I've been busy at work the past few weeks. I began September with a week of vacation then had less than 12 hours at home before leaving on a business trip. I traveled to Austin to staff our booth at a conference. I got home from that trip thankfully not too late at night on a Wednesday only to have ridiculously busy days with all my "normal" work ( Read more... )

Vegas Travelog #4
AWS re:Invent conference - Tue, 27 Nov 2023. 3pm.This week I've been attending the AWS re:Invent conference to staff my company's booth in the exhibitor showcase. I've done this countless times before for various conferences, including AWS re:Invent at least 3 times in past years, but this time I'm doing it a bit differently. I'm ( Read more... )

Vegas Travelog #2
Hilton Resorts World, Las Vegas - Mon, 27 Nov 2023. 8:45pm.

Day 1 of the trade show is done. Well, it's almost done. I'm back at my hotel, dressed down, grabbing a casual dinner. Yes, it's almost 9pm and I'm just now eating dinner. That's how things often roll at trade shows ( Read more... )

Once the very twee trade show I supported on Thursday got going it was fine. I think it was mostly the organizers who looked like they just stepped out of the picture on the cover of Hipster Monthly. The attendees and my fellow vendors were dressed more typically for tech- at least for middle managers and sales people in tech. There were no t- ( Read more... )

My two Macs, work and personal, were pestering me for upgrades yesterday. MacOS "Sonoma" is up to version 14.1. I was running the latest version of "Venture", 13.6.1. On my work machine there's company software that forces me to take upgrades after a certain period of time, so I figured I'd get ahead of that nagging by upgrading the OS now. What a ( Read more... )

Last month my jury duty service brought me to the courtroom where a murder trial was being conducted. I was not selected for the jury. Dozens of us were dismissed even before being interviewed in the process called voir dire. Once my service as a prospective juror ended I remained curious about the case. I started searching for news about the ( Read more... )

This past weekend the comic strip "Dilbert" was canceled, and its author, Scott Adams, effectively was, too. As I mentioned in a brief blog yesterday, these were consequences of Adams publishing video of himself going on a racist tirade ( Read more... )

My company ran a small devops show this past week, Thursday, in San Jose. We've got another this coming week, in Austin. I'm presenting a 2.5 hour, hands-on workshop at each.

The show in San Jose went okay. After meeting colleagues for a surprisingly low-key dinner the night before it wasn't hard to get up early Thursday morning and drive down ( Read more... )

The past day-ish of work has been tough. I worked until about 9:30pm last night, taking an hour off for dinner, then was back online this morning before 7am. But worse than the long hours has been the frustration. "I'm not even at Square One," I bemoaned. "It's like I'm at Square Negative 6!I was struggling to prepare some use cases to show a ( Read more... )

I'm gradually migrating over to the new work laptop I received yesterday evening. The substance of this migration isn't migrating the data. That's actually a minimal effort as most of my data- most of the presentations, systems, and notes I've created, and all my email- are in the cloud anyway. The time consuming part is installing all the apps I ( Read more... )