3.0 Stage of Life, working on some of the Best Stuff

In the book Becoming Steve Jobs is a point I remember well.

“I wish I could have seen Steve Jobs 3.0. Seeing him from age fifty-five to seventy-five would have been fascinating. If you’re in good health at that age, 3.0 should be the best.
”

— Jim Collins. Schlender, Brent; Tetzeli, Rick (2015-03-24). Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader

I quit Microsoft 9 years ago at 46.  Spending 26 years at Microsoft, Apple, and HP I was done.  Part of quitting Microsoft is I realized it was better to quit before I turned 50 to think about what I wanted to do next.  There is very little chance I would have made it at Microsoft for the last 9 years and make it to 55.

Now I am 55.  Well tomorrow I am.  My health which includes physical, mental, and social aspects of health are so much better than 9 years ago.  And, the ideas of what is a 3.0 version of life are coming together nicely.  Working at great companies like HP, Apple, and Microsoft were valuable, but I've realized there are so many other things I can do that are so much easier when not being constrained by corporate managers.  I can blog and write whatever I feel like.  I can research ideas.  Challenge the status quo without being reprimanded by my boss.  

Ironically the ideas I am working on have corporate managers as the users, but probably less than 10% see the true value of the service as it works for those who want to transform the way they run operations, but it requires a different way of looking at things. 10% of the users is still plenty big and we'll help them out compete the rest.

A lesson I learned taking a break when quitting Microsoft is to focus on your social health.  Who your friends are.  With great social health your mental health naturally improves.  Feeling better socially and mentally, then your physical health wants to catch up.  Looking at problems in different ways is the luxury of the 3.0 stage of life.  On the other hand I think there are plenty of people who think the 3.0 stage of life is about endless vacations and hobbies like playing golf.  Is that how you think you'll improve your social, mental, and physical health?

Intel's Video on Reusing Water in Fab Facilities

Intel has a nice video with 19,000 views after a month on water reuse in its wafer fab facilities.

Published on May 12, 2015
Meet Geetha Shankar, Environmental Health & Safety Engineer at Intel. Her job is to manage water treatment facilities that recycle and purify the water used during the manufacturing of silicon wafers within Intel Fabs.

City water is used to clean silicon wafer during the production process at Intel, that water is then filtered back to drinking water standards and re-used, or filtered to gray water standards and re-used throughout the community in a variety of forms. Geetha and her team insure that the water treatment facilities run correctly, thereby providing the necessary water for production while also providing usable water back to the community in which Intel is a part of.

7x24 Exchange Spring Conference Publishes its Attendance and Updates its Mission to include Sustainability

How many people attending a conference can be hard to find.  The staff at 7x24 Exchange make it easy to know as they share the current and past attendance numbers.  (Note: SC is spring conference and FC is fall conference)

This sharing fits with 7x24 Exchange updating its mission to include sustainability and social responsibility which is built on being open and transparent.

As you look at what data center conferences to attend look for whether they disclose past conference attendance to gauge whether the conference is appealing to its user base.

7x24 Exchange has been discussing energy efficiency, renewable energy, and other sustainability ideas for years.  And, now its part of their official mission statement.

7x24 Exchange Spring 2015 Keynote Astronaut Mark Kelly - "Endeavour to Succeed"

Astronaut Mark Kelly gave the opening keynote at the Spring 2015 7x24 Exchange Conference in Orlando on June 8, 2015 - "Endeavour to Succeed"

The keynote was well received and a memorable one. The opening video was an excerpt from this U2 video to a concert in Seattle at Qwest Field.

One of the main themes that Mark Kelly covered is having a Goal, a Plan, and Working hard.  One of my data center friends had just seen Mark Kelly at another executive event and he noticed there were parts of the presentation that are his theme, and how he customized the presentation to the data center audience.

To give you an idea of what Mark spoke about here is a Ted video.

7x24 Exchange spends a lot of effort to get inspirational keynotes and this keynote by Mark Kelly is amongst the top ones.

Fun Project, Video System for Ski Race Team at Crystal Mountain

The Crystal Mountain Alpine Club (CMAC) is the race ski club my kids ski with.  Last year the new president asked me to take on the project to add a video system to one of the race hills (Gold Hill).  Below is a map with distances.

When they first approached me they were pumped to use wireless.  But, here a few problems.  There would be 4 access points - Start, 2 midpoint access points, and finish.  The suggested wireless equipment had no data on working in snow and rain.  There is a Verizon Cel tower at the top of lift.

Good things is we can get access to each ski lift tower and there is power available.  Snow making gear is being installed this summer which adds additional areas to add conduit.

After talking to some friends at Corning Fiber I had enough information to look at single mode fiber with one pair going between each of the 4 access points, another pair from the start to finish, and one more pair as backup.  After a bit more time thinking this through I got worried that having 4 access points/switches to get a signal from the start to finish would have issues with performance and a failure in a switch or fiber would affect the overall availability of the system.

Given we were now using single mode fiber we could run the fiber from the race hill to the lodge, allowing video distribution to areas in the lodge when there is a race.  Also we could put switch gear and servers in the lodge instead of only having the heated start shack.

One way to solve the problem of having up to 4 switches in the fiber optic network is to home run the fiber optic run to each of the switches on the ski lift towers.  So we would now have 4 pairs of fiber optic, home running to the lodge and after the splice add another home run with the 4 pairs to the start shack.  There are now fewer switches in any video feed run.  There are 4 fiber optic cables we can isolate and run each at 1 gbps for the video stream from each individual switch/access point.  If a connection from the lodge fails to a given switch, we can see if we have connection from the start shack to the same switch.  If both connections don't work, then most likely the switch on the ski tower is bad.  We can also set up the switches with two network connections with fail over.

I'll be writing more on this project as we get into more of the details.  As far as I know no one has gone through this much effort to think through the network and operating issues in a video system for a ski racing with snow and rain conditions.