February 23, 2012

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Top Blog Voting : Cast Your Vote

January 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment

vote-for-me-e1303746179672Once again the time has come in the year when vSphere-land.com does their voting for Top VMware/Virtualization blogs.

I am a firm believer in voting for who you love so head over and take the quick couple minutes to choice your favorites. If something I have done on Nickapedia.com has been cool, useful, or inspiring then showing me through a vote would be awesome.

Here are some of the most popular posts I have done in the last year:

But, even if I don’t make your list. Vote anyways – this is a great way to provide feedback to bloggers.

.nick

Filed Under: Commentary, Life/Work, Slider_Featured Tagged With: , , ,

The next iteration : What I learned & what you can expect

January 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

DriveHonestly I think the only reason I started this blog what as a holding spot for crazy things I wrote/built in my spare time. I never thought people would actually pay attention at first. Now I look back and realize that while I have stayed pretty true to that original course in some aspects, things have evolved a bit also. Going from customer, to vendor as part of sales org, to being part of engineering/R&D product development has changed my perspective and interests.

And honestly I don’t know where I will end up in 2012. But I have made myself a goal for self development that I am hoping will both challenge myself and encourage others to challenge themselves.

I am going to be taking on (what I call) the Manic Innovation Challenge in 2012. In simple terms and with simple rules to follow I will attempt to create something unique and creative using as wide a variety of frameworks, codebases, and presentation methods as possible. My goal is to release one example each month with a stretch goal of one example every two weeks.

All this work will be in my spare time unless it is also an EMC supported example. I have a couple crazy ideas kicking around in my head and one midway to completion.

I will also be starting a new series of commentary posts focused on what I see are cool trends in modern information technology at a very geek-centric level. My goal on these is brevity and something to hook you into exploring more on a topic.

Ultimately this blog has been a massive outlet for my personal development and I want to extend that in 2012 even further. Thanks for reading this so far and hopefully I can find a way to keep your interest this coming year.

.nick

Filed Under: Coding, Commentary, Life/Work, Manic Innovation Challenge Tagged With: , , ,

The late recap post : AKA Top 7 things I learned in 2011

January 4, 2012 By 1 Comment

2011 was a banner year for me in accomplishing great things and learning new lessons. To recap my 2011 I thought I would share:

 

 Top 7 Things I Learned in 2011

 

1. I must be doing something right

This is the obligatory stats part of my list. Comparing 2011 to 2010 I doubled my visits, unique visitors, and pageviews. Time on site went up about 33% per visit which may just be because I cleaned up the look and made it easier to find stuff. The most interesting thing is my traffic has been much higher in the last half of this year. It is yet to be seen if I can keep this up in 2012. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Cloud, Commentary, EMC, Life/Work Tagged With: , , , , ,

IT, Silos, Cloud, & You : What do you want to be when Cloud grows up?

December 17, 2011 By 5 Comments

Senior Developers, Network Admins, Virtualization Architect, Security folks, and more – in the world of skilled labor in IT there sometimes seem to be more common boxes we like to place people in than most other fields. These boxes exist partly due to the fact that the CFO/HR/recruiting folks need nicely written job descriptions to map resources and maybe a little bit because of how people assume these position – through the fires of a limited education systems and bootstrap-yanking from the bottom. square_peg_in_round_hole_2Regardless of why, we organize skilled people into buckets in much the same way everyone else is world is either an accountant, attorney, marketing expert, business analyst, or any specialty therein.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Cloud, Commentary, Life/Work, Slider_Featured Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Note to self : Scary choices pay off

October 17, 2011 By 21 Comments

Self-reflection is something I don’t do very often. I tend to focus on the next impossible goal and not look back. But, these last few weeks I spent a lot of my time looking back. I have been thinking about what a great run I have had so far here at EMC.

 

If you would have gone back in time and told me (relevant post : Fear and Atmosphere) that I was going to do some of the things I did in the last 1 ¾ years I would have thought you were crazy.

To be honest, when I first joined the vSpecialist team I was scared to death I would fail. I was so far outside my comfort zone going to work for a pre-sales organization with a major vendor that I didn’t have a really good idea what my job would be exactly and if I could do it.

Fast forward to now and I am sitting here typing on my Mac and thinking of all the impact that the vSpecialist organization has enabled for me. I have been able to move the ball with vAppliance and Virtual Storage hackery. I made a rap video extolling the tenacity of my group (which was watched by the CEO). I spoke at my first conference session (VMworld). I was able to help do things at both EMCWorld conferences that were never done before (VPLEX demo /Labs). And I released a ton of free tools that helped enable my community.

I also had the privilege of learning, working, and having fun next to the coolest group of men and women there is. I have made a great many friends and will always consider my run as a vSpec as a turning point in my career.

But, this post isn’t about success itself. It is about knowing that sometimes you can do great/fun things by stepping out into the unknown.

So having said that, I am excited to announce I will officially be leaving the vSpecialist organization. I have accepted a position with the EMC Office of the CTO as a technologist working with the Advanced R&D team. My new role will be as a part of the team attacking the new challenges around cloud and helping EMC be ahead of the curve in providing value to this new paradigm.

This is a bitter-sweet change as I am leaving the vSpecialists where I have a strong personal connection. I will be leaving my Tech Enablement buddies and no longer working for the management that made me who I am today.

But, life is about change and growth. And this decision is based around that goal. I had a great many choices (which I won’t share here) and making this decision was one of the hardest I have had to make. Yet, ultimately moving to the Office of the CTO is going to challenge me in a way I have never been challenged before. In my original logic I decided that EMC was a great opportunity to develop and this move is a continuation of that goal.

From a blog/community perspective this blog will no longer be as dedicated to purely VMware tools/gadgets (though it will include those also). 99% of what I am going to be working on will be confidential. But, the work will allow me to expand and comment on newer technologies and broader cloud-computing topics.

I want to thank the vSpecialist organization from my peers to my management for the incredible run and helping set me up to where I am going. I will never forget what an amazing experience it was to work with such an awesome group. I also want to thank those who provided insight and wisdom in this decision (You know who you are).

Life is full of safe and scary choices. Sometimes the scary ones pay off the most. You never know till you try.

Wish me luck.

.nick

Filed Under: Commentary, EMC, Life/Work, Slider_Featured Tagged With: , , , ,

VMware Workstation 2011 : w00t

September 14, 2011 By 1 Comment

Just a quick blog post but I wanted mention that VMware has just release the new VMware Workstation 2011 and Fusion 4.

Basically 100% of the projects I do on Nickapedia.com have been done on VMware Workstation. I have done the big-Windows 7 machine running Workstation with virtual ESX/vCenter for over a year now. And I was just getting ready to pull the trigger on moving to more of a white box design when I got invited to the BETA for both of these products.

The new changes with Workstation have changed me back to staying with the current model for my current lab. Some of the big cool stuff I am excited about:

  1. It now supports the ability to run 64-Bit OS’s inside a virtualized ESXi VM inside Workstation. This was the biggest issue I had and the primary driver for me to want to move to a whitebox.
  2. New UI – it rocks, it is easier to use, more options, and so cool.
  3. Remote connection – now I can be running VM’s on Workstation on any of my big machines and connect from my main workstation. This is so slick for extending lab environments across machines.

I am so appreciative of the work of the VMware Workstation & Fusion (I have a Macbook Air now also) teams. I can’t wait to upgrade my BETA to the new release.

Check out more and download a 30-day trial here: http://blogs.vmware.com/workstation/2011/09/vmware-workstation-8-now-available-worldwide.html

.nick

Filed Under: Commentary, Life/Work, Tools Tagged With: , , , ,
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