January 2009

Sign-up for NetQoS Symposium ‘09

For NetQoS employees, the Symposium is also known as “Free Polo Shirt Day.” Once a year at Symposium, we release a flock of polo shirts into the wild, as a symbol of hope that someday there will be peace among natural and synthetic fabrics. (Of course, any polo shirts that we catch, we get to keep – and polo shirts are notoriously bad sprinters – so you’ll probably see us all decked out in NetQoS branded polo shirts on the Symposium floor.)

February 2009

Unified Communication and the Bouncing Grey Lady

Those of us who work closely with the Web – bloggers, Web designers, media professionals – are aware of CSS, which removes content from layout, and RSS, which removes content from context. How far can we be from a society in which all content is completely removed from any sort of context or layout? A society where everything is abstracted? Where you could download the model of a basketball, and print it out on a 3D printer. Or even, if you wish, have the New York Times printed daily on a basketball, if you so chose…

I don’t know if I’m ready for that world. I’m not sure I want my news to bounce.

Fight on, my mosquito friends! For Microsoft!

The headline still read: “Bill Gates Unleashes Swarm of Mosquitoes on Crowd.”

It wasn’t the Onion.  This was too weird to be the Onion.  Bill Gates, one of the richest men in the world, and certainly one of the most well known, decided that in order to make a point about empathy, he would release a jar of mosquitoes at a talk he gave at the TED conference on malaria in developing nations.

Now, I’m all for Bill’s charity work; and you have to admire a guy who uses the money he’s made towards good deeds. But I’m a little bit worried that Bill Gates may have finally decided to make the full-fledged leap from eccentric billionaire to evil genius.

March 2009

You can’t manage an economy you don’t measure.

I wish that we could claim moral superiority in our own tech world, but I don’t think we can.  Too often, silos persist in IT where protective individuals try to keep their own jobs secure by being the only person who can understand and interpret the data.  It’s the same kind of thing, and I’d say it’s “just as bad,” except that while it may be counter-productive, it hasn’t yet blown up an entire civilization’s economy.

Yet.

In the meantime, here’s some handy links from Amazon:

· Blazer PT-4000 Pencil Butane Torch.

· Speeday Series 60” Pitchfork

And for the kids:

· Angry Mob Playset

April 2009

Time Warner brings tiered caps to Austin.

That sound you’re hearing is the screaming of my soul being crushed.

All great journalists can maintain complete objectivity in the most trying of circumstances. I am merely a good journalist.

Well, I’m adequate.

Why is Australia’s Channel 7 making our jobs harder?

According to the news report, a report where the anchor freely admits that he “doesn’t know how this Internet business works, I thought it just went through the air,” I “learned” the following things:

· By 2012, the Internet could get “full.”

· The Internet is about 13 years old, and it hasn’t broken down once. (For those counting, that means the Internet was invented in 1996.)

· The Internet is probably “the most perfect machine we’ve built as humans.” (It clearly outshines, of course, the lever, inclined plane, wheel and axle, screw, wedge, or pulley.)

· The problem with The Internet being “full” is not the pipes, because “the pipes are fine.”

At the risk of insulting Australia Channel Seven’s news staff, this is frozen concentrated stupid juice.

May 2009

A week and a half til’ Interop Vegas.

The “Bottom Issues Affecting Application Performance” are, as usual, Wombat attacks and an oversupply of AOL CDs.

Webinar on ROI with Forrester Consulting Tomorrow

For those who choose not to attend, tomorrow, at 1:00 EST, I will be personally calling each of you individually, and telling you all the spoilers for the new Star Trek movie.  So, the only way to avoid knowing what happens to the crew of the Starship Enterprise, thus ruining your enjoyment of the film, is to attend the Webinar.

By the moons of Qo'noS , I will do it, I swear. 

Do not tempt me.

June 2009

Axia NetMedia chooses NetVoyant to handle SNMP metrics, flying polar bears.

Axia NetMedia corporation, which runs the Alberta SuperNet, had deployed NetQoS® NetVoyant for their device performance monitoring needs.  SNMP based metrics are important when at any moment, your network can be attacked by the varied hazards of Albertan life.  For example, flying polar bears who take out network links.  (It could happen.  Calgary still has its ski jump from the 1988 Winter Olympics, and if Coca-Cola commercials are anything to go on, bears like extreme sports.)