get in or out of the Mile High City. Vacations were cancelled, gifts were left unopened and there was an almost Revelations like weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Continue reading "Nature vs. Nurture and the big snowstorm of December 2006" »
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