Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, technology, and snowmen. Hal Stern: The Morning Snowman

This may be a record for latest first snowfall, at least in terms of what I remember here in New Jersey. We got about half an inch last night, a nice little dusting that made it much easier for the rather lazy bluejays in our backyard to pick out the stale pretzels that we frequently leave for them as late morning snacks.

Tonight's fluff stuff was more of a snow dump than a snow fall; it began snowing when hockey practice was almost over, and by the time everyone changed, packed up, and go to their cars, it was really coming down; by the time we got home there was measureable snowman raw material. There's still a trickle of snow, the kind of snow that's hard to distinguish from wind blown rehashes of what's already down.

This is a warning sign that it's time to finally finish cleaning out the garage, so I can park indoors again, rather than spend the first ten minutes of every morning scraping "winter mix" off of the car.

Mary Cay Kosten tagged me yesterday, although she did it behind the Sun firewall so non-Sun employees must take my word for it. I get to present five fun-filled formerly faintly fanned-out facts about myself, excluding my love of alliteration or anything I've blogged or podcasted about previously, greatly limiting the source material.

Warning: this post contains references to nudity, lingerie, and anatomic correctness, and it got really, really long. And in case anyone is four or five standard deviations off the mean and wants to know how I chose to relay these tidbits, they're in chronological order.

I know what the GECOS field is. My first job was at Six Flags Great Adventure. And yes, I was in the IT department, which was located in an inflatable "bubble" temporary building located on an unused part of the parking lot just behind the main entrance. The benefits were plentiful but of marginal value: an employee store that sold some of the choitchkes you could get in the park, the ability to zip in and out of the park on your break time, and employee parties that usually involved having us test out some new ride. The IT part was humorous in retrospect. First system we had was a Northern Telecom (before they were Nortel) Sycor 445, running some mutant variant of CP/M and six random pages torn from a Multics manual. Our second system was an actual Honeywell GECOS Unix-like system, which felt familiar after having used BSD Unix for the previous academic year. So munging the GECOS field in a password file isn't entirely foreign to me. Coolest thing about the job: For about two months, I worked for a guy named Rex. Funniest thing about the job: we shared the bubble building with the body puppets, those larger-than-life characters who walk around and accidentally terrorize little kids. It's hard to be serious about writing COBOL programs when a guy with a 3-foot wide head walks into your inflatable office looking for the bathroom. Best deal of the job: I once wrote some simple shell scripts for the Sycor system so that we could transmit our payroll records to Six Flags HQ in Dallas, have them processed via RJE, and receive the formatted check images, payroll register and general ledger all during the graveyard shift, when we didn't have to warn people keypunching card images that typing too fast would cause our 300 baud modem to drop the BSC connection. Those scripts saved us an average of $300 in phone bills a week. I got a $50 bonus (not in employee store credit) at the end of the summer. And it was a big deal.

I sold radio advertising. It was my first sales job, and it paid commissions. WPRB-FM is not only one of the first college FM stations, it is one of a few commercial college stations, supporting itself through advertising sold to local and national businesses. I learned about prospecting, building a pipeline, collections, cold calling (lots of cold calling), and proof of concept work (when we'd produce an ad and play it for the prospective client). Of course, part of being at the bottom of the sales pile was that you had to produce some of your own commercials after selling them, which made me (for a very short while) the radio voice of Edith's Lingerie. I still love good radio commercials, especially the Bud Light "Real Men of Genius" series.

I took aerobics classes. It was the healthiest time of my life, the last time the most significant digit in my weight was a one, and while I wasn't really flexible I at least knew where my toes were. Blame Pat Parseghian, who was my co-worker at Princeton, across the street neighbor and connoisseur of post-class take-out Chinese food.

I have no uvula. That's the anatomic correct reference, or more correctly, the anatomically incorrect reference. More precisely, I had UPPP surgery in 1989, and it's quite possible that my uvula is enjoying a nice vacation on an eastern seaboard beach with other medical waste of the era. As an aside, it's a really cool way to freak out a new physician.

I was hired by Sun as a sysadm. I started at Sun in 1989, three weeks from the end of the fiscal year when the previous systems administrator in the Lexington, Massachusetts sales office literally up and quit one day. I combined what I knew of device drivers from Princeton days with what I learned from the rest of the pre-Professional Services "Consulting Gang" and got into performance, fixing kernel bugs and networking code. Six months before starting at Sun, I had interviewed at Thinking Machines Corporation, and was offered a job that I turned down, but which would have landed me at Sun in server engineering rather than systems engineering.

With a tip of the hat to ESPN: The Magazine, here's what didn't make the list: I once made Rob Pike laugh at a USENIX conference, I believe there is a highly airbrushed but plausibly denied picture of my rear end on Internet, and I am one of only a literal handful of people who know the only building that is not named Daniel P. Arovas Hall. More on that one another day, I think.

Still reading?

I tag: Greg Papadopoulos, because I don't think anyone else has; Tom Chatt, former Princeton roommate and the guy standing next to me in the above-mentioned picture; Candace LoMonaco and Maria Buoy, the GSE Divas (they only count as one for HR, they count as one tag, too!); Sin-Yaw Wang from our Beijing office, who explained to me what "Dogs Don't Pay Attention To" means with respect to really good dumplings, and Warren Meyer, who also knows the truth about Daniel P. Arovas Hall, pointed me to Virginia Postrel's blog in the first place, and is the next Princeton author I need to read.

Postscript: Turns out that Rex actually went on to the big time after Great Adventure, as he was (until his retirement) the CFO of Isle of Capri Casinos. The things you find out using Google when you're researching a blog entry at 1:00 AM. Here's the downside: if Rex had not retired, and if the Isle of Capri bought the Pittsburgh Penguins, then I could have asked him for a job, again: driving the Zamboni.

I feel morally compelled to complete the hat trick of annual lists, as part of a continuing pseudo-tradition of checking off the year just completed. My little life snippets pale in comparison to some of the accomplishments regaled in the pile of holiday cards, paper and electronic, that we received in the past weeks. But that's never stopped me before:

Best Parenting Moment. Several contenders this year, ranging from watching our daughter discover that she loves chemistry to seeing our son volunteer as a junior coach with the NJ Devils Youth special needs hockey program. The best, though, was one of the most difficult -- our daughter decided to withdraw from synchronized skating competition after five years on teams of various levels. This would have been her year to go to the US Figure Skating Nationals, but she was no longer loving the sport enough to make up for the time invested in it. It was a long discussion, and one that had me frequently repeating my mantra about not quitting, but in the end this came down to having her focus her attention on the things she enjoys the most. Sometimes the biggest wins are from not doing something.

Best Sports Moment. Where to start? Rutgers beating Louisville on national TV, while the whole state watched wide-eyed and slack-jawed? Princeton's share of the Ivy League football title, and the first bonfire on campus in 12 years, celebrating wins over Yale and Harvard? Or for that matter, the triple overtime Princeton-Penn football game which came down to a bobbled extra point attempt, and made CNN Headline News as one of the top college sports clips of the year? Even closer to home, the NJ Devils' 11-game winning streak to end the regular season, taking them from 19 points back to an Atlantic Division title on the last day, capped with a come-from-behind win in Marty Brodeur's home town? Like the Oscars, there are so many good contenders, but we have to go with the non-obvious choice: Patrik Elias deciding to sign a new contract with the NJ Devils for 7 more years, for about $2 million a year less than he would have made in New York or Montreal, with a no-trade clause. Our family's sports hero put heart about wallet, team above self, and the local gnocchi place above some world class restaurants.

Best Work Moment. This was another category with a leading contender that got outraced to the post. In February, at the annual Sun Analysts Summit, I spoke to a room full of people about expanding Sun's developer communities to include devotees of scripting and other dynamically typed languages in addition to Java, C, C++ and FORTRAN. I was the spokesperson; the idea came from lots of hard work from Bob Brewin, Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart, Tim Bray, and others. And then we put our money where my mouth was, hiring the JRuby team. And then I switched jobs, rejoining the field organization. The best work moment of the year was our announcement of our first quarter FY2007 financial results, in which we showed growth and performance improvement across the board. The import and impact of this gelled for me while reading Buzz Bissinger's "3 Days In August" over the holiday break, a book in which he talks about professional baseball players who play below their potential, because it's easier and it's sufficient. What I love about Sun's field -- from the sales reps to the systems engineers to the service delivery engineers to the folks who dissect never-seen-before problems in the customer solution centers -- is that nobody phones it in. Everybody plays not just to their full potential, but in many cases, exceeds what they thought was their previous upper bound. Seeing that consistent demand for excellence translated into facts and figures tops the work list for the year. You can't quantify it in a spreadsheet, but you see the results in the spreadsheet's cells.

Best email. Much easier. A few weeks into our youth hockey season, I got an email from one of the new parents on our team, telling me that my son had made her son feel comfortable and welcome on the team as a first-year Pee Wee. Long after the season, nobody remembers the scores of games or what our league standings were, but the kids remember where we ate and who brought donuts, and the parents remember their new extended family.

Best new toy. Easy -- the low-power cell phone repeater I installed so that our cell phones work consistently (well) in the house. Getting a new phone helped as well, it turns out, but solid signal strength should never be taken for granted.

Best reading accomplishment. More of a prelude to reading, I managed to find three books I was sorry I never bought as a teenager, courtesy of eBay and amazon.com: Tretiak's "The Hockey I Love,"; Rick Wakeman's "The Caped Crusader"; and Willie Stargell's "Out of Left Field."

Best shopping experience. Some big wins courtesy of pointers from BoingBoing: a birthday party held at Robot Village in NYC, and a literal tasty mash-up of our favorite treats, sushi engraved and shaped from chocolate.

Best t-shirt. New category -- I used to try to remember the best poker hand of the year, but I didn't play too much poker this past year. However, Bill Bradley, our Global Systems Engineering Business Operations Director, gave me a t-shirt that reads "Eat More Pork Roll." Not exactly words to live by, unless you thrive on additives and sodium, but it has that Jersey je ne sais quois.

One day into the new year, I'm trying to follow advice offered to me by fellow writer, Princeton alum and former Sun employee Kristin L-A, who said "Set simple goals for each day." Mine include blogging more, working on that book regularly, spending more time talking to my friends outside of work, and trying to stay out of the emergency room for another year. Happy 2007 to everyone.

I've been observing 9/11 for many years, as it's my birthday. It's also what kept me out of the World Trade Center on that day in 2001. Since being surprised by my family with a party several years before (and I truly, truly dislike surprise parties, believing they should be the the equivalent of a fireable offense for your family and friends), I decided the best course of action was to be on the road on my birthday. I've celebrated birthdays in parts of the Midwest where there is epsilon probability of surprise.

I have many strong memories of my birthday, and the week following it, in 2001. I was in Boston for a customer event, which we cancelled as the morning's tragedy unfolded. Our local marketing person had rented a car, so she and I jumped into it and drove about as fast as we could from Boston back to New Jersey, easily topping 100 MPH at some points. I will never forget crossing the Tappan Zee Bridge and seeing the smoke rising from lower Manhattan, visible all the way up the Hudson River. To this day, when I hear Billy Joel's "Miami 2017", the hair stands up on my neck, because many of the lyrics describe what it was like to see New York City burning.

I actually found out about the attacks when my wife called me that morning, moments after I had landed in Boston. My flight and the hijacked planes literally passed each other in the air. As the world discovered the news, it became nearly impossible to make phone calls on the east coast. I used the Sun internal phone system to call some folks in California, who were able to dial back to NJ and relay messages for me. Chalk one up for SunIT.

I spent most of the day leaving messages for my good friend Bob, terrified that he was in the WTC. Sadly, a customer of mine, two parents from our neighborhood, and one of my Princeton club mates were there and didn't make it out. While digging through old pictures this weekend, I found one of me dressed as Elwood Blues for a pseudo-talent show, and remembered that my Tiger friend was the one who convinced me that even if I couldn't sing, it would be funny.

When people ask me what I remember the most from that week, though, it's two extremes of life in and around New York. The first is that my sister was on business in Switzerland on 9/11, and she wasn't able to return to the States until that Saturday. Her flight was delayed nearly 8 hours, the limo company she had scheduled to pick her up never showed up (out of fear or confusion, we'll never know), so I sat in Newark Airport until just after midnight, having guessed she'd need a ride. After dropping her off, I drove back down the west side of Manhattan and through Times Square. At 1:00 AM, Times Square is busy any day of the week, especially on a Saturday night. That weekend, however, it was deserted -- the city that never sleeps wasn't really sleeping; it was in shock.

The other extreme is what happened that same Saturday morning. It was my one and only season of coaching youth soccer. The soccer board decided to hold the regularly scheduled games that weekend, intent on restarting the little cadences of our lives. Standing on the school fields, I saw the contrails of airplanes in the Newark airport flight path. It was the first time in five days there had been planes overhead, and I finally noticed the engine noise that we'd taken for granted nearly every other day of the year. Noise indicated normalcy returning.

The Baal Shem Tov wrote that the first time we see something, it's a miracle, then we call it nature, then we take it for granted. We don't always realize what is normal until the natural order of our lives is disrupted. What we should think then was best written by my top-ten favorite author Jodi Picoult: What if a miracle is not something that happens, but something that does not?

I'm hoping for a boring birthday, when I can be blessed by the miracles a Monday might not bring.

See Jonathan's latest blog entry and its comments, for the full back story, including some interesting comments on whether SUNW can generate financial traction and bridge the digital divide at the same time.

Those who claim that we are diluting our growth by focusing on social issues imply this is an either-or proposition. One of my favorite rabbis likes to say that most of the major conflicts on our globe are caused by "either-or" statements when a "both-and" conjunction would be acceptable. Applying either-or propositions too broadly causes you to miss potential markets. Those start-ups that recognize network users as both creators and consumers of content rather than separating the world into artists (who must be paid) and audiences (who must do the paying) are defining "Web 2.0" interactions. From the number of social web site icons dotting blog postings, it seems like the both-ands may be winning.

I believe Sun can both generate growth and deliver network services to largley unserved communities because they are merely different facets of the same problem. It's about cost of acquisition, cost of operation, availability of developers (who have their own cost of acquisition and operation), and network access (which is a function of, you guessed it, cost of acquisition and operation). Good things happen when you make the technology accessible by focusing on power, space, environmentals and cost. Services get built on top of that technology platform.

This isn't purely a technological postulate. Cameron Sinclair and Kate Stohr have shown with Architecture for Humanity that you can build low-cost housing out of local materials and have it feel like home. The designs captured in Sinclair's book Design Like You Give a Damn rely on disruptions to the economic assumptions make about housing in disrupted areas.

As a homework assignment a few weeks ago, Jonathan asked a number of people "What is the one thing about Sun about which you brag?" (his participles dangled but no English teachers were invited; no harm, no foul). I've learned something about these simple-sounding questions -- either you have a killer answer that jumps right out, or you're better off shutting up. I had what I thought was a killer answer -- I brag that Sun has, and will continue to, disrupt the economics of our industry. General purpose Unix workstations in the early 80s. General purpose multiprocessing servers and scalable I/O in the 90s. Zero cost of acquisition software, including developer tools, in the naughties.

The day we run out of things to disrupt is the day I worry that we're out of story. Before then, I'm confident we'll see that the participants in the Participation Age are both those who are networked (today) and those in non-consumptive, non-networked parts of the world (today). The both-and implies growth.

Know me and know that I bristle at Jersey jokes. It's not just that I went to the same high school system as Bruce Springsteen, or that I spent endless summers "down the shore" or even that I witnessed the pseudo-rebirth of Atlantic City. I'm a Jersey guy, like Solaris Internals author Jim Mauro, and proud of it.

Sometimes, though, we bring the Jersey jokes on ourselves in ways that Joe Piscopo couldn't have even dreamed. Yesterday my father, son and I played the local par-3 golf course as a way to officially kick off the unofficial Jersey summer (Memorial Day to Labor Day). The course sits next to a state highway, nestled between an industrial complex, a county airport, and a big box electronics store. Very Jersey. The scorecard gives all of the ground rules of the course, including what to do if you hit the chain link fence separating course from parking lot and airport.

The last local rule is "No high heels."

I can't add more humor to that; it's the stuff Jersey jokes are made of, along with shopping malls, big hair, and people in their 40s who still wish it was the summer of 1983 when WAPP was commercial free and catapulting Jon Bon Jovi into stardom. I may miss WAPP (103.5 FM, now WKTU), but at least I was wearing sneakers on the par-3 yesterday.

Several years ago, Scott McNealy made a sales call with me (and a host of others) to a prominent NYC investment bank. Scott had always been heavily involved with the executive management of this bank, not on behalf of Sun's banking business or his own banking, but because it was good for Sun Microsystems to maintain this kind of relationship. As a result, he frequently was asked to attend meetings that ranged from executive board room to engineering bored room.

Our joint sales call was one of the latter: we met with an absolutely brilliant bank employee, who discussed matrix math, floating point, Monte Carlo simulation and the value of epsilon in our hour together. I enjoyed it as much as Scott endured it; it wasn't really a great use of his time. As we were leaving, Scott turned to me and said "I'm glad you're here, and I hope you're learning something, because this is a bit geeky, even for me". And he said it with a smile, and with complete sincerity -- because nobody was going to get in trouble for an impedance mismatch on the executive level, or find that Scott refused future sales calls due to one random experience.

Scott has always treated people at Sun as much as his extended family as his employees. We goof up, we get a laugh out of it, and then we go out for McDonald's (seriously). Tragically, that bank employee was killed on 9/11/01, and I remember telling Scott, relating it back to our somewhat comic sales call. I'm pretty sure Scott already knew the details from his continued conversations with the customer, but he gave me a look that conveyed a sense of personal loss.

That's what it's been like to work for Scott for 17 years.

At this week's Spring Leadership Conference (also known as the "VP Barbeque Event"), one of the tributes to Scott's leadership showed him on a magazine cover hugging Jack Welch. I asked Jonathan, during open Q&A, who his Jack Welch is -- and Jonathan answered without a femtosecond of hestitation -- Scott McNealy.

That's my hopeful glimpse of the next 17 years at Sun.

Quiz question: name the one person in your organization known to all of your customers, most of your superiors, all of your peers and the people who work for you, and anyone who has even the faintest interest in connecting with you?

Answer: your administrator. He or she is the only person that talks to everyone, and ensures that those people retain some interest in talking to you. Your administrator is the public face of your company and your role in that company. Friday concludes Professional Administrator's Week, so don't let the chance to say "thank you" slide.

My administrative assistant, Linda, saves my work or family life at least once a week. For a 2:00 AM flight out of Beijing, Linda noticed that I had been booked a day earlier than I wanted to leave (hmm, that date change after midnight gets you every time) and made sure I wasn't left a stranger in a strange land. She makes sure I have time to get from Point A to Point B, whether on foot or in the car, and tries to clear a path for food in whatever time zone I need to be fed. Fax, email, phone or SMS, she knows how to find me appropriately and promptly.

Most important, though, is that everyone I meet is quick to tell me that Linda is wonderful, prompt, polite, creative, and easy to work with. They're right, and not a day goes by when I don't appreciate those attributes.

The other person who gets the major kudos today is Karen, Scott McNealy's administrator. More than a dozen years ago, I made an egregious faux pas with a customer, becoming entangled in a political fight via a design document (with my name on it) that was used as an organizational forcing function. One of the people so forced called Scott's office, looking for my head. This is where Karen executed a kick save that would make Marty Brodeur proud: she informed Scott, got my line of business VP on the phone, initiated damage control both locally and globally, and within 24 hours there was a plan to repair the relationship. The "plan" mostly involved having me on the receiving end of some deserved dressing-downs, but had this festered the net result would not have been nearly as good for me, for Sun, or for my management chain.

To Linda, Karen, and the hundreds of other administrators at Sun, "thank you."

I met Jonathan Schwartz in 1996, immediately after Sun had acquired Lighthouse Design where he was CEO. At the time, I was the chief geek of the Northeast US sales geography, had recently helped spin up the first JavaDay event in New York, and Eric Schmidt (Sun's CTO at the time) was my informal mentor and someone who tolerated me as a fellow Princeton Tiger and inhabitant of its infamous "fishbowl" dormitory room.

Eric suggested that the two of us connect to discuss "the state of applications." What I remember most from that first meeting ten years ago was that I was insanely late, mostly due to traffic on the 101 freeway. I arrived in a chaotic state that only approximated what was going on in Jonathan's office at the time, as he was in a post-merger, pre-integration whirlwind.

Despite tardiness and workload, Jonathan made the time to talk. And not just a perfunctory listen-mostly mode while planning his next meeting; we spoke about application design, user experience, and how software was going to be constructed. To this day, I've found that Jonathan returns emails, stops to talk, and is an aggressive listener. You always know where you stand, whether it's admonishment not to make sports analogies (from the first software staff meeting I attended in 2002, when I briefly worked for Jonathan the first time) or telling a group of vice presidents how he measures accountability (this week's leadership meeting).

As of Tuesday, Jonathan is both my boss (acting VP of Software) and my meta-boss (CEO). It's the first time I've been older (and in worse physical fitness) than my entire management chain. It's a remarkably good feeling, because we are finally getting into an interesting state of applications on the network.

It's been a wild year since Jonathan Schwartz was a baller at our annual Customer Engineering Conference. After he agreed to go along with my sight gag, he graciously autographed the jersey and then we got Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, to autograph it as well.

At the time, I promised that we'd auction the jersey off in support of our work with ONE.org, the organization fighting poverty and AIDS that has been most closely associated with U2's Bono and his TED prize from 2005.

Quite honestly, the jersey project got side tracked when my family decided to move cross-Jersey last spring, and I only recently uncovered it while digging through my home office "supplies" closet (looking for glue sticks, if you need the unvarnished and sticky truth).

Today, I put the jersey up for auction. 100% of the proceeds will go to Oxfam America, one of ONE.org's partners in fighting hunger. Getting the auction set up was made trivial by eBay's work with MissionFish, allowing me to select the recipient, build the listing, and set up the flow of funds with a few button clicks. The hardest part of the whole thing was getting sharp pictures of the Sharpie work.

The auction runs through the end of March. If you want to check out the goods (and hopefully make a bid) you'll find the auction action here.

What is MaryMary really like? To borrow from Mary Poppins, we spent a jolly holiday with her.

She is the kind of person who will park her kids for three hours to drive an hour on a day off, to sit in a local ice rink and watch someone else's kid play hockey. The someone else would be me, the day in question was President's Day, and at the time, she was the most famous person at the Reston SkateQuest Olympic rink.

But no techno-celeb autograph signings for her. Just great cheering. She cheers the way the writes: authentic, fun, concise.

But in true MaryMary style, we needed to make the Important Connections. Think of them as the links in life that imitate a blog. So I introduced Mary to one of our team parents, a figure skating coach who had just been on his cell phone with one of his skating friends from Russia. Now MaryMary knows someone who knows an Olympic gold medalist.

When asked where her cheering accomplices had gone for the day, Mary told us they were bowling. We warned her that precisely that kind of "we're bored, let's do something different" activity led us to be watching our fifth youth hockey game in less than 48 hours, a 4-hour drive from home. My wife added that bowling doesn't seem as all-encompassing as ice hockey, until you realize that my wife (and I) went to high school with a fairly quiet, good-natured guy who went bowling on his days off -- and turned into 29-time PBA Champion Parker Bohn.

School holidays are when dreams are born, aren't they?

I have analysts on the brain right now as we prepare for the annual Sun Analysts Conference, which wraps up January and opens February in San Francisco. Analysts are valued for their industry insight, validating decisions, and sometimes making predictions about the future.

Back in November, I intimated that maybe Petr Nedved wasn't a permanent in Phoenix, perhaps electing to play closer to his fashion coach and lifetime teammate (that would be his wife) rather than his fashionable former teammate (that would be Wayne Gretzky) turned coach. Nedved got traded to Philaldelphia on Thursday.

If only predicting the future was so easy.

Dan Berg is in forbes.com and Prague, Czech Republic. Almost at the same time.

Dan is the CTO of our Services division, another long-term Sun employee, and another former Systems Engineer who became a Distinguished Engineer. He's been in front of a series of trends, from jumping on the Java train early on to creating patterns to defining how an architecture-focused consulting business would (and still does) operate at Sun.

In his interview Dan covers two of the biggest geographic displacements that are affecting IT shops worldwide. First, smart people are distributed, and will remain distributed. Sun has worldwide engineering offices, and we are trying to develop career paths that diverge outside of California. It's not just enough to hire people in Bangalore, Prague, St. Petersburg and Beijing, they have to be full-fledged members of the technical staff. At a developers conference a year ago, someone asked me how Sun regulated the quality of our engineering efforts that are "off shore." My two-part answer was that since all of our non-US employees are Sun employees, I'm not sure what boundary was implied by "shore,", and further our engineers are expected to follow our development frameworks, design reviews, product lifecycles and architecture review processes regardless of ZIP or country code.

If that's our expectation, we have a responsibility as technology leaders to develop leadership bench strength in all of our geographies as well. That's why Dan Berg is moving to Prague - to take his collected experience as a Distinguished Engineer, software developer, services leader, start-up veteran, and former Texan to a major software engineering center. We'll see how long the Texas part lasts; I'm betting he trades 'horns for beaks within a month.

In addition to geographic independence of our engineers, we're also striving for geographic independence of software. Call it utility computing, call it IT as a service or software as a service, the bottom line is that you'll consume software over the network, without worrying about data center locations. Do you really know where Google is? Or eBay? Or the data center that routes text messages to your cell phone? When we talk about delivering IT as a service, that's what we mean. All you care about is reliability, quality of service, security, privacy, and consistency in time and space. Location is so 1990s.

So where in the world is Dan Berg? Blogging along his (e-)world tour.

More specifically, I'm the rw-rw-rw- web. It's only funny until I get more eBay feedback.

My cast of alter egos grew by one over the holiday break. That's me, in a Santa suit, accompanied by my "elves" as we prepared to make landfall on the beach in front of the Hotel Riu Ocho Rios.

Backstory: On Christmas morning, the head of the entertainment crew at the hotel asked if I'd step in as Santa Claus. There were a few small facts omitted, but I considered this fair payback for my near-continuous musical mauling of Babylon By Bus by the pool.

The Prep: I was literally stuffed into a Santa suit, equipped with workman's boots and handed a Hefty bag of trash to lug around, turning me from one resident of the North Pole (Frosty) into another (Santa) in about 40 minutes. I got a nice tour of the backstage area at the hotel, and got to see first-hand what it's like to be in the entertainment division of a major resort. What we see is people having fun, teaching aerobics on the beach and making up silly games by the pool. What we don't see are the 12 hour days, six days a week, including cleaning up the backstage, front stage, tables, and bar areas after every show.

The Approach: If the Jamaican Bobsled Team has to go to Wyoming to train, how do you find enough cold stuff to land Santa for gift dispensing? You use a fishing boat and drive it up on the beach. True to form, I slammed my red velour covered shin into the gunwale of the boat. I'll swear I was Santa but won't swear as Santa.

The Kids: About 100 kids followed me through the property, through the main lobby, and back to the show stage, where I sat and posed for pictures while handing out gifts. I only lost my beard twice, both times when I grabbed white nylon and a kid at the same time and snapped the elastic on the back of my head.

Major props to Bill Rosenblatt, good friend and former roommate, without whom I never would have discovered Rastafarianism, the Lion of Judah, Positive Vibrations, or how much fun it is to bring a bit of the snow and cold to part of the world that's always warm. Irie, mon.