July 2009
Baseball moves from Fault to Performance
I was working on a proposal for combining IT and baseball into a professional competitive sport I call “Packetball.” If any of you out there knows Hal and Hank Steinbrenner’s phone number, can you let me know in the comments section?
The State of Network Management
We recently put together a report with Ashton, Metzler & Associates, trying to gauge the state of network management today. After our best efforts, we have learned a few things.
For example, the state of network management is not Ohio. That’s the Buckeye State.
After checking the 50 states of the U.S., the six states of Australia, and the 31 Estados of Mexico – even broadening our definition to include Canadian Provinces – we still couldn’t find the state of network management.
August 2009
Unified Communication Monitoring Options
NetQoS Option B consists of the NetQoS End User Brainwave Frustration Monitor, mounted on each end-user. When unified communication problems cause sufficient frustration, they send signals to the NetQoS Unified Shock Collar System, worn by all NOC staff. This sends out an uncomfortable but not harmful reminder to the NOC staff that there’s a problem with communications, and they will hurry to fix the problem. Or they will be eaten by a dinosaur. (See Figure 1)
September 2009
Today at midnight will mark the release of “The Beatles Rockband.” In case you’re not familiar with “Rockband,” or it’s predecessor, “Guitar Hero,” I would like to congratulate you on your recovery from the deep coma that you have been in since 2005. Welcome to the future, where a common pastime is pretending to play famous songs with fake instruments in time with little buttons on a computer screen.
Also, Michael Jackson is dead, the Sopranos is no longer on TV, and instead of “blogging” we all do something called “twitter” now. Welcome to Hell.
Now, the Obama plan is both controversial and the coverage and interpretations are steeped in misinformation. I’ve known supporters that believe that the plan will give them a free robot and puppy, and detractors who fear that they’ll have to install a crystal in the palm of their hands that will start blinking when they reach “lastday.”
October 2009
Packets that stay crunchy, even in milk…
Though it hasn’t made a decision one way or another, Kellogg’s, makers of “Corn Flakes,” is looking into the possibility of laser-etching individual corn flakes with the Kellogg’s logo for the U.K. market, in order to prevent it from being confused with competitors – most notably store-brand corn flakes…
It’s almost a good idea. I mean, you could do that… or – and this is crazy, I know – but you could simply put the logo on some sort of cardboard box or plastic packaging, and then sell the corn flakes inside the box.
The Blue Screen of Deathly Hallows.
The more I think about it, I wonder if Microsoft doesn’t suffer from some sort of “Star Trek” curse, with every other operating system release decent, and the rest, doomed to mediocrity, with 95, 2000, XP, and 7 as “Wrath of Khan,” “The Voyage Home,” “The Undiscovered Country,” and “First Contact,” respectively. Okay, maybe 98 doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with ME and Vista, but neither does “Search for Spock” deserve to be lumped in with “The Final Frontier” and “Generations.”
November 2009
Listen to the Wombat.
And finally, I’m not sure if this is a REALLY bad idea, or a REALLY good one from “140Mandak262Jamuna.” I also wonder if this has already been tried…
- Collect the amount of water pumped reported by each sensor as a trace between 9:30 AM and 4PM on the days the market is open. Find the correlation between this trace and the S&P500 index with a two minute time lag. See which sensor has a correlation coefficient more than 0.05. Use that info to come up with a trading strategy to buy and sell the exchange traded fund IVV. Propose a project find the leading indicator sensor for more securities like QQQQ, Diamond, XLF, XLU, XLV, XLP and the stock ANSS. …. Build an empire under you. Watch the cash flow of the company. Just before it goes bust, put all this experience in a resume and get a job in the ultra high speed trading division of Morgan Stanley.
December 2009:
Cisco and Australia’s National Broadband Rollout
The Kevin Rudd-led Australian government has put forward a Fiber-To-The-Home, or as the Australians call it, “Fibre-to-the-Home” initiative, including an open-access network which supposedly will provide
r100Mbps connections to 90% of Australian homes and businesses. This is presumably in order to diversify the Claudia Black based-economy, which, sometime in the 1990s, became Australia’s primary export.
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