Family, friends, fun, career, and more…

Rough drive from the airport when I returned home last night. Landed to find more snow than expected and made my way home in a fun 90 minute drive that should have been about 40.

This morning’s commute brought more fun, but I was the passenger in a car pool this week. Accidents doubled our commute time (fortunately not our accidents).

I had a great meeting regarding automated builds and deployments with a colleague. It is crucial for our very active agile teams to get this in place. I provided my vision and was pleased to receive feedback that the team’s progress is closely aligned to my vision. Now all we have to do is do it! That’s the hard, yet fun part!

Today I am in our office of Questia. I currently work for Gale (a part of Cengage Learning). I was part of the due-diligence team during the acquisition of Questia and am now part of the teams that will integrate the technology (both applications and infrastructure) with our core business at Gale.

Regarding Houston. You would think that traveling from the Detroit area to Houston in February would be a welcome change. Well….it snowed in some areas near Houston last night. I didn’t see any snow myself, but it was cold and blustery - not the 70 degrees I was hoping for!

I decided to pay some attention to my blog. Ok for a few minutes anyway. I managed to find a new, decent looking skin. And also am updating via the iPhone for once.

Speaking of the iPhone. I did discover it is not well equipped for “push” when dealing with Exchange. Kills the battery in hours. Now that push is off, I can avoid carrying (and borrowing) iPhone charging cables.

I don’t often post regarding a product I use or evaluate for my work life, but I recently ran into a product that bears mentioning. It’s called ClientVantage and it’s part of the Vantage suite offered by Compuware.

I have been responsible for Borders.com for some time now and it has offered up all the fun that a newly launched, large-scale, eCommerce website can produce. We have performed reasonably well, but when problems happen they tend to be ugly. And worse, we have a hard time getting to the root cause.

Enter ClientVantage.

About a month ago, Compuware contacted our CIO and got a change to do a proof-of-concept (POC). The product was set up in a few days and immediately started to shine a light inside our website, showing where problems are (and even as important where problems aren’t).

The product is made up of two forms: agent-less and agent. The agent-less provided almost everything I needed immediately, but the agent-based version will provide details down to the Java method call.

When they pulled the POC hardware away from me I was immediately in withdrawal. After some negotiation we decided to move forward with the product. And what a difference it makes in my life.

I am now able to see the performance of our website from many points (physical points and points in time). We don’t have to speculate nearly as much as we did in the past. On top of the performance of the product, Compuware’s engineers who worked with me on site are the best of the best. I almost never come out the other side of an implementation feeling like everything is complete and in order.

With ClientVantage I feel informed and armed to keep the site up and running.

It’s been a little over a month since we launched Borders.com. The website is Border’s entry into the online commerce world and marked the end of a long relationship of…well let’s say one of those “other” online booksellers.

I am responsible for the operation of the site and am also extending my efforts out into the development teams to help stabilize the site and allow us to handle more traffic. I like having the background of a software engineer and an operations manager. It allows me to work with a lot of interesting people - each one of them thinks differently and tackles problems in a unique way.

We have busier days due to email campaigns and tomorrow is one of those. I enjoy the pressure of a tough day and always love the feeling of ending the day knowing you processed as many transactions as possible.

Make sure you visit Borders.com (or any Borders or Borders Express store!).

Just a quick post. Chris Wascha just pointed me at an Outlook plugin that is pretty cool. It’s Xobni. The plugin provides new ways to organize and search Outlook email, view threads, and connects better with my mind’s version of organization.

It has cool built-in analytics that I found very useful right away. I currently get in excess of 200 emails (from humans) a day and even more than that from systems throughout our enterprise.

Give it a shot!

After a lifetime of being glued to an Intel machine of one form or another, today I bought an iMac. Yep, after months of playing with the iPhone (and several visits to the Apple site) I finally gave into the temptation.I must say getting up and running couldn’t be easier. I started taking it out of the box about 20 minutes ago and here I am posting from it.So far I am enjoying it - the screen is awesome and it is side-by-side with my 24″ Dell. Both of them look pretty good actually. I would post more, but…. (back to the iMac  )  

About six months ago, I left my former employer for a new opportunity. That opportunity was a chance to run projects at Borders Group (the corporate headquarters of Borders Bookstores). It started as a more laid back role than I have held in a while; a chance to run some projects and not have any direct reports.

It didn’t take long for the pace to pick up. I quickly found myself running a few large projects along with a few small ones. I really enjoyed myself helping an organization that was not following standard process get going - putting some sanity around some chaotic past.

A few weeks back I was presented with an opportunity to run the data center at Borders. I was the Director of Data Center Operations at MarketWatch/Dow Jones and left there in 2005 to head back to my home state of Michigan. I was thrilled to get this opportunity at Borders since I enjoyed the challenges at MarketWatch so much.

There are a lot of differences between the data centers. Borders has an on-site data center running a large variety of business processes as well has a variety of platforms (mainframe, AIX, Intel, and more…). MarketWatch involved managing remote lights-out data centers in AT&T hosted environments.

Adding to the excitement is the fact that we are launching our new website which will run out of the data center in April. It is our separation from Amazon which has fulfilled online orders for years. We will do this on our own starting in April!

I am glad to be back in the data center world. I feel comfortable - sort of like the feeling you get when visiting a familiar place or reuniting with a great friend. Wish me luck!

As much of an early adopter as I am, I never carried around a USB flash drive. A year or so ago I started carrying a 1GB USB on my keychain. I started to use it more and more.

I was reading about the U3 Smart Drives and I purchased a Verbatim 4GB model. It uses a small amount of the drive for the O/S. When plugged into a desktop or laptop, a menu very similar to the Windows Start menu is accessible from a task tray icon.

You can save desktop settings, browser favorites, etc. from a program named migo. You can install apps written specifically for the U3, but I think I will use it more to store my data as I move from machine to machine. I have three desktops and three laptops not to mention plugging into other systems at work and other places.

I still have to give this thing more of a test drive, but it seems to work nicely. If all else fails, it still is a 4GB flash drive! Oh, it also has security to protect your data in case you drop it somewhere.