Entries from May 2008 ↓

You may ask yourself: What does Dave read each week?

Or not.  Either way, here’s your chance to find out.  This week, I made an effort to take note of interesting stories I stumbled across in my RSS reader.  The result fills up my Casual Friday post nicely this week!  Hope you enjoy something here.

• Wish you could use Google Earth in your browser?  Now you can.
• NASA blogger suspended.  Not as controversial as it sounds.
• NYC DOE employees told not to blog (and this one is a bit more controversial).
• The consumerist shares a funny story about trying to order the discontinued hamburger value meal at McDs.
• Weblogged talks about kids and oversharing online.
• Dr. Ari Juels at RSA says to rethink password expiration (and I agree).
• Some images from EMC World 2008.
• Comparing the size of the mobile internet to other types of media worldwide.
• Marginal Revolution gives a shoutout to Murakami, only Japanese novelist I’ve read.
• DD-WRT update on Lifehacker (still haven’t updated).
• Insulting Einstein?  Not really.
• Storage Anarchist’s EMC World wrapup.
• The challenges of corporate blogging.
• Designing for Evil.
• Glimpses of what The Road might look like (still haven’t read this).
• Euler, the first 101-word short story that made me laugh aloud.
• Hobbit movie chat highlights.
• Chuck Hollis on social media in enterprise.

Where would we be without RSS readers?  I have trouble remembering what that world was like.

See you Monday!

Integrity is one of the big name values that people like to say they hold dear.  We all like to think that with our jobs on the line, or facing the temptation of a big score at someone else’s expense, we’d take the high road.  But how about the little things?

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You’ve all seen my coverage of EMC World both here and on twitter, so I won’t bother linking it again. What I wanted to write about here was how the trip was fundamentally different from any other company travel I’ve done, and what the changing face of EMC had to do with that.  My apologies to my EMC readers, who have already seen this content from me.

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We’ve all heard discussion of the technology gap.  I tend to feel I’m spending most of my time among the “haves” when it comes to technology.  I’m not talking about income, just availability and comfort.  And yet every time I make mention of certain technologies and tools, I am greeted with at best a politely blank stare.

Twitter? Forget it.  It’s a toy technology, used to tell people what movie you’re waiting in line to see, right?

Blogging? That’s what those guys do who get into fights with our competition, right?  What could I possibly have to say in that area, and when would I find the time?  “What do you even blog about?”

Imagine only a few dozen people are blogging at your company, or twittering from your event.  Imagine you are one of them.

In what other scenario can you imagine having such disproportionate access to potential customers, employees, partners, or employers? Can you even imagine it?  Your voice could be one of only dozens in any given area.

Talk about leveling the playing field.

Among the “haves” there’s a new gap forming.  This isn’t even about early versus late adopters.  It’s the gap between producers and consumers, in a world where everyone can be both. And it’s a gap entirely under our own control.

I’d write a real summary of Day Four, but it was honestly more of the same, plus travel. Not a very exciting blog post, and doesn’t really fit my Casual Friday theme. So instead, I’ve put together my own list of things I learned at EMC World.

Everything I need to know, I learned in Las Vegas

• You should describe your technology in terms of words which make people laugh at how they sound (see: fungible). Continue reading →

The third official day of the conference started with an impressive keynote from Dr. Stephen Herrod, CTO of VMware.   Turnout was low — third day of a Vegas conference might not be the best time to speak to people at 8:30 AM.  But I was impressed with the consistency of the message.  From ESXi to VDI to VM Lab Manager, VMware is continuing to do exciting stuff.  I hope we continue to invest in using their technology at the office — we already make use of VMs for doing some development testing, but we’ve barely scratched the surface of what I saw on Tuesday.

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Another day down in Las Vegas!  Instead of writing a blow-by-blow of the day, I wanted to focus on an interesting event I was a part of.  I spend a lot of time writing about changes in company culture, but on Day Two I was able to participate in an example of the positive “old school” culture that let EMC get to where we are.

Last year, there was very little turnout for the “advanced” handson for StorageScope.  So this year, it was only offered once, and only 25 laptops were provided.  I decided to drop in on the session (being run by my manager Seth Silverman and my peer Anu Shivnath) to see how it went, and was greeted with chaos.  At least three times as many people arrived as were planned for, and more were lining up hoping to get in.  The room was packed beyond capacity and we had to turn people away.  Seth, however, offered everyone who was turned away a second runthrough in 75-90 minutes.

We pushed through the session (which I was very impressed with) and were wrapping up in 75 minutes as expected.  As people filtered out, a few filtered in — but only three people had returned for the promised second runthrough.

And they got it.

Three StorageScope customers had the undivided attention of 4 Control Center managers (QE and development), the director of our development organization, and an additional QE representative.  Six employees to three customers, for about an hour of intensive education and discussion.

We talk a lot inside the company about putting the customer first.  It’s not always easy in a development team to see how that happens.  But that, to me, defined EMC’s customer focus.  

I hope they enjoyed the session (and that they tell their friends 🙂 ).

It’s pre-breakfast on Tuesday and time to try and sum up yesterday’s chaos in a nice simple blog post. Not so easy.

I started the day attending a presentation given by a co-worker about managing VMware with EMC ControlCenter 6.0. The presentation was given by an employee and a customer together, which was pretty cool — theory and practice all in one. Unfortunately, it sounds like the customer stated a few things as facts which weren’t 100% correct, at least according to the people I was sitting with. They planned to follow up before the presentation is given again.

Next, I attended the keynote addresses by Joe Tucci and Howard Elias. They talked general EMC strategy and then more specifically RMSG strategy. As I twittered, I thought it was interesting that they talked services and software prior to talking hardware, even though hardware was where all the announcements were.

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Mr. Denny has some great pics of the concert I had to bail on yesterday evening.

Bill Petro talks about twitter, among other things.

I’ll link to others as I find posts.  Some of the others haven’t updated yet.

Remember to follow me or the #emcworld hashtag on twitter.

Time for me to seek out some coffee, I guess.  Body is still on Eastern time.

Greetings from insanely warm Las Vegas, Nevada.  Until I landed, it didn’t really sink in that our conference was in Las Vegas this year.  But as soon as you step into that airport, and see the folks hitting the slots for one last shot at the big win before their trip ends, you know you’re in Vegas.

I was on the ground by 10 AM local time, which means I’ve been up since 4:30 AM Eastern time.  I skipped lunch to help with “last minute lab fixes” which turned into a full day of fighting with a finicky demo lab network setup.  We called it a night at 8:30 local time, and darted off to the Goo Goo Dolls concert for some quality appetizers and some tasty west coast Fat Tire.  I’m not sure it makes up for skipping lunch, but it came close.

Unfortunately, too many hours on my feet left me with too little energy to really dive into Vegas nightlife tonight.  A 21-hour day will do that to you.  So back to the hotel room I go, to my overpriced internet access and comfortable bed.  Tomorrow, the conference really begins.  No more fine tuning, it’s time to dive in and give the people what they came for.