So off I went to sunny Las Vegas last week for IBM’s IMPACT 2009 conference and overall I have to say the conference was an unexpected lot of fun! Lindsay and I (she tagged along and enjoyed the rough life laying by the pool everyday) headed out to Vegas bright and early Monday morning and arrived just as things at the confernece started to pick up. The tone of the conference from the folks attending this year was different than in the past at other technical conferences for IBM or other companies I have attended. I know that a lot of times its a ton of information for most attendees to process and commit to memory so everyone gets the deer in the head lights look (or it might just be the drink specials in Vegas are too good to pass up and 8:30 presentations are a little too early!) as the sessions carry on. But this year was different. I really had an enjoyable time in my sesisons and others because of the complexity of questions being asked by folks in attendance. I felt it brought out a lot more understanding of the concepts I was presenting as well as drove others to ask questions as well to drive a lot more of the concepts from being words on a slide to something concrete in folks heads. Nothing beats a session that is interactive, challenging and ultimately helpful to those there and I feel that my sessions were that this year so like I said I had a really unexpected lot of fun in them.
Besides my sessions (2939 : IBM WebSphere® V7.0 Performance Update 2937 : IBM WebSphere® and Multicore Platforms: Performance, Scalability, Best Practices 2941 : The Top 10 IBM WebSphere® Application Server Performance Best Practices 2935 : Understanding and Tuning the Java Virtual Machine for IBM WebSphere® which saw me presenting something like 10000 times (ok it was 8 total) I spent a lot of time (breakfast, lunch, and dinner most nights) with WebSphere customers walking through scenarios and issues they were having. I found a ton of interest from folks on understanding exactly how to use the new hardware that has upped the game in performance here over the past few years from both a consolidation play as well as a flat out XTP play for specific segments of their business. Almost everyone is looking to save money from a licensing cost perspective, power perspective as well as the un thought about areas such as heating and cooling as well as floor space. This area has always been intersting to me so I am going to seed some topics on the blog here over the next few weeks out of questions I got asked at IMPACT to hopefully give some guidance to others out there to help answer what I am sure are similar quesitons. So stay tuned for those segments coming out hopefully twice a week or so. I also want to take the above presentations and break them down into a few 10 minute short snapshots in a youtube video and post them here as well so even if you weren’t able to attend IMPACT you can still get some of the benefit…or you could always just hire me. 
So what was cool about IMPACT 2009 besides $3 margaritas and KC and the Sunshine Band? I think that the buzz around the Cloud Burst appliance was excellent and really showed that a lot of folks are interested in building out corporate clouds for their dev, test, QA and possibly prod environments (lots of cool areas for performanc gains in this space but also lots of pitfalls), WebSphere eXtreme Scale also seeing healthy crowds for its sessions was great to see as well as its one hell of a solid product and can be very powerful for saving you money or building a big money app in the hands of the right development team, and lastly to circle back to my first point the customers of our product in attendance really made the conference. For all of you that stopped by to talk or attended my sessions thanks a ton and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Hopefully I’ll see you back at the Venetian for IMPACT 2010.
General, Work and Geeky Stuff
eXtreme Scale, IBM, IMPACT 2009, JVM, WebSphere
In an effort to get my web presence more consolidated (actually known as I can’t remember all my passwords any more) I am going to be moving my work blog over here as well as hopefully integrate my twitter feed into wordpress and just make sure I am consistent in tagging posts correctly so folks can find what they need.
As promised I’ll get some more thoughts up about the IBM IMPACT 2009 conference here today. I will also get a racing update done later tonight as I got a big weekend coming up at Blackhawk Farms for the first real race of the season for me. Should be tons of fun and can’t wait to get the car out actually turning wheels. I’ll twitter away over the weekend to annoy the hell out of people with my new toy but hey…you guys who know me already knew I would.
General, Home Life, Racing, Work and Geeky Stuff
Blackhawk Farms, IBM, Racing
Obviously working at any big company its impossible to know all the intentions of the overall business but normally at least you have some clue of whats doing to happen but in the case of IBM opening a 1,300 employee office in my old home town I was shocked. Of course my lovely sister in law Abby decided to call last night after I was sleeping to break the news for Lindsay and me and then this morning I got about four simultaneous emails with links to the thonline.com page showing it was indeed true. All I can say is absolutely awesome for my old home town and I really hope to see the city start to move into the 21st century by finally taking out the stop lights on 151 and more specifically Dodge street so people can actually get to the other end of the city in less time than it takes me to drive from Rochester to Minneapolis.
General, Work and Geeky Stuff
Dubuque, IBM
I ask myself that question every year about this time but yet extol the virtues of living in Minnesota during the summer months while my friends and coworkers in the South bake in the heat…but now its my time to bitch and moan so deal with it. Here is what my walkway has looked like since Saturday…yep full sheet of ice about 1/4 inch thick. Why am I posting this because today I ate it while taking Bella out and it peeved me off. So today I officially give you winter the middle finger. Bring back summer ASAP please.
The usual Minnesota walkway ice over
General
Bella, Minnesota, Winter
So Lindsay prodded me by making fun out of me for hours and then emailing me today making fun of me to tell everyone about my new work chair. I have been trying to figure out how in the hell to get some exercise sitting in the office on a daily basis pounding away code (or powerpoint sadly) and I stumbled across some pretty fit folks that were using a exercise ball as their office chair and I said screw it I know what I am getting. So I picked up my exercise ball and tried it out as a chair for the first time yesterday and damnit it’s a hell of a lot more physical than I imagined. I can pretty much sit on it for about 2 hours before my abs and lower back start to burn. I was skeptical that it would actually do anything but you really do subconsciously put in a good deal of physical effort to keep yourself balanced on the ball and in a normal seating position.
I picked up a 75cm Weider one since I am 6′3″ pumped it up to the max and she was beautiful. I’d recommend anyone out there try it cause hell if what I read on multiple health websites is true and you can really burn up to 200-300 calories more per day just sitting on it thats an easy way to lose weight.
That’s right guys I am not embarassed to say I sit on a ball at work instead of some ergonomic chair. 
General, Work and Geeky Stuff
Exercise Ball Chair, Fitness, Lindsay, Weight Loss
While I can’t say I don’t make them myself (and then subsequently break them) the one I find most humorous is the “I am going to get fit one”. Not because its not a great goal but because everyone starts at the same time in the first week of January and packs the gyms full. My wife and I had the joy of running into this early this morning first starting with having to park about a mile away from the Dan Abraham Healthy Living Center which makes for a lovely walk in the lovely 4 degree weather up here. Once inside it wasn’t horrible but I can only imagine its going to get worse. Would make a lot more sense it would seem to outfox the other New Years resolutioners, who’s will if its anything like mine with resolutions only lasts about a month, and actually start in February thus having a nice peaceful and quiet gym all to yourself with a close parking spot.
General
Fitness, New Years, Weight Loss
I finally decided to actually consolidate all my different blogs into one single space. This baby will be my main personal one and then I’ll link from here to my racing and also new tech blog middlewareworld.com. It’s amazing how you can sit around for months swearing your going to do something like this but never actually do it and it was easy as hell.
More to come shortly…
General