This has been a tough week for my family and I as we learned that our dear friend and Pastor, Dr. Forrest E. Pollock (44) and his oldest son, Preston (13), were taken home to be with the Lord after the small plane that Forrest was piloting went down early Monday morning in the mountains Southwest of Ashville, NC. Just the day before I had a nice conversation with my friend, and I never thought that it would be the last time that I saw him on this earth. For some, this would be a time of saying good bye. For the believer in Jesus, this is a time to say “I’ll see you again…”
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So I was feel nostalgic today, so while I was over in Orlando, I drove by what used to be the Naval Training Center for the US Navy in Orlando. It has since been turned into a park and residential area, and the city has done a really nice job of making it a beautiful area. The area we lovingly referred to as “The Grinder” is still intact, and is now called “Blue Jacket Park” and has been converted from a massive slab of cement and review field to a beautiful park where you can do all sorts of things. Continue reading this post…

I started off my seemingly anti-Microsoft rant a few weeks back when Steve Ballmer was threatening Yahoo! with a hostile takeover.  My premise was not that I was anti-Microsoft, but rather, anti-hostile takeover.  But since that time Microsoft walked away from the deal after making generous offers, and now Yahoo! stock is in the tank.  This morning as I write this, YHOO (their ticker symbol) is sitting poorly at $24.00 and change.  That is down significantly from where it was on Friday. Continue reading this post…

A few weeks ago I wrote a two-part article about managed hosting for your data center if you are a small or medium sized business. The idea, you tell them want you want to do, and they give you a quote…then you put your applications on their servers. They sell you power and bandwidth and manage it all for you, and *poof* your IT department is outsourced. However, after a rash of outages at Rackspace, people are re-evaluating their managed hosting options, and many are packing up and leaving Rackspace for other sites, or simply moving into their own data centers. Continue reading this post…

Today we’re going to talk about what you look for in a facility that you’ll be hosting your data center in. You would think that a lot of these I am going to mention are “no brainers” but they do get over-looked a lot, and when you are talking about the crown jewels, you can’t afford to have things like these ignored. There is just too much at risk, especially in today’s game where we have so many regulations, and compliance issues that we need to be up and protected 24×7. Yesterday I was in a meeting with a customer here in Tampa. They are a major player in their particular line of business here in the US. They had a BIG problem…the cage they had at their data center (which is hosted in a Qwest facility) is to small for their growth requirements and there is no more space available, so this is where I will begin my rules for hosted data centers. Continue reading this post…

I am sitting here in Jacksonville, FL getting ready to walk into a data center that is directly underneath the flight path for several airports (including military airfields.) Now that in and of itself isn’t such a problem as it is a fact of life here in Jacksonville. Between the airports and the Navy base that is not far from here, most data centers are under an airplane (low flying) at some point. It is what it is, and you can’t do much about it unless, of course, you decide not to put your data center here in the first place. Continue reading this post…

It was only a year or so ago that I was in Las Vegas enjoying a beautiful evening at the Symantec America’s Sales Conference at the Venetian. I can remember the week like it was yesterday, and despite all the alcohol (not really that much) and lobster & other good eats (ok…there was a lot of that) I survived. But it wasn’t long after that when we started to hear rumors of staff cuts, and territory restructuring. Now, let me say that while some of this article may appear to be my slamming Symantec, I am not. I enjoyed my time there and leaving was a hard thing to do, ESPECIALLY when you had a manager like I had who was one of the best I have ever worked for. But when you see something that doesn’t make sense you have to stop and say something. Continue reading this post…

An article appeared yesterday in Valleywag.com regarding dirty pool at Google, and their laying off the DoubleClick staff a week after asking all of them to sign a non-compete agreement. How screwed up is that?

Now we all know that there is no company that manufactures things that doesn’t try to force non-compete agreements down our throats (I myself have signed three of them) but if you live in some states, it isn’t enforceable. To my line of thinking, this needless, and useless too is nothing more than a way to get people to think they are being forced to find work doing something else. Continue reading this post…

It came, and it went. It was, shall I saw, very underwhelming. Actually, as technology shows go, I thought it was disappointing. While there were some good sessions and a couple of good booths to visit, it was mostly sessions, and those that I went to were really not all that exciting. One of them about killed me it was so boring.

However, there were some highlights to point out. First of all, XioTech introduced a new “self-healing” disk pack. It’s called the ISE, and you should check it out…fairly interesting piece of hardware. Continue reading this post…

So I’m in the middle of a “business ethics” course for my MBA, and each week we write a paper about something relating to ethics. Then I read the letter from Steve Ballmer threatening to wage a proxy fight for YAHOO if they don’t sell out to Microsoft. With all due respect to Mr. Ballmer, screw you. It isn’t that I don’t like you, or that I am against Microsoft. Yes, I use a MacBook Pro and prefer Linux and Solaris to Windows…but I’m not a Microsoft basher. I just prefer the alternatives. I say “screw you” because I am really, REALLY against hostile takeovers. Continue reading this post…