Holiday Spirit????

This lovely Black Friday morning I awoke to a quiet house, the boys slept in a little or at least were pretty quiet when they got up.  However, my peace was disturbed when I read the front page of the paper, The Billings Gazette and looked at the two main articles adjacent to each other on the front page.  The first one titled Shoppers, Stores Just Can't Wait For Black Friday was about the excitement of the official start of the holiday shopping season.  The second one titled This Means Everything To Me was about the Thanksgiving meal prepared by the Food Bank for people in need.

The reason that I was disturbed was the sharp contrast of these two images.  On the one hand, we had a story about greedy shoppers camping out in front of a Best Buy store at 6PM waiting for a midnight opening so they could all rush in and buy 42" TV's for $200 along with a photo of a lady with her shopping cart overflowing with toys from the Toys R Us sale that started at 9PM.  On the other hand, we have a story about the Food Bank providing Thanksgiving meals for needy folks and there is a person named Frank Tall Bull quoted as saying "I'm homeless and starving.  This means everything to me.  I'm just happy and grateful I'm still alive."

What is wrong with this country when in the same day and in the same newspaper on the same page these two stories could exist?  I'm by no means exempt from materialism and "want" but at the same time as I watch my boys grow their collection of toys, I'm becoming more appreciative of a more minimalist lifestyle.  I feel compelled to do something but I am at a loss as to what action I can specifically take.

Recently I've been to several of my son's friends' houses and seen the sheer volume of toys those boys have.  While I feel that my sons have a lot of stuff, their levels of stuff appear to pale in comparison to those other kids.  And those kids aren't living in what would typically be considered "rich" households.  I'm not sure what causes those kids to have so much stuff but nonetheless, they do.  With Christmas approaching as well as my older son's birthday, I'm again faced with the issue of limiting how much stuff the boys get from both us and others as gifts.  They just don't need that many more gifts and with my job situation, it is a great opportunity to restrict the amount of things coming into the house.

We are going to be moving before too much longer and I will be taking that opportunity to reduce the amount of "stuff" I have as well.  My shop if full of tools, toys, parts and a multitude of items that seemed useful, important or needed at one point in time.  I'm going to be selling, giving away or just plain eliminating as much as I can.  The same goes for the contents of the house.  Having stuff just for the sake of having it isn't necessary.  I'll be doing my best to unload items cheaply or freely in the coming month.

Going forward, I need to help those around me and in my community reach balance without being annoying or somehow pushing values onto others.  The two articles that I referenced above make it so clear that as a society, out way of thinking is so far out of whack that it shouldn't be hard to nudge folks into a more balanced approach to needs and wants.

Underemployment

This week marked the first week in many, many years that I've been in an underemployed or unemployed state.  Fortunately it wasn't a surprise, it had been brewing for sometime and I was working diligently ahead of time to mitigate the impact this would have.  However, losing your job when you are the sole income source for a family is still a challenge.

I have a simple strategy, reduce spending as much as possible and network, network, network to locate a new position.  I see this as a great opportunity for me both professionally and personally. We are going to have an opportunity to move to a new city and meet new people, I'm going to be able to work in a new career with a new company.  That of course, is glossing over many of the difficulties associated with this but on the whole, I expect it to be a positive experience.


So far, one of the most eye opening and surprising things I've discovered is how non-responsive recruiters are to potential candidates.  I know they are generally snowed under with applicants, candidates and other stress of the recruitment process but communications are the key to the process working.  On the other side, it is a hard lesson for a candidate to learn but recruiters don't work for candidates, they work for companies and if a candidate can't fill a current need, the recruiter can't afford to spend much (if any) time with the candidate.  In many ways, the process is broken.


I remember years ago when the job search process was a task intensive operation of reading local newspapers, calling job services, and contacting employment agencies.  It was difficult to learn about openings and was difficult for employers to get a broad selection of candidates for roles.  Contrast that with today's environment where virtually every job is published world wide and essentially unlimited numbers of qualified (and unqualified) candidates are able to apply to positions.  It is as truly a daunting task for companies and recruiters to sift through all of the noise to find the star candidates as it is for candidates to get into the hands of the selection managers.


Further complicating things is with all of the noise in the process, there has been an evolution in hiring to screen candidates with long lists of perfect selection criteria.  Seemingly gone are the days in which a candidate was judged by his or her potential to be the next superstar the company needs and has been replaced by an arduous process of ensuring that every potential wish list of qualification has been already covered by the candidate's job history.  Hiring for aptitude and attitude seem to have gone by the wayside as old fashioned and out of favor.


Its time for a new approach to recruitment and job searches.  Differentiation in resume appears to be one of the few tools available to candidates to attempt to stand out in the candidate pile.  I've worked with a pioneer in the area of contrarian thinking to the job search process.  Doug Whatley has developed the PIP (Personal Intellectual Property) process of developing a resume.  While the process might have some people that don't like the format, looking at a PIP CV is an eye opener for sure.  I've had a number of recruiters tell me that they didn't know where I belonged, they just knew that I belonged at their company.  All of those comments are from the enlightened nature of the CV itself.


So, I'll continue my networking and searching, working my way through the system of recruitment and hiring.  Wish me luck (and don't forget to help me network).

The Cloud Revolution

As I continue to look for new and exciting technologies to apply in my role as Director of IT, two items continue to surface. Both Cloud Computing and Virtualization are the place to be these days. Interestingly enough, they are both extensions of the concept of clustered computing from the 90's. When I was at Red Hat, we were developing some of the first clustering tools for Linux aimed at load sharing and high availability. Those same concepts and tools have evolved into what has become the infrastructure for clouds and virtulatization.

Virtualization is taking those concepts internal and creating virtual machines within a single computer to allow better resource utilization as well as to gain more robust performance from technology investments. Of course there are many other purposes for virtualization. Cloud computing builds on that concept in that it groups N machines together for a common purpose. Those machines might also contain any number of virtualized machines as well. Cloud differs from virtualization in that a "cloud" is created to provide a service without regard for the logistics of the hardware. This includes both public clouds and private clouds, the main difference being in how the environment is hosted.

So anyway, back to my investigation of practicality. The price points for these technologies range from next to zero for some open source based solutions all the way to the moon for complete managed and hosted environments. Some applications and environments lend themselves very nicely to public clouds given that the bandwidth requirements of the data passed between the cloud and the clients is relatively low. As the interaction between the cloud and the clients increases, the bandwidth requirements go up also. Services such as cloud based storage and virtual desktop environments substantially increase the need for bandwidth making self-hosted private clouds more appealing.

As with all technologies, there is always a trade off between features, costs and staff resources necessary to implement and manage the solution. What I think is truly amazing is that the breadth of options and choices available makes it so that there is an optimized solution for almost every environment and budget. Where the rub comes in is with marketing and with competition between all of these choices, it becomes increasingly difficult to sort through the noise to get to the solution that actually would work for a particular need and budget. For the smaller IT shops, this is a particularly challenging dilemma given they don't have the staff resources to become expert in enough of the options to determine the best fit for their operation nor are they likely big enough to hire an independent consulting firm to guide them. Partnering with a vendor is the likely path, however that path eliminates virtually all choice beyond what that vendor sells and offers.

The good thing is that like almost every other cutting edge technology, a few more years into its life cycle and these challenges will have been worked out and there will be well documented paths to follow, no matter what your budget or scope. This is the evolutionary part of technology that I love so much, first it is technology for the sake of doing what hasn't been done but then it becomes the business side of deploying it to increase the profitability of the firm. Participating right there in the middle is the sweet spot.