Archive
The little guy
At my company, management has been talking for months that they were going to fix our insurance.
Unfortunately all they did was change insurance providers. Same unimpressive benefit levels … and we have to pay more for it.
Sure there are good excuses, but does that make us peons feel better about it?
Not so much.
I thought this picture was rather appropriate for my feelings on the subject. 🙂
Taking a metaphor too far
Office building near Colman Dock designed for creative professionals
The Colman Center will let companies create bright, open, unique spaces, with high ceilings, decks and terraces, and will feature hip, high-tech common areas.
“This building is a Macintosh,” said architect Blaine Weber, of Weber + Thompson. “Most buildings in downtown Seattle are PCs.”
We get it. It’s a cool building. I think if this guy had his way it would look like an iPod and feature an iPhone on everyone’s iDesk with great views out their iWindows. Wait, that won’t work … iViews?
This is simply Apple’s next step to get into the business world. I think I’ll call it … iJobsâ„¢! 🙂
For those of you who don’t know, Steve Jobs is the iFounder of Apple.
A new toy!
My new phone came in today – a Blackberry 8300 (a.k.a. the Curve). Unfortunately today is a patching day for our corporate servers, plus we had a bunch of people moving desks. BLAH! Not much time to play.
But in the short time I’ve had I already love it!
I’ll post a more thorough review in the next couple days. Stay tuned!
Show me something…
Alicea and I just watched the latest episode of Studio 60. We LOVE this show! Hope they continue it again next year … though that may not be in the cards according to what Alicea just found online.
Anyway, two of the main characters have had an on again / off again relationship for a long time. This most recent episode they kept flashing back to all the arguments they’d had over the years. All of them were centered around Harriet being a Christian and Matt being an atheist/Jew. Kind of a microcosm of the Bible Belt vs. Hollywood stereotypes.
Anyway, a LOT of bad stuff happened in the past two episodes, and at the end of this one Harriet asked Matt to come pray with her. The audience couldn’t tell if Matt was going to or not, but then his phone rang. Saved by the bell. It was another emergency and the two ran off to the hospital to be with some friends.
Harriet ran out of the door to the parking lot and Matt hesitated for a second. He looked up, gave a little point, and said “show me something.”
That’s how I feel a lot. It’s tough to stay grounded in this world, and it’s so easy to get caught up in nonsense and feel like God really isn’t there. I can totally related.
Show me something.
The new divide
I’m sitting in LAX catching up on some feeds and I came across a great article from the Seattle PI dealing with the state of Christendom in today’s “post-modern” society.
In some ways, the emergent-church phenomenon is a judgment on established churches. By their very existence, emergent churches say that younger generations haven’t found room or voice in existing churches.
While there may be plenty of open seats in established churches, there haven’t been open seats in the places where decisions were made.
But creating churches for one generation runs the risk of reproducing the problem such churches are meant to cure. What’s new becomes old, what’s edgy becomes mainstream, what’s hip becomes dated. What then?
The author briefly touches on the “why”, and the brief explanation given I don’t feel is deep enough. However, this would be a great conversation starter. I know our church is facing these issues as well. Even though we’re growing, it’s increasingly difficult to get younger folks (20s and 30s, singles and new families) to engage in the “life of the church” beyond attending Sunday services.
How do we fix this? How do we integrate the post-modern churches and the “classic” churches so our community doesn’t fracture beyond at the crazy denominations we already have?
Every new non-denom church is really a new denomination. Is that good? Am I wrong – should we split up?
In the immortal words of Tom Cruise from Top Gun, “Talk to me Goose!”
It’s going to be one of those days
I’m sitting in the Orlando airport waiting for my flight right now. The morning started off an hour earlier than I had anticipated with United paging me to tell me that my plane was now in queue for departure. This is a regular email they send me about 2-3 hours before a flight.
When my Blackberry woke me up I assumed it was my alarm. So I got up without worry. When I actually checked my Blackberry I found that United’s email indicated my flight was departing at 6:55a. My itinerary had it leaving at 7:40a.
Oh shit.
I called the bell desk to see if there were any towncars out front. Nobody home – transferred to the operator. I explained the situation and asked for a towncar. She transferred me to a bus shuttle service. Reservation made – hopefully they’ll be able to get me there in time. I threw the few items I had out for getting ready in the morning in my bag and headed out ASAP.
The folio left under my door while I was getting dressed didn’t charge my room to a card – manual checkout required. The person at the front desk said that they only had the credit card I gave them at check-in on file, even though the room was supposed to be paid for by a corporate credit card. Whatever – I’ll take the airline miles.
I get out to the curb and viola – two towncars! Screw waiting for a bus, I’m outta here!
Arrive at airport: long lines. Thank goodness I had upgraded to first class so I could go to the shorter first class line. More delays from stupid people. How hard is it to make flight arrangements folks? It’s not rocket science.
My flight is “very full” and I’m 3rd in line for a first class seat (in first class standby on this leg, first class confirmed for LAX to SEA). Because I upgraded with miles and one of my two legs me in first class they’re going to dock me for first class mileage for the whole trip (not prorated). I joke about it with the agent and she moves me from the “back of the bus” up into the economy plus seats. More leg room … YAY!
I get through security without too many issues. The folks who Disney rejects because they have crappy customer service skills are evidently hired by the TSA. Right in front of me a little 4 year old boy got yelled at because he didn’t have his own boarding pass in his hand. Nice…
Make my way to the gate and find a seat. There are no signs that say what flight it is and I want to make sure I’m in the right spot. I get up to ask a gate agent and the power goes out. About 30 seconds of darkness. Nice…
I am in the right spot so I settle in for a bit of a wait – they’re boarding another flight at my gate. The outside lights on that light up the planes and working areas go out for a couple minutes. What the hell is with this airport?
And this is just the beginning. OYE VAY!
Nah, I didn’t want sleep…
The conference is definitely over. I have new neighbors tonight in the hotel.
On one side of my room is a couple yelling and arguing over divorce terms. Nice. Just split the damn house 50/50!
On the other side is a family with two young kids. They checked into the hotel around midnight and the kids are screaming and crying because they don’t want to sleep.
Thanks hotel gods!
TechEd day 5
Whew. Maybe I can start getting more sleep now that TechEd is done. Oh wait, no, I have to meet my ride to the airport tomorrow morning at 5:30a.
The first session today was about the new Server Core platform for Windows Server 2008. Essentially they’ve stripped out all of the UI and superfluous apps and tools from Windows and created a lean and mean OS for specific “workloads” (Microsoft’s new term for what a server is used for). A Server Core installation is managed via standard remote MMC tools, or via command line on the box itself. The workloads Server Core is used for include a domain controller, file server, print server, basic web server (no .NET), or virtualization server (Hypervisor). It’s going to be a bit of a change to get used to administering these boxes, but I like the concept.
Next I attended another discussion on Microsoft’s Virtualization platform. THIS is the session I was expecting to see on the first day. There was a fair bit of content overlap, but we actually got some good technical information on Windows Server 2008 Virtualization and had a nice Q&A session. I feel better about what’s coming with Windows Server 2008’s Hypervisor, but if I had to deploy a production environment right now it would be tough for me to not do use VMware ESX.
I finished off my conference sessions the way I began, with a security talk by Steve Riley. This one was about securing mobile devices (laptops). Steve spent a lot of time talking about BitLocker in Windows Vista, which utilizes special chips in newer laptops called TPM modules. I won’t get too technical, but Steve did a great job of explaining how all this works. I might even be tempted to try it sometime … though I’d need to wipe my laptop to do it as BitLocker needs a disk partition that’s outside your OS to keep unencrypted for some types of application installers. The official recommendation is 1.5GB of space, though according to Steve he hasn’t had any issues with a volume only 55MB.
And that was that. I hung out with Will Strye from our Portland office this afternoon & evening. We walked across the way to Downtown Disney and saw a movie (Oceans Thirteen – liked it).
After we got out we hung out by the lake for a couple minutes and were treated to a view of the Space Shuttle Atlantis lifting off from Kennedy Space Center 45 miles east. WOW. Awe inspiring. Goose bump moment. We were too far away to see the shuttle, but we saw a long trail of fire and the smoke trail from the rockets. We watched it through rocket separation and until we couldn’t see the glow of the main engines anymore. I’ll remember that forever. Will try to get some pictures posted from Will’s phone soon. A couple guys from Ascentium drove out to the coast this afternoon so I’ll get some pics from them too. 🙂
Well, time to pack!
TechEd 2007 – OUT!
A couple numbers
13,000 – number of attendees, vendors, etc. at TechEd 2007
22 – number of acres the main show floor is, all under 1 roof. This does not include the breakout rooms in the north/south wings attached to the main floor area.
TechEd day 4
One more day down – one more to go. It was a pretty good day in all. The biggest thing for me was that I won a Microsoft Zune from the Microsoft TechNet Webcasts/Podcasts group. And because I was actually standing at the booth when my name was drawn (multi-day drawing from everyone who registered at their station) I got two bonus prizes: a Zune Home Kit to dock the device and hook it up to my home stereo, and a Zune Car Kit (car charger and FM transmitter). YAY ME!
I’m loading the device right now, so I’ll let you know what I think later. 30GB should hold all the music I have on my laptop right now, which is most of our library. I’ll have to put some videos on there to watch on the plane!
I also attended a session presented by Laura Chappell entitled “The Network is Slow”: Identifying the Cause of Slow Network Communications. Check out Laura’s site at www.wiresharku.com. Laura is fun and engaging, and if you ever have a chance to see her. She teaches about analyzing network traffic in a way that my wife would understand. Great session!
Other sessions today included three sessions on Exchange Server 2007. The first was on storage design, and the presenter was not very good. He had the wrong room number so was late getting going, and was very flustered … he never really settled in.
The third session of the day was on high availability on Exchange 2007 and E2K7 SP1. LOTS of new information about features and enhancements coming with SP1, and demos of a number of HA scenarios. The audience was really into the session and there was a lot of applause. SP1 features a new feature called Standby Cluster Replication.
SCR can work ON TOP of CCR or LCR or a regular stand-alone server to ship logs to a third server and have the content replayed there. The SRC replica DOES NOT use Windows Cluster Service, so there are no dependencies on network subnets, etc. The activation of the other server is manual and you’ll need to rehome mailboxes to the other server name, but you can pre-script that re-homing with PowerShell and just have someone run it when the big rock falls from the sky. This gives you SITE RESILIANCE from Exchange without a nasty cluster configuration that’s geographically stretched. WOOHOO!!!
The fourth session was also about Exchange 2007 disaster recovery scenarios, and how to leverage all the different design options based on your business needs and requirements. Sounds bland, but it was another great session.
The day finished off with a trip over to Universal Studios Orlando to, as it turns out, get rained on, have a decent chicken and ribs dinner, and then walk around with the thousands of other TechEd attendees. Myself and a couple other guys from Ascentium didn’t stick around – not our cup of tea to wait in long lines for stuff. I’m VERY glad my family didn’t come out to go to this with me … they wanted $109 for 4 hours in the park (with open bar and free food). No way was it worth the $$.
Tomorrow is the last day. I’ve really enjoyed this trip, but I miss my family. It will be good to head home on Saturday.
Nathan's Occasional Blog 