The S Word Blog: A mostly 100% sort-of-semi-technical blog by Thin Guy. Mostly.

As a 29 year old in the fall of 1999,  I was recruited by tech juggernaut and dot com sweetheart Sun Microsystems to come aboard in their Professional Services division focusing on PC NetLink (remember that!!??) and interoperability.  When I officially started in January of 2000 (I had to make sure the Y2K bug didn't bite Bellagio!) "Interoperablity" meant a totally different thing to Sun at the time.  To me, and the team I joined, it meant making Sun hardware work in a Microsoft environment.  Unix and SPARC in a MS Domain?  Impossible?  Nope.  We were wildly successful for PS, a small team raking in millions in billable hours.

Eventually that led me to working with the Sun Ray product and doing the sacrilegious thing of displaying full screen MS Windows on a Sun Ray without ever interacting with Solaris from a user perspective.  That eventually led to a job with Sun Ray Engineering where I've spent (thus far) the best years of my life.  Three of my five daughters were born under the SUNW stock ticker.  10 years, my second job out of college, friends that I consider some of the best I've ever had.

I could dedicate a whole blog entry to the "second half" of my tenure at Sun, where I got involved with Social Media.  I owe a lot to the Blogs.Sun.Com  team, without their vision I wouldn't know half of the people that I know around the world today.  Thin Guy became synonymous with Sun Ray.  (Could you believe I was going to first use "Tall Guy"?).  Talk about social media building a brand.  I'm now introduced as "Thin Guy" rather than my given name of Craig Bender.  There are so many to thank, Linda Skrocki, Rama Roberts, and of course the very early blogging queen Mary Smaragdis (Not to brag, but I was her new favorite blogger once...that was a huge deal).  And the friends I made on those teams...too many to list.  Liz Ditucci, Dave Arguelles, and so many others.  I feel like I know them all personally even though I've only met one of them in real life.

If you're worried about me, don't be.  I'm continuing on at Oracle and more importantly so are the Sun Ray, SGD, VDI, and VirtualBox products.  The blogging policy is a wee bit different at Oracle, so my blog posts will be "on topic" for my job.  I'm contemplating moving the personal topics (recipes, workouts, autism, general humor) to a new non-work related blog, but all the technical posts will continue to live over at Think Thin.

I have so many great memories of Sun.  My colleagues made Sun what it was.  The technology was a side effect of the freedom given to extremely talented people and the eye for hiring exceptional talent.  We may have lacked at execution on bringing the stuff to market, but Sun was an innovator.  Note to hiring companies, if someone has a couple of years at SUNW/JAVA on their resume, that's all you need to know.  They're a keeper.  One last thing about my time at Sun...I used to travel a lot (150K+ airmiles a year).  I saw the world and it was beautiful.  But when my youngest was diagnosed with autism, the travel was becoming harder on our family and had to be reduced and that was OK with Sun.  Their work from home program was not only saving both employees and the company money, the environment, it might also have "saved" a little girl as well.  While I won't say she's recovered, she's a totally different kid because Sun's policies allowed me to be there for her.  For that I am eternally grateful.

With that I bid this "S-Word" blog goodbye.   Catch me on Think Thin and speaking at Oracle events near you.  Thank you so much for your readership.  Let's see if Thin Guy can be synonymous with Oracle VDI.  I know my new boss is finally getting the N|C he always wanted.  GO ORACLE!

Yes, cloud.  Not a typo.  What do you get when you combine a low cost netbook and the upcoming Sun Desktop Access Client?  You get a ton of computing power in a very small form factor that can go anywhere accessing powerful servers and Windows, Linux, and OpenSolaris VM's safely in your data center or cloud.  How's that for VDI in the clouds?

(WiiMote shown for scale)

Here's a quick video I made showing the different supported OS choices available only with Sun VDI 3.  I mention "supported" because you can make any OS VirtualBox supports into a VDI solution, but we officially support XP, Vista, Win2KPro, Ubuntu, and OpenSolaris.  "Supported" means you can place a service call if something is not operating as advertised.  Note the "Full PC" experience of the boot and shut down for each OS.   I'll be cleaning this up a bit by making it shorter and adding some tunes (server was right next to me while filming so I removed the original audio track).

Due to my blog being stale I've gotten a few inquiries as whether or not I'm still with Sun.  Since you're reading this, the answer is yes.  It's not that I don't have a lot to talk about, I just have been doing it in much shorter bursts.

♫ I feel happy. I feel happy. ♫

If you're tired of doing the VNC route to remotely display an apple desktop, check out AquaConnect!  AquaConnect brings an RDP Server to OS X Server.  This means you can use our Sun Ray Windows Connector to display a Leopard desktop on your Sun Ray and couple it with hot desking and stateless goodness!.  Here's a couple of shots of Sun Ray and AquaConnect from MacWorld

(Photo's courtesy of Chris Kawalek)

Welcome to Fabulous Frozen Las Vegas!

And a few more from my camera phone as the weather unfolded throughout the day.

Sometimes you think you know what beauty is.

And then sometimes you add a new definition.  

Beauty:  When at the sound of a school bell you see young mentally challenged boy dash fifty yards in an awkward gait into the waiting arms of his mother and you can feel the love in their embrace across the distance of a parking lot.

We'll be meeting tonight at the Yard House about 7:30 PM.  Nothing too formal, just drinks, appetizers, and some good conversation.   The Yard House is located in the Town Square, cab drivers should know how to get there.   (Don't attempt to walk it like folks from last year as things in Vegas are farther than they appear)

View Larger Map

Kids have school off tomorrow for Nevada Day, so today was costume day.  No face makeup allowed according to the school district though, so not as fun as they will be tomorrow.  I prefer cute to scary anyways.

Here's Laney as a Scary Fairy

Mags as a Ghost Bride

Cami as a Pretty Witch

And Bellamy as her favorite thing in the whole world.  A strawberry!

Cute!

We are planning another desktop dinner during CEC.  If you are coming to CEC and are a desktop person (or a fan of Sun Ray, SGD, Sun VDI, or this blog), leave me a comment or send me some mail (first.last@sun.com).  I'll post the location and final time and date when we get final word.  We are trying to narrow it down to Monday or Tuesday night.  Looking forward to see my virtual desktop friends once again from across the globe.  #goodtimes

This has been a heated election.  Both the right and left, including their respective media outlets of choice, have done their best to get the average voter spun up, angry even.  Inspiring people is good, making them get angry is bad.  I've found myself getting angry a lot lately, what's more I haven't made up my mind as to who I'm voting for.  Yes folks, I'm undecided. 

Today however, I learned to relax about it all.  I won't let blogs, or snarky twitter comments upset me.  Nor will I make comments that are bound to upset others (I know I have upset a few friends).  I'll do my best not to watch any political pundits on the news.  What I will watch is how much each candidate shows their humanity in the next few weeks.  And what made me relax?  This video showing both McCain and Obama and their human side.  They both made me laugh.  I think I laughed more at Obama not being able to keep a straight face after his jokes than anything else.  But again, most importantly it reminded me that 1) these two are human and 2) they are proud Americans.

Sure they had (extremely talented and funny) speech writers, but I do hope they meant every word.  I do believe that every little thing is gonna be alright.

More details and download links over on the Think Thin Blog.

Thanks to my friends at Dataman for capturing this pic at a recent tradeshow.

Bellamy starts school today, a little more than a week after she turned 3 years old.  This is a picture of me saying goodbye as we have a bit (read "a lot") of separation anxiety even when I leave the room, so we felt it best for Mom to take her alone.   Bellamy is entering the program for kids with Autism in the Clark County School District.  She'll be going from 9 AM until 3 PM, 5 days a week.  My wife talked to the mother of a child that went through the program and now he's a "typical" kid (by standardized tests) that is actually in my 7 year old daughters class.  You'd never guess that when he started the program he was diagnosed with Autism and had zero speech.  We will also continue with the private occupational, behavioral, and speech therapies that we've been doing since about March.  She's going to be one busy 3 year old.

We are hopeful, excited, and scared all at the same time.  We've seen great progress over the last 6 month, and can't wait to see how she will grow.  Maybe in a couple years you'll be reading this blog and the topic will be about coaching her soccer team and how she scored her first goal.  Fingers crossed!

That's were you'll find me if you happen to be attending VMWorld.  I'm easy to spot as I think only Joost is taller than me, and I've got far more hair.  Sure, it's receding, but it's still there.  Mostly.

In my last entry, "CL" posted a comment wanting more to see more examples of Windows media redirection.  Here's another video showing a variety of clips.  Talking heads, animation,  a couple of VC-1 live streams.  Enjoy.  Still have the dog barking at the tripod problem, so I apologize for some of the shaky parts.  Take a Dramamine if you get queasy.  If you want to watch this in a bit better quality, follow this link and click on the "watch in high quality" link once you get into YouTube (right under the "Views" number).

I've decided to do a series of small videos showing the new features of our forthcoming Sun Ray Server Software 4.1.  The first video will feature our Multimedia enhancements.  I had a nice setup for the first shoot, only to find my dog really hates the tripod.  Second attempt, with the tripod in the garage and the camcorder in my hands is less than optimal quality but you get the idea.  Cut the video a little short as my dog decided to start barking at other dogs in the neighborhood halfway through the windows demo.  It's not often I get a quiet house with 5 daughters so I'll have to accept this cut for now.  :)  Oh yeah, don't watch this YouTube Video from a Sun Ray as Flash support is next up on the drawing board.

Less than a week after getting my wife an iPhone 3G, it was stolen.  Here's what I've learned.  Neither AT&T nor Apple care that your phone was stolen.  AT&T will not black list the IMEI or SIM, meaning that whoever stole the phone can go right down to AT&T and get the phone switched over to their account with ZERO questions asked.

Apple will not black list the serial number and will allow it to be registered with iTunes, just by plugging it into the computer.

Even if you deactivate your phone service, the iPhone (either model) basically becomes a fully functional iPod Touch.

Condoning theft is a strong accusation, but it would be simple for either AT&T or Apple to brick the phone.   Furthermore they refuse to offer insurance on the iPhone (far more expensive phones are insurable) which begs the question why?  I'll tell you why, because AT&T get a new customer with the stolen phone locked into a two year contract, the theft victim has to continue paying for two years with no option but to pay full market price ($499 USD) to replace their phone AND get locked into another two year contract.  Luckily you can drop the 3G data plan at will, and luckily we still have her old Motorola RAZR.  Otherwise, we'd be out of luck and spending at least $150 USD on the most basic of phones.

The rotten cherry on top of this crap cake story is that I bought the phone with my Corporate American Express Card since that's the card I have on file with AT&T to pay my bill with.  American Express offers a great service called Buyers Protection that covers you from damage or theft in the first 90 days.  It's complimentary service available on every American Express Card...EXCEPT the Corporate Card.  Nice.

I've given both Apple and AT&T a lot of my hard earned money and they flat out don't care.  I honestly think "iPhone Theft" is viewed as another revenue stream for them.

What the hell NBC?  Hasn't our language been butchered enough?  It's not even like you were saving characters.  Are 3rd graders editing NBC web pages?  Thx 4 da LOL tho!

An hour and a quarter later, they fix it. 

via Kevin Chu

Boring conference call?  Make "YearBook" photos of yourself from the 1950's to 2000 on Yearbook Yourself.  Just remember to hit mute as you'll be laughing.