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

No, Idaho wasn't tagged, but I'm still getting follow up email and commentary from last week's trip, so here's the follow up blog entry with five things you may not have known about Idaho.

1. Idaho is the Gem State. Originally, the name was offered as a moniker for the land around Pike's Peak, and claim was made that "Idaho" was a Shoshone Indian word. It's not, it wasn't, and Pike's Peak is now in Colorado. The mountain didn't move, but the boundaries of Idaho did.

2. sunforsmallbusiness.com resolves to Indigo Networks, a company I referenced as a try and buy success story. It's a "Sun inside" ingredient branding, which is appealing because it takes Sun into smaller, local businesses. Gems of a silicon nature.

3. Banner Bank's new building in Boise is off the hook in terms of eco-responsibility. Combine geothermal heating with proximity to public transportation and wrap the whole thing up in a building that's 40% recycled material, and you have a world-class example of doing more with less.

4. Before Google Maps there was Sacajawea, the Shoshone Indian guide for Lewis and Clark's expedition west. She was born in Idaho, and more recently can be seen on the circulating US dollar coin.

5. Solaris eclipses vistas in Idaho.

During the Idaho Business and Technology Expo, Microsoft parked their big rig along the curb, offering demonstrations and previews of Vista for those who ventured inside. Personally, the whole idea brought back a pair of memories -- from the Silicon Graphics "Jurassic Park" truck that we used to spot in Manhattan to the traveling freak show that occasionally arrived in the Monmouth Mall parking lot, offering the chance to see a "real frozen wooly mammoth" for only $2. Draw your own parallels from either of my flashbacks. The folks pictured above are two Sun employees and customers who put on the shirts, braved the cold and faced into the Sun, because, well, Solaris has fans and we were having fun.

That strange existential combination -- having fun, great technology, and general upset with a competitor's idea of 18-wheeler entertainment -- was our summer of 1995 impetus for the first JavaDay in New York City. The incongruity of the Microsoft Across America truck (leaving aside the "Beavis and Butthead do America" and "Tap Into America" movie references) is something I said in closing at my talk in Boise. Jon Katz's fabulous book Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho is a good read because it talks about the culture of being a geek, of belonging to a group that is defined by network routing protocols and not social protocols. Katz has the right idea but the wrong direction -- the Internet brings technology and communities into Idaho (or any other place with reasonable bandwidth), without any particular reason for you to leave. No trucks needed, departing from or getting to the Gem State.

I define a truly successful trip as one in which I learn something from our customers, our partners, or our employees, and frequently, more than one input from that list. So far, this is a good trip.

The primary insight I gleaned was first-hand accounts of how our Try and Buy Program is creating growth opportunities. Digitar, the customer testimonial on our Innovating@Sun story, is based in Boise. Turns out they're not the only customers using the free systems to test out new configurations for Sun in existing applications. One customer told me about using Sun's Opteron servers with VMware and Windows, and feeling much more comfortable getting the hardware through try and buy because they could put whatever stack they wanted on the metal.

Before my own session at the Boise Business and Technolgy Expo, a local Boise hosting company was talking about their choice of platform for web, application and managed network services targetting retail, auto dealers, and the hospitality industry. It's build on Solaris and Sun Opteron servers, and a full-up "SAMP" stack -- Solaris, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, along with their custom network management scripts. And they got the servers through Try and Buy, because it was an easy way to get started quickly, and test out new stacks.

What's the big deal? It's not quite the bottom of the bottomless blue that Fred Schneider sings about, rather, it's an example of a Blue Ocean strategy. However much it pains me to reference anything having to do with Harvard, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne highlight the ability to grow an existing large business (say, Sun) through non-consumptive markets. You need to find those attributes of a product that are valued more by the customers, and then over-rotate on them. That's what struck me about the two Try and Buy examples -- neither was cannibalizing existing Sun business; it was pure new business.

Apologies to the B-52s, but when in Boise, there's no need to get out of the state you're in. We're spinning round and round, but with opportunity.

I'm on my way to Boise, Idaho for some customer and partner meetings, via a pair of early morning flights from Newark through Minneapolis. The early departure gets me to Boise in time for a lunch meeting, and saves Sun the expense of one additional night in a hotel and the fare difference for a more "normal" flight time.

Unfortunately, Starbucks at Newark Airport don't share my love of early departures. The first flights depart Terminal B at 6:00 AM, which means you're in the terminal by 5:00 AM or earlier. Bring your own coffee, because Starbucks isn't open at 5:00 AM. Both coffee stops in this terminal are locked up without any posted hours. The Dunkin' Donuts counters in both Terminals A and C are open 24 hours a day, so passengers and the employees of the Port Authority can get a hot shot at any time. Yet another reason why my loyalties lie with the pink and orange, rather than green and black.

I'd get a coffee in the Northwest Airlines lounge (which honors my Continental club membership), but it doesn't open until 5:30 AM either. If your first flight leaves at 6:00 AM, you should really have your branded lounge open at the TSA recommended lead time before then, or at least by 5:00 AM.

Caffeine levels at quarter-full, I have a plane to catch.

On top of the enormously fun discussion I had with Glenn Brunette about systemic security, we had a longer conversation that included Darren Moffat as well on the broader topic of Solaris 10 security features. It's available as -- you guessed it -- part of our Innovating@Sun podcast series.

This has been an extra-hot topic in every customer meeting I've attended in January. Operational folks who want separable system administration roles and individual process rights are happy to see those features show up in Solaris 10, decomposing the historically single privileged root into multiple points of control and delegation. Security and privacy experts, particularly those who worry about data architecture and what to do about the ever-growing volume of protecting data at rest, like new OpenSolaris projects involving cryptography for the ZFS filesystem and the lofi interface that makes filesystems look like files (for easier crypto-handling). We have long emphasized the security features in Solaris, and Solaris 10 adds in functionality that was formerly the express domain of the Trusted Solaris edition consumed by federal government customers.

But as Marty DeBergi would say, "Enough of my yakkin'". You can hear the experts first-hand.

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'm now the proud owner of a 14-CD set containing the complete Adventures of Chickenman. All 273 episodes, including the weekend specials that were sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency, and the promotions, contests and "local avails" (where the local carrying station could insert some listener into the show, typically by splicing the intro and outro provided by Chickenman's producers around a contestant). Chickenman was a spoof on Batman, with completely repetitive, goofy audio gags replacing the unlikely physical jams into which Batman and Robin were typically placed (and even less believably extracted).

The boxed set makes me smile on a number of levels. What you get is essentially a CD version of the vinyl tracks that a radio station received in the 1970s, each day's episodes put onto a tape cartridge (cart) to be sequenced between commercials, station promotions and public service announcements. A great reminder of my days producing similarly sized taped gems at WPRB-FM.

Bigger smiles come from reliving summer days down the shore, where my sister and I would listen to WJRZ-FM, soaking up episodes of Chickenman between the Paul Harvey news and ads for the Ship Bottom Motor Lodge. It's not Law & Order but that's precisely the point -- Chickenman locked himself out of rooms, accidentally set his wings on fire, and frequently had to answer to the most unbending authority of all, his mother.

Chickenman was also well ahead of his time. Some of the later episodes than ran on the weekends weren't serialized as part of the "main" storyline, and instead featured Chickenman taking on polluters and other eco-unfriendly types. The Fantastic Fowl knew about eco-responsibility thirty years before it was fashionable. Chickenman's radio outro was clearly one of the first true network memes, as you can walk into clusters of 40-somethings and ask about "the most fantastic crime-fighter the world has ever known," only to find out that "he's everywhere! he's everywhere!". And now he's riding shotgun in my car's CD player, too.

I was talking to a high school student this weekend who said, rather matter of factly, "I grew up with Harry Potter." Color commentary is that the Sorcerer's Stone hit the bookshelves when student and story protagonist were the same age, and now the final installment in the world's most-read wizard's tale will coincide (roughly) with high school graduation. The thought was a sidebar to a longer conversation about good and bad television, the quality of media, and my own surprise at seeing former Princeton classmate Cecil Hoffman walk onto my living room's TV via the fifth season of LA Law.

But the notion of growing up with characters that we adore stuck with me, because I had trouble identifying any characters from the big or small screen that paralleled my own life (please, no Revenge of The Nerds jokes just yet). The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family didn't age, and at the time I guess it wasn't too weird that Greg Brady lived with his parents until he was in 19th grade. Fonzie on Happy Days lived in the suspended animation of Friday night television until he was forced to visit Milwaukee in the Laverne and Shirley spin-off. Stories were told, but we watched, ate ice cream, and forget about the characters until next week. There was no way to find any facet of life reflected in the glare of the prime time television. Not until I ran into Michael and Elliot's Company in thirtysomething did we find characters who looked, aged, and dealt with made-for-TV crises the same way I did, or at least the way I would had our positions behind and in front of the screen been transposed.

I have emphasized to our global systems engineering team, and to the larger customer engineering community at Sun, that storytelling is a critical part of an outstanding customer experience. If we can relate what our customers need to what our products do, and convert the language of technology to the language of business, then there's a good story waiting to be told. Should customers, employees, or partners find themselves reflected in the narrative, we grow our community. It's less the magic of Harry Potter and more watching him grow up that fascinates those of us who are, at any age, spellbound by good storytelling.

Part number next in our continuing Innovating@Sun audio-fest features Distinguished Engineer and Jersey guy Glenn Brunette talking about systemic security.

Typically we think about securing things -- a system, a network, our homes, sometimes even our personal content like email or files on a laptop. That's security as a place, a well-drawn boundary around what is secured and what lies at risk. Security, however, is itself a thing, something that evolves as risks, components and the relationships of those components change, and as new risks are discovered and tolerances for those risks tested and cost-adjusted. Glenn's systemic security patterns reflect outstanding systems engineering -- thinking about security in a dynamic context, not a set-it-forget-it mentality.

Sometimes systems engineering is a bit like designing the ultimate dessert: it's discovering that peanut butter and chocolate taste great together, and that when you scramble a few of those delights into a bowl full of chocolate ice cream it's heavenly. The systemic sweetness is arrived at incrementally, one good idea building on another one (and yes, you can get this truly heart-unhealthy dessert at Thomas Sweet, if you live near Princeton, NJ, New Brunswick, NJ or Washington, DC. They call it a mix-in, not a mash-up, but it's the same idea).

Only New Year's resolutions to reduce my intake of junk foods would lead to parallels between sucrose engineering and storage systems. I digress from a valuable engineering discussion -- the systems engineering parallel is that the composition of products often yields a new system with characteristics outside the scope of any one of the components taken by itself.

A few weeks ago, I hosted a spirited taping session with Jeff Bonwick, Distinguished Engineer, co-creator of the ZFS filesystem, and CTO of the storage business unit at Sun, Bill Moore, the hardware architect for the X4500 server (also known as "Thumper") and Bob Sokol, fellow Jersey resident and Chief Architect for our Media and Entertainment industry group. Our design roundtable covered how and why Thumper came into existence as a systems product (the peanut butter), why ZFS is the ideal filesystem for it, allowing us to solve for improved reliability, performance and ease of management at the software layer (the chocolate), and how it applies to those industries with some of the most intense and largest-scale data management requirements (ice cream as entertainment).

The podcast of our attempts to contain the data explosion is now available as part of our Innovating@Sun series.

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.