Current Events

For some reason this evening, Chennai has put a child in charge of the electrical grid. Power on; power off. Lets get everyone really frustrated with the power delivery. Bah.

For at least 7 times here, they have turned it on, then off, then on again. Here’s a clue guys. People want the power on. I’m frustrated and heading toward Zara pretty soon here for dinner. At least if the power goes off there, I have beer too.

End of clue.

Well, today is my last full day here in Singapore. Tomorrow I fly back to Chennai for about a week and a few days. Today I ventured out to Sim Lim Square and the Bugis Junction. Both are pretty cool but there is this set of smaller shops all around Bencoolen Street which are more cool. There really is no electronic, computer, or other stuff I need but the internal geek in me drives me to Sim Lim each time I come here.

I’ve been thinking a lot of going home of late. I’ve been gone almost 6 months this year in travel mode. Living out of hotels, eating each meal out sounds romantic when you travel for more limited stays. I like the 2 week stays that I’ve done before. Traveling for months at a time takes things to another level. It’ll be good to do that last long flight in 10 days or so. I leave on 3 December for Singapore again and then fly out on 4 December for a few hour layover in Hong Kong and then that long trip back to SFO.

This trip has been good for me at a few levels; but I’m getting anxious to let it end gracefully. I think I need to get home. Thanks to the company for giving me what they do. I’m so grateful to everyone who has helped me through some rough personal times, ensured I had what I needed, and was supportive. I’ll post some thoughts later on all the great guys in Chennai I’ve had the privilege of working with.

I’m really hoping though that my old bud Bill S hears some good news beginning of next week. My thoughts are with ya Pine Man.

Tonite, the guys took me out for some great food here. We had Singaporean “finger food” spiked with goodly amounts of large bottles of Tiger Ale. Twas fun! Thanks to Celestix Singapore for being so nice to me! Today in the office here in Singapore was a great day. Wari and I went to this Korean BBQ place for lunch where you cook your own food. We had triple portions of Beef, Chicken, seafood, soup. Really good! Thanks Wari!!

This evening, John and David C. took me to a typical Singaporean evening place where everyone sits outside, drinks beer, eats various kinds of food served from small food stalls. Lots of fun and great conversation. It was very interesting eating that kind of finger food and I had a great time. Thanks guys.

Tomorrow is a free day. No office, work, or other stuff. May go see Yong Ping for beers tomorrow night. Mostly gonna explore around the hotel area. Got a few things I need to buy. Its been a great R&R stay here in Singapore. Great party town and interesting food.

After tomorrow, its back to Chennai for me for a week or so and then I journey forth back home on the 3rd of December. Long flight and I get to claim back those hours. Between then, I go to Goa for a weekend of doing absolutely nothing.

First night. No sleep last night. I’m living off coffee, curry, and beer. I’m going to bed soon and get a night’s sleep. Tomorrow, I am in the Singapore office which is really enjoyable! Its a great office to work in and being in a company with discrete offices in different international locales makes it all more interesting.

Saturday is my day. Its my day off with no real thing to do and all day to do it. I am going to explore the area around the largest Mosque in Singapore. Singapore is truly beautiful and I love this place. I am on the 17th floor of a very nice hotel. My boss got me a really nice place this R&R break. All my food and beer is paid for so I am living it up .

Sunday I fly back to Chennai.  I am not there that long when I get back.

Well, I installed Windows 7 x32 onto my ubuntu karmic desktop so I could create a personal PST file and backup a bunch of email and then hopefully convert it to mbox format so I can actually use it with something. I then started using Outlook 2007 for company email. It had been awhile. I forgot how much outlook so sucks even in corporate exchange mode. it so reminds me of iTunes and its foibles and dark parts and crashes and rebirths and stuff. But now I am using it to do company email because no matter how much it sucks, I can be somewhat productive with it. Gadzooks! I won’t start another tirade why a company of 50 people need a exchange 2007 server. Its sublime. If it were me, I’d move the entire operation to google apps business version and have it all the same. Calendars, contacts, etc. I think folks enjoy the iPhone, Palm, Android activesync thing with exchange and I have to admit the way the combined calendar shows on my HTC Magic is pretty cool. I get my google calendars and outlook calendar view in one interface with different colors for the various calendars. Thanks for that HTC! You make me instantly productive.

In reverse order, tonite or first thing tomorrow morning at 115am I fly to Singapore for a weekend off and some days to work in that office. I like going to Singapore and staying in a nice hotel, eating good food, drinking a few too many beers; and having someone else pay for it . Thanks Celestix Networks! You guys rule for me. Bestest workplace I ever had. I should say that the work of late has been plenty challenging, fun, motivating. I’ve spent a lot of years managing development engineering at a PS level, at a company level, and a few others. When I did enterprise PS, we did deals that I managed that brought in 300k US at a time doing enterprise Linux solutions. I had teams of 3 to 5 developers across countries working for me. Very rewarding work. Developers are rather crazy though and they like weird things and eat strangely and hardly ever sleep and say unusual sentences. But overall, I like ‘em. I ain’t one though. But I grok their lives.

So, the time is winding down here in Chennai. When I get back from wondrous and beautiful and beery Singapore I will have a little over a week. Next weekend I  travel to Goa for Thanksgiving. I plan on doing absolutely nothing there as well besides sitting on the beach. Then I’m back for two days and leave. I get back to Fremont, CA on 4 December before I depart from Hong Kong. I love the International Dateline in reverse! Gimme back that time you stole sucka.

That’s the plan Stan. Don’t get off the bus Russ. Don’t tell me again, Len.

I’m not a rabid exchange voyeur. In fact, I think its fair to call myself the person seeking for other solutions that would always be simpler, easier, faster. Most of all, more able to recover from failure. Why does exchange 2007 seem so fragile? I always wonder. Is it the database that it keeps the mail in? Is it because it tries to do way too much and then it does none of it very well? Its kinda like iTunes pretty much. But exchange has been around. Suddenly I know. Its not really exchange; its the client. Its Outlook that sucks. Exchange is probably decent but its hampered by the stupid and useless client we must use. Its either outlook or OWA it seems like. There is nothing else unless you do IMAP. There is no “best of rest of” with exchange and outlook. You either take the enchilada or you pass and take the chips and salsa.

In other lifetimes, I managed operations and data center for a rather large start-up. We had a lot of people but we seemed okay just doing IMAP using a regular old IMAP server. We had a failure there and it took us about 3 hours to install the server on debian, get postfix working, rsync over the mailstore, replace it and re-hostname it with new SSL certificates in place. What is the deal here? But at work on exchange 2007, it took us days. Days of no email. Days of lost productivity. I work sometimes on the weekend and I lost those days as well. No way to send stuff I had worked on. No grand collaboration tool. Why? Because of a stupid f**king database. So I wonder: Why store mail in a database? Databases get corrupt. Well, duh.

Its a case of David and Goliath to me. You pick the right tool to handle the Goliath you have. At Visa, Inc; we had scores of very savvy exchange administrators who kept our farm of exchange servers working. Not happy, content, serving up all those users with happy face emoticons; just working. But where I am now; we are 50. Why in the world do people feel that 50 people need exchange? How in the hell much collaboration are we gonna do? I don’t think we really use most of the calendar stuff like we did at Visa. Fifty people. At the Battle of Thermopalyae there were 300 with the right mix of weapons, guts, and bravery. We are 50 with the the weapons to kill a towering Goliath; but we ain’t got that. Our major challenge is doing simple email. Yet we have exchange. What the heck?

So, I’m done venting and ruminating and wondering. As someone once told me in IT management at the GAP, “its the way it is because its that way”. I remember leaving there and wandering around my charge of hundreds of OS/2 desktop that hummed along with little or no maintenance. None until we installed NT4 Workstation. Then the games would begin. Not enough memory, CPU, disk. Nothing was enough for that OS. Move the mouse by Network Neighborhood and reboot.

If the “powers that be” read this crummy excuse for a feeble blog; relent guys. Its not worth it. Its not worth 5 people spending days on a ruined database. It will just ruin again and again again… And on and on and on. Let us look for simplicity and the right tool to kill the Goliath we have. As Rich said, IMAP is so last century. But sometimes we should take the simplicity when it works and not just move toward the complex when it doesn’t.

Friends; don’t let friends deploy Exchange unless you know the Goliath you are aiming for.

Used to be Michelob. Now I walk over and have a Kingfisher Ale and party down a bit. But as I look out the window at the New Woodlands Hotel. Today was made for rain. It looked rather cloudy most of the afternoon and when I walked over for dinner at the Krishna Restaurant; it was just a waiting game. If this stuff clears up, I will end hibernation and walk over to the Marina Beach and then do lunch at the KFC at the Citi Centre Mall. I want some pictures of the beach areas past the road that leads through Mylapore.

Its been another in the series of relaxing weekends here in Chennai. No big decisions or activities this weekend. It is my last weekend in Chennai though so I pretty much decided to kick back a bit.

I’m heading to Singapore in a few days and will be working out of our offices there Thursday and Friday. I like Singapore a lot. Then the following weekend; my last one here in Chennai; I go to Goa and stay at the Raj there which is right next to an old Portuguese rampart of a fort. My plan for Goa is to do absolutely nothing for two days besides sit on a beach and drink a beer now and again. Perhaps sit in a chair and let them photograph me drinking a corona…

In a bit of other news, this is my last long-term trip to Chennai. When I leave this time, I will not be back until March of 2010 or so. Then those trips will be shorter like on the order of a week here or so. My daughter will also be coming along with me on one of the trips. That should be great fun! It will definitely be nice to have some company.

Seems that my desktops running Ubuntu have gotten messed up of late so I need to get home and install Karmic on them. I already have the AMD64 iso downloaded and ready to go! Got to do my home laptop with it too.

Its raining really good now. Just heard thunder boomers. Usually it rains evening time here and then may clear up a bit during the days. We’ll see if I can do my beach walk and photo thing tomorrow.

So where do all these social and networking tools meet up? I’m going to start a brand new venture funded startup ladies and gentlemen. You see, I am a antrapanoor. Last year I could not even spell it wrong; but now I can even say it. I am going to start a brand new social networking site called TweFBin. It will combine all the worst elements of the major 3 sites including unlimited TweFBin’s which will be unlimited mini blog posts that take up all your screen in a browser. It will also allow you link to your friends but it will mix up all the friend’s phone numbers and email addresses. Finally, it will install a mostly unwanted firefox extension that does absolutely nothing worthwhile but remind you how long it is until 2012. When 2012 gets here, it will launch a firefox bomb that will delete the iexplore.exe executable if you are on Windows.

Now the good news. I have a found a VC to give me 100m US for this new venture and I am going to hire the best of breed CFO and CIO and CXO and CMO and CTO. In other words; I am gonna get all the CF**kingO’s I can find. I’ll pay them all more than what the VC gives me and then I’ll seek a second round.

Yeah doods; I know how to make a VC funded company go broke in record time. I been with more than my share that have done that. I figure I need to put all that great experience to work getting severed every few years; taking my lame severance package, spending it down and then starting the whole wierd and freaky thing over again.

Seriously, I am so glad to be where i am now. Neil; this PBR is for you dude! You asked on FB and I am delivering it on my new VC funded disaster.

There ya go Boss man. Sorry I was a bit late getting that virtual PBR to ya