Cloud Computing, Life

What if there was a job where at least one time a week, and most weeks, many times, you had to do some activity where you would be openly judged either a "success" or "failure". And that process repeated every week of every year. Would you do that job? I'm a technical person who works with sales people. The product my company sells is complex and most sales people don't have the background or context to answer all the technical questions that come up during the sales process. So that is where people like me fill in. We have different titles: Sales Engineer Pre-Sales Engineer Systems Engineer Sales Architect Sales Analyst and others.... The most common short hand way to say "Sales Engineer" is to say "SE" or "SA". Most of my co-workers and friends that do this job say "SE". THE HARDEST DAY EVER (at work that is) As a SE I do many things. One of those things is delivering the product demo. Most of the time

It has been a while since I've been able to look at this blog. Mostly because of the posts regarding my pets. "Stormy" my first greyhound dying, then when "Sizzle" my second greyhound died, I couldn't really look at my old posts regarding my dogs, and I couldn't bring myself to delete them. So, I stopped looking. Shortly after Sizzle passed away, my other best friend in the world "Buddy" (the Coatimundi) also passed away from old age. He was 11. I still can't watch any dog/pet related movies, TV shows, etc. In our house we still have "Nilla" (the Papillon), she is also 10+, but doing fine. Anyway, time to move forward.

Ok, I have to admit that I created the iPhone app called 'SizzleTEXT'. Use it to access internet based information using SMS short codes instead of using your browser or an app. Update Twitter, check your bank account balance, get a weather forecast, look up a stock quote, using only SMS Text messages. For example text "pizza 97208" to 466452 to find a pizza place in your zip code. Sometimes I'm in a low connectivity environment and want a simple and fast way to do some common things. That is why I created this app, to give me "options" when I'm traveling. SMS messages will often work even when you can't get a data connection to work on your mobile device. One of my friends pointed out that for newer iPhone users, they have capped data plans, so being able to use SMS instead of your data allotment might get you out of a jam every now and then. There is a very large pool of short codes you can draw from to request common information that you acces

Out of all the gadgets at CES the one that really stood out for me was the Motorola Atrix. It is basically a full featured smartphone that can be docked into a laptop-netbook shell. When docked into the shell, the smart phone helps power a full size netbook screen and traditional netbook keyboard. In the near future, why would you need a powerful smartphone, and a separ ate laptop which has its own CPU, memory, and disk? Why can’t it be just the same device where the laptop shell acts like a UI extension to the phone? All of your data would just be on one device, no data sync needed. When docked into the laptop shell, the device would still be able to leverage wireless networks with all the same connectivity benefits of a traditional laptop. The docked smartphone would simply become the main CPU, memory, and disk for the laptop shell.That is what I see when I look at the Motorola Atrix. The same concept would also work for a tablet user experience. You would take your s

On the heels of the recent iPhone 4 debacle, "Don't hold it like that!" (antenna-gate) we have another PR problem in the works for T-Mobile with the release of the much anticipated G2. It appears there is much confusion between customers and T-Mobile support regarding the specs of the handset that was sent to pre-order customers. The official launch date was supposed to be this week, but existing customers were allowed to pre-order the handset, and those actually were delivered on Friday 10/1/10. Even this seems to be a point of confusion since new owners have been calling into T-Mobile customer support, and some are reporting that the support folks were not expecting any handsets to be delivered until the official launch day, which hasn't happened yet. Owners who have received the handsets (including myself) are reporting two problems. First the slide out keyboard seems to have weak springs. If you horizontally hold the top part of the handset containing the LCD, bu

Stormy passed away Tuesday morning. Over the last month he was slowly deteriorating, and we finally learned he had a form of cancer that couldn't be treated. He was still "functioning", but he was no longer eating, and he didn't have much strength left. So we decided it was best to do the right thing before he experienced a lot of pain, or could no longer stand or walk. This is one of the recent pictures I took of him with my mobile phone a few weeks ago. He was sick, but his natural easy-going self still did shine through. This is how I want to remember him. I could write a book about him and Greyhound behavior, but for now, I just want to recount two days in the time he was with us. The first day we brought Stormy home, the realization of what it meant to have a Greyhound became apparent. Stormy went from the race track, to the Greyhound shelter kennel, to our home. He had never been in a house before! He didn't even understand what it meant to walk up a small s

This picture about sums it all up. Taken from the top of Cape Kiwanda in Pacific City, Oregon. Nothing more needs to be said.