I wasn’t expecting much. The call was going from my comptuer over hotel Wi-Fi, from Canada to the US, and then accross the country to my home phone in California. The call quality was great. There were one or two momentary sound quality issues, but my neither my wife or kids noticed.

The only thing i wish I had done was try the call from Skype on my iPhone. Tried that at home before I left, it worked, but the true test is when I’m away from home. Maybe next year when I head to Toronto again.

I live in Orange County California. As a commnity, I would like to think we’re very a diverse and mostly friendly bunch of people. Yet I’ve heard Toronto descrived as one of the most cosmopolitan cities in world. 

Should be interesting.

Being an IT director, I report to our president at our small/medium company. Very few people in my office get what IT does. There’s even one or two who seem to think we’re supposed to bring them cool toys. So from the top to the bottom, IT is alone. When the pressure started getting high, it took me a couple months to see the forest. After that, I had a light bulb go off and so far things are going well. Here’s what I did:

• Shut up and listen to what people were saying. Respond to them, don’t react. Helps keep the tension down.
• Thought back to my (a copy I bought) audio book  ”The One Minute Manager”, get yourself a copy.
• Find one trusted person who can “see” you…then shut up and listen.
• Set and keep one week goals, even if you are in until Sunday night.

When we started doing one week goals at my office, reaction was mixed. Now that we’re setting one week goals that are tangible for people outside of IT, the reaction is getting warmer. Yeah, you can’t work many miracles in a single week. Wait though..who says you need a miracle? My department spent a year working on some major items. They were all large scale and desperately needed. However, in this economy business leaders need results now and the impression of “completed projects” no matter how small is a positive force on attitudes. (To put this into context, a one week project might be a difficult to code right click menu that does something time saving.) It’s almost like some folks have blinders on and can’t see the value in long term projects, even if it’s right in front of them, they only see what can happen this week. So give it to them, this week!

The only reason the whole Skype situation bugs me still is the carriers greed. If you make a call on your handset, your handset must turn that into a data stream and wirelessly transmit that. It’s all data, so why not just say “if you want quality, you are going to pay a premium on the cellular network, otherwise enjoy our higher latency 3G network”. If I have an iPhone data plan, do they really think I’m going to be one of those “lite” users who doesn’t suck up much bandwidth? I use 2 to 5 times the data I used to on Windows Mobile. I doubt that Skype uses as much bandwidth as a Google maps session or me downloading my video podcast on the phone. 

OK, done complaining about greed and happy to have Skype back on my mobile.

If you like Microsoft because it just works and you don’t have to get into every single detail, you will NOT like VMware. If you like to dig into every setting and maybe sometimes reinvent the wheel, and are a little familiar with Linux, you will like VMware. 

Disclaimer: my exchange server is currently down because it apparently, sometime, on another ESX server had snapshots turned on. They are not currently on, but the link and old files are still there and are required to boot the server (but it won’t boot because there is no disk space left). So VMware has apparently kept this setting, and I have a mess of files I can try and go through to look for settings and try to pull an answer out of……. At this point I wish this was an MS virtual server. Every setting is stored in one file (in plain text!), all of the data is stored in a single VHD. Nothing complicated!

So when are people going to start court battles against companies that make bricks? Now that I’ve told everyone the secret of how to break into a store window I should expect a gag order and expect the lawsuits to start pouring in against me and the brick companies. If you can sue a gun manufacturer for your child getting your gun and shooting you with it, why not brick companies?

It may sound rediculous, but it’s the same thing as what these students have described. I suspect police everywhere will be very busy, very soon enforcing new laws about what we can and can’t talk about.

I know many people are not familiar with technology, but there are A GREAT MANY PEOPLE for whom breaking an electronic lock is as simple to them as what most people view as using a coat hanger to break into your own car. For people who are so tech smart, this is not a miracle, and is not groundbreaking, it’s just interesting. They just know their stuff. Just like everyone else has something that they really know, very, very well. Everyone is an expert in something.

If you would like to read a description of what the students were going, click here: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=call-the-cops-on-second-thought-don-2008-08-14

Here’s a summary of what happened as of 8-14-08: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10017438-83.html?tag=nefd.lede

Now you know my experiences to date. And now, I will have no other smartphone besides the iPhone. I tried explaining this to someone at the office today couldn’t articulate what I wanted to say. So I decided to write up my to reasons why I enjoy using the iPhone:

• Interface speed is much faster. I can open apps in a second or two. Sometimes it would take upwards of twenty seconds to get mail open if Windows Mobile was busy. Switching and loading apps now happens almost as fast a I can think it, which means I still have “that thought” in my head by the time my app opens.

• Convenience. I can read all my HTML email and use non-flash websites easily.

• Convergence. All my casual email use, news website reading, video and audio podcasts, music listening, and twitter use all happen in one simple device.

Yes, it does have limitations, but I am more than willing, so far, to work within them.

(written on my iPhone, much more quickly than I could ever type on my pocket pc)

Perception can be very hard to get past. When you finally do, you will see the truth regarding Vista. It’s can be better than Win XP, but don’t try to run it on old hardware….just like running Win 95 on 3.1 hardware. Looking back now, no one in their right mind would do that.

Yes, Vista has it’s bad points to. But look at apple, they had/are currently still having massive issues with iPhone 2.0 (which I will by…eventually). Read about lost Mobile Me emails here http://tinyurl.com/5jp4wl. Really, MS and Apple are just software companies. Now that Apple has so much public scrutiny of major releases, the polish seems to be off the Apple, just as the polish on MS ended around the time of Windows Me.

So the end result is you can’t go out and buy the latest dual quad core server and expect it to run your SQL server N times faster than the dual single core chips it was running on. In my mind, this takes all the shine off VMware’s product and leaves me feeling like I have been cheated…because I paid for it!

OK, so really, the new server I have will perform much better than the old one. I don’t really need 8 cpu cores, and I doubt MS SQL could make that much use of ALL of them at the same time. The only reason I feel so cheated is that I had to work REALLY hard to dig up that fact. It’s not clearly written out anywhere. There is a ton of materials online that boldly trumpet multiprocessor support, but nothing clearly states how many processors.

Unless your vendor has the confidence to clearly state what the products limitations are, you better complete your due dillegence no matter who is pressuring you for deadlines.

So when we installed the MS virtual server product, I was familiar with the concepts, and had experience using Virtual PC. The install on the MS product went well, didn’t require lots of rethinking and second tries, and I didn’t have to pay for it. I spent a few hours today trying to get all the parts of VMware up and running. After a ton of reading, it looks like the old server we tried to test this out on isn’t compatible. Apparently, you can’t allocate space for a virtual server on IDE drives. Parts of their docs to say you can’t use IDE for production environments, and the server does install on IDE drives. You just can’t create any virtual servers on IDE. I can’t blame them for that, but for testing purposes, why not?

We’ll see how it goes in a couple days. We’re getting a new server in which we can use for a week or two for a VMware test. I already purchased our licenses so I hope it goes well!