I have been so busy with work, school and life in general that I did not have time to update this space for a while. I set aside a hour or so to write just because so much has been happening and I actually have some time to take a breather this Saturday.

In this time I am getting introduced to a number of people, ideas and stuff in general personally and professionally through friends, conferences and just serendipity that excited me and in process are helping me get guidance around things I want to pursue in the short term atleast professionally:

Experimentation Platform: I had known about this for a while but I was at a conference and had a chance to see what these guys are up to. The idea of experimentation on live systems to drive change as opposed to decision made based on intuition or position is very compelling. I did have a chance to talk to a the presenter and maybe in the future, I will meet up with him to see some of the internal workings. I did not manage to swipe a Hippo though, maybe next time. Either way, while the idea of experimentation is not new but I thought because this is to be used for exisitig systems to drive improvements is novel especially because of the reluctance that we see to change something if it is not broken: I think this leads to a rut in companies.

Server Virtualization: Since my team manages a bunch of servers we are looking to improve performance and the overhead by looking at Virtualization and in the process I was looking the Hyper-V technology and the work done by VMWare and while I am not a computer science / hardware person, the whole idea of something running just above the hardware and then allowing multiple OSes running on top of the same hardware is very cool. In the demo, they were able to create clusters and entire data centers with failovers in less than 15 minutes As the hardware gets more and more powerful, I think that this is the future of the datacenter: the ability to virtualize all hardware to save on costs and energy. I think it was one of the things that I never thought i would be interested, it is partly the technology but mostly what can be done with it in order to enable cool things in operations that caught my fancy. I got into thinking how VMWare does it and how Hyper-V is trying to do it.

I also had a chance to listen to Debra Chrapaty and it was at around the same time that I was tinkering with Amazon's Web services and in particular their S3 Strorage service as a means to back up all my data and store it securely. The work around data-centers in a box, edge computing especially by Sun in the container and now other companies is very exciting because the price of hardware is plumetting and this is definitely the future. I will not be surprised if the next truck that passes by me on the road is there to help a company load balance because of a event in the area or enable communications for a emergency.

As I proceed in my course at MIT and my work in particular, I have begun to realize that my interests and career is going to be in building large scale infrastructure systems, processes to enable execution projects in the short term. I think that I am very good around getting a v0 in place, set up operations and foundations of a system and then handing it off to someone else to run it and move on to other projects. If you have ideas or thoughts or projects around any of this, I would love to have a conversation with you.

Enough about work. A friend who follows this journal said that my writing reminds her of Douglas Coupland and on her recommendation, I am currently reading Microserfs and it is fantastic and so funny and I cannot believe that I had missed it all this time. Now that I am reading it, I can see some of the similarities with this journal: and the abruptness and sketchy writing, the references to idealism in and trying to reason it to work that I do etc. While this is the best that I can do, I think that Coupland was just feigning a style to suit the atmosphere.

I do think that what he talks about in the novel: the quest to find ones identity especially in the software world is a very unique experience because software is all "fake" as in not a real thing that can be touched but the money it generates and the lifestyle and habits that come out of it are real and one has to be in the software world to understand that. I came in to this world from a non-software job and the pressures and environment that I was experiencing were very different. I think software in particular and IT industry in general have changed the process of "learning" and adulthood profoundly. I think that it sheilds the people from "real" problems that people face and perpetuate the adolesent experience. That is why I think that our offices are called campuses and P1 bug is something that does not cause any physical damage where as in automobile manufacturing a p1 problem would be something that affects the safety of the user. These are two entirely different paradigms but have the same connotations as far as the job is concerned. Software and Internet is particular is about ideas that are relatively easy to implement but when put in a large organization context, these ideas all of a sudden have to deal with "real" human problems: policitcs, emotions, timing etc. and therefore it is very easy to get cynical about the world. I struggle with this a lot but I have my own to let my steam out. In the same vien I would recommend the other book I am reading: How I left.. and the story is really fascinating. Definitely check out the site and the videos. This is much in contrast to Microserfs, I am seeing the power of global corporations and trying see how they can be leveraged for the greater good. Ambitious much?

While I dont think that I am going to change the world (yet :-) ), at the beginning of this year, before heading off to Mauritius, I had read a very interesting article in NY Times around how to plan a year. I did the exercise as mentioned in the article and one of the goals for this year was to upgrade the IT infrastructure of a non-profit that I volunteer in. Over the last few months, I worked with them and MS as part of Microsoft's Unlimited Potential program. We got into a program that enables them to get upgraded to the latest and came up with a plan that was just almost approved and it is so exciting. This work will be carried out over the summer by myself and a few other people and I am so happy to have achieved this personal goal.

This semester I am taking a class called Product Design and Development. This class is geared more towards Mechanical Products and there are times taht I wish that I was workig with a real prouct in the class instead of a service architecture that we are trying to develop. It is quite fun none the less and I am learning a lot. This is a class that I am struggling rigth now especially because of our product and some deadlines that I miseed.

I travelled a bit in the last month and it was fantastic. I am planning my a few other trips over the summer (time permitting) but lets see.

I am also trying to redesign my site to a new design. I upgraded my Movable Type installation to MT 4.0 and I am very happy with the performance on my server. Still haven't figured out how to do it on my new Mac and the right tools for it. One of these days..

So many more things. I am getting tired because this seems too self absorbed but that is the point right? Other notables include: Laptop RAM Upgrade, St. Paddys Day, DeepZoom, new cellphone, HSDPA hacking, mini-marathons, interviews for the first employee to our startup, violin lessons, friends leaving for other countries and much much more. As I told a friend the other day if I was run over by a truck tomorrow, I would have no regrets because I would have lived like there is no tomorrow and dreamt like I will live forever.

I will update this soon enough.

And finally I end with XKCD because I thought that this was apt for the this time: