I need to get a life...

I was curious so I signed up at Second Life. Learned to walk, talk and fly. Managed to stumble and tumble around for a while and then it hit me...like a ton of virtual bricks... allow me to elucidate...

05:00 Pager goes off - sent by my primary network management system - "Wake up call." Serves as my programmable alarm clock _and_ tests the paging system.

05:30ish...
First thing in the morning I usually check my PDA for my daily schedule and then wifi for my gMail. A quick read of the gNews followed by a check of my gReader feeds... kiss my lovely wife (the Saint) and then dropping teenagers off at highschool. Yes, I did remember my laptop, my cell phone, my PDA and my pager, thank you very much... "Make sure you e-mail me if your mother is going to pick you up after school."

07:00ish
Visual check of the Simplex Fire Alarm system on my way across the lobby, green is good. Check the snail mail. Checking for 'red-light' messages on printers, fax machines and copiers as I wind through the office. Through two locked doors to access my office and the network operations center.

Check the status of the network. Hobbit reporting which systems are on-line, which have system messages, which PCs have recently been rebooted. Hobbit also displays Server status - CPU loads, disk utilization, tcp connections and more. MRTG generates traffic graphs for key network connections. This big peak means the back-ups ran on schedule last night. This long sustained peak means that Sally is trying to send Halloween pictures to her sister again.

Fire up gReader on my main Slackware system (v.11 running KDE 3.5, tight) start in on the professional blogs...Trade Slicks (magazines) for the 21st century. Dock the laptop and fire it up... corporate e-mail - good the spam filter is working. Load the CCTV application - double check that all the cameras are on-line, good. Generate the Internet proxy report for last week and send a copy to the boss.

07:25 Pager goes off - sent by secondary network management system, "Morning staff meeting." Snag my first cup of office coffee then off to the morning briefing...

I need to get a life...yeah right, just what I need, a Second Life.

New Business Computers

Business computing is not evolving as fast as the technology of PCs.

Take Joe Clerical for instance. An evaluation of his PC usage shows that he spends 10-15 minutes per day on company related e-mail. He works with an Access based program (front end for an SQL database) for 4.75 hours and he is allowed to surf the Internet on his breaks (2 x 15 min.) and lunch half-hour.

Were it not for the advances Microsoft has made with Active Directory and Domain management Joe might still be using Windows NT on a Pentium I. It is very difficult from a business perspective to reconcile buying Joe a new PC complete with OS and a new Office suite when his job requirements have not changed in the past four plus years.

Perhaps Microsoft should take a long hard look at their B-to-B model. By forcing upgrades they are pushing business folks to the very edge of their patience. This could be particularly dangerous when the competition, albeit immature and scattered, cost so very little by comparison.