System i Addict

As planned the Beta was put out today for the next version of Ubuntu. You can view the details of the release here, and download it from here.

I have a few opinions on this article. They may not be popular, but I will give you what I know and have seen in the last 17 years.

CIO Insight has an article that points out that the number of women in IT is dropping. They may have the numbers right but I think the reasons are wrong.

Over all if you were to stand on my chair in my IT dept right now, and I do stand in my chair alot around here to see what is going on, I can tell you that IT has less women in it, but if you look at the numbers over the past 30 years and I don’t have those numbers but it would be more of a guess based on conversations and common sense I would also be able to conclude that the numbers for women in IT up way up compared to 1980.

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Story Here and Here

The Bexley, Ohio high school district reportedly is migrating all of its desktop computers running Windows ME to Linux, instead of to Windows XP. The move is expected to save taxpayers as much as $412,000 in licensing costs, according to an article in a local community newspaper.

The entire technology budget for the district last year was $159,000, Director of Curriculum and Instruction Dr. Anne Hyland told the newspaper. The move away from Windows ME was required due to the purchase of new computer systems that are incompatible with ME. Hence, the district faced the added costs of upgrading to Windows XP, in addition to the new systems’ hardware costs. Money will also be saved through not having to purchase anti-virus software to protect the Linux systems.

To think that all those years and years of my Mom telling me that I needed to clean my room were doing nothing but killing my inter geiuness? I am one of theo messy geeks. Anyone who has been in my basement knows it. I do however know where the majority of the items in that mess is located. Now I reason to tell my lovely and talented wife to stop telling me to clean up that mess…..it’s just me being smart as ussual.

Link to a story about messy people and how smart they are….

“Most of us are messy, and most of us are messy at a level that works very, very well for us,” he said in an interview. “In most cases, if we got a lot neater and more organized, we would be less effective.”

I love this:

Hunting through messy piles has its value, Freedman says.

“You discover things that, if you had filed things or containerized them or purged them, you never would have seen them again. It becomes a natural reminder system,” he said.

This was proclaimed by Michael Larabel’s blog and he would be farther along with testing it than I am.  So here is what Michael comes up with.

” Earlier this month I covered Ubuntu’s Migration Assistant, which is one of the features that will be found in Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. The migration-assistant is designed to make it very easy for Microsoft Windows converts to jump into the Ubuntu world by automatically transferring files and settings. However, when I originally tried out Ubuntu migration-assistant I had run into a few bugs that ultimately rendered the assistant useless. However, in that post Evan had commented that the two major bugs being recently corrected, so this morning I gave this installation assistant another shot.  ”

More of the artilce is here 

This is one of those steps in the right direction. We need to be able to make migration from one platform to another. The migration tool is one of those critical steps to making things easy. Microsoft is making huge missteps in the computer world and is still up to their old tactics of strong arming customers and making them pay for software they don’t want or need?

or at least that is what the schedule says. I am not 100% sure what that all means but I am sure we are moving right along to 7.06.

Artwork is also due as well.

BeteFreeze Link

The Schedule

We are about a month away from the full release. I have everything crossed and will be ready for that to come out.

I just wanted to post this so I could find it later and maybe someone out there could use it too….

Link to installing Ubuntu Server on VMWare

RuSPORT a Colorado based Champ Car Team has not idea what keep the wheels spinning on those cars. I am a huge motor sports fan. I love to watch racing. I love to do a little on my own and I especially love to keep up with F1 and Champ Car. They are my two favorites. I like NASCAR but the “Soap Opera” gets to me at times and I can’t take it.

Needless to say. RuSPORT is about a 15 minute drive from my house in the middle of Northern Colorado and I have been up there on two occasions. Once today and once last summer to deliver tickets for the Denver Grand Prix. On both occasions I have asked if someone can show us around the racing operation and as you may have guessed they seem as if I am asking them to barrow one of the race cars to test on I-25 for a few hours. RuSPORT does not get it that the fans are the center of the sport.

NOTICE: I AM A FAN. I LOVE CARS AND I REALLY LOVE RACE CARS AND THE PEOPLE AND TECHNOLOGY BEHIND THEM.

I noticed this at the Denver Grand Prix. The pits and paddocks are open but no one seems to understand they need to conversate with the people. Altogether Team Australia was wonderful and friendly so I am going to leave them out of it. You guys at Team Australia get it, while the list of people and teams that don’t get it is much longer. Even the Champ of Champ Car, Sebastien Bourdais, is a world class jerk and no one including him from his pits would talk to me or anyone standing there ready to ask questions.

It was like dealing with a bunch of stuck up rich folk and I think that is where NASCAR excels. They know who pays for the sport to run and in F1 they realize the same thing. If I were to walk into Petty Racing in N.C. right now they would show me around and if The King were the he would show me around and thank me for coming. I of course would wet my pants and say “You da King, I watch you and cry you last race, you great!” or some dribble like that.

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Denver will be a quiet place this summer, August will probably be the longest month ever, and I will need to up the meds just to live with the idea that there will b no Champ Car in Denver this year. I was given the opportunity to volunteer last year for three(plus some other days) of the most glorious days of the year. The Denver Grand Prix was awesome and a joy to be apart of. I have been asking around to find out why and here is what I have found. Please Champ Car if you happen to read this I am just one voice in a sea of people who want the Denver Grand Prix to come back and you can run it during the DNC Convention it would be the only highlight to that dysfunctional gathering.

Link to Press release - [1]Â [2]

COME BACK TO DENVER! The IRL has left and the Morons out by the Airport don’t want to build a NASCAR track so we need CHAMP CAR to come back and make my summers wonderful.

More on the Morons that live by the airport in Denver who don’t want a Nascar track, but live under the airport traffic and is lousy box housing and call it upscale. Reunion Subdivision is a joke and is filled with over priced housing just seconds from DIA. Yea a great deal….you all need a Nascar track to make you realize your subdivision is just another subdivision. I think what they meant to say is we don’t want a bunch of rednecks in RVs to come unload millions of dollars in 3 days in out neighborhoods/town. Idiots!

In case you have been wondering where the schedule was and I was too and found this [Link to Feisty Fawn Release Sked]. It’s not to far from being out and I am downloading Herd 5 for my new Dell D620 because I was to give it a test run. I sure hope the things in 7.05 are better than what 6.10 is doing to it right now. I know it’s Alpha but if it looks better than 6.10 I will just save some room and not use up the entire 80GB hard drive.

Please I get it that the CoLUG is a little slow this year. I think is it a combination of the snow and the fact that I have not been able to pull myself away from work long enough to plan anything. I had lunch with the new Lotus Sales Rep today in Longmont, I will post his info on the site, ad we are gearing up for our first meeting in March….in 3 weeks. I am going to have to move the meetings to Wednesday Nights as this is the only nights I have off from school right now. I am trying to get educated. Imagine that.

I asked Brian to help me get a good strong year set up for all of us here in Denver. The big event so far is Lotusphere Comes to you in April and we are going to try to get Ed Brill back in town even thought Ed does not know it yet? So if you are reading this Ed, Brian needs to work out a few kinks but we need you for a very special event Brian thought of himself for the CoLUG.

I am working on the new site. If you do not know it I purchased ColoradoLUG.com, we still have the FREE Site but I am not posting anything there anymore.

So have no fear we are going to treat you all right this year. It’s going to be a great year from Lotus with version 8 coming out and I think that is going to change the face of Lotus and IBM because now the user can’t say “Lotus Notes is Ugly”

Later!

The new R32 just shows how Audi is apart of VW. It looks cool, it looks fast and VW Vortex cover it all.

Volkswagen of America, Inc. today announced the return of its motorsports-inspired R32 at the Chicago Auto Show. First introduced in 2004 to an enthusiastic reception, the R32 delivers the ultimate in Volkswagen sports performance with dynamic handling and refined road manners.

The R32’s power comes from a 3.2 L naturally aspirated 15-degree narrow angle V6 engine. With 250 horsepower and 236 ft. lbs. of torque, the R32 is all muscle. The standard 4MOTION all-wheel-drive system transfers at least 75 percent of available torque to the rear wheels. Volkswagen’s acclaimed DSG® transmission allows for seamless gear changes and accelerates from 0-60 in approximately 6.4 seconds.

Audi is starting to talk about the new Audi A5 & S5. It’s pretty nice looking and I want to get it on here and get you opinion.

I think they had a pretty nice line up before. The S5 is nice, but in the end I don’t think it’s going to be as wonderfull as they think.

I still love Audi but I don’t get the 2 door moves. They have never been a 2 door car company. They have the TT and it’s perfect.

I never meant for this site to be a political rant board but good lord this is just hilarious and it sounds like someone on SNL making fun of Hillary, but it really is her and it really is damn funny.

Link to Hillary Audio 

Link to Article

I am going to establish some items here. I live in Colorado. I have been to a hand full of FRUIG meetings. I have made contact with many of the IBM staff in Denver and I know Lonnie and others connected to FRIUG. I was not in the day to day operations of FRIUG. I did attempt to help them with a number of things over a two year time span.

So with that established. Let me take what Lonnie says bit by bit and explain it from my stand point, keeping in mind I am not anti-Lonnie, rather I don’t think the FRIUG in Denver was very good at knowing who their target market was and they catered the meetings to those eight people who always attended.

“I think user apathy was responsible for discontinuing the Front Range IBM User Group,” says Lonnie Kendall, the president of the Denver-area group when the decision was made to pull the plug in December. “We were having the same eight people show up for each meeting. Nobody was interested in joining. We went from monthly meetings to quarterly meetings to closing the doors.”

It is sad that Denver lost the Front Range IBM User Group. I am truly very sad, but at the same time my head is thinking of all the reasons from my perspective as to why it may have failed. The same eight people showed up I think is inaccurate. This is an exaggeration on Lonnie’s part. The fact that eight poeple kept shoing up should also key you off to the problems that were there.

At times it was 3 and at other I had seen over 20. So this doom and gloom is created by the group, and the constant that IBM does not care about them was a point I tried to bring up with a few people but only got ignored. If you think IBM is ignoring you then you will eventually spread that like a cancer and everyone starts to believe it. I know many people in the Denver area that have attended at least one FRIUG meeting and never went back for one reason or another.

Mainly because the eight who were always there were very self involved and didn’t want any outside or new help. The other reason was relevance. The topics had to be relevant to the community. The eight people who showed up catered the topics to their needs and for the rest of us in the area there was no reason to go find out how to do free flow RPG, put CL in your RPG, or how to compile Pascal on the iSeries. Pascal is a learning language and is not meant for production level applications and especially Enterprise solutions.

People don’t realize the value of networking, Kendall says. “They don’t want to take four hours out of their evening or afternoon to go to a meeting. If they need education they go out and do a Webcast or a search on Google or they go to IT Jungle.”

It would have been the same eight people who showed up and of them none of them seemed to interested in networking outside of their group. Not to say they were not capable of working outside the group but they didn’t seem interested at all about new blood or help of anykind.

I can give an example of this. I wanted to be apart of the group and contribute and make it stronger so I attend a few meetings. There was a “personality” named Robert Tipton who seemed to only want to talk to the people of the users group when he needed them to do something for him or you were a “C” level contact. Other than that Bob had little to no use for you. Unfortunately Bob also used the group to help him and manipulated the group for their contacts and such to gain a better footing in Colorado and the surround areas. When you have people who don’t give back to the group and try to do everything they can to suck the life out of it you are eventually going to run dry.

I had many times when I ran into Bob and he made a point to either leave while talking or avoid the conversation. Grated I had nothing to offer him but conversation so that may have been why he often left without much to say. We can talk more about Robert later. He is a very successful person who claims to have written a pamphlet book which he sold at the meetings for a ridiculous sum. I think Bob is funny, bit I deagree with many of his ideas and lectures about IT. I am allowed to do that as I have an opinion and a blog.

Other than Robert the people who did attend were a mixed bag. You always had Lonnie there and Mark from ISS, there were always others from other places but these were the two main road blocks people getting things done.

Kendall’s frustration with the indifference shown by System i, iSeries, and AS/400 professionals boils over into anger due to the lack of interest by IBM in its OS/400 community.

This is just out and out funny. IBM was more than happy to talk more about what to with the users group in Denver. I had many conversations about the user group with many people at IBM. I was also told by IBM about all the calls that were made to FRIUG to help out and were either ignored or rejected.

When I was attending the meetings there was talk of a new contact at IBM and none for the users group. I would have to wonder if it didn’t have to do with the leaders of the group and their inability to branch out and really get the new people in the community, like me, to help out and become apart of the group. I just had lunch with IBM and I did start up the Lotus Users Group in Denver last year and they were talking to me about what we could do? Funny they seem to have ideas I think the group just needed some fresh blood, but the “8″ and I am going to call it from now on ran most of them off or never made them feel welcome. Not to say that the 8 were not nice or polite, they were, but they didn’t seem open to new ideas and they didn’t seem like they wanted any help.

The absence of IBM support for the Front Range LUG is more than a bit embarrassing. Kendall points out that IBM has a sizable presence in Denver, with a disaster recovery center, a large tech center, and an office in Boulder.

I may be wrong but the IBM presents at Boulder is not a heavy iSeries or AS/400 presence. It’s more infrastructure, but I could be wrong as I have never been over there and ask everyone what they do at IBM.

IBM as I remember it was presenting at the meetings on a regular basis and the group seemed to attract the most obscure IBM people on the face of Rochester. Rochester has some very odd and very smart people who can come present and FRIUG seems to attract them. I attended two meeting in two months that really smart IBM people who started the conversation with words I had never heard of and ended it by explaining how to do things on the iSeries at the assembly code level. Please someone tell me how that helps me Admin and iSeries better. Granted interesting but not topical or relevant. I think this is the theme I am driving at, the user group is not and was not relevant to the community and needed to die in order for it to be started again, reborn if you will. I do hope that someone will pick up the ball and try a go at it again.

There’s a two-edged sword aspect to IBM’s involvement with local user groups. It’s needed to some degree, but it is also pushed away when it begins to feel like influence pedaling. The LUGs strive to maintain a level of autonomy and are sensitive to being served the Big Blue Kool-Aid without a break.

Sure this is a known quantity with a users group. You have to have everyone present ideas and have to limit the “selling” time to the end of the meetings. Members are to present their ideas, their wins and they failures. The group is supposed to learn from each other, not try to talk about technology that is 15 years old and that the iSeries is moving away from.

We all have to drink the cool-aid to an extent, we are all apart of the community and sometimes it’s apart of the trade off to keep the LUG running. I welcome the IBMers to come and present, but I see Lonnie calling IBM “THE MAN” than he does calling them partners. IBM would rather support users groups than run them but you have to have them import Rochester SME’s to get that job done or contact VAR’s to bring in SME’s either way you have to take the pitch, with IBM is more limited as they know you are customer and are now looking for solutions.

For now that is all I can talk to on this topic, I have no exposure with the Pheonix group and will save my comments on COMMON at this point.

I would like to point out a few things. I tried right after I moved to Colorado to become involved and for about 7 or 12 months I struggled with Mark of ISS to give me a shot at remaking the web site for them and getting it a better look that might attract a bigger base and create some on-line activity in order to create a need to come meet. I wanted to make the on-line community strong so the local community would want to meet and talk more.

No one at FRIUG saw it my way and I came to the realization that they wanted to keep heading down the same road they had been going down. In the end Mark would never give me the go ahead to update the site and create a new look for the LUG. At one point I called Lonnie and asked him to help me, help Mark, help the LUG get a new site up and running and was told to leave it alone.

They were not accepting of new members and also were not open to new ideas coming from these people, even though month after month I would get asked about topics and would submit them and never see them come about.

I grew tired of fighting the group and figured I could get the same community experience on-line from places like COMMON, iSeries News, and others to get my fix and create my community. I heave created a blog, the one you are reading and I think it draws a good many readers from around the community.

You can see by the web site that is still up what was going on when they went down. The board of elections is going on in 2004. There is a listing of the last known memebers of the group. Note that the bulk of this info has not changed since 2003 when I started a move from Atlanta to Denver and was looking for a user group to grow some iSeries roots in Denver. It really saddens me that Lonnie is blaming everyone but the seven who were the ones in charge.

With that said I am going to open up the floor for comments and again this is my opinion and my experience. Others may have seen it another way and that is fine I just wanted to get my side of the story out so that IBM does not look like the bastard in this story, I think the blame could go both ways.