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Travelling

Entirely unrelated to my previous post on the TSA – I decided that the time had come to replace my travelling bags with something newer.

I’ve been travelling and working with a soft leather briefcase since I started consulting – almost ten years ago. I’ve also used a variety of overnight bags, suit carriers, Novell BrainShare bags and the like over time.

With my carry on pretty much standard now (laptop, power, books, iPod, headphones, pencil, notepad) and hopefully I can travel a lot lighter – I wanted to reduce my dependence to really a single, carry on size bag.

I looked at all of the traditional offerings (yuk – American Tourister carry on – guaranteed to get lost in the melee)

I finally decided on the Victorinox Trek Pack Plus – one flight so far – and it’s just great.

I’ll be taking this to London and Barcelona next week – so I’ll post an update on how it behaves with 10 days of gear and a couple of laptops.

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Passionate Users

I lifted this post from Luis Villas blog – he always seems to get to good stuff early. Maybe being a student again helps 😉

Anyway – this post – and others over there (I especially like the one on presentations – I’ll blog that later!) are really interesting.

This chart (from the post) – really re-states a lot of the concepts in Cluetrain; except in a table rather than 150 pages:
Chart

The rest of the post really goes on to discuss why ‘traditional marketing’ gets a bad press and how ‘neo-marketing’ (yuk) tries to change this.

My own personal viewpoint is that product/solution evangelism is going to be big in the next 12-18 months. Especially with the noise in the traditional marketing spaces. What will seem like more personal one-on-one conversations will make the difference. You reading this Ted?

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Red Hat on Open Source

I knew I had this from several people last year – but I refound the article browsing snorps blog.

Matthew Szulik, Red Hat CEO talking to Computing in the UK – http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/analysis/2075934/putting-linux-desktop

Why Red Hat versus Novell-SuSE or Sun JDS on the desktop?

They’re all proprietary except us. They all have proprietary technology inside, not 100 per cent open source software. They continue to lock customers in to limit choice.

If you buy the Sun desktop, you’re going to buy into the proprietary Sun architecture. With SuSE there’s Red Carpet, integrated with other Novell technologies, still proprietary.

As the saying goes:

Matthew Szulik – I hereby request source to the 100% Open Source Red Hat solutions “Red Hat Network Proxy” and “Red Hat Network Satellite”

Here’s waiting.

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ZENworks Imaging updates – forge.novell.com

I keep getting asked about updates to the ZENworks Desktop Imaging engine – specifically driver support and the like.

There is a cool project on the Novell forge site – that hosts new drivers, lots of docs and complete ISOs of the environment. It’s here – http://forge.novell.com/modules/xfmod/project/?zfdimgdrv

Point to note – in ZENworks 7 – we moved to a SLES9 based distro for imaging – so driver support is vastly improved.

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TSA are jobsworths

Flew back from Stamford, CT – I had to check a carry on bag as it was ‘not permitted’ – not too large, not too heavy – just ‘not permitted’.

I got a leaflet from TSA explaining that sometimes items can be ‘just not permitted’ – at the discretion of the TSA agent.

It’s not like I tried to sneak a box cutter (Stanley Knife to the civilised world), wrench, hockey stick, 5 gallons of gas/petrol or anything else on board. Just a small rucksack – way smaller than the carry on limit – that was ‘not permitted’.

I fly a lot. I fly a lot with just carry on. I fly a lot with this bag.

Jobsworth. Another English word that I proudly introduce to the wider vocabulary of the English speaking word. Learn it, use it, love it.