The sum of what I know that might be useful to my sons. Maybe not.

The sum of what I know that is useful and appears to be true now that I’ve achieved 43 years of age. (in no particular order)

• Happiness, in general is not a good goal – it is a by-product of trying really hard to do something else.  Also, it doesn’t last.
• A good wife, at least based on my experience, is one that is not too terribly ambitious, and one that has not too much success early in life.  If either of the first two conditions is met, you will need to either hire help to fill in the gaps left by her pursuit of ambition or perform those duties yourself.  A nice girl that got B’s at state from a reasonably agreeable family is a good start, but no guarantee of success.
• What is required for a marriage – either party can do it, but these are the fundamentals.
  • Income in any amount.
  • Child care / Supervision of children’s intellectual, physical, and spiritual education
  • Acquisition and Preparation of food
  • Initiation and completion of sex
  • Upkeep of the interior of the dwelling
  • Upkeep of the exterior of the dwelling
  • Interface with other families outside of either birth family
  • Bills / Bookkeeping
  • Planning for family togetherness so that the children bond amongst themselves which will serve them well when the parents have died.
  • Parents are interested in silence, not justice (Bill Cosby)
  • The condition of being a man is to be essentially lonely.  The cure for this is to read books or even better (I think) write them.  Do not believe for one second that your wife is your best friend, a confidant, a soul mate, or any such thing.  This is not to say that you cannot love them deeply, because you can – but they will never ever understand the way that you think and if you’re normal, you will think many, many things that you must never, ever share with your wife.
  • Most of what you learn in school is in fact useless.  The things you learn while at school, outside of the classroom are far more important.  Therefore, go to a good school with high quality people so that you will learn the right stuff.
  • One should read “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” in high school, again in college, again after college, and after being married for 1 year, 6 years, 10 years and 15 years.
  • Define what success means to you early, or you will never be happy.  Once you define it, you can achieve it and if need be, redefine it after you achieve your first goal.
  • Don’t trust Wall Street or any investment vehicle.
  • Your home is not an investment.  It is a place to live.  Do not confuse it with an investment.
  • You make your best friends when you are young and single.  Take care of them.  You will need them later so that you can grow older with them.
  • I feel terrible even writing this, but people from two-parent households tend to have less complications in their lives and are easier to deal with.  If you come from a two-parent family, it is best to seek a wife from a two-parent household because they will have no baggage and a more realistic approach to marriage, life, and conflict.
  • There will always be someone at your job that you will perceive as doing better than you, getting ahead faster, deservedly or not.  It is best not to worry about this and to focus on something more important.  Just about anything is more important than this.
  • I believe that one area that the Europeans have over the Americans is no illusion of class mobility.  If one seeks to maintain their class status rather than improve it, ones life will be easier, better, and will not endure so much suffering as one who strives to join a club to which they were not invited.  This is just my belief.
  • If you want something, ask for it.
  • If you like a girl, ask her out.  The worst that can happen is she will say ‘no’ – and that doesn’t happen nearly as often as you would think.  Besides, you’ve got nothing to lose.  You already not enjoying her company, so you’ll just be where you started, plus the ‘no’ will help you move onto the next one.
  • Get through your first love quickly.  For whatever reason, it seems that the inevitable painful failure of first loves falls more on the male than the female.  Maybe they’re better at hiding it?
  • A girl is going to look like her mother – so if looks for the long haul are important to you, make sure the mother is at least 50% MILF.
  • It is important to have at least one good hobby that you can do in complete isolation, without talking and without the need for a helper.  You will have much more time alone when you are an adult than you can possibly imagine.
  • It is good to travel – experience new places and things – so that you can appreciate the beauty of your quotidian existence.  It is better to live abroad and learn to speak another language.  Learning another language doesn’t only teach you new words for things you already know, it teaches you another way of thinking entirely and enriches your understanding of the world, because you will have two points of view.
  • Admire, but don’t desire beautiful people.  They are wonderful to look at, but don’t project any further than that.
  • To go to jail for more than 24 hours is a failure and is to be avoided at all costs.  When trying to decide whether to do something you know is bad, ask these two questions – “If I get caught, will I go to jail for more than one day?” – the second question is “have I ever done this before”.  If the answers to both questions is yes, DON’T DO IT.  People rarely get caught the first time they break the law.
  • Only break one law at a time.  If you are speeding, don’t drink.  Trespassing is a crime – often the first law broken.
  • Read great books first.  There may not be enough time to read the less good ones.
  • A good religion is at least 10 generations old and has descendents from the first generation still practicing it.
  • It is never worth it to commit suicide.  You’re going to die anyway – why rush it?  Having good friends can help you avoid this.  If you think you want to commit suicide, write down all of the reasons you want to do it on a piece of paper.  Put the paper away for three days.  Don’t commit suicide during those three days.  After those three days have passed, open the paper up and make a decision – carry on with life as it is or choose a new life – you can plan a new life.  If neither of these things works – anti-depressants, coffee or a road trip to a hot sunny place may help.  If that doesn’t work, then maybe suicide is the answer – but I don’t think that it is.
  • Pornography, like alcohol, is unavoidable, but one should not spend more than 5 or 10 minutes a week with it.  It will lessen the quality of your real-life relationships, create unattainable desires, and generally cost you more in wasted thought and anxiety than it is worth, so don’t spend too much time with it.  Alcohol will make you fat and sick.  Both have their place, but must be managed.
  • Make sure you meet your obligations.  If a paper is due, turn it in on time.
  • Attend all classes.  You don’t have to pay attention, but nobody I know ever got below a ‘c’ in a class that they bothered turning up for.  You can graduate with ‘C’s – but of course I expect better from you.
  • Be prepared to take care of your parents.
  • We, as parents, know that you will think that we are idiots until you are fully an adult.  Then you will have a more reasoned opinion of us.  This is normal.  We will be looking forward to the day when we are all adults.  We’ve been looking forward to it since the time you were potty training.
  • Your brothers and sisters will be your best and most reliable friends – so don’t ruin those relationships unless it is absolutely unavoidable.  That situation is if a sibling is a verifiable psychopath – verified by someone outside of the family.  Simple bad behavior, borrowing your stuff, taking your money, marrying “wrong” is no excuse.  You have more in common with your siblings than anyone else on Earth – including your spouse. There are many times when this matters a lot.
  • Money isn’t everything.  In fact, it’s no more important than anything else – but you do have a responsibility to make sure that you can meet your obligations.  By the way, for the most part, you get to choose your obligations – so choose them wisely.
  • Do not allow your happiness to depend upon the happiness of another – especially your significant other.  There are so many other forces at work that affect your partners every action, mood, etc., that it is foolish to think that you can do anything to cause or change it.  What you can do, however, is to not cause the grief / anxiety – i.e.”don’t piss them off” knowingly.  You can’t cure another person’s unhappiness.  Don’t be fooled into thinking that something you can do (buy a big house, buying a new expensive gift) can make a difference.  It cannot.  The root of this foolishness comes from early in the love, when things you do, appear to make a difference.  They don’t.  You are learning nothing during the early stages of love because there is no pain.  You learn later in love, when it is at its depths.  Worry about yourself – go practice your hobby.
  • Children are wonderful.  They are wonderful 21 hours a day.  The 3 hours a day that they are not wonderful is separated into 10 minute increments spread throughout the day.  Remember, if there are 2 children, that’s 6 hours a day.
  • Children cost about 10% more money than you have.  Just be aware of this.  Doesn’t matter how much you have.

IT Marketer Tip 1: Determine the bias of your firm

How to tell if you work for a Marketing and Sales oriented firm.

You work for a Marketing and Sales focused firm if:

1. The firm is chaotic
2. Your CEO is moody, as opposed to always in a bad mood
3. The firm is opportunistic – i.e. when sales uncovers a prospect that needs something that the firm does not provide, there’s a real good chance that the sales team will “go for it”.
4. Products ship on time (although they might not actually work as designed for a little while)
5. You earn six figures and work in marketing.

 

How to tell if you work for an Engineering biased firm.

 

You work for an engineering biased firm if:

1. The firm is not chaotic.
2. You never are really quite sure whether the product is going to ship on time.
3. Your CEO has an engineering degree and has never been in sales.
4. The ratio of engineers to marketing / sales staff is 2:1

 

In small companies, the difference between being an Engineering focused company and a Sales and Marketing focused company are like the difference between being right-handed and being left-handed.  In a larger company, the differences occur at the business unit level.  It’s worth noting that the engineering focused company tends to be a better acquisition target than the sales and marketing one.

 

If you work for a Sales & Marketing Focused firm, enjoy the ride.  You will get to try new things and have big programs.  Unfortunately, your career may not last long due to your moody, possibly over-involved CEO.  If you work for an Engineering focused firm, start dating one of the Sr. Engineers, or get a low cost hobby – you’re being underpaid and underappreciated so you’ve got to do something with your time.

Top 10 Things IT Marketers Need to Know – Intro

I’ve been collecting thoughts, observations, and best practices for those of you who market IT Products to IT Buyers.  Feel free to quibble.  Enjoy

Pandora and TiVo

I wish that I could get the Pandora application on my TiVo.  I’m assuming that you know what TiVo is by now.  Pandora, www.pandora.com, allows end users to create and (more importantly) train streaming internet stations so that they only play the music that you like.  I’m listening to Pandora as I write this post.  Anyhow, TiVo allows you to rate shows with a “thumbs up, thumbs down” button on the remote.  Pandora allows you to rate songs with a “thumbs up, thumbs down” control on the user interface.  If I could stream music from pandora via my Tivo, I’d use it all day long.  I think this would be a bigger win for TiVo than it would be for Pandora.

Last thought on this – TiVo used to have a relationship with MoodLogic, which would allow for the TiVo to stream autogeneretated playlists on your .mp3 collection.   This was a pretty good application that overcame a lot of the limitations of the built in .mp3 player in the TiVo – namely, that the TiVo application craps out / becomes unusable with a list of more than about 2000 .mp3’s due to memory limitations and timeout errors.  But, alas, moodlogic is defunct and I can no longer add new songs to my library and have them categorized.

I had one more thought – TiVo should reposition themselves as an application delivery platform for home entertainment and REALLY ENCOURAGE 3rd parties and hobbyists to develop applications that can be run on the TiVo.  Imagine – Flick’r or Webshots on your TiVo – for example.

Maybe the TiVo folks are listening?  Evidence suggests not.

How the desktop virtualization market is going to shake out

The desktop virtualization marketplace is going to be fought by Microsoft, Citrix, and VMWare.  There are tons of startups in the space, so maybe one of them will break out, but here’s how I envision it’s going to shake out;

VMWare is going to have the best technology.  They will be the expensive, high quality player and will be embraced by organizations that have standardized on its infrastructure for server virtualization.  Now that they’ve got a new CEO from Microsoft, they will probably learn how to put sneaky, proprietary hooks into their server code so that their desktop software performs best when you standardize on a 100% VMWare solution.

Citrix, whose battle this is to loose although i don’t think they see it this way, will be the price competitor.  Same features as vmware and microsoft, but cheaper.  To a certain extent, I think that their position in this market place is going to be the same as Linux is to Windows today – a (big) niche player that will have its afficionados, fine technology, but an inability to really break out.

Microsoft, and its desktop virtualization suite, will win using the classic Microsoft method – distribution – the offering will be ubiquitous, come bundled into the operating system(s) and be the default choice – not unlike Internet Explorer is today.  Microsoft already is using some application virtualization in Vista for non-compliant applications.  I’ve said this before – distribution channel wins the war in the end.

I’ve been watching the startups that are out there, plus seeing what Symantec (SYMC), Parallels (aka SWSoft), Sun, Quest Software, are doing.  My sense is that these players, plus the big three in this space above will set about acquiring some of these startups to assemble portfolios of offerings.

This should be a fun one to watch!

What do you think is going to happen?  Post a comment.

TechEd for IT Pro’s – Orlando, FL

 

Bob Muglia (pronounced mug-lee-ah), as opposed to the Italian pronunciation that would sound a lot like the word for “eggplant”, was the speaker.   They organizers passed out rattles, showed commercials for Technet. 

 

An aside:  In the midst of this pomp I got an email from David Ferris’  news service (see www.ferris.com) which used to be an excellent source of information about messaging products and developments, but which has recently taken a turn towards covering the IT security market – which is bigger and undoubtedly more profitable.  One thing about messaging ISVs that make add-ons to Notes and Exchange is that they’re all pretty broke and small and hard to sell to…  This I know from experience.  Today’s Ferris post was all about some new products that CA had released.

 

Another thing I’ve noticed about TechEd this year, is that the participants look a lot thinner and healthier than they have in the past.  This could be relative, as perhaps I’ve put on a few pounds lately.

The keynote opened with some sort of native dance, a drumming call to action.  I was not “feeling it”  Perhaps I should have sourced and smoked a doobie before coming to the show.  I suddenly understand what the rattle is for.  

The drummers are pierced, blond, vaguely polynesian in approach.  It’s more like a hippie fair in Eugene, OR and the blond leader of the group reminds me a lot of my chiropractor.

There’s a big stiltwalker.  She is dressed up like a character from one of the live action disney shows (It’s about a band) that my oldest son used to watch.  Then again, we are near the “House of Mouse”, so it might actually be that character.

OK, enough already.  All in all it was not a bad way to wake up.

I may have been hallucinating, but on the big screen that was showing head shots of “heroes”, I’m almost positive that I saw Barack Obama’s face go by on the big monitors while they removed the props from the dance / drum ritual and readied for the keynote.  They did some cool things on that video – suffice it to say that there are some people at MSFT that really know how to work Powerpoint.

First Theme – The theme of Bob Muglia’s presentation was “IT Pro Heroes” – given that this entire audience was made up of IT Pro’s, it was probably a safe route to call them all heroes.  Major points were:

Microsoft is an enabler (of great things)

IT Pro’s are “unsung heroes”

They showed a video featuring Hunter Ely, a security analyst at LSU.  A story was told (against a backdrop of acoustic guitar) about Katrina and how LSU used Groove and SharePoint to track storm victims and their families with relationship to the hospital.  A picture of Hunter’s wife and baby were featured.  Oddly, they were all barefoot in the picture.  Did Annie Liebovitz take the photo?

Hunter came onstage to much applause.  He had much less hair than he had in the photograph they had on screen.  Hunter, grow it back.   You are not in the NBA.

2^nd theme – Dynamic IT.

Bob Muglia then talked about how Microsoft, some 5 years ago, introduced the concept of Dynamic IT.  technology can change your business lifecycle.  Again, I saw some of the nicest Powerpoint slides I’ve ever seen.  Kudos to the marketing services team at MSFT.

He went on to discuss that Dynamic IT is a 10 year vision and we’re half way through it.  There are 5 more years to go.  Muglia pointed out that Microsoft has Infrastructure Optimization models that are available online where you can benchmark your infrastructure.  The major point being that moving away from IT being a cost center, to a Dynamic IT that is a part of your business strategy is something that you can buy now.

Some of the subpoints were

Identity Management / Managing Identities.  Security and credentials are fundamental and adopting a model of federation is a good thing.  Somehow, and I’m not sure how, this was going to allow users to do more self service identity management.

Identity LifeCycle Management with Active Directory and Windows Server 2008 was discussed.  Bob Muglia announced that Identity LifeCycle Manager “2” was in beta 3 and available for download.  

Fred Delombaerde – program manager gave a demonstration of the new UI for security provisioning.  I would like to use that UI to manage SharePoint permissions within our organization today.  ILM manager looks like a good thing and the integration with distribution lists and self-serve password reset would be great things to have.

Sidebar:  It occurs to me that Bob Muglia sounds a lot like a smarter version of George Bush.

3^rd Theme – Interoperability

Bob Muglia talked about how open Microsoft was becoming.  An example was given that 50,000 pages of documentation about standards had been produced by the developers at Microsoft.  That’s a big number, but a Public Enemy song “Don’t believe the Hype” kept echoing through my head.  The presentation got a little vague on some of the points here, but you can’t blame him for trying.  I’ve always thought that Microsoft’s idea of standards was to standardize on Microsoft.  One concrete example was that SCOM (Systems Center Operations Manager) now works with Linux.

 

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