Discover the Secret to Great Pizza, Tom Douglas's Serious Pie

This weekend my wife and I attended a Hot Stove cooking event where Wildwood Grilling had a smoked cooking event. Below is the Wildwood crew with Tom.

What was a pleasant surprise is how much time Tom Douglas was there hosting the cooking class.

With Tom Douglas in front us I figured it was a good chance to get cooking tips from a top chef. Tom has two awesome pizza restaurants in Seattle.

So I decided to talk to Tom about pizza. What should I ask?

I went up to Tom. And told him, "I have a Woodstone Oven at home (which is the same as what he has in his restaurants). I make my own dough. What should I do to make pizza at an advance level?"

His answer. "The crust."

Totally agreed. But he was busy with the cooking class.

I tried looking for a downtime when I could follow up. 

So food is on the table. We are all eating. Then Tom comes over. Pulls me to side let's talk.

I knew Tom's time is valuable no different than any top executive, so needed to quick and go with his thoughts.

We discussed dough time high gluten vs. low gluten, oven temperature, how long to let the dough rise, stretching the dough, how to cook without the cheese for 3/4 time then finish, his attempt at patenting his pizza trays and how he retains heat after removing from the oven versus the common practice of putting the pizza on a grated surface to reduce moisture. 

I think the discussion was maybe 3 minutes. and what Tom shared will give me months of ideas to experiment with as ultimately I need to find my own way to make advanced pizza. Pizza that has a great crust.

Below is a picture of one of my pizzas.  I think I am pretty close, but always can do better.

Ireland Taoiseach (Prime Minister) makes his 1st trip to USA a trip to GAFAM

Yesterday I was at a luncheon for Ireland's Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar at the Chiluly garden and glass. http://chihulygardenandglass.com

https://twitter.com/AilbheConneely/status/925813069074145280/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rte.ie%2Fnews%2Fpolitics%2F2017%2F1101%2F916850-leo-varadkar-seattle%2F

Here is a picture of the Taoiseach from my seat.

At my table was Microsoft and Amazon. And next on the Taoiseach was Menlo Park.

When looking at where the Taoiseach went his list comprised the GAFAM - Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft.

Apple. https://twitter.com/DanMulhall/status/926232751925108738

Google https://twitter.com/eob/status/926220221278576641

Facebook https://twitter.com/theirishpost/status/926212058483392512

amazon. https://twitter.com/DanMulhall/status/925798675216863232  Sorry no picture

Microsoft https://twitter.com/bcollins241/status/925774687942066176

As one of the attendees to the Seattle event said I don't know why I am here, but must be because I am Irish. I think I snuck in because they saw my name and thought i was Irish.

Here is the O'Hara family crest on a coffee mug in my office.

;-). Here is my name in Japanese in the center of my Aikido black belt certificate with the way my ancestors wrote Ohara.

There was many more little things I learned from the event, but given I didn't disclose I would write about anything I don't have permission to say more than above. Maybe next time I go to a Taoiseach event I will attend under a media role and I have been granted permission and what is shared is "on the record."

The end of DCIM is coming

Chris Crosby writes an entertaining post making an observation on DCIM’s attempt to be a star. https://www.compassdatacenters.com/dcims-window-of-opportunity-appears-to-be-closing/  

I am copying Chris’s last paragraph. Please read the above post to get the context. 

”The world moves fast. Sometimes, things that look really good at first turn out to be not good enough. People loved silent movies, but they liked them better when they could hear the actors talk. While folks never have universally embraced DCIM, they liked the idea of it. It’s hard to say what the future holds for DCIM, Norma never gave up hope of returning to the silver screen. Of course, she wound up shooting William Holden in the back and, psychologically broken, she descended down a staircase to a gaggle of news cameras, declaring “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille”. I suspect that whatever DCIM’s ultimate fate is, it will be a little less dramatic.” 

What some of you may know is the number of people who would like to shoot their DCIM deployment and move on.   Or some of you will just let DCIM be turned into just another one of those tools that only a few use.

I have never been a big fan of DCIM. Why? Because whenever I would peak under the covers of the system I found it wasn’t meant to scale, or the automation wasn’t ready yet.  Or other issues that were best just left under the covers and hidden.

Why isn’t DCIM simply a use case of Industrial IOT platforms? 

If you made DCIM do all the things the sales team said it would, then there is no reason why it is not the Industrial IOT Platform.

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google openness to failure

Here is a video on Business Insider that explains the secret of these four. 

“Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at NYU Stern and the author of “The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google” shows how some of the biggest successes in tech have also had major public failures. He explains why failure is an important aspect of success. Following is a transcript of the video.

Scott Galloway: So there’s a famous chart that shows, it says, what people think success is and it has a straight upward line and then what success really is and it’s a jagged, multi-art adventure. And that is accurate.

Scott Galloway, professor of marketing NYU Stern and the author of “The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.””

— http://www.businessinsider.com/scott-galloway-amazon-facebook-apple-google-failure-success-tech-2017-10

What is kind of sad is Microsoft has many failures, but is not considered part of these 4. Why?

Structure Conference SF, Nov 14-15 2017

http://www.structureconf.com/ Is coming back to SF and so many of my ex-GigaOm friends are there and some of top data center executives

On the 2nd day is the following line up. 

9:30A Global Infrastructure for 2 Billion People

What can we say? Who in their right mind does not want to talk to the person in charge of the Facebooks infrastructure? When you have to deliver services to 2 Billion people and plan ahead for things like VR services and IoT, your job is to push vendor infrastructure to the edge of it’s envelope and when that does not go further you create your own solutions. Unique problems to Facebook? Not forever… one day these cutting edge problems unique to Facebook will be the problems of F500 companies as they catch up. So take notes. A regular contributor to the Structure community, this year Jay will talk about Facebook’s approach to connectivity and in-house designed data centers including some specifics on next-generation networking systems. Not to be missed. Speaker:
Jay Parikh
Head of Engineering and Infrastructure, FacebookModerated By:
Stacey Higginbotham, Editor, SKT Labs

9:50Google: In Search of The Perfect Infrastructure

Urs is in charge of one of the most spectacular and innovative cloud infrastructures on this planet. Urs has the reins on Google’s infrastructure and is deciding where it will go next. A company that through sheer need and brilliance of it’s team has defined and redefined cloud technologies as a competitive advantage since it’s first major funding round. There is much to be learned from Urs and in this fireside chat we look at how the past year is redefining Google’s infrastructure strategy for the coming years. Speaker:
Urs Hölzle
Senior VP, Technical Infrastructure & Google Fellow, GoogleModerated By:
Tom Krazit, Cloud Computing Editor, GeekWire

10:10Future Cloud Architectures: Microservices, Containers, Edge and "Lambda"

Adrian has worn many hats in his career. The most prominent was as CTO of Netflix, where it can be argued that he architected the 1st enterprise grade public cloud deployment that set the pattern and standard for future deployments. Now as the architect at the platform (AWS) on which Netflix’s infrastructure success was built, we sit him down to talk about how new trends in microservices, containers, edge computing and serverless “lambda” compute will affect enterprise deployments. Hear insights from his thinking and use them to shape your near term strategy. Speaker:
Adrian Cockcroft
VP of Cloud Architecture, Amazon Web ServicesModerated By:
Stacey Higginbotham, Editor, SKT Labs

If you read down this far, I have some discount passes for friends. Friends who have my e-mail can contact me and I’ll send a discount code to register.