Last May I traveled to Uganda. I never thought I would ever go to Africa, but there I was boarding the airplane to fly 17 hours to the other side of the planet. I would be lying to you if I said I was excited  I was out of my comfort-zone, I didn’t know what to expect, and as one who usually has some level of control, I had none. It was all an unknown for me and required me to trust my daughter, my youngest child, who’d been to Uganda at least six times. I had to put myself out there knowing she had it all under control. Seven months later, I’m heading back.

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Cage Data offices will be closed from December 23rd- January 1st, but don’t worry; our on-call line is always available for your technology emergencies. Just give us a call at (203) 774-0294 and listen to the prompt for assistance.

Merry Christmas. This greeting has struck fear and elation in the hearts of mankind for years. Usually you’re on one side of the poles: you love it or you hate it. I am not sure I have met anyone who is in the middle. No one’s ever looked me in the eye and said, “Christmas, yah it’s ok. Kind o’ like the peppermint but that eggnog stuff, not really a fan.” No, it’s one of the two extremes.

A family friend starts the Christmas countdown on December 26th. It’s a bit extreme and I must admit, I find it a bit annoying to see Christmas social media posts in July.  It’s over the top. The Christmas in July movie celebration on some cable stations I can do without. The good thing, I realize I can change the channel. Yay for me!

There are others who just hate Christmas. They are like the Grinch (from the live-action movie starring Jim Carey):

Narrator: So whatever the reason, his heart or his shoes, he stood outside his cave, hating the Whos.
The Grinch: [opens phone book] Alphabetically!
[looks into book] Aadvarkian Abakeneezer Who, I…
[yelling] HATE YOU!
[looks into book again]
Aaron B. Benson Who, I hate *you*.
[looking into book]
Hate, hate, hate. Hate, hate, hate. Double hate. LOATHE ENTIRELY!

I admit this might be an extreme for those who “don’t like Christmas” but it illustrates my point. I’m not sure why some have such a reaction to the holiday. I understand the revulsion to the commercialism, (see my post from last year), and I understand all of the issues with family that’s cause pain and trauma in a lifetime where we would want to just take the holiday and toss it out the window.

Whether you hate it or absolutely love it, you have to admit this time of year has a great influence on our lives. And if you’re on the end of hating, I feel for you. There is no escaping, there really isn’t any place you can go to escape, Christmas.

I guess that’s my point in all of this: it doesn’t matter who you are, or where you’re from, Christmas is going to influence your life one way or another. My hope for you this year is you allow the joy of Christmas to sit with you, to touch your life and influence how you interact with the world. Hopefully, you can take a moment and reflect on the moral of the story of the Grinch: that Christmas will come. It will “come without ribbons. It will come without tags. It comes without packages, boxes or bags… Maybe Christmas doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas…means a little bit more.”

This is my wish for you this Christmas, that you might exclaim, like the Grinch, “Help Me… I’m feeling.”, that you will find joy this Christmas, and that your heart may grow three sizes that day! Merry Christmas!

You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.

– Rahm Emmanuel

When I first heard this quote years ago, I was appalled, how can a public figure use a tragedy to forward their private or personal agenda. He was specifically referring to the energy crisis of the 1970 to move the country forward to a better energy policy, this never happened and the opportunity was wasted. But I’m not using this to talk about politics.

If you work in technology, it’s not if a crisis will happen, but rather, when. As a technologist I constantly have to deal with crisis. It can be as small as an employee not being able to print or as big as an entire enterprise infrastructure going down. Can you say firefight? We learn to live in chaos, controlled chaos but chaos none the less. This chaos becomes a normal part of life.

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I started out in the technology business years ago, too many in fact. I have to admit for transparency, I am not one of the original tech gurus who wrote code and stored it on keypunch cards. No, the first code I wrote was in high school; I stored it on paper teletype tape back in the late 1970s. Yes, I just dated myself, it’s ok, like fine wine, I feel like I’m getting better with age… or like cheese I am just starting to stink.

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It seems to happen every year. You tell yourself, this year I’m not going to let it happen, but then it happens. As the end of the year approaches and we all talk about how the stores are putting up Christmas decorations earlier and earlier. Right after Halloween, or even before Halloween, we see Christmas trees showing up in all of the large chain stores. We say, “it’s too soon”. Then we let the Holiday do what they do best, creep right up behind us and scare the stuffing out of us because, “AHHH, Christmas is NEXT WEEK”.

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Many of us have our grade school memories of Thanksgiving, it’s all about Native Americans and Pilgrims sitting around a big table; the 1621 Plymouth colonists celebrated the first Thanksgiving with the Wampanoag Tribe. This celebration organized by Governor William Bradford lasted three days and included harvest from the colonist “fowling mission” and five deer provided by the colonist new native allies.

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I started writing this post thinking about using the term “critical mass” and I thought to myself, those word you are using are you sure they mean what you think they mean? (kudos to Inigo Montoya) So I looked it up. Critical Mass is the amount of fissionable material needed to maintain a nuclear chain reaction. And yes we have come to use it in the business community in regard to the amount of effort needed to sustain a venture.

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Recently we had a very strange issue occur with a Dell VRTX, the system is a sub-two-year-old production chassis running two physical M620 server blades. One module is a physical Windows Domain Controller (DC) the second being Microsoft Hypervisor (HV) host. One day during routine administrative task we notice the DC was “not responding” correctly.

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