Personal

My pal, Greg Schulz, just pointed out that TechTarget has posted the presentations from Storage Decisions New York 2008. If you were there, you might have tried to figure out how to download the presentations at the kiosk/table in the lobby. I couldn’t figure it out, myself, though! So you might want to head over to TechTarget’s page to download them yourself. And if you weren’t there, you might want to check them out anyway, or head over to San Francisco in November, since many of the sessions will be repeated at that show.

You can find my presentations here:

• Deep Dive into Email Archiving Products: 11 Essential Attributes of Email Archiving Systems
• Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Virtualization — In One Hour

"Marche sur le feu" by Josélito Tirados

Sitting in a jumbo jet five miles above the Sierra Nevada, I got to thinking. Now that I work at home and fly to work rather than drive to an office every day, has my carbon footprint increased or decreased?

Let’s lay down some facts for comparison:

1. I rarely got on a plane for work until the last few years. At those jobs, I normally drove 30 miles per day.
2. I now work from my home office but fly regularly. Over the past 12 months, I’ve taken 29 trips and flown 56,000 miles, and normally drive 100 miles (round trip) to the airport. Let’s leave it at 30 miles per day on the road, and 82 days on the road (thanks, TripIt).
3. I’ll assume that my office was comparable whether at home or at the office park. They are probably very different, but for now I will ignore the many other confounding factors.
4. I’ll also assume I never drove to lunch, spilled toxic chemicals, or chopped and burned rain forest trees.
5. I’ll use a rate of 1.35 lbs of carbon per air mile and .70 per driven mile (thanks, b-e-f.org)

Ok, so let’s do some math!

1. 250 work days times 30 miles driven to the office times .70 lbs of carbon equals 5,250 lbs of carbon - roughly twice the weight of my (tiny) car!
2. 56,000 miles flown times 1.35 lbs of carbon plus 82 days times 30 miles driven plus 29 trips times 100 miles driven times .70 lbs of carbon equals 79,352 lbs of carbon

Being a “road warrior” or “nomadic worker” or whatever has multiplied by carbon emissions by a factor of 15! I bet I have had a greater carbon impact in the last year than I accumulated in the first 30 years of my life. How can air travel ever be sustainable?

Some more things to consider:

• My travel schedule alone is four times the average American’s annual carbon footprint of 20,000 lbs.
• My travel footprint this year was equal to the lifetime footprint of the average Moroccan, Costa Rican, or Fijian.
• A single seat on a single round-trip flight between Chicago and San Francisco (4,616 miles) has the same carbon footprint as the entire lifetime of the average resident of sub-Saharan Africa.

If you’re interested in email archiving or record retention policy automation, I just recorded a webcast for AIIM titled Automating Policy with Email Archiving Technology. I talked about email retention best practices, matching technology to your needs, and making it happen in the real world. I’ll update this with a link to the recording when it’s available.

My son, age 8, asked if I would send the following message to “my friends on the internet”. Here is his message, unedited!

Would you be intrested in buying some cub scout popcorn to suport my cub scout pack.If so go to www.orderpopcorn.com to see the list of different kinds of popcorn.If you would like to buy some enter this order key TEXJ0QX the credit will go to me.

thanks,
Grant

If you hate that I posted this, please let me know. Because girl scout cookie time comes soon! Or you could switch to one of my filtered feeds…

Why can't digital cameras come with a useful memory card?

Over the last year, I have purchased two Canon digital cameras. Both are excellent, and I would recommend them to anyone. But each came with a worthless 32 MB SD flash card. So did the (now broken) HP point-and-shoot I picked up last year. And the Nikon that preceded the Canon. In fact, it appears that just about every digital camera comes with a tiny, mostly-useless “starter” memory card.

I understand the reasoning of including a memory card - the camera won’t function without one, and people like to be able to play with their new electronics right out of the box.

But who thought it was a good idea to include such a tiny card? Continue Reading »

Another Storage Decisions has come and gone, and 2008’s New York show did not disappoint. TechTarget always recruits an excellent set of conferencegoers, and not even the Wall Street crisis could dampen attendance. Even Spike Lee, Richard Gere, Dian Lane, Keira Knightley, John McCain, and Sarah Palin made appearances at this year’s show! (No, seriously, they were really there!)

Although my email archiving session always attracts a smaller crowd, they are all a dedicated bunch. One pertinent suggestion from an attendee was to ingest PST files into a special separate archive in order to ensure that messages recovered from it are treated with the proper skepticism. Questions after the session focused on the trick of engaging legal and business people in the decisions around email policy, truly a challenge. I suggested that an on-site mini-seminar for the relevant folks might help to break the logjam and illustrate the issues, something that I would be happy to arrange!

My storage virtualization session was once again placed in the main room, and a much larger group attended it. I was interested to hear just how great the impact of VMware’s VDC-OS had been. In just a week, a dozen or more folks in the audience had heard, comprehended, and strategized about the concept. It’s really that big! Others were very interested in the topic of green metrics for data center usage. How does one monitor and report the real “green” savings (power, carbon, cooling, space) for a virtualized environment? Although storage greenness is debatable, the savings from a virtualized server environment are real, and these often bundle in some of the storage numbers, too.

These topics are top of mind to me as well, and I will continue to investigate (and speculate) about them in the coming year. If you missed the show (or the handouts), I will be posting them here soon! Get my email address or head to LinkedIn by clicking the links in the sidebar (at top left).

Watch this space, and consider coming to my virtualization seminar in Charlotte on October 21 or to the Storage Decisions show in San Francisco, held November 17 to 19.

This is part of an ongoing series of longer articles I will be posting every Sunday as part of an experiment in offering more in-depth content.

For IT-centric workers, being productive from the road requires more than just exceptional personal skills: A killer laptop is needed to replace an entire office full of equipment. Let’s consider what a modern digital nomad’s laptop should include.

Continue Reading »

Sprint USB EV-DO + Cradlepoint personal hotspot = sweet!

I was traveling this morning, and was shocked to not be able to check on my flight status with my iPhone. It just sat there churning when I arrived in Chicago. I couldn’t figure it out, but quickly booted up the Cradlepoint router and Sprint EV-DO card and was online. Since I also had critical work-related email to respond to, I would have been seriously upset if I didn’t have backup connectivity.

It turns out that AT&T’s network was out in quite a few locations. Although I didn’t see Chicago on he lists at first, it was definitely down this morning at 7 local time!

I guess my iPhone’s camera wasn’t the only thing on the fritz in Chicago!

You've got voicemail!

This is part of an ongoing series of longer articles I will be posting every Sunday as part of an experiment in offering more in-depth content.

I have long felt that voicemail was archaic.  Like fax machines, voice mail systems seem stuck in an earlier era, with arcane controls and so little feedback that the user has no idea if their attempt at communication has been successful.  In fact, I was long loath to trust voice mail systems at all, instead just asking people to call my other numbers or email me.

With this in mind, I was impressed by Apple’s reinvention of voice mail with the iPhone.  Although the Visual Voicemail feature is widely recognized as referring to the interactive table of voice messages shown in the phone, their implementation goes well beyond that, offering all I wanted in a voice mail system.  Indeed, although I was considering other systems prior to getting the iPhone, I have since settled on Apple’s simple but effective system.

Continue Reading »

Translation: American Airlines does not want my business anymore

I once enthused about my favorite travel sites, and among these was Kayak.com, the AJAX-y Web 2.0 travel search engine that I use to find flights. The thing I love about Kayak is that I can literally slide the dials to look for just the right departure time, connections, and even planes to make sure things work out.

But American Airlines recently decided that it didn’t like paying Kayak for referrals, and has apparently pulled its listings, even through third parties like Orbitz. Now, Southwest never included listings on Kayak, but that was no great loss to me. But I’m an American elite (Gold) and they were my strong number two airline choice. I was even thinking of shifting more business their way! But thanks to their spat over a few dollars of commission, they’re unlikely to get much more business from me.

The ironic thing is, I never used Kayak for bookings anyway! I always shifted over to my page at aa.com to buy the tickets, since it ensured that I got the right flight, codes, and instructions. So they never lost a dollar of my business to Kayak.

US Airways is becoming the Ryanair of the US!

Air travel really is getting rapidly worse. The other day I was forced to fly cross country on US Airways, and it was just depressing. The flight attendants had to pitch credit card applications over the PA and in the aisles, they charged $2 for a bottle of water or cup of coffee, and there were ads on the tray tables. Oh, and US Airways doesn’t do planeside check - they require you to check your bags through (and pay a hefty charge) if they don’t fit.

Something has to change here. The airlines are almost bankrupt, yet there is a huge volume of travelers who must get from place to place. Service is dropping, passengers are unhappy, and no one is doing anything about it. Virgin America and JetBlue seem to be eating everyone’s lunch right now, but it won’t be long before they’re in trouble, too. And I can’t fly them anyway, since neither comes to Ohio. Something’s gotta give…