Training trip coming up

I'll be going to California soon, for some training. I can't say that it won't be nice to get away from the cold weather that we have been having lately, but something always seems to happen back home while I'm gone. (and it usually costs me money). Here's an example: A little over two years ago I was at Solaris 10 training in San Jose and I got a call from home, something was wrong with the boiler of our hydronic heating system.















Specifically, it was the a broken spring on the interface between the motor and the pump that circulates the heated water. I knew what was wrong from the description, but I'm ~2000 miles away. So my wife has to call a repair service and what would have been an hour of my time and a $10 part turns into a ~$600.oo repair bill.

I'm almost over my head cold, so I've been back on my bike trainer. While I'm gone I'm going to take my bike to a local shop (http://transitioncycle.com) and have it cleaned up and checked out for the upcoming season.

Last thing, I've been working on updating my Instructables project related to the steadicam mount and I'm working on a new modification at the same time. One of the people who commented on the project suggested that I use RC (Radio Controlled) car parts (shocks) to dampen the vibration. I'm looking into that for the update to the project, so that and the training trip is going to delay the posting of the project by a couple of weeks at least.

Data Center Deployment

I got the chance to present our proposal (Data Center deployment) to a very large customer this passed week. Things went smoothly and hopefully we'll be hearing back from them with questions and, best case, a request for quote to do a proof of concept for the server deployment strategy. One of my favorite slides from the presentation was this one with a comparison of old to new rack space requirements.

Each rectangle represents 38 Rack units (red is the existing
environment and purple is the proposed)

Sorry I can't a little more specific, but I have to be a little careful about what I post, that's why a lot of it them are about life in general, hobbies or biking.

The Power of Ice

I had a meeting with hypothetical customer recently and to protect their anonymity lets say that this hypothetical customer sells ice. Now if this were the 1800s, you would find that everyone wants ice, needs ice, uses lots of ice every day and tries to conserve their ice supply. This customer is interested in buying some systems that would help them save a lot of ice. But since this customer sells ice they are not as concerned about saving ice, even though they promote saving ice on their website.

It's just one of those things that make you shake your head at the end of the day. What do you think, should they be more concerned about their own ice usage?

T2000 finally arrives...

Yes the long awaited news...WooHoo!! The SunFire T2000, which I won as part of a SUN Partner Webinar promo back at the end of March '06, has finally arrived. The configuration isn't bad either, (I couldn't find out what it was going to be till it arrived) a UltraSPARC T1 1.0Ghz 8-core CPU, with 16GB of memory and 2 - 73Gb SAS drives. Now if I can just keep it for a little while, before it has to go to a customer site, I'd like to play around with it a little bit.

Thursday Ride: Maybe not quite all the way to Dousman tonight, but if we do, it's a good 30-32 mile ride (so we'll have to step-up the pace a bit) on The Glaicial Drumlin Trail (one of the "Rails to Trails" - trails). The 15 mile section between Waukesha, WI and Dousman, WI is paved, so it's great for road bikes and roller blading.

Marketing Plug

To borrow from MaryMaryQuiteContrary this part of the posting is; "Explicitly and without apology a marketing vehicle." (I have to toot Laurus' horn here once in a while)

Laurus Technologies’ Kerrigan Hits the Ground Running with Business Applications Team

No Weekend riding for me, I had a family reunion to attend, in west central Illinios.

This week should be back to normal and weather permitting--back to riding.

T2000 countdown: 151 days, still no word on the tracking number.

Touring Wisconsin for my job

Two days off usually amounts to three days worth of catching up on the day that you get back, and this time it was no different. I stopped in at the office early to make some printouts of my presentations, I had two customer visits planned for today. What was my first clue as to how the rest of the day was going to go? The printer was REALLY low on Black toner (2% left) and I couldn't find a replacement. So, I pressed on and completed what I needed to do, but it left the printer completely out of toner. So, I grabbed my printouts and hit the road, I have a ~140 mile drive ahead of me to get to the first customer meeting. On the way to the meeting I get a call, my participation isn't going to be needed, but I can drop of the printouts and if the topic comes up the sales rep. will cover it. Ok, no big deal, it gave me a chance to find a WiFi HotSpot, check email and grab a bite to eat, which wasn't going to happen in the original plan. So, not all bad, but it rained for most of the drive. The second customer meeting went off without a hitch, just the usual tweaks and changes to the final configs that need to be quoted and oh by the way can we get those back to them by tomorrow morning? Oh sure, not a problem. It actually wasn't, I found a nearby WiFi HotSpot and got the wheels rolling on the changes before heading for home. So about 290 miles later, I've checked the config's and hopefully we'll have the quotes back sometime tomorrow morning.

Thursday Ride: cancelled due to rain and Severe T-Storm warnings.

SunFire T2000 countdown: 147 days, still no T2000, but my SUN contact says that it was supposed to have shipped two weeks ago. He's trying to get the tracking number to see what happened.

Back to school trip

Summer vacation is over for my daughter, it's back to school for her. We have a 5 hour drive ahead of us this morning (from Waukesha, WI to the Twin Cities, MN). She's a student at UMN and we're moving her into an apartment over the next couple of days.

SunFire T2000 countdown: 144 days (still no T2000)

Tuesday Ride: Clunker Junker for charity and Cookout. I'll miss this event, we'll be traveling, as I mentioned above.

I'm working on a recommendation for a HW system upgrade on an SAP system, to give a customer some headroom over the next couple of years, for various software changes and growth over that period of time.

Weekend Club Ride

The weekend club ride is the "To Hell-enville and back (again)", with 70 and 80 mile options. Should be fun and the weather is supposed to be great.


I just completed some data analysis that was very interesting from the standpoint of perception verses reality. The customer wants to do an upgrade to solve a business issue (they think that they are seeing peaks of 80% system utilization) and they have some application upgrades planned over the course of the next year or two. So, we setup a cron job to gather baseline data over the course of several days. Here's one of the graphs from that data.


Hmm, looks like they are actually seeing peaks of 99% and periods of sustained utilization in the 80-90% range. There are other considerations as well, but I just thought it was interesting. Never a dull moment. Now I need to put together a presentation and make some recommendations.

Where I landed after the RIF 6/05

It's been just over a year since my departure from SUN. While at SUN I worked in Sun Services; first as an SSE, then an RSSE and finally an ASSE. I was hired by a great reseller that focuses on SUN hardware and solutions; Laurus Technologies. I work in the pre-sales side of things now (so no more pager).

I finished up my part of the RFP that I was working on and it has been submitted. I still work with a lot of the customers that I had previously dealt with while at SUN.

Thursday Bike ride: The weather was great, and about 10 people showed up. We took the Glacial Drumlin trail from Waukesha to Dousman and back, (the paved segment of the trail - about a 28 mile round trip) with our usual rest stop at the Bike Doctor in Dousman.

One last thing, a Shout Out to Leo Laporte, Thanks for TWIT. I miss the old TechTV; Screen Savers and Call for Help shows, but the podcasts at TWIT have filled that gap. The "Thank You" is for turning me on to Instructables, it was mentioned in one of his podcasts and since then I've posted four different projects, one of which got an Outstanding project of the month, for which I received a free tee shirt and a Nikon digital camera.