• Nonsense Awareness

    Jessica Joy Kerr in her blog post titled “Open your eyes to the nonsense” has a great anecdote from a friend, about the software development process at a utility company:

    “We make power, not sense.”

    But she goes on to make a wider point about evaluating the existing culture and processes of institutions.

    Culture doesn’t make sense, to anyone from outside. Culture is common sense, to anyone embedded in it. To understand and work with a large organization, let go of trying to make sense of it. Observe it and see what’s there. After that, logic might help in finding ways to work skillfully inside it, maybe even to change it.

    This applies to organizations of any size and in every industry, although the nonsense obviously increases in complexity as they scale, as all things do.

    Far too often people expect consultants or an "expert" to come in and tell them  how to make things perfect. In the past I'd only work with customers in a very narrow window, typically to implement one or maybe a handful of technologies. Best case I'd get repeat customers and learn more about their business requirements, and how they operate as an organization and how they make decisions. But more often than not I'd offer recommendations based on general experience and hope that there aren’t unforeseen consequences in the environment.

    I’m also more interested in seeing what everyone in the room has to say about their requirements before I offer what could be an otherwise ignorant or unconsidered opinion. It's not that I'm necessarly afraid of being wrong, but different people from different backgrounds in different departments with different goals often see things... differently.

    One of the things I particularly enjoy about my role as a VMware TAM, is that I get the runway to have these conversations and collect information with the customer, to advise over the long term as opposed to some two day "best practice review" and then run off to the next project.

    Once in a while, companies can adopt technologies in greenfield environments where you can take everything about the vendor’s best practice and apply them. But more often than not, you have to find a way of blending the two. The trick, I suppose, is knowing how much of the old ideas and processes are actually still required and why. You rarely get that in an hourlong conversation. In order to do that you need to understand more than just the business and the technical requirements.

    You have to understand the culture in which it will operate.

    Friday January 3, 2020
  • Thirty Eight K

    I've historically been pretty terrible at two things: negotiating salaries, and promoting to my own skills. As someone who freely admits the movie of his life story could very well be titled The Imposter Syndrome, when it came time to discuss with a recruiter or hiring manager what I was worth, I've been a slow learner.

    The question that prompted this blog post.

    In 2010, I worked for a private university making roughly $38k a year. Technically, it was $19.21 an hour, as my position wasn't considered elegible for salary, and they considered 38 hours a week to be full time. At this point in time I had a bit of experience running infrastructure/systems under my belt, but absolutely no concept of my true worth in terms of the industry. I had completed a project that gained a lot of notoriety and praise, case studies and awards, but I had no certifications and no college degree.

    I started at the university doing desktop support in 2006, and moved up to a "network analyst" position a year after. My primary responsibilies included managing the dorm network, campus anti-virus system, backups and creating the images that would be deployed to new desktop systems. We adopted VMware virtualization at ESX 3.0 shortly after my promotion so I quickly picked up storage and networking, then databases, messaging, and all the rest as we were a very small team supporting 4,000 users. We couldn't afford to specialize too much, and in education everything is discounted, including the people.

    Recently married, and thinking of having kids, I knew I could be doing better but had no solid concept of what I was worth. This was in the infancy of Twitter and the vCommunity, there wasn't the level of openness there is now around softskills, and pay. The only thing I knew is that wanted to specifically get a job with a software company based in the town where my wife and I had recently bought a home. One frustrating day at work I went to go check their careers page, found a listing for a System Administrator, and applied, then started a Staycation.

    One early morning the next week my phone rang, it was a recruiter with said company. I was sleeping in because this was two years before my first child was born and I was on vacation, not expecting any life altering phone calls. "Is this a good time to talk?" Well, not really, but half-asleep I started answering pre-screen interview questions, when the dreaded one finally came: “How much are you looking to make?” I'd only thought briefly about it to this point.

    “Fifty thousand a year.”

    Now when you’re making $38K, this is a big jump. My wife, who was working at the time, had a masters degree in accounting and a CPA license – and even she wasn’t even doing that well. What I was asking for seemed like a lot of money, in my mind.

    Over the next couple weeks I went through a few interviews. Finally one day as I was walking into lunch, the recruiter calls to offer me the job. The salary: $50,000.

    I didn’t negotiate at all. I wasn't sure that I was in a position to even try. I wanted to work for this company as much or more than they wanted to employ me and when you don’t know your value it’s hard to think you can convince anyone else of it. In the moment, I was pretty excited, but as I was eating lunch I started to also wonder if I should be worried by how quickly they came back with exactly my original number? Should I have asked for more? Could I have got more?

    What I didn’t realize at the time, is that I’d just helped sink the hopes of some folks in my new department looking for raises. What I’d asked for was indeed the going rate for admins there, perhaps even a little bit lower, so HR was happy to oblige my request. The other folks I'd soon sit next to had hoped it would take more to bring in someone with the relevant skill set, to justify them getting their own salaries adjusted. The topic of pay would come up frequently among members of my new team.

    The software company was privately held, but during my interview process they announced they were being acquired. I decided to accept the offer reguardless, and a few weeks into the new role we officially became a subsidiary of Lexmark. Yes, that Lexmark, the purveyors of those fine ink jet printers you remember so fondly from 1999.

    After a few months of mostly nothing changing, people from Lexington, Kentucky who were our peers started to show up and try to learn about our operations. After getting to know them a bit and discovering they're not all evil, we wanted to know pretty much one thing ... what their pay scale was.

    Folks in our roles there made around $85k. That was maybe the first time I truly realized how off balance my own valuation was.

    My previous boss had once encouraged me not to leave the university for anything less than $85k — more than double what I made at the time — and I honestly couldn’t tell if he was serious of full of shit. My pay inequity there had nothing to do with him, and everything to do with the nature of the university. If I’d pressed for more money there, I might have got some more, but nothing close to that number. Everyone there was (and probably still is) grossly underpaid.

    Around this time our manager at the software company decided to leave, and one by one those of us on our team started getting interviews and offers to join him. By this point the pretense of not discussing salary has dropped between us, and so when the first offer letter anyone received came in we all reviewed it. To our surprise and excitement, this kicked off a bidding war between the two companies, with our current employer being the winner. My team lead got the next offer though, $80k with a $5k bump after certification. He was out.

    Then came my turn, and after the interviews, the hiring manager calls to give me an offer of ... $67k.

    Wait, what? This couldn't be right, why was I getting so much less? My wife straight up didn’t want me to take it, and I was about 50/50, but thought "well if the last guy went into a bidding war, now is my chance to use this as leverage to get my own counter offer." I didn't want to leave, so much as I just wanted what was starting to seem like a fair deal.

    Apparently HR decided that I wasn’t worth it, there would be no counter offer. In hindsight there's really not a reason to blame them. I'd only been there a year and didn't do a lot of highlight myself or make it seem like I was so valuable that there was a cost associated with me leaving. They got me for the price they did not more than 12 months earlier, why would I be worth so much more now, just because I realized it? And in reality, I couldn't even get the market to pay it.

    So, I left, for just a slightly larger bump than I got to come there.

    The company I landed at did end up promoting me and steadily providing healthy salary increases over the six years I was there. I would finally hit the magic $85k target, in 2013.

    Thursday January 2, 2020
  • Resolution Delusion

    I'm not one for making new years resolutions. They always get broken, and then you're disappointed in yourself. However, Brent Simmons posted something on Inessential which I think is a good goal for anyone this year:

    My resolution is to try harder to get angry only when it’s actually worth it. I can be angry at cruelty, angry at the forces destroying democracy for their own corrupt power, angry at the malevolences driving our climate crisis. ... But I need to not get angry just because Instruments won’t profile my app, or I get a robocall, or someone on Twitter completely missed the point of something I wrote.

    If I did have a resolution, it would be this coupled with the idea of acting with intentionality. Beyond any specific philosophical meaning to that word, I would use it to mean acting with intention, moving with a purpose, being present in the moment, and focusing in getting things done.

    Maybe I do have a resolution.

    Wednesday January 1, 2020
  • Feeling Helpless

    For a while, what transpired in the aftermath of that night, left me feeling betrayed by some people that I thought I could trust, and feeling helpless. Like so many times in life before, I was told by those who had the power to stop what was going on, that there was nothing they were willing to do, that this was my problem, and that I was to blame. My pain was always my fault. It’s never the responsibility of the people who were inflicting it.

    Kernel Panic

    I sat there motionless, unable to speak.

    I could have said something, anything, but I didn’t know what to say. It was the mental equivalent to getting the wind knocked out of me. Instead, I just sat there and focused all my attention at the water bottle sitting in front of me.

    It was a dimly lit room, where I sat at the end of a long narrow conference room table, with the window behind me and the door at the opposite end of the room. To my left was my direct manager, who almost six years prior had been the one to call and offer me the job, but less than a month before this day had told me that she didn’t believe me. “Delete your account,” was her advice.

    On my right was the human resources director, who’d been in that role the entire time I had worked there, and who had pleasantly reminded me shortly before the meeting, that “sometimes life is hard.” Towards the end of the table was the CEO, who’d just been hired from outside the firm at the end of the previous year.

    “If you can’t handle working here, you have technical skills that you can take somewhere else.”

    Those were the words from a man I barely knew, but up until that point seemed like he would have been a force for change in an organization that desperately needed it, words that left me hollowed-out inside. I like to think he didn’t mean it to be a cruel statement, but in that moment it sucked the life out of me.

    Six years of service ignored, my state of mind, ignored.

    The meeting on this Monday afternoon had started with an apology, from me. Hours before the start of the weekend, in a trance fueled by a dump of adrenaline, I’d called and left my manager a voicemail that I would come to regret, where I demanded that the company help me, but said the magic words that would suddenly make me a threat. Now, here we were three days later, sitting in silence.

    Other words were said, but I don’t remember the details. I asked to leave the room, went into the stairwell of our building, and broke down. I stumbled out of the building and out to the van where my wife was had been waiting with our children in the car. The next time I’d ever set foot in that office would be the last time.

    It was in the front seat that the rage escaped my body; I screamed and repeatedly punched the dashboard of the vehicle. My wife pulled the car out of the parking lost and drove me to my already scheduled doctor’s appointment.

    My blood pressure baseline is generally 118/79; that afternoon, the reading was 130/92.

    Tuesday May 28, 2019
  • Gigacast Appearance

    I was recently a guest on Gigacast, along with Cody de Cody De Arkland and Al Rasheed, to discuss mental health and my recent Kernel Panic post.

    You can watch it on YouTube in the video embedded below, or listen on the go in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Castro, or wherever else fine podcasts are found.

    Wednesday May 8, 2019
  • Kernel Panic

    I’ve been thinking for over two years about how to talk about this, how to talk about the day I couldn’t process anymore. The day where my bullshit buffers overflowed. The day of my internal kernel panic. When starved for resources, my brain finally threw up a PSOD, and quit.

    vmstan 1.0 build 11091983  
    PCPU 0 locked up. Failed to ack.  
    frame=4C lbs=E1 age=21  
    VMK uptime: 9:15:33:45.014  
    No coredump target configured
    

    If there were some predictive analytics running on me back then, it would have been evident that this was coming for a long time. Unbeknownst to anyone else, I knew that I couldn’t keep up and that I couldn’t go on forever in my degraded state. The warning signs were all there, but no one was reading the logs.

    The root cause analysis would tell you: lousy code embedded on possibly flawed hardware. No permanent fix, but mitigations are available.

    I have depression.

    My crash that day was in part because I was pretending there wasn’t a problem. For years I would think to myself “I should go to a therapist,” but you’d never catch me say the words out loud, to anyone. It was the result of repressing emotions for years, the consequence of not wanting to admit to anyone else that I could have a problem.

    I was an anxious child. Even as far back as eight years old, I remember spending a lot of time in a state of worry. Thinking about if my family had enough money or fearing what would happen at school. It was around this time that I started to get bullied — teased continuously about how skinny I was, or about how I didn’t have an issue hanging out with girls on the playground. I had a “friend” who lived up the street, who’d do things like sucker-punch me in the stomach. I was, from an early age, an attractive target for people who wanted to make themselves feel better at my expense.

    Spock

    Getting to junior high school, around age 12, was a chance to reset. While the peer bullies didn’t completely disappear, I found a group of like-minded friends with a common interest. I immediately got involved with our school’s nascent computer club, and we did at the time what seemed crazy for a bunch of 12-year-olds in 1996 — we made a website for our school that won a grant from Microsoft for $20,000.

    The grant enabled our club to purchase a 16-system Windows NT lab for our school. The members of the club built and ran the lab, and for nearly three years this was the real focus of my school day. The librarians would pull me out of class anytime there was an issue, of which there were many.

    I was 13 and trying to manage NT security policies without any training, without Google to fall back on. What could go wrong?

    My final year there, the advisors put an incredible amount of stress on me to keep the lab running. One of them was working on getting more technology-related grants for the school and district. They had to show off our lab, my lab, as a way they were using the new technology to benefit the educational process in the school. Their efforts were complicated when the lab didn’t work.

    If I couldn’t do the job, they were going to let someone else handle it, or worse, give it to the school district IT department to manage. I took an immense amount of personal pride in this project, and while in hindsight I shouldn’t have been the only one responsible, at the time I felt a lot of ownership for it.

    It all came to a head when I walked into a club meeting, to a sign posted by the adult sponsor that said: “fix the lab, or else.” — In front of the entire club I went on an angry tirade, but not in front of the sponsors who were, in that moment, hiding somewhere far away. Whatever the issues with the lab were, whatever their reasoning, it didn’t necessitate the behavior that was targeted at me by an adult. The damage to my psyche was there. Soon after my mother finally found out what was going on, and went all Momma Grizzly on them, they backed off.

    I’d had my first moment of IT burnout.

    I spent my high school years in the jazz and marching bands. I became the editor of my high school newspaper. Instead of the club, I’d organize LAN parties for my friends, and I had a side project that involved running a dedicated server for web hosting, with around 30 clients.

    After working in retail while sporadically attending college, I landed my first real IT role working as a network analyst for a private university. I had supportive management who in hindsight let me do all kinds of crazy things. We didn’t have the money to hire professional services, so we implemented our own ESX clusters in 2007. Storage, backups, security, data center networking, campus wireless, we did it all.

    I got to touch everything in the environment, and sometimes do things that would blow it up.

    Kirk

    It was there that I would spearhead a virtual desktop project that ended up gaining notoriety, with case studies and awards. I was busy but incredibly proud of the work that I was doing. I found my job stressful but very satisfying. There were some personalities, like any place, but it was fulfilling. When I have dreams about going back to work at an old employer, this is the place. However, the pay was lacking and I was newly married and planning on starting a family.

    In 2010, I started working for a software company which at the time was “the company” to work for in the area … and I was pretty miserable for the first few months.

    In almost every way, the new company was a great place to be with more money and better benefits. It was a goal of mine to work for them for a long time. I intentionally bought my first house in proximity to their building and within a year had a job there as a systems administrator. The company had a lot of great people working for them, and it was a very relaxed workplace with lots of new technology coming in the door every month. We even had a regulation-sized dodgeball court down the hall from the datacenter. There was a slide between floors. And yet, I was uncomfortable.

    As strange as this sounds, I missed my VDI environment.

    Eventually, I started finding fulfillment in the new projects that I was assigned. I needed to show my new coworkers that I was worthy of sitting alongside them. I’m probably always harder on myself than others are of me, in this respect.

    Very quickly, I started building some great relationships with my coworkers there, but my time in the role would be short-lived. The company was acquired, and it became apparent that the new owners were not interested in being in the IT business. Outsourcing firms did the hands-on administration in their corporate environment, and as a result, all our jobs were now in jeopardy.

    Nothing bonds a small group of coworkers together like knowing upper management is out to get you. My direct manager did his best to shield us from this, and to set us up in positions that wouldn’t be as impacted, but he could only do so much and in the end, for his sanity, left to take an architecture role with a VAR. He was a big part of that team being successful, and we all wanted to follow him, and continue working with each other, so by the end of 2011, one-by-one we all got engineering roles at the same VAR.

    “Value Added Reseller”

    Now, if you’ve never worked for a VAR, I would suggest listening to the Datanauts podcast from April of last year, to help get an understanding of what VAR-life is. Being a post-sales engineer, you’re an essential part of the “value” the customer is purchasing. Initially, it took a lot of work to adjust to this life. At first, I thought it was because I missed having ownership of my infrastructure. For the first couple of years before walking into a client I’d never dealt with before, I’d sit in my car in a state of severe anxiety. Mostly afraid that customer would be the one to unmask me as a massive fraud. After repeatedly not being discovered, I decided my secret was safe.

    Batman

    But in hindsight I was never happy. I might have acted that way to customers and coworkers that I interacted with on projects, but inside there was something else growing.

    I never felt like I belonged as an employee of the company. Other than the people I’d come into the job with from the previous employer, in many ways I felt out of place among my coworkers. I worked there, but I didn’t feel like I belonged there. Not to say I despised every one I worked with, far from it. I was friendly with most everyone I worked with and spent my 4 o’clock hour on the phone daily with a couple of them to commiserate on the events of the day. But, not to dwell on the details, sometimes standards for professionalism and etiquette were not always in lock step with the rest of the organization.

    After a few years of toiling through grunt work, there were a few key technologies that I had worked myself up to “expert” status on, so customers, sales teams, and project managers would want me to work those implementations regardless of where in the midwest they were located. I started traveling too much, but in some ways, it was the intended result of my goal to become so relied on that I was the best or only choice, for my job security. So, I didn’t complain.

    I rarely complained to management about anything there; I was more adept at just doing the work. I was making pretty good money and concerned that I couldn’t do better anywhere else, but most of all, I was subject to a restrictive non-compete agreement. I was already getting a lot of flak from my family for changing jobs as often as I did, despite knowing that it was pretty standard for people in this industry.

    My father, in contrast, has had two jobs in 40 years, and if he wasn’t laid off from the first in the early 1990s, he might still be there.

    After three years, I thought about leaving. After four, I looked around but got turned down in the final round for what at the time would have been my “dream job” — Even after a few months from being turned down, when that company got acquired, and it was apparent that the “dream” would have been a nightmare, I still felt resentment. I’d never been turned down after making it through that many interviews, and I didn’t want to do it again. So, I turned down multiple opportunities to interview for positions with VMware shortly after that.

    My customers were continually satisfied with my work, and I enjoyed the challenges presented in doing it. My boss put me in for substantial raises and bonuses each year, and so I collected an ever-increasing paycheck. I kept thinking it’d all get better soon. Despite all that, while I was still miserable, I stayed silent.

    I thrived in darkness.

    Meanwhile, the state of the world seems to be mirroring the darkness that I was feeling inside. By the fall of 2016, I’m a secretly broken person floating from day to day, hoping I’d wake up and eventually all the crap inside will go away and feel “normal” again … but it never does; it only gets worse. I’m now spending too much time on social media being angry at everything, and like swimming in the pink slime in Ghostbusters, I’m just feeding off the negative energy of everyone else.

    Ghostbusters

    I began feeling paranoid about the world around me. It would start the moment that I woke up in the morning, and last until the night came as I sat in my children’s bedrooms, worried that someone was going to break into the house, and take them away. I always thought about all the terrible things that could happen to my family or me. I’d think about the danger lurking behind every corner, about all the terrible people in the world. When I would be out of town for work, as I was frequently, I’d be mostly unable to sleep.

    I’m thankful that I’ve never really had much of a taste for alcohol, but I’d eat terrible meals while traveling and continue to gain weight. My back hurt and I’d have headaches all the time, something that I’ve had to deal with ever since I was a teenager.

    But of course, I told this to no one. I’d have my yearly physical and during the mental health screening, lie-lie-lie through the whole thing. I knew what the doctor wanted to hear because I’d been telling the same lies my entire life. If the doctor couldn’t find it, I wasn’t going to volunteer the information.

    It’s not as if I thought that by being honest in my answers, they’d send me away to an asylum. It was that everyone would discover my weakness. It was something else that someone could direct against me, or maybe worse when everyone else found out they’d feel sorry for me: “Poor Michael, he’s not tough enough.”

    I’d be in the system as having a problem. It didn’t matter that these doctors were the same people who would prescribe me antibiotics for my chronic sinus infections, and that never seemed to bother me — now we’re talking about being marked as having a mental health issue.

    Then at age 33, I was bullied, again.

    I knew it was going to be a problem almost as soon as it started, and I remember the moment it began. Sitting in a Zaxby’s restaurant in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, just checking Twitter — as I all too frequently do — I’d just flown in on a Sunday afternoon for a week-long project. I’d never been to Zaxby’s before, so I was looking forward to trying something new, but instead, this was the lunch when everything went from bad to awful. Now the harassment started, and later that night is when my Twitter impersonator first appeared.

    When you’re worried about people in the world coming after you, it doesn’t help matters when they do.

    I fought back the harassment by effectively doing nothing, hoping they’d give up by not getting a reaction out of me, but there it was every time I’d open Twitter. I’d see some shitty comment about me or something about my wife. Maybe something about the things that I was passionate about or someone from the community being targeted, with my name and likeness. When I thought it would help, I’d play whack-a-mole with Twitter to get accounts closed for impersonation or abuse, but they’d just come back.

    The harassment went on for a little over a month, and then finally, around 3 pm on a Friday, I’d come home from a particularly complicated customer site and opened Twitter to find another shitty comment. Another fucking tweet. At that moment, I crashed.

    Angry

    I make analogies to a server crashing, because in hindsight that’s what felt like was happening. I couldn’t think, I just started crying, and I nearly threw up. My stomach had been in knots for weeks up to this point, but it felt like everything was coming undone. My body was still moving, but for some time I wasn’t in control. I remember very clearly everything that day leading up to that moment, but very little during the event. What wasn’t de-staged from the cache when the controller died, is gone.

    I didn’t have to tell my wife. It was impossible for her not to know; she was there when the crash happened and immediately went into action to get me help. I knew something like this was coming, so I’d been trying to reach out to a therapist in the days prior, but could never get our schedules synchronized. By chance, the therapist called me that afternoon in the middle of my panic, and I let it all go to her over the phone, having never met with her previously. She could tell just by the tone of my voice, my breathing, that I needed immediate care. Off to the emergency room, I went.

    For the first night in a long while, I felt a little better.

    I got sent home with a temporary prescription for Xanax, and a directive to talk to my doctor. The strange thing is that while I felt better because I finally let my secret out, I spent the weekend an absolute wreck. The flood gates of emotion had opened, and I had a backlog of questions to address. I also knew that there was no going back and that I would be forced to tackle even more issues and make some significant changes in my life.

    For a while, what transpired in the aftermath of that night, left me feeling betrayed by some people that I thought I could trust, and feeling helpless. Like so many times in life before, I was told by those who had the power to stop what was going on, that there was nothing they were willing to do, that this was my problem, and that I was to blame. My pain was always my fault. It’s never the responsibility of the people who were inflicting it.

    I don’t know what exactly motivates people to be so cruel to others. It’s unfortunate, but in the end, we are all flawed individuals. Even the bullies are coping. It doesn’t matter if they’re a kid in school or adults who act like children. It could be a teacher who is supposed to be looking out for the kids, and not their self-serving interests. I might cope with my issues by becoming withdrawn from others. They might deal by lashing out, by letting the demons inside them come out and feed the beast hiding in others.

    I quickly began looking for a new job, far away from the life I was leading. No travel. Regular hours. I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to stay in the same realm of IT. These events are why I spent a year at a customer in a role that I was utterly dispassionate about; it was a place to hide and regroup. Even though I was physically in a different situation, I was still a mess of a human being inside. If you worked with me there, you don’t even know the real me. It was a period of my life where I’m not even sure I knew who the real me was. I’d wonder that every day, and it still crosses my mind. I told almost no one there about what had happened — no one on my team, or my boss. Truthfully, I was ashamed.

    My brain needed to heal.

    I now take medication for something I acknowledge is both an internal and an environmental condition. Every one of us is a collection of biology and experiences that got us to this point in our lives. Great athletes can be physically superior to others, but neglect the gray-matter between their ears, too.

    Since that fateful day:

    • I have gone to therapy to discuss my issues with bullies, and other factors that contribute to my anxiety and depression.
    • I try to listen to my body and recognize both the internal and the external factors that get me worked up, and avoid them to get centered and calm my brain.
    • I have more routines that help me regulate how I keep myself organized.
    • When I go to the doctor, I tell her what is wrong.

    The awareness that I have now about my self makes this much more manageable. But this is a daily, sometimes hourly, practice. Even in doing all of these things though, this isn’t something you just beat; you can have things under control and still have struggles.

    Even in moments of achievement, I can be prone to feeling depressed. I don’t have to have a bully or be in a bad situation. Brains are funny like that. When VMware hired me in April of last year, I felt as if I’d reached a highpoint in my career and celebrated the realization of a decade long goal. Almost instantly after signing my offer, I started to worry.

    Imposter syndrome began to kick in.

    What would happen to me if this didn’t go well? How soon would it be before everyone I’d respected up to this point found out that I was a massive fraud? Where would I work, what would I do, how would I feed my family!? I was having heartburn, trouble sleeping, and always worried that it would all come crashing down. The dark side of my brain was back, trying to sabotage me again.

    Hulk

    But you know what helped this? Doing the work, having a positive and supportive management team, but mostly just talking to my teammates and others about their struggles. To quit being afraid of “getting caught” and freely admit what I know and what I don’t. Realizing that this is the most fabulous job I’ve ever had, in the company of some of the smartest and kindest people I’ve ever met. A year later I wake up and get dressed and wonder how this happened. Sharing my thoughts, and opening up to let them do the same. We all had the same fears. We were not alone.

    Every single person you meet is dealing with their devil inside. You don’t have to be to the point where you’re contemplating the end of your life. Your best friend can appear to you to have things rightly figured out, yet be suffering in total silence, never showing any outward sign of the struggles they’re going through. Nothing can be “wrong,” and yet they can be in pain. The jerk in line at the coffee shop may always be a jerk, or you possibly caught them on a bad day. Your coworker can be fighting to keep his kids while his ex-wife tries to move them across the country, and every extra hour at work is just a distraction to keep his mind off the fight.

    This story has sat in my drafts folder for over a year. What started as a rambling journal that was never planned to see the light of day, has been evolving as I get more perspective on my recovery from that life. As I’ve contemplated my journey, I noticed something else happening. People I knew and respected were now becoming vocal about their similar issues. Whereas previously I felt as if I was the only one, I now see where I am one of many.

    Eric Lee, who I’d known both as a co-worker, client and community leader for many years, posted his story. The parallels were striking, especially in the overlap of where we’d worked and what we’d done in our careers. The next day I took him out to lunch and shared my story. I would watch his presentations about what he calls “IT Burnout” at VMUG and other settings. I’d contemplate how I needed to tell my story, but I was still scared.

    Madmen

    More and more people would start to tell their stories, and I’d privately share mine with more people. Aaron Buley started sharing his struggles on his YouTube channel. He posted a video called “All Humans Struggle – Depression” which calls it for what it is. Cody De Arkland talks about carrying baggage, Erik Shanks talks about the dark side of stress, and Al Rasheed quoted Paul Simon. Even the CTO of Citrix has a story to tell.

    I call them out as examples from the Greater Virtualization Community, but it’s not just them. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has talked about his struggles. Jon “Mad Man” Hamm has as well. Here are two people who play tough guys on TV, yet struggle in real life. We see these people and realize they’re actors playing a part, but it’s not far off from the persona that we share with the public and the one inside of each of us.

    Then there are “real people” like Jason Kander. Someone who has served in Missouri state office then ran for the U.S. Senate and later led a nationwide voting rights organization. He was in the process of running for mayor of Kansas City when he abruptly brought his campaign to a halt to declare that, he too, was broken — struggling with depression as a result of PTSD from his time as an Army intelligence officer in Afghanistan.

    It is in those moments that I remember; we all have struggles.

    And I’m done being quiet about mine.

    Picard

    ♥️

    Friday April 19, 2019
  • Excess Battery

    I recently picked up an iPhone XS Smart Battery Case, for my iPhone X. I’ve previously owned the 6S battery case for my iPhone 6, and the iPhone 7 case. Let me first say that even though Apple has designed the case for the XS, it worked on the X running iOS 12.2.2 without any effort.

    MRXK2_AV3_GEO_US

    The two cosmetic issues of not being designed specifically for the X is that because the camera housing on the XS is slightly taller than the X, the cutout on the back of the case leaves a little extra space that wouldn’t be seen when using an XS. This is … fine, I know it’s there, but unless you make a habit of putting your camera six inches away from your target, no one else would ever see it.

    The other issue is that the speaker grills on the XS are not symmetrical, but it is on the X, so the XS case doesn’t have cutouts that match that at the bottom. However, from what I understand, the additional holes on the X grill serve no purpose. They’re just there for aesthetics, so there is no loss of functionality. On the XS there is an antenna line on the exterior of the case, so Apple did away with the faux-holes entirely.

    Comparing the new case to previous iterations, they’re functionally very similar. Some reviews have mentioned that there is no passive antenna array on the new cases, as there was with the 6S and 7 version. I did not rip the silicone off to verify this. According to Rene Riche, the XS case runs at a higher voltage that yields a total of 10.1 Wh of energy compared to 7.13 Wh for the iPhone 6/6s case and 8.98 Wh for the iPhone 7 case. Otherwise, it features the same Lightning pass-through that allows you to charge both the phone and the case, or hook up to a car stereo or iTunes without any issues. When using a “fast charging” setup such as an 18W charging adapter and USB-C to Lightning cable, the case and phone are able to leverage the additional power delivery.

    MN012_AV1_SILVER

    I have mixed feelings about the new design of the bottom of the case, compared to previous battery cases. I really like that there isn’t a chin that extends off the phone anymore, although on the previous designs this provided a channel to redirect the sound to the front of the phone, which was great for watching videos and not having to cup the end of the phone with your hand to “boost” the sound towards your head. The more obvious solution to this is use headphones and not expose your audio with the world like an animal, but sometimes you just want to share.

    The chin on previous versions houses the charging circuitry and controller for the battery. The lack of chin means these electronics have relocated to the back of the case. I think the new design looks better than just having a straight up hump in the middle of the case, although it means it’s not as easy to hold one-handed from the bottom. The hump in previous designs gave you a place to rest your pinky. (Yes, I do the pinky support the bottom grip thing which I’m sure is bad for my hand.) It’s harder for me to single hand type with the case on, but that could be like any form factor change, requiring some time to adapt.

    Back in my day, the 4″ iPhone 5 felt “huge,” and now we have people palming the iPhone XS Max like it’s no big deal.

    Usually, I’m caseless or use the Apple Leather Case which doesn’t have any coverage of the bottom of the phone. Because of this, I’m aggressive with my swipe gestures up from the bottom of the phone, but that is annoying with the addition of a case lip. If I actively adjust my swipe it works and doesn’t catch, so I have to train myself to do that.

    MTET2_AV2_GEO_US

    Unlike previous iterations of the Smart Battery Case, this one has Qi charging integrated, and it is fantastic. I have about nine Qi chargers in my house now, so if Qi weren’t a supported option, I wouldn’t have even bothered to test the case. The Qi charging target seems smaller for the battery case than on the X without the case. I’ve become pretty accustomed to throwing my phone on a charger and getting it placed where it would juice up without much effort.

    Many times I placed the case’d phone on a wireless charger it required adjustment to get it in the exact right spot. The Qi target is at the top of the battery bulge, so it ends up being the middle of the phone, but based on the layout one could expect it to be in the middle of the bulge.

    The case came out of the box with a minimal charge, and I didn’t focus on giving a dedicated charge to the case that day (it can be charged wired or wireless, independent of the phone) so I think it was at around 7% when I went to bed. When I woke up 7 hours later, the phone and case were at 100% charge on both. After a morning banging away on it, I was at 87% on the case, 100% on the phone. As for heat while charging or in usage, I’ve not noticed anything hotter than I would on a naked phone.

    IMG_2827

    One thing I would like to see is some more “Smart” around when the battery is engaged in the iOS battery status. Using the case means always being at 100% for the phone until the case is depleted, and it would be nice to see some statistics around the charge status of the case in this view.

    One other concern: I did perceive a minor drop in signal strength when using the phone, for both LTE and Wi-fi. Putting the phone in Field Test Mode, I was able to see changes to “RSRP” and “SINR” values on cellular, with the case on and off in nearly identical conditions. I didn’t do this testing extensively or average out across different sites and times. I also didn’t test this with an XS, so while it is possible this is due to the case not being designed for the X, it could also just be expected for this case. I’m also not a wireless engineer, so I don’t truly understand what all the values mean and what all the variables are.

    Wi-fi signal indicators also could be decreased when the case was on, in a corporate environment. I did not test throughput or any other values. I don’t want to speculate or say that my results are typical, so I’ll let someone who understands this more dig into it.

    Overall, I think it’s a solid product, but it’s not for me. Sadly this is the same conclusion that I’ve come with previous iterations. I just don’t like a lot of extra bulk on my phone. My wife has gotten way more mileage out of me owning those previous case iterations than I ever did, using them 24/7 for many months during the release cycles. The extra battery helps offset a Facebook app that sucks it up like a Dyson does dirt on my floor. However she recently switched to an iPhone XR, and the battery life has been pretty stellar, to where the case may not be necessary.

    With the aforementioned abundance of Qi chargers in my home, a general dislike of all iPhone cases, and an Anker battery with 72.36 Wh, featuring USB-C PD in my daily bag, I don’t think it’s worth it for me to have the extra bulk on the phone all the time.

    Tuesday January 22, 2019
  • Revisting ​​Essential

    Back in July 2017, I wrote about my 10 essential iOS applications. I thought now that we’re reaching the end of 2018, it might be a good time to revisit that list.

    As I mentioned at the time:

    I find it helpful to mix things up from time to time, even going as far as doing a reset of my app icon layouts periodically to reshuffle the deck chairs and throw out any old cruft hiding in corners. One of my favorite activities is to delete apps that don’t get used anymore, or used enough to take up my attention. This time I took the approach of installing only the apps that I know I need on a daily basis, and then filling in the rest as the need for them arise.

    A few weeks ago, I took a similar approach but this time with a far more aggressive regimen. I uninstalled nearly every third-party application from my phone. Then I started to analyze the feature/function of every app and determine if the app itself provided something more than just a wrapper around an already functional mobile website.

    I find that having fewer things installed on my devices brings me some joy.

    Shopping, banking, social media, travel, news, food, weather, shipping. Almost app categories were fair game. About the only group that was mostly safe were apps that controlled the various smart devices around my house: Nest, Hue, eero, Rachio, Lutron, myQ, etc.

    From there, it was about finding the apps that were the truly essential apps in my workflow:

    • I recently switched to Outlook as my primary email/calendar application. This means I can displace the stock Mail and Calendar apps, as well as remove Fantastical, which was on my 2017 list. Currently, though, I’ve been experimenting with having only my work email in Outlook, and my personal email in the stock app, just for workload isolation. I can’t decide if there is more of less mental friction in keeping them together or keeping them separated.
    • I also have been using Microsoft To-Do as a reminders replacement, mostly because of the Tasks integrations with Outlook on Mac. (However, I’ve been bad recently *at actually doing *the things in here.) I’ve been comingling work and personal tasks in here. This has replaced Things for the time being.
    • 1Password is simply irreplaceable. You’ll pry it from my cold, dead hands.
    • Then there is Overcast for podcasts. I’ve experimented with alternatives in the last few months from the stock Podcasts app, Pocket Casts, and Castro, and always come home to Overcast for the basic reason that podcasts just sound better in there.
    • And of course, Tweetbot for Twitter. I just can’t quit you.
    • Shortcuts has replaced Workflow after Apple bought them and built much of it into iOS 12.
    • I keep the ads and other trackers away in Safari with Better.
    • I have Parcel setup to automatically track Amazon, FedEx, UPS, and USPS shipments, of which there are many this time of year. (Seriously, the entrance of my house looks like a loading dock right now.)
    • Zoom is a requirement for work.
    • As is Slack.
    • I’d be locked out of both of those without my RSA soft-token.
    • And I love the ability to upload receipts with Concur.
    • While authenticating through Workspace One.
    • AT&T Call Protect has become my new junk filter for phone calls. This replaced Nomorobo from the 2017 list, which is still a fantastic app, but AT&T’s app is network integrated.
    • Finally, despite my new love for Nespresso, I still have a requirement for Starbucks on the go and like to have my order ready as I walk in the door.

    From there I started a review with the assumption that I could avoid anything else. Despite quitting Facebook a couple years ago, I’m still on Instagram for close friends and family. I tried for weeks to limit myself to using the web app, in an effort to avoid another app install, but also having it try to entice me to spend more time in it with a dedicated shortcut on my home screen. After trying to limit my usage, I gave in and reinstalled it because it was just too damn hard not to.

    I had a similar experience with LinkedIn. The issue there was more around the usability of the website on a mobile device. It was pretty terrible. I’d like to keep this uninstalled but I occasionally end up dropping it back on and then off again. I’ve uninstalled it again recently.

    My primary bank has mobile check deposit, and I have family members who for some reason continue to write me checks despite showing the multitude of better ways to transfer money around. So it was a given for reinstall because the only thing worse than writing a check is having to physically go into a bank. So 2007.

    I had Microsoft OneDrive installed for accessing work files from my phone, but realized I never used it outside of the native integration of the Outlook app. So, I deleted it. This may return if I find some other reason I was using it.

    Target came back, despite my original wipe of shopping applications because of its store card being integrated with the app. The only thing I like more than being able to delete an application from my phone is taking a physical card out of my wallet.

    IMG_2276

    A few other apps that were considered essential in 2017, I’ve since abandoned. Carrot Weather is great, and probably one of the best third-party weather apps on iOS, but I find the stock app to be good enough most of the time. Pcalc is another great app, but I don’t find myself needing to calculate anything so complicated at the stock app can’t get the job done. Cloak was on the list last time and has since been sold and rebranded as encrypt.me. Like many things that get sold, it just doesn’t feel like it has the same level of love and care as the original owners, and so it’s been cut.

    Tuesday December 11, 2018
  • About

    My name is Michael Stanclift 👨‍💻 I work for VMware 🐢 I live in Kansas 🌻 I'm married to Sadie 🦸‍♀️ Together we have three boys and one daughter 👣

    I have been a Star Trek fan my entire life 🖖

    I’m not a perfect person there's many things I wish I didn’t do. But I’ll continue learning. I never meant to reboot that host for you.

    I'm currently the Administrator of the Mastodon instance vmst·io. You can find me there as @vmstan.

    I am no longer active on the Birdsite.

    Personal Technology

    The first computer I ever used was an Apple IIe. The first computer I ever owned was an IBM PS/2. I spent the late 90s to 2000s all in on Microsoft, but beginning with the release of the iPhone 3G, I've swung back into the orbit of the fruit company. I try to have mostly Apple products at my disposal for my daily computing needs.

    Computer

    • Apple MacBook Pro i9 (2019) in Space Gray (provided by VMware)
    • LG UltraFine 24" 4K Thunderbolt 3 Display (24MD4KL)
    • Keychron K3 with Blue Optical Switches
    • Apple Magic Trackpad in White
    • Apple Magic Mouse 2 in Black (and White, for the road)
    • Beats Studio 3 in Midnight Blue
    • Logi Brio 4K Webcam & Litra Glow

    Phone

    • Apple iPhone 14 Pro in Space Black
    • Apple AirPods 3 with Wireless Charging Case
    • Apple Watch 5 (44 mm) in Space Gray Stainless Steel with LTE
    • Apple MagSafe Battery Pack

    Tablet

    • Apple iPad Pro 11" (2019) in Space Gray
    • Apple Smart Keyboard Folio
    • Apple Pencil 2

    I'm on a quest to move everything to USB-C or Lightning connectors across everything I own.

    Corporate Overlords

    I’m currently a Technical Account Manager for VMware focused on healthcare clients. What exactly does a TAM do? Basically whatever my customer needs me to do. I’m part-advocate, part-consultant, part-analyst, and part-therapist. It’s the best job I’ve ever had.

    Please note, all opinions expressed on this blog or any of my other social media are mine, and may not reflect theirs.

    Prior to VMware, I spent a year working as an Integration Engineer for a financial services and healthcare technology provider called DST Systems. As an IE, my primary function was to work directly with the company business units and help assess their infrastructure needs and design solutions for them that were consistent with the best practices established by the enterprise architecture teams. I supported our pharmacy solutions and business workflow automation groups. I put in my notice the same week a transaction to purchase them was going through, for $5.4 billion.

    For six years I was a systems consultant for a value added reseller. I left a few months before they got bought. I did mostly VMware, Cisco and EMC data center consulting projects for them. What can I say? It was VAR life. If you’re not sure what that means, I suggest listening to episode 130 of the Datanauts podcast where the panel explains exactly what that means.

    Prior to that, I was a systems administrator for a document imaging software provider called Perceptive Software that was purchased right after I started working for them, for around $250 million. Shortly after I left they rebranded the entire operation but then bought a competitor for $1 billion dollars. Some Chinese investors bought that a couple years ago, and then divested all of the software, so my company became a separate company again, and then it was sold to a different competitor. I only worked there for a year.

    For four years I was a Network Analyst for Rockhurst University which is a small Jesuit college in Kansas City. I did a bunch of crazy things there including one of the first major VMware VDI implementations in education. Wyse did a case study on it, and it won an award from ComputerWorld Magazine. Here’s the video version, where you can see a very nervous, 40 pounds lighter, 25 year old version of me explain why desktop virtualization is great.

    Saturday August 11, 2018
  • Privacy Policy

    Who we are

    This is Virtually Benevolent, the personal website of Michael Stanclift. Our website address is: GHOST_URL/.

    If you’re reading this content somewhere else, I don’t know what to say. It should also be loading with TLS, if it’s not, run.

    What personal data we collect and why we collect it

    As little as possible.

    Comments

    Comments are disabled on this site. If you want to leave a comment about an article, I would suggest commenting on Twitter or LinkedIn.

    Media

    If for some reason you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

    Cookies

    If you’ve been given an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser. This site does not accept general user registrations.

    When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

    If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

    Embedded content from other websites

    Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

    These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

    Analytics

    Limited analytics may be collected by the following providers:

    • Cloudflare
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    Who we share your data with

    We do not actively share data with anyone except those necessary to host this website.

    How long we retain your data

    For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

    What rights you have over your data

    If you have an account on this site you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

    Where we send your data

    Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

    Friday August 10, 2018
  • Certified Expert

    vmware-certified-implementation-expert-6-5-data-center-virtualization

    I’m pleased to announce that yesterday I passed the VCAP6.5-DCD exam, thus earning the VMware Certified Implementation Engineer – Data Center Virtulization “milestone” after elevating the VCAP5-DCA exam that I earned back in 2014.

    The DCD exam has been on my list of things to do since not long after I did the DCA. My first attempt was during the beta cycle for the 6.0 exam. The results for that exam took so long to be returned, and after shifting in job roles since then, I’d not had an oppertunity to sit for it until now. The 6.5 version of the exam differs from the 6.0 in that there are no longer the “Visio” style questions, which I think were problematic for the exam from the beginning. There are 60 questions consisting of multiple-choice, drag-n-drop, and multi-select questions, with 140 minutes to complete the exam. I was able to complete the exam in just under 90 minutes, and I didn’t feel like I was rushing.

    In terms of advice I can pass on to others who are interested in taking this exam, make sure that you understand:

    • AMPRS (Availability, Manageability, Performance, Recoverability and Security)
    • RCAR (Requirement, Constraint, Assumption and Risk)
    • The difference between Functional and Non-Functional requirements

    If you are hands on with vSphere 6.5, especially working with vCenter HA, PSC/SSO and cluster design, you should have all of the bases covered. I have been removed from much of that in the day-to-day for the last year or two, so that was probably the more challenging part of the exam for me. I think if I’d done more to read up on differences between 5.x/6.0 and 6.5, I’d have come back with a better score. But, pass is pass.

    Thursday July 26, 2018
  • VMware TAM

    I have accepted a job with VMware, as a Technical Account Manager (TAM).

    To say I’m excited about this would be a gross understatement. VMware has been the company I’ve spent the majority of my technical focus on up to this point, and since announcing this change on Twitter last week I’ve been thrilled with the replies like “I’ve been here 4 years and it’s an amazing place to work.” During the interview process, one of the current TAM’s told me point blank: “This is the best job I’ve had in my career.” All of this has maintained a level of anticipation about this career change that I’ve not had for any other.

    It’s not as if this is a surprise because I interact with so many great people on a regular basis who work for VMware, who seem to genuinely love the work they’re doing. But it’s been refreshing to get the same messages from people I’d never even met before.

    The last year has been a rebuilding year, for me. In early 2017, I left my role as an data center engineer at a Value Added Reseller, to go back into a customer role. I had been working as a consultant for nearly six years, but prior to that I spent seven years on the customer side. So now I was back working 9-5, at the same desk. It was tough because I loved consulting, and I literally couldn’t wait to get back, but for various reasons I needed the transition. The role I took was intentionally outside my comfort zone, to force myself to do something different and pickup new skills. It was challenging in ways both expected and unexpected. The team I was working on has some great people, and it has been a fun to work with them, even if all the while I knew this wasn’t the place I wanted to stay at for very long.

    This year in transition was a change that I needed, being a customer was a place to lay low, reset, and figure out my future and my priorities. There was no travel and no on-call, not even an expectation to even have email on my phone, let alone respond after hours to it.

    But now I’m back, and ready to get to work doing what I love, for the company that I’ve spent the last decade focusing on, in the company of all the great people who’ve helped me get to this point.

    Monday April 30, 2018
  • Blueberry Lover

    Occasionally I’ll wear my “blueberry” VMware certification shirt to work.

    Some people in the community love these shirts, some people don’t. I, do.

    Blue also happens to be my favorite color.

    Occasionally someone I work with in my current workplace will comment on it. Before the last year, it was a bit of personal marketing while working as a VAR engineer. When I’d show up on site maybe there was a bit of “you can trust me because hey look it says right here I’m not some rando off the street.” In my current role, it’s not always obvious that I’m engaged in the VMware ecosystem. Since the shirt is, very blue, it gathers comments that range from “oh I didn’t know you were a…” to genuine curiosity of “what does that mean?”

    Occasionally though, someone makes the less than flattering comment: “you know no one here cares about certifications, right?”

    My usual response? “I do.”

    In the moment I might get a little defensive and mention the number of hours required to sit for multiple VCAP exams, the underlying VCP exams, between training classes, time spent doing self guided learning or the process and stress of the actual exam.

    The cost of the training, both in currency and time, is sometimes carried by the owner or sometimes their employer. I’ve been fortunate enough in my recent career to have had an employer that would make those investments on our behalf. It wasn’t always that way. Despite being deeply engaged with VMware products since 2007, it took until 2011 to obtain my first VCP. The financial hit for the required class was too much for me to take on at the time.

    That VCP was my first industry certification of any kind.

    I’m acutely aware that certification doesn’t mean you’re an expert, or that there are plenty of folks running around with certificates for things they have no practical experience with. That’s one reason why I’m such an advocate, and so proud of obtaining two practical/administration VCAP certificates. You can’t just memorize a test dump to walk in and regurgitate against multiple choice questions. You have to demonstrate your competency in a -slow- live environment.

    So it’s fine that “nobody” in your organization cares about certifications. They have a value, if sometimes only to the holder.

    In the wake of the last comment I got at work, I ordered two new blueberry VCAP shirts. My old one was getting a little rough looking. They’ll come in handy, especially in my next role.

    Saturday April 21, 2018
  • Doorbell Tweets

    I received a lot of feedback from my tweet about ditching a new Ring for Nest Hello.

    Rather than tweetstorm it up, I’ll try and summarize it all here as to why I’m switching.

    Most of it boils down to already owning a fair amount of devices in the Nest ecosystem (2nd-gen Thermostat, 3 Dropcams, 3 Protects) and wanting to stay in that. All my smart home gear is split between HomeKit and Nest. Since Ring doesn’t play in either of those ecosystems, it’s yet another platform to manage, and especially since Nest and HomeKit have zero integration without flaky hacks (Homebridge) adding a third platform that talks to neither, was already a step backwards.

    I’ve toyed with the idea of replacing the Nest equipment, over time, but if I do it’ll have to be into HomeKit compatible devices. Ecobee has a great thermostat alternative, but as it is, Nest makes some of the best cameras, and there’s not an alternative to the Protect that I’m interested in right now. There is a First Alert competitor that looks interesting but I’ve had bad experiences with false alarms from standard First Alert detectors recently, so my trust in them is broken.

    I was already planning to buy the Hello after we moved into our new house last month, but when Costco ran a promotion on the Ring 2 that included a year of monitoring and an extra Chime at a significant discount, I couldn’t resist trying it out.

    The Ring is functionally fine. One of my biggest gripes however is the recording isn’t always on, and when it is triggered by an event it’s for a limited period of time. Most recently I noticed this when our new neighbors came to the door to introduce themselves. Being bad at remembering names, I went back to the video tape only to find it cut off after about 20 seconds. I still don’t know their names.

    Since it’s not always on, and it’s in sunlight most late afternoons, after activating the first few seconds are over-exposed and worthless.

    The benefits of Nest for me do come at a price. The cost of the Ring 2 package was about $50 less than the Hello, and the monitoring for Hello would run another $60 for the year.

    One other consideration is that the Hello just looks nicer, in my opinion. The Ring isn’t ugly, it’s just kind of meh looking, to me. I admit to also having a sour impression to the quality of the hardware, having already swapped out faulty Ring for family members, as well as having some come DOA.

    Wednesday March 14, 2018
  • Define Essential

    Two weeks ago, after regretfully trying to use the iOS 11 developer betas on my primary devices, I was forced by general instability to roll back to iOS 10.

    Unfortunately, there’s no great way to do this without doing a restore and fresh install. I had a backup from iOS 10 that I’d taken prior to jumping on the beta train, but it was old now. This process is further complicated by the way Apple Watch activity and health data is really maintained on the phone, not the watch itself.

    The result was I ended up fresh installing iOS 10.3.3 (beta 6) on my iPhone 7 and iPad Pro 10.5”, as well as doing a factory reset of my Watch. It also meant losing a couple years worth of workout data, awards and streaks. But such is beta life. It did give me an opportunity to reassess what gets installed on these devices. I find it helpful to mix things up from time to time, even going as far as doing a reset of my app icon layouts periodically to reshuffle the deck chairs and throw out any old cruft hiding in corners. One of my favorite activities is to delete apps that don’t get used anymore, or used enough to take up my attention.

    This time I took the approach of installing only the apps that I know I need on a daily basis, and then filling in the rest as the need for them arise.

    For the most part, these are the apps that if I couldn’t put anything else on my phone, I’d be able to make due. These are the apps that I interact with daily or that provide an essential service or workflow.

    1Password

    Hands down, 1Password is the best password manager on the market and without a doubt the one app I couldn’t survive without. There isn’t really much more to say except if you’re not already a user, become one.

    There’s been a bit of controversy recently about their move to a subscription model, but in my mind, it’s overblown. This software is worth every penny.

    Better

    I’ve been using Better as my iOS content blocker of choice for at least the last six months or so. It’s not as aggressive as other blockers, so you’ll still see ads, but it’s focus is more on blocking the unethical user tracking. It also tends to not slow down site rendering, or be detected by anti-ad-blocking scripts.

    Tweetbot

    At this point, I’ve been a Tweetbot user for so long, I don’t even know how to use (or why anyone else puts up with) the regular Twitter app. I even own stock in Twitter, and refuse to submit.

    There are a few features you lose by going with a third party app, like group DM, but its advanced keyword muting, gestures, plus the clean and “traditional” timeline/tweet view, keep me hooked.

    Overcast

    This has been my podcast player of choice since it came out a few years ago. The syncing between devices works great, and it has a nice clean design. What really motivates me to keep using it though is Voice Boost and Smart Speed, which cleans up the audio on even the most well produced podcasts, and saves you time listening to dead air.

    86 hours, in my case.

    Carrot Weather

    Who doesn’t love a little attitude with their weather report? This is exactly what Carrot delivers. It’s powered by Dark Sky, with an option to enable Wunderground data as an alternative. To be honest, before last week I kept flipping between this app, the stock Weather app, or apps like Weather Line, as my “primary” app. What kept Carrot on there for me was actually it’s fantastic Apple Watch app, but prior to Carrot Weather 4.0 the app wasn’t hands down The Best on iOS.

    However, since 4.0 came out this week, that really put it over the top. I’ll still use RadarScope during storms for active tracking, but for general use, it’s all about Carrot now.

    Also, they threatened me.

    It rained later that day.

    Pcalc

    It’s a calculator. I mean, not really a lot to say here. I suck at math, so I use it a lot. But really it’s so much more advanced than the stock one, that I can’t not use it. It also has a built in unit conversion system. Also, since there isn’t a calculator on the iPad, it gets installed there and I like to have things consistent between it and the phone.

    Workflow

    I started using Workflow a few months ago, and now I have built enough little scripts with it, that help me get things done faster, that it’s become a part of my essential kit. Tip calculator, sending items to Tweetbot, getting public links to iCloud documents, cleaning up screenshots in my Photo Library… just to name a few. The app was recently acquired by Apple, and is now free.

    Things

    There are many to-do list applications I’m not totally married to this one, and occasionally I will just go back to the stock Reminders app (or use my #9 pick’s integration with them) but right now it’s Things.

    Fantastical

    Fantastical takes the stock Calendar application and turns it up a notch. It integrates with the system calendar and reminder synchronization to pull in iCloud, Exchange or Google data but it just presents them in a far more useful way than the stock app.

    These days my current employer forces the use of Good as an corporate email/calendaring app, so Fantastical is really just for my personal and shared/family calendar, but I’m hoping corporate policies change to allow native Exchange integration at some point.

    Nomorobo

    My phone number is on a list somewhere, multiple lists probably. I get a lot of crap phone calls, sometimes a dozen a day. Well, at least I used to, until I subscribed to Nomorobo. It integrates with iOS to act as a blacklist for known robocallers and spammers. It’s not perfect, and some still slip through, but it’s better than nothing.

    Cloak

    If you were counting, this would be #11. Didn’t I say there were 10? Yes I did. Tough. This one is too important not to include. Cloak is my VPN provider of choice, for use when connecting to insecure wireless at hotels, coffee shops, etc. I don’t leave home without it. It automatically activates on unknown networks, and can even work around captive portals.

    One thing you’ll probably notice, is that these are all independent app developers. They’re also all paid, or free with in-app subscription. There’s a reason for this. Not only is it because these particular folks make what I consider to be the best software, but I want to make sure to support their ecosystem and their livelihood.

    Friday July 21, 2017
  • Reasonable Salary

    The process of looking for a new job is stressful. If you already have one, you’re a bit like a secret agent, sneaking around town trying to complete the mission of getting someone new to agree to sign your paychecks, without the old boss finding out. If you don’t have a job, it’s even more stressful, as you wait around and watch your bank accounts dwindle, with nothing to replenish it.

    I knew by March of this year that I was ready to move on from my now previous employer. I’ve never really had a difficult time finding a job when I decided to commit to the process. I don’t think this time was any different in that respect, but it was interesting. I was fortunate and excited to accept the position that I had the most interest in of all those I looked at during the entire process.

    My process was around the same time that my friend @davemhenry was in the midst of his #HireDaveNow campaign on Twitter. It was fun to watch Dave advertise himself, while I was lurking in the shadows, although I’m sure it was super stressful for him at the time. It would have been refreshing to be able to shout “I’m available” to the world.

    Someone eventually hired Dave.

    I have never used a third-party recruiter in any of my job quests. I’ve always been a direct applicant, and it was no different this time. I’m sure people have had success with external recruiters, but I’ve never tried. I’ve shared my thoughts before, on that process.

    It just seems like even direct recruiters could do better to make the process suck less for the people on the other end. If the application, interview and waiting process is completely crushing all your enthusiasm, what does that say about your future if you’re offered a job there?

    Direct recruiters, I like to think, are salespeople. They’re looking for qualified applicants sure, but they’re also selling you on the company itself, and they’re the first line in representing the culture of the company. In a twist, as the candidate, you’re a salesperson too. In every moment of the interview process, you’re supposed to be putting your best foot forward to try and make the sale, of yourself. It seems like the recruiters should be doing the same thing on the other end.

    I’m happy that I’ve found one that did.

    I was pretty surprised that a recent comment about the efficient hiring process of my new employer on LinkedIn, seemed to be popular, garnering 7,600 views over the last week. It gave me the idea to discuss a little bit of my process for my most recent job search.

    From the application on April 27 to the accepted offer on May 19, there wasn’t more than a few business days that went by without some contact with employees of the company.

    The application process itself consisted of a phone screen with the recruiter, three phone interviews, and an on-site interview. Each one lasted between 30 minutes to an hour. Honestly, it seems like a reasonable amount. A few years back I interviewed for a position that involved a total of seven interviews, three phone interviews but then I was flown out to their offices to do four of which were back-to-back-to-back-to-back.

    At least they took me out to lunch for the last one.

    Since the offer was accepted, I’ve continued to be impressed by the manager and recruiter keeping in contact with me. For instance, I closed out of my work with my previous employer on June 2 at 11:30 am. After lunch that day, I got a call from the recruiter that all of my background check processing completed and before 2 pm, I had an employee ID and access to the HR system to begin filing as much of my new job paperwork online before I started.

    I didn’t even get an afternoon of “true” unemployment.

    Even this weekend, I got a personal email from the recruiter letting me know how excited they were for me to be starting on Monday. To say that I was impressed by the efficiency and professionalism through this entire process is an understatement.

    During my search, I had other companies that I was talking to about various positions, which is atypical for me. It sounds strange, but my last three jobs were mostly I knew I wanted to work for Company X, and so I figured out how to make it happen. In fact, with one of my past employers, I purchased my house less than a mile from to their headquarters with the intent of going to work for them eventually.

    I did, 8 months later.

    This time around, after expanding my community involvement over the last six years, I put out feelers to see what was out there. I blasted my resume out to some places I had no connection with, sure, but for the most part, I tried to focus on where I could leverage my professional network to some degree. However, none of them got as far into the process as the company that I accepted a position with, even though they all had a much more extended period to try.

    The shortest process (aside from those who never get back to me at all) was a vendor I applied to for a professional services role. Their recruiter emailed me on a Sunday morning asking me to call them as soon as possible! It was Mother’s Day, and I knew I’d be traveling the next day, so I quickly emailed to let them know my plan to call them in the morning. After leaving a couple of voicemails across the next two days, I was finally called back, and they immediately asked what my salary requirement was.

    When I told them the number, she cut me off to say that was way too, and that was the end of the call. I swear the entire event lasted less than a minute. I was driving home, but I couldn’t stop laughing after I hung up. It didn’t upset me, in a way I respected her for just getting to the point. Nobody wasted any time.

    Still, maybe tell me I’m pretty before you dump me.

    Another vendor, I applied for a sales position with back in March. I had multiple internal referrals. I don’t have a background in sales, but I know the technical subject matter inside and out from a post-sales role and want to see at least if I could talk about making the jump. I had the contact information for the hiring manager and left a voicemail one afternoon as an introduction, but I didn’t hear a peep from anyone for a long time.

    Finally after two months, during the last week of interviews with my new employer, the recruiter reached out to let me know I was under consideration, but one of two candidates. Then despite the excitement in that call, I didn’t hear anything else from them again until after I had another offer. At that point, I was told I was no longer under consideration despite never having spoken to anyone else.

    For a brief time, I considered the possibility of relocating. One VAR that I applied to, I had an internal referral for and the day after filling out the application got an email from the recruiting manager to let me know they were interested. He asked when I was available for a call, so I replied with possible times over the next few days. I then didn’t hear anything back for a week. I politely replied again with some refreshed dates and got an apology for missing the previous email. We agreed that I’d get a phone interview that next afternoon, but my phone never rang. I reached out to my internal contact to see what was going on, and then the next week got another email with a time scheduled for a call, and we had a friendly chat.

    Then I was told a recruiting coordinator would be setting up another interview with one of the hiring managers. Except that scheduling process was me getting notification of when they’d call me. No asking if it worked, just a date and time predefined. In all my interviews I’d never had it happen that way, and my initial reaction was that it was very off-putting. In this case, the date and time was about the worst option it could be, so I asked to have it rescheduled.

    The next assigned date (again not even bothering to ask me for suggestions) worked for me but then 15 minutes before the call I received an email notifying me the manager was stuck traveling. Understandable, given the nature of what we do. But the call was rescheduled again, and then again. Each time they were never asking me when I was available. Finally, the call comes, and I’ll be damned if it’s one of my poorest interviews in recent memory.

    Information that I could have told you about in my sleep, that I’ve talked about in every interview I’ve probably done in the last few years, or that I’ve talked to customers about daily, I choked on. Based on my experiences in the process at that point, I didn’t even want the job and wasn’t interested in relocating. The whole thing felt like it was my body’s involuntary way of just making sure I didn’t stand a chance.

    Despite being an uncomfortable mess, they told me that I’d proceed to another interview but … here’s the kicker … they didn’t need to fill the position at this time. I’m just on a list, I guess. Someone else told me that they went through multiple interviews with the same company to be told the same thing at the end.

    At this time, the position is still listed on their website.

    Saturday June 10, 2017
  • Beginnings End

    This morning I gave two weeks notice to my current employer, a Kansas City based VAR, where I have been a senior data center engineer for the last six years.

    I’ve enjoyed many aspects of my current role; becoming certified in new technologies, learning new skills, and solving problems for customers. I’ve had the pleasure to work with a lot of talented people within the organization and within our partners… and of course, with our customers.

    Looking through my documentation folders, it appears I’ve worked with at least 242 different customers on technology implementations. Some of these have been single day, one and done type customers. They needed a VNX, so I stood it up for them, and I never talked to them again. But really, many of these have been customers that I’ve had the pleasure of serving as a trusted advisor, where I can not only help guide them through infrastructure changes, but also build relationships. I will absolutely miss working with them on a daily basis.

    There have also been other countless service tickets, some in the wee-hours of the morning, where I’ve helped people recover data or reassemble failed infrastructure. Some of those sleepless nights I might miss a little less.

    I have been both lucky and challenged to travel a lot in my current role. Growing up and living in the Kansas City area my entire life, it was fun to be able to go to Boston, Seattle, San Fransisco, Austin, Atlanta, D.C., etc., for projects and training. Even the less glamorus places like western Illinois, northern Arkansas, eastern Oregon, or southern Tennesse could be fun for a while. While the travel schedule was not as aggressive as some in our industry endure, it was starting to became more than I wanted keep up with. Having two young children, and wanting to be always be present in their activities has been getting harder and harder.

    I also reached a point a couple of years ago where I wanted to go a different direction in my career. I like to brag to people that I was a system administrator at age 13 and I became a consultant at 27, but I’ve always basically been the guy pushing the buttons and turning the screws to make things work.

    My new role will be back on the customer side, but this time in a much larger enterprise than anything else I’ve really worked in before, and now my role will be a more strategic, architecture focused role. I’ll be working within the company business units to standarize systems, define technical requirements for projects, and act as a liason between the development, business and operations teams. I won’t be abandoning my experience as a virtualization, storage, and core infrastructure guy, I will be leveraging it to also get out of that comfort zone. I will be able to really focus on being the trusted advisor, within the organization, and less on pushing boxes into racks.

    It will be a major change for me, and a new type of challenge, but it is one that I’m excited to be making.

    Monday May 22, 2017
  • Choosing Electives

    I’m going to start this by saying something that might seem strange for a post like this, but is no surprise to my closest friends: The last two months, and especially the last two weeks, have been very stressful and mentally draining. Without getting into the details of it all, I will simply say that the biggest contributing factor, or at least the medium that has facilitated the stress, has been social media.

    I decided to temporarily set my Twitter account private for a few days last week, something I’d never done in nine years on the service. The only thing I learned from that, is that having a private Twitter account sucks. Over the last few months, I’ve unfollowed and set mute filters for topics that generated more noise than signal. I’ve tried to step back and get some perspective on what’s going on in the world right now.

    But at a larger level, it feels like we’ve all lost our minds, and our awareness that the things we say and do to other people have consequences, emotionally, and physically. John Mark Troyer, in his latest TechReckoning Dispatch, touched on it in a way that I think really resonated with me:

    It turns out a lot of us are taking a good hard look at social media and how it is affecting our psyches and how we spend our time. Some people are opting out completely, especially off Facebook. Some people are using tools to block out distractions during the day.

    Too often — and this has happened to me in 2017 — too much information becomes noise that leads to paralysis. My brother, who has been a pastor and social worker, points to the stress of all the emoting without the benefit of slowing down for ritual, without coming together. Yelling is cathartic but does not sustain us.

    I spent a good deal of time and energy from the last year yelling because I had a lot to be mad about. Honestly, I still do. But even with me yelling, I’ve always thought of my opinions as just me expressing my views, and tried to limit any negative engagement with “the other side” … but it’s inevitable that someone would take offense to even my yelling into the ether. I realize now that even the yelling wasn’t helping anyone, and that most of it were really just disruptive to everyone else’s well being. Especially my own.

    For the last couple months, I’ve been making a concerted effort to bring my “social center” back to the real reason why I enjoy social media. I’ve been “blogging” since before it had a name. I’ve been managing communities and forums since before major corporations employed armies of staffers to do it. I love this stuff, and I freely admit it’s an addiction. I engage in social media because it’s a way to keep up with family, friends, co-workers, vendors, partners, customers, etc, in an open and accessible way.

    I love to learn new things and to facilitate the free exchange of ideas.

    Acknowledgement

    On Wednesday morning, during my morning Starbucks cold-brew run, I received a shocking message from my friend Jon Hildebrand.

    “Congrats on EMCElect”

    I seriously thought he was kidding.

    But then he sent me the link to the announcement, and there was my name, just a couple under Michael Dell. Yes, that Michael Dell.

    I’m not new to the concept of these influencer marketing programs. I’ve been a member of the VMware vExpert program for five years. In the past, I’ve been a member of the Cisco Champions for Data Center program but missed a deadline to reapply the next year. I’m aware of the numerous other ones, that have sort of sprung up in the wake of the vExpert program within the data center infrastructure community. I take a lot of them for what they are, marketing programs, and not necessarily reflective of any pinnacle of particular expertise.

    I’ve also known about EMC Elect program for a while, and I’ve always considered it to be one of the most elite of the many groups, mostly due to the size and the process they go through to determine who gets in. Despite working for one of the largest EMC partners in the midwest, truthfully, I’ve never considered myself anywhere on the level to be an Elect member, simply based on the contributions of the previous members of the program. I have never nominated myself before. I didn’t nominate myself this time. With the other things going on in my life right now, I didn’t even realize nominations were open. But someone did, and the trustees felt that I belonged, and so I thank you immensely for that.

    According to Mark Brown, there were over 600 nominations, trimmed to 300 finalists, and then eventually 153 Elects were selected.

    Because of the completion of the Dell and EMC acquisition/merger last year, the new “Dell EMC Elect” program combines the previous “EMC Elect” with the “Dell Tech Centre Rockstar” programs.

    Mark elaborated on his blog more about the process, and shared his views on why these programs continue to be important:

    From my perspective as the trustee, this was indeed a challenging time, effectively putting together a new influencer and advocate engagment program. It’s a larger world we are in, now with Dell EMC. And things are moving fast technologically in a challenging market and an uncertain world.

    That is why, we need programs like this. We need communities of trust and skill to sort the signal from the noise in” Tech”. We need to establish these communities into innovative networks. Because technology is a tool of the people, not the other way round. Thats why I firmly believe this List of Dell EMC Elect of 2017, is a community of people, who are engaged in getting their hands dirty and getting things done for their customers and stakeholders . And its never been a more important time to have such a community, that is for the people in technology, nominated by the people in technology. It is a marketing program, but it is so much more than that. It’s a community of very skilled peers in technology, who are curious and most of all authentic. And I am vey happy to be in their midst and see the world as a slightly brighter place having these people recognised for all they do.

    In light of my stresses and anxieties around social media in general, to be recognized in this way, and to really connect with the meaning behind it, was well timed.

    With all sincerity, I consider this to be an extraordinary honor. My hope with this program is that I won’t let down those who nominated me, and those who found me worthy of inclusion.

    Thursday March 30, 2017
  • Neowin Retrospective

    Most of the people who know and interact with me professionally, or on social media know me as “vmstan” — and if you asked most of those people they’d tell you I only pay attention to two things when it comes to technology: VMware and Apple.

    They’d be mostly right.

    But there was a time before that, where I was “Marshalus” — and if you asked most of the people who knew what he paid attention to it was one thing: Microsoft. Specifically, covering Microsoft at Neowin.

    That’d have been mostly right, too.

    In late-2002, during my freshman year as a college journalism student, I was “hired” by Steve (Neobond) Parker to be a Gaming News Reporter for Neowin.net. I still remember the night it happened, sitting in my dorm room getting access to the news CMS at the time. I think my first post was something coming off of my previous obsession, Command & Conquer game modding.

    As an aside, anyone reading this remember Federation Studios?

    Anyway, I put hired up there in irony-quotes because it would be many years later before any writing job on the site paid money, and even when it did, I think I earned less than $1000, total.

    That’s not to say that there weren’t other benefits to my involvement. The Neowindex, staff meetup, events were things that I still think about, and tell stories about, occasionally:

    • Like the time I got to play Team Fortress 2 with the development team of Valve Software.
    • Like the time I got to go on the Northwestern of Deadliest Catch fame and sit in the captains chair while interviewing to Sig Hansen.
    • Like the time I got to go to HP and walk on the server assembly floor.
    • Like the time I got to go to AMD and meet the people who overclock their own processors to see how far the limits are.
    • Or, Like the time I was dealing with some difficult life events, had a little too many Midori Sours, and decided it was a good idea to head to the strip club with some other staffers where I promptly forgot another staff member who came with us was gay, and couldn’t understand why he was so uncomfortable there…
    • And then decided to buy him a lap dance to loosen him up.

    Neowin was my life for most of those years, so much so that the groomscake at my wedding in 2008 was a surprise from my wife: The Neowin Logo.

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    I left the site in mid-2009, for reasons now that I don’t exactly remember. There was a lot of infighting between staffers at the time, mostly centered around the North American/Europe divide and the lack of representation among the US and Canadian staffers, among the Administrators.

    For most of my time in any kind of leadership role, I fought with Steve constantly about the direction of the site. I remember resigning and being fired a couple of times during my tenure, but nothing lasting more than a day or so. Somehow during the seven year run I managed to rise through the ranks to the position of Managing Editor. These things either happened by purely annoying Steve to the point it was the only way to shut me up, or by being willing/able to do things other people on staff were not.

    But there was a schism in the summer of 2009, that resulted in the departure of roughly a dozen, mostly US, staff members. In the wake, those of us who left stumbled around to find a new place to build and call home, a sort of an anti-Neowin, eventually leading to a site called TechVirtuoso. The site still technically exists but nothing much happens with it. The Third Prime group that formed to run it, now consists of just Frank Owen, who I transferred control of the domain to a couple years ago. It turns out that having a lot of strong willed Internet personalities trying to start and run a site by committee is a lot harder than it seemed. I still remember sitting on conference calls with that group realizing that this was never going to work.

    But what I also realized, today, is that I’ve been away from Neowin now for as long as I was ever involved with the daily operations. Neowin still exists, and by an outsider’s view is as successful as ever. I apologized to Steve a few years ago, after which he was gracious enough to allow me “Veteran” status on the site, after previously being unceremoniously stripped of all status. (Not that I blamed him, at the time I didn’t want my name on it at all.)

    Veteran status came with a special iron cross badge in the forums, but also gave me the ability to post news on the front page again, which I did in for a while, but never with any regularity.

    Starting with getting married in 2008, my life began a series of major changes. We bought a house in 2009, I became more focused on my “real job” and less on the “side hustle” of writing. Twitter replaced the Neowin Forums as my new social media drug of choice. My wife and I had a son, and then another. My real job became a lot more mentally demanding around certifications and traveling for projects, which led to less time for writing. I also switched sides in the Mac/PC debate, and my “real” job became less focused around Microsoft and more around other technologies.

    I only talk to one former Neowin staff member with regularity. I really never talk to any of the folks that I left with to start another site. The rest I will occasionally exchange plesantries with on Twitter. Some of the people that I hired as writers went on to bigger and better things, and I’m incredibly proud of the work many of them are doing. Every so often, when I remember, I’ll pop into the general Neowin Staff discussion board and wish Steve a happy birthday on our shared day, he’s 11 years older than I am, at last count. Then, I look around at the names and avatars of those who remain and while I recognize a few of them, most of them are completely unknown to me.

    It’s sort of like visting your old high school after being gone for years. The halls look smaller, the students look younger, and all your old teachers have retired, except for the gym teacher.

    I only rarely will check the news porition of the site for… actual news, though it’s still has a place of prominance in my Safari favorites. The content just is not in my sphere of interests anymore.

    In short, while the site still has a place in my heart, most of the actual details of my time there have mostly faded from memory.

    Probably for the best.

    Monday February 13, 2017
  • Enough Windows

    I’ve not been a true “Windows user” on a daily basis since the glorious afternoon my first MacBook Pro arrived in 2011. That didn’t exactly mean I quit using Windows on that day, but over time I’ve continued to slim down my actual needs of the Windows desktop operating system to the point where now I keep a Windows VM around for “just enough” of the things I need from it.

    Windows 10 is a huge advancement over Windows 7, which is where I left off as a PC user and over these last six years Microsoft has learned a lot from Windows 8.x being such a mess. But Windows 10 is an OS intended for use on everything from 4” smartphones to watercooled gaming rigs with multiple 27” 4K displays.

    In this guide I’ve focused on simple methods of stripping out a lot of the things that don’t apply to virtual machine usage, and some of the cruft that is really only useful for someone running it on a daily driver. Typically I can reduce the idle memory and disk footprint by about 25% without loss in necessary functionality.

    These instructions are not all specific to VMware Fusion, but some are. This also isn’t designed to be the “ultimate guide” in Windows 10 performance, space savings, or anything else. It’s a quick and clean way to do most of those things but not all encompassing. I think it’s easy for some of those types of optimization guides to focus on getting Windows to the point where it’s so lacking it’s almost unusable or starts breaking core functions.

    This is a “light” optimization for my usage. It could it yours as well, if you have similar needs like running a small collection of utility type applications, such as a couple of EMC product deployment tools, or the old VMware client.

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    What edition of Windows 10

    Start with a fresh download of Windows 10. Microsoft spins updated copies fairly regularly, so if you’ve not got one based on the 1607 build, start there.

    In terms of editions, if you have access to the Windows 10 LTSB (Long Term Servicing Branch) then I suggest using that. The LTSB is updated less frequently with the latest features from Microsoft, but in my mind that’s just perfectly fine because we’re not concerned about features, just basic core OS functionality, stability and security.

    If you don’t have access to the LTSB, another option is to download the evaluation of Enterprise and reinstall your VM every 120 days. It seems like I do this already as a matter of habit anyway.

    The last option is to grab a copy of Home or Professional. Either one. Nothing we are doing here really needs the Professional features. I just like the LTSB and Enterprise for their lack of preinstalled bullshit, like Candy Crush.

    One of the things you don’t get in the LTSB is the Microsoft Edge browser. If you have a need for that, such as browser testing on websites, then don’t use it.

    Creating the VM

    So fire up VMware Fusion and create a new VM using your freshly downloaded ISO.

    • Uncheck Easy Install, because life shouldn’t have an easy button.
    • Customize Settings, I usually give my VM 2 vCPU/cores and 2.5GB of RAM.
    • Disable 3D Graphics, if you have a discrete NVIDIA or AMD processor in your Mac laptop, this will generally prevent it from engaging with your VM running on battery power and easily give you another hour of work time.

    Advanced VM Settings

    Option + Right Click on VM in the Library and select Open Config File in Editor.

    • Enable support for EFI based booting, instead of BIOS.
    • Replace the E1000 network card with a more efficent VMXNET3
    firmware = "efi"
    ethernet0.virtualDev = "vmxnet3"
    

    Installing Windows

    Power on and run through the GUI installer as normal. After the files get laid out to the disk and the first reboot happens, you’ll begin getting configuration choices.

    Do not use Express Settings, and set the following customized options:

    • Disable all of the personalization options
    • Disable all of the location options
    • Disable all of the connectivity and error reporting
    • Disable all of the browser protection options

    Set a local username, if you’re not using Enterprise you have to jump through a couple hoops to tell it not to connect your login to a Microsoft account, but it’s worth it.

    After the installer processes complete, you’re dumped to a halfway functional desktop. Perform your standard VMware Tools install to get all your network and display drivers, reboot.

    Drop in your license key to activate Windows and then run Windows Update, reboot. Unlike prior versions of Windows, updating a new Windows 10 installation isn’t usually a horrible cycle of download 147 packages to update, reboot, update more, reboot again, update even more, reboot, process. Kudos to Microsoft on that.

    After installing updates and rebooting it was necessary for me to run a repair process on my VMware Tools. I’ve never had that happen before, so it could be an issue with a recent update.

    Enable sharing between your VM and Mac downloads folder, I don’t like sharing the other folders because I only rarely use them from Windows and don’t like them messing with my Mac files. I also have an SD card in my Mac with archived installers and such, so I share that as well.

    Before we run our optimization tools, Enable .Net 3.5 from Windows Features because you’ll need them for the first tool we’re about to run.

    Optimization and Privacy

    Run Tron

    This will automate the cleanup and removal of junk that Microsoft has in Windows that we’re not going to use.

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    The Tron process takes a long time. The script says 4 hours, I don’t find it to be quite that long, but it’s a while. This will run a lot of stuff you don’t necessarily need, like performing anti-malware scans against the system. They won’t take super long since the VM itself is pretty basic at this point, but if you’re pressed for time you can look into CLI options to disable them. Otherwise I just set it and forget it. I went and got a haircut while my copy ran. Overall, it took around an hour.

    Reboot

    Run Blackbird

    This will privatize your Windows setup. This should disable most of the Microsoft telemetry, call home and tracking stuff built into Windows 10.

    It’s not that I’m really super paranoid that Microsoft is going to spy on me (mostly the NSA, through Microsoft) but disabling a lot of this should cut down on system overhead.

    Plus, yeah, privacy.

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    Blackbird should only take a few minutes to apply.

    Reboot

    Uninstall, Uninstall, Uninstall

    Uninstall built in applications under Control Panel > System > Apps.

    If you’re using a consumer version of Windows there will be a lot more here, like the “metro” Mail app, Calendar, etc. Get rid of them. The LTSB version has almost none of these, which is one reason I like it. I uninstall OneDrive. Malwarebytes was installed by Tron, if you want to keep it on the system, that’s fine, but I just uninstalled it.

    Disable unneeded features

    • Media Features
    • Print to PDF
    • Internet Printing
    • Fax & Scan
    • SMB 1.0
    • Remote Differential Compression API Support
    • Work Folders
    • XPS Services & Viewer

    Your milage my vary here. If you connect to a lot of Windows 2000/2003 based shares or have to manage a lot of faxes, act accordingly.

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    An interesting one to remove would be Internet Explorer. I typically use Firefox or Chrome in my Windows VM. If it’s problematic not to have IE installed as well (especially when you don’t have the built in Edge browser from the LTSB install) you can always reinstall it later.

    As for PowerShell you’ll likely want to keep this, especially in order to install and run VMware PowerCLI.

    Run the VMware OS Optimization Tool

    This tool is designed to run in VMware View desktops, and so while the overwhelming majority of the changes this tool makes are beneficial to us, there are a few things that I adjust to accommodate for the fact that this is one VM that I’ll be using, and not a template VM that will be used to roll out 1000 clones in a shared environment.

    • Leave the Windows Firewall enabled, unless you really don’t like firewalls.
    • Leave UAC enabled, unless you really hate UAC.
    • Leave Windows Defender enabled, unless you don’t like it and want to use something else.
    • Leave Security Center enabled, unless you don’t get the point of the last three suggestions.

    Check all of the app removals you don’t want, if any of them are still there at this point.

    Reboot

    Wrapping Up

    At this point you should only really be left with a core Windows system. During one of the optimizations, Windows Updates may have been disabled. Open up the services.msc utility and check, if it is, enable it … unless you don’t like patches.

    Shut down the VM

    Run a disk reclamation on the VM to free up about 3GB of space.

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    I go ahead and set my VM hard drive not to go to sleep, because most of the time I have it open it’s being used for a purpose, and I will manually suspend the VM in Fusion when it’s no longer needed. Sometimes I have to use the VM to run updates on EMC VNX systems using Unisphere Service Manager that can take hours at a time. I don’t want the VM to accidently sleep during this time.

    A useful tool on the macOS side to prevent your overall system from going to sleep during these activities is a free tool called Amphemetine. You can set it to keep the system alive as long as an application (like VMware Fusion) is running, indefinitely or on a timer.

    From this point it’s a matter of installing my utility applications.

    • Java. Yeah, I know.
    • EMC Unisphere Service Manager
    • VNX Initalization Assistant
    • VNXe & Unity Connection Utility
    • EMC RecoverPoint Deployment Manager
    • VMware vSphere “C#” Clients
    • VMware vSphere PowerCLI

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    Saturday February 11, 2017
  • Leather Wrapped

    I have an on-again, off-again relationship with iPhone cases. I put them on. I take them off. I generally don’t like cases. I’ve only broken my iPhone one time and that was when my 6 Plus came out of my pocket attached to my hand, unintentionally, on a sticky day. My iPhone 5 and 6 were rarely in cases, and had minimal wear and tear. I’m usually pretty careful. I also buy AppleCare+ on them, even though I’m lucky enough to rarely need it.

    I’ve owned a variety of third-party cases over the years, from vendors like Mophie, Incase, Spigen, and Speck. I try a lot of these other cases mostly to be a resource for more case-needy friends and family, on what or not to buy. However, the only cases I personally tolerate are the official Apple cases. There are situations where you might need or want something more substantial, like if you’re working in construction or taking your phone spear-fishing, but otherwise I feel like the simplicity of the Apple cases go a long way in keeping the style of the device.

    I’ve owned just about every iteration of the Apple Leather Cases since they started making them around the time of the iPhone 5S. That was a good case, but it was for a device that really didn’t need one. Even for the price, I think Apple leather case is a great value. It’s got a nice amount of grip, without being so grippy it gets stuck coming out of pant pockets like with the Apple silicone case. The leather also just has a much more premium look to it. It ages and over time, which some people like. Apple calls this “a natural patina” … it’s just a gradual darkening of the material as it obsorbs the oils of your hands.

    The cases themselves are easy to put on, but removal can be a little difficult if you don’t want to damage the case. The leather cases themselves are much stiffer than a silicone case, so it seems like the more they’re messed with, the more wear they take. If you’re someone who likes to change cases depending on the situation, or even to go case less most of the time and just put them on for the evening, I think the intention with these is for them to go on, and stay on.

    In terms of protection, the leather case is not going to protect your device from total destruction if it falls out of your pocket and hits the rock face while you’re mountian climbing. Neither is the silicone case. It’s purpose is to protect the alumium edges from rubs and nicks, let you sit it down on a table without stressing that the camera bumb is going to get your lens scratched, and for you to worry less that when your 2 year-old son grabs it from your bedside that it’s not going to get a divot in the corner when he tosses it into the floor as you’re chasing him down the hall.

    I still think that design wise the iPhone 5S was probably a sweet spot, and given how popular the iPhone SE is now, I’m not the only one. The leather case for that phone is no different. However, the leather case for the 6 and 6S felt like a step backwards in a couple of ways, the biggest was the cutouts for the buttons.

    They sucked, to put it midly. They weren’t really buttons, just areas in the leather where Apple cut little groves to represent where the actual buttons under the case were supposed to be. This made it difficult to actually press the buttons, especially on a case that was fresh out of the box. You’d just kind of mash the side of the phone and hope you were turning the volume up and down. I hated it, I think I used this case for a few days before it went in a drawer.

    My wife ended up using it for a while after she had my 6 for a few months (while I experimented with the 6 Plus) and then switched to Apple’s silicone case, and now battery case, with her 6S.

    I used my 6, the little bar of soap that it is, caseless for almost the entire time I owned it.

    When my iPhone 7 arrived in September, I resisted the urge to get back into testing cases, at first. Since I’d survived mostly unscathed during the 6 line, and essentially nothing of consequence had changed for me on the 7, I’d just carry on. Then I one day while browsing the Apple online store, I noticed the new leather case was different.

    It had… buttons.

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    And yet, I resisted, I hovered over the order button a few times, until the one that I wanted was eventually out of stock and on a multiple week backorder. Eventually, I gave in and picked up the midnight blue version from local Apple store. I didn’t love the color, but I loved the buttons.

    Then on a trip to Dallas a week or two later, while killing time one afternoon waiting to head to the airport, I went into an Apple store and found it: Sea Blue.

    The midnight model got returned a couple of days later, and the new blue leather case with it’s equally clicky button goodness has been on my phone most of the time since then. It actually takes me a while to get used to having a case though. It’s like this physiological problem, where I have to put it on, take it off, put it back on, and then force myself to keep it on for a little longer each time. Eventually I reached the point where having the iPhone out of the case, felt more uncomfortable than having it in one, and so it’s been in there ever since that day.

    Seriously though, naked iPhone is a hard thing to give up after doing it for so long, because it just feels so great. It’d be like if you wore nothing but your underware around the house everyday of your life, and then suddenly because the neighbors complained that their kids were being tramizied, the police told you that you had to start wearing pants.


    If you’re in a situation where you suddenly need a good pair of pants,**I’ve a got recommendation.

    Thursday December 8, 2016
  • Pant Lover

    I have some strict requirements around work pants. My wife hates the “I can see your socks while you’re standing up” hipster look, so they have to be full length. Honestly it’d be a great look since I’m 6’4” but as a result I’m at a 36” inseam. I’m also currently 220lbs, which results in a 36” waist. I could probably lose some weight, but it’s not happening today.

    I also have a job that’s requires me to dress nicely to meet a customer in the morning, but be willing to crawl under raised floors and chuck 50# boxes around later that afternoon, without a change of clothes. Expensive slacks will get destroyed. Wearing jeans everyday is frowned upon. I also don’t want to deal with getting pants tailored.

    Between size, cost, looks and durability, I’ve found one pair of pants that consistently meet all my requirements.

    Eddie Bauer Men’s Legend Wash Chino Pants. Classic fit, preferrably in slate.

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    I wear these pants almost every day.

    Eddie Bauer has come to be my go-to clothing shop over the years, for a number of reasons. The biggest is they make nice fitting, durable clothing, for a reasonable price, that look nice. However, what I apprecaite the most is that they carry “bigger and taller” sizes without being a big and tall store.

    You can usually order 36×36 pants online from just about anywhere, but I hate buying clothes online, or making special orders in the store. Eddie Bauer will frequently have these in-stock, although not many. Finding these in the size and color I want has almost become sort of a game. When ever I’m close to a store, I pop in just to look for these pants, even if I’m not in need of more. Yesterday I did this, and to my surprise found two pairs, on sale. After leverging a gift card from my sister, and a $10 off coupon, I got both pairs for $19.

    Score.

    They will soon join the half dozen or so other identical brothers in my closet. Eddie Bauer also has my favorite “Large Tall” shirt size, which seems like it was custom cut for my height and body size. Maybe that’s a post for another day, and another sale.

    Did you think you’d be reading about my pants today?


    I was in no way compensated by Eddie Bauer for this post, although if they need a paid spokesperson, I’m available. It was however written while wearing one of their shirts and a pair of their pants. I also wore one of their jackets to go to the grocery store this morning.

    Wednesday December 7, 2016
  • Securely Obscure

    A couple of years ago, one of our network security architects at work told me that I was in the wrong business. Storage, virtualization, data centers, it’s all going to the cloud. I’d soon be out of a job.

    I barely knew the guy. At first I politely laughed when he said it, but then realized he was serious. Not really a great way to make new friends at work. The irony of the situation was that he tracked me down on one of the few times I was in the office, and approached me to help him lay out some of the VMware requirements for a Trend Micro Deep Security implementation.

    It wasn’t more than a few months later, that he didn’t work for my employer anymore … not by his choice … and I’m still there, two years later, still billable most of the week.

    I don’t even remember his name.

    But, he’s wasn’t wrong, just a jerk. It’s not as if he was delivering some sort of life changing message, that I’d never heard before. It’s one I hear repeated very often on social media, in conference presentations, etc, and in the wake of this Amazon re:Invent conference last week, I’m hearing it a lot.

    It’s undeniable that a big part of my job is chucking boxes of rust and silicon into racks, stringing copper and fiber optics around, and making it all sing together in unison. I kind of enjoy it.

    It’s also undeniable that things are changing.

    Monday December 5, 2016
  • VCSA Migration

    Last night I did my first customer migration from a Windows based vCenter to the VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) using the new 6.0 U2M utility.

    The customer was previously running vCenter 5.1 GA on a Windows Server 2008 R2 based physical HP host. In order to migrate to the VCSA, we first had to do two in place upgrades of vCenter from 5.1 GA to 5.1 U3, then again from 5.1 U3 to 5.5 U3d. After that, onto the VCSA migration.

    Given the length of time the system was running on 5.1 GA code (ouch) and the amount of step upgrades required just to get things cleaned up, there was some cause for nervousness.

    I admit, even though I’d read up on it, tested it in a lab, and heard other success stories … I still expected my first try to be kind of a mess.

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    But, it was not. The entire migration process took around 30 minutes, and was nearly flawless.

    I had more issues with the upgrade from 5.1 to 5.5 than anything else during this process. Somewhere during that 5.5 upgrade the main vCenter component quit communicating with the SSO and inventory service. There were no errors presented during the upgrade, but it resulted in not being able to login at all through the C# client, and numerous errors after eventually logging in as administrator@vsphere.local to the Web Client.

    I tried to run through the KB2093876 workarounds, but was not successful. I ended up needing to uninstall the vCenter Server component, remove the Microsoft ADAM feature from the server, and then reinstall vCenter connected to the previous SQL database. Success.

    Given those issues, I was nervous about the migration running into further issues, mostly from the old vCenter.

    But again, it worked as advertised.

    After the migration I did notice the customer’s domain authentication wasn’t working using the integrated Active Directory computer account. After adjuting the identity provider to use LDAP, it worked fine. I’ve had this happen randomly enough on fresh VCSA installs to think its something to do with the customer environment, but I was under the wire to get things back up and felt there was no shame in LDAP.

    I’ve done too many new deployments of the VCSA since 5.x to count, and at this point was already pretty well convinced there was no reason for most of my customers to deploy new Windows based vCenters. I’d also done a fair bit of forklift upgrades with old vCenters where we ditch everything to deploy a new VCSA, which isn’t elegant, but it works if for my smaller customers that still don’t yet have anything like View, vRA, SRM, integrated backups/replication, etc.

    Now I’m confident that any existing vCenter can be successfully migrated.

    Windows vCenters, physical and virtual: I’m coming for you.

    Friday December 2, 2016
  • RAID Crash

    Recently I had two VMware Horizon View proof of concept setups for work, where we designed an all in one Cisco UCS C240 M4 box, full of local SSD and spindles, in various RAID sets. This lets the customer kick the tires on View in a small setup to see if its a good fit for their environment, but on something more substantial than cribbing resources from the production environment.

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    • 5x 300GB 10K SAS RAID 5 for Infrastructure VMs (vCenter, View Broker/Composer, etc)
    • 10x 300GB 10K SAS RAID 10 for VM View Linked Clones
    • 6x 240GB SSD RAID 5 for View Replicas
    • 1x hot spare for each drive type
    • VMware ESXi 6.0 U2 is installed on a FlexFlash SD pair

    After getting all the basics configured, we had a single View connection broker, with another View Composer VM on a local SQL Express 2012 instance for the database. Both were version 7.0.2. At the first site the VM base image we attempted to deploy was an optimized Windows 7 x64 instance.

    But under any sort of load during a deployment of more than a handful of desktops, the entire box would come to a total stop. In some cases the only way to restore any functionality was to pull the power and restart the infrastructure VMs, one by one. Of course, once the broker and composer instances were connected, they’d attempt to create more desktops and the cycle would continue. In an attempt to isolate the issue, we tried various versions of the VMware Tools, a new Windows 7 x86 image, and I even duplicated the behavior by building a nearly identical View 6.2.3 environment, within the same box.

    After digging through the esxtop data as clones were being created, I could see KAVG/Latency across all RAID sets jumps to as high as 6000ms right before all disk activity on the system eventually stops.

    It didn’t matter what configuration I tried, it was present with a fresh install of ESXi 6.0 U2, and after applying the latest host patches. It was present on the out of box UCS firmware of 2.0(10), and with the stock RAID drivers from the Cisco ISO. It was present after updating the firmware, and the drivers. It also happened regardless of if the RAID controller write back cache was enabled/disabled for the various groups.

    Cisco is very particular about making ESXi drivers for their components match their UCS compatibility matrix, so before I decided to give TAC a call, I made sure (again) that everything matched exactly. TAC ended up reviewing the same logs, to determine if this was a hardware issue, and while they made a couple of suggestions for adjustments, they were not successful in diagnosing a root cause. Yet, they insisted based on what they were seeing that it was not a hardware issue.

    With this particular customer, we were also impacted by a variety of issues relating to the health of the DNS and Active Directory environment. With that in mind, we decided to focus on fixing the other environmental issues and in the meantime, not overload the UCS box until a deeper analysis could be done.

    Try Try Again

    A day or so into the second setup at another customer, and I encountered the exact same issues. This time with a Windows 10 x64 image, and View 7.0.2. The same crazy latency numbers under any amount of significant load, until the entire box stopped responding.

    The physical configuration differed slightly in that we were integrating the C-Series UCS into the customers fabric interconnects, so the firmware and driver versions were even more different than the first host which was a standalone configuration connected to the customer’s network. After digging into it again with a fresh brain, and more perspective, I found the cause.

    I started looking through the RAID controller driver details again. In both cases, VMware uses the LSI_MR3 driver as the default driver for the Cisco 12G RAID (Avago) controller in ESXi 6.0 U2. In both environments I verified that we were running the suggested driver versions based on the Cisco UCS compatibility matrix, and we were. So I started digging at this controller and wondered what VMware suggests for VSAN (keeping in mind we aren’t running VSAN at either site) and sure enough, they DO NOT suggest using the LSI_MR3 driver, but instead list the “legacy” MEGARAID_SAS driver as their recommendation, for the exact same controller.

    After applying the alternative driver, I’ve not been able to break the systems.

    What is odd, is that this appears to be related specifically to Cisco’s version of the controllers.

    This week I did a similar host setup (although not for View) using a bunch of local SSD/SAS drives in a Dell PowerEdge 730xd, with their 12G PERC H730 RAID cards (which from what I can see appear to be rebranded versions of the same controller) and VMware’s compatibility matrix has the LSI_MR3 drivers listed.

    I left those drivers enabled, and the customer ran a series of agressive PostgreSQL benchmarks against the SSD sets, with impressive results, and no issues from the host.

    So, long story short, if you’re using local RAID sets for anything other than some basic boot volumes that don’t need any serious I/O, with the Cisco 12G RAID controller, you don’t want to use the Cisco recommended drivers.

    Installation instructions

    • Download the new driver (for ESXi 6.0 U2)
    • Extract the .vib file from the driver bundle and copy it to a datastore on the host
    • Enable SSH on the host and connect to it via your terminal application of choice
    • Apply the driver from the SSH session and disable the old one.
    • Reboot the host
    • Reconnect via SSH, and run core adapter list command to verify it’s active

    This should verify that your RAID controller (typically either vmhba0 or vmhba1 is now using the megaraid_sas driver. If the “UID” is listed as “Unknown” in this readout, it’s normal.

    Wednesday November 30, 2016