I don’t need to run an UltraThon

Posted by on June 18, 2013 No comments

I don’t need to run an ultrathon (50 miles) to feel pain, suffering, and near-death. I felt that way today just trying to complete my 4 mile run!

So… I’m in week 2 of training after having to take 7 weeks off due to three (yes, three) breaks in my toe. The accident happened just before I had a 5k race scheduled (the i5k in Charleston SC). I was knocking out 7 minute miles in training and 5 miles (much slower!) was pretty easy for me. Now I’m struggling to hit 4 – and that’s not even trying to push the pace.

I can’t wait to build my endurance back up so that running starts to feel good again.

Microsoft Office for the iPhone

Posted by on June 15, 2013 No comments

Microsoft finally releases Microsoft Office for the iPhone! I can’t believe it took them this long. I think Microsoft’s focus on re-branding as a services company has distracted them from the fact that they are historically a very profitable software company. Why not make Office for the iPhone? Why not make it also for the iPad? And every other big platform available with more than X users (to justify the porting costs)?

I have mixed feelings about the pricing strategy. I didn’t like it upon first read, but now I’m starting to warm up to it from a business perspective. I’m not an Office365 user (other than for testing) because we run our own Exchange Servers. But from a business perspective that may be a smart move for Microsoft – this model adds value to O365 plus drives more people toward SkyDrive. It will be interesting to see what the O365 target consumers (SMBs?) thing about the model and how it impacts (or doesn’t impact) adoption.

$249 Chromebook?

Posted by on June 13, 2013 No comments

I saw the Google Ad about the $249 Chromebook and it caught my eye. At 2.4 pounds and 6.5 hours of battery life it sounds so-so. But hey, that price-point! $249?? At that price I can see people buying these things and tossing them to the kids. Or buying them as potential disposable (if the time comes) computer options.

Have you worked on a Chromebook before? If so, how do you like it? I envision it to be sort of an Ubuntu-type experience (which has gained a LOT of users over the past few years).

I LOVE Google’s Chrome as a browser, and at $249, I think it just might be worth taking a little (very little) gamble and checking out their operating system.

Two Recent OpenStack Articles

Posted by on June 13, 2013 No comments

OpenStack is getting a lot of buzz lately. I admittedly don’t know a TON about it, but it seems to be an automation and provisioning platform mostly geared toward the KVM and Xen hypervisor platforms. It’s an open source project initially started by Rackspace but appears to be largely driven by Red Hat now.

The two articles I found interesting this morning are:

The secret to OpenStack’s success, which talks about the open platform, the different contributors, and how specifically Red Hat has become the largest contributor – pushing the community project forward at an accelerating pace lately.

The second article is also about Red Hat’s aggressiveness in the OpenStack community and how they are working to integrate OpenStack more tightly into their enterprise Linux offerings. Red Hat’s site doesn’t give much in the way of details, but it will be interesting to see just what they’re doing.

Linux-based hypervisors (Xen and KVM) already have a pretty big market share with Amazon’s backing and use in the EC2 product; but it sounds like perhaps Red Hat is working to enhance the entire ecosystem surrounding the hypervisors to develop a better platform that may give VMware (and Microsoft’s Hyper-V) some serious competition in the enterprise cloud marketspace.

It will be interesting to follow the developments.

Savannah Rock and Roll Marathon

Posted by on June 7, 2013 No comments

I see the Savannah Rock and Roll Marathon is showing up as an ad on my site, which I think is pretty cool because it’s going to be an awesome race! My wife and I are already signed up and have our travel arrangements set.

We’ve run shorter races in Savannah before (and I’ll just say that Savannah is one of my favorite cities to visit!) but this will be our first time running in the Rock and Roll series, and just our second half marathon.

Are you going?