Fiasco of my first Posterous post via email

I thought I would be cool, all social media connected and witty at that.  I thought that Posterous was going to enable me to be all that.

I took a picture of something with my phone.  I composed a very clever caption for it and a couple of very witty sentence to go with it.  I put all that into an email on my BlackBerry and sent it off to Posterous right then and there.

What I didn’t remember was that my BlackBerry adds my corporate signature to every email.  Oops!  I mean, OOPS!.   Last thing I wanted in my post was a long disclaimer.

So the witty post was followed by a few minutes of panic and fumbling with my BlackBerry to delete the post.  Good thing I was able to.

Perhaps the slickness of Posterous, the ability to post and share everywhere and everything is not for me.  I think I’m gonna stick with my WordPress blog for now.

My fan is driving me crazy

This is slightly dissapointing…  The right fan in my brand spanking new MacBook Pro is making noise.  It’s very low but very noticeable.  More so late at night when all is quiet and not even a mouse is stirring.  So I’m off the Apple store tonight.  Luckily there’s one right across the street of where I’ll be this afternoon.  Hopefuly they can do something about it and quick.

And in the mean time, hurry up, Time Machine.  Back this puppy up.

PSC Collaboration Team is Growing

I want to welcome Andrew Barickman to the PSC’s Collaboration team.  Andrew has uncountable years of experience working and consulting in the IBM Lotus arena.  In one of his previous lives he even worked for Lotus and, as I learned today, before R5, his was the 3rd name to appear in the “Elvis is Alive” Easter Egg.  (Remember that one?)

Andrew is an outstanding professional: a consultant and a technologist.  I’m excited to have Andrew join the PSC team.

Watching Gangster No.1

There’s something about these gritty English and French gangster movies.  Oh yeah, and testing this whole posterous thing at the same time. 

I’ve been looking for something that would post easily to multiple places.  This [Posterous] seems to be able to do the magic.  Feel like I’ll be taking a lot more pictures…

 

Waiting… Anticipating…

And I’m waiting…  And anticipating…

Sadly my new MacBook Pro won’t get here until middle of next week, exactly when I’ll be in Boston.

PSC is writing new Lotus certification exams

Once again, a member of the PSC Collaboration team, Luis Guirigay, was selected to assist in preparing a couple of new certification exams:

• Websphere Portal 7 Administration
• Lotus Quickr 8.5 Administration

While Luis is already the most certified person I know, now he’s got a couple of new certifications to add to his belt.  Great job!

Panic moment

Sitting in a kick-off meeting for a new project with a new client.  First time I’m meeting these folks.  I glance over and see that one of the client’s team members is on my blog.  What followed was 30 seconds of intense soul and memory searching, trying to determine if I had posted anything in recent history that may be deemed not 100% kosher.  This was followed by a much longer period of regretting not having posted anything that may be related to this current project.  A little self-promotion could’ve been good.

So the lesson here, if you’re not sure, don’t say it.  And never miss an opportunity to promote yourself.

IamLUG 2010 impressions

I just realized that it has been 1 week since the 2nd annual IamLUG and I am yet to post my impressions.  The truth of the matter is that my impressions of IamLUG are very few.

There are times when planets, cosmic forces, one’s biorythms and other ethereal powers align just so to wreak utter havoc in one’s plans.  At those times your to-do list is long enough to instill fear into the hearts of the most productive people and to paralyze the rest of us into inaction.  That was my IamLUG.  The 2 days of this conference I spent on the phone, in conversations and in emails.  I’m sorry for the missed learning opportunities, I promise to try to be better next year.

So my impressions of IamLUG are mostly those of St.Louis.

I learned that some really big praying mantises can be found right in the downtown.

The St. Louis City Museum is really, really cool.

See that school bus hanging off the roof?  You can go inside through the back emergency gate, sit in the driver’s seat, open the front door and look out.  Not something recommended for the faint of heart or people with fear of heights.

And lastly, when Mississippi floods, it can get nasty.  This is a picture of the street under the Eads Bridge.

The same location I took a photo of last year

Sitting on these chains…

Here’s to a better IamLUG (for me) next year.

Real world example of DAOS-related savings

Here’s a real world situation where turning on DAOS resulted in time and disk savings for backups.

After we enabled DAOS on the primary mail server at my client, they calculated how it impacted their backup procedures.

Weekend full backups went from 137 GB to 98 GB. Time went from 289 minutes to 218 minutes. The savings here is mostly from eliminating duplicate attachments.

Average daily differential backups went from about 105 GB to 35 GB. Time went from 93 minutes to 45 minutes. The savings here is mostly from not backing up attachments that didn’t change.

We anticipate that the total backups for the week (1 full and 5 differentials) should go from 664 GB to 275 GB. This should save about 1.2 TB on the larger backup NAS.

The DAOS store is 35 GB in size and contains 60,763 files.

If this is a result for a 250-people organization, imagine what DAOS can do on a larger scale.

Getting ready for IamLUG

IamLUG is approaching fast and it is time to get your marketing materials in order.  I just finished updating PSC flyers with IamLUG logos.  Next step — get them printed.