Well, here we are once again at the end of a very busy, exciting and tiring year.  I get to the end of every year thinking that it had been more hectic and faster than the one before, though this past year has been exceptional both with work commitments and also selling and then moving house.  The result of this has been less time to dedicate to my home lab and also blogging, which you may have noticed with the decline of regular posts.  I have tried to keep semi-regular posts flowing with mixed success.   Of course, having all of my lab equipment in storage for four months whilst we move house didn’t help things.  

Now, I’m not saying any of this from a negative perspective, far from it, moving out of London was most welcomed and I have been fortunate enough to be involved with some exciting projects and have worked with some fantastic and talented people.  My role at EMC has seen me involved with many different things; all around team enablement via creation of collateral, show/event support and the creation and evangelism (great US term) of EMC vLabs.  The vLabs have proven to be highly popular by providing people with the opportunity to get hands on time with a vast range of EMC’s VMware integrated products.  Plenty of hard work and long hours (as with most jobs in IT) but very rewarding to be doing something I enjoy. 

As with any role you see people join and leave the company, though one thing I love about this industry are the people in it and how we all continue to stay in touch irrelevant of where we are in the world and who we are working for.  All bound by the passion for what we do and the industry we’re fortunate enough to be part of.  

Moving back into the present.  After using up  my annual leave and moving house during December my batteries are now almost fully recharged and I’m ready to face the coming year with all the fun, challenges and excitement it will no doubt provide.  For me 2012 should prove to be more stable having moved house, which should (in theory) provide more “me time” to blog in the evenings and weekends. 

The new house provided a new ‘Man Cave’ space which was significantly larger than the oversized shoe box I had whilst living in London.  After moving into the house my new Man Cave started as an extremely tired 1970’s looking room with terrible cheap, worn and filthy carpet complete with tatty 1980’s Magnolia coloured walls, with a lovely damp smell to boot.  I had my work cut out for me to transform this sad and tired looking room into a light and vibrant workspace for me to work from in the evenings and weekends.

Below Left: Not dissimilar to how the room looked before the hard work began. Right: New Man Cave being renovated, complete with fetching vacuum cleaner – not mine (honest).

After much hard work removing the old carpet, dirty floor tiles and painting the room with a nice bright coat of white paint the new TechHead Man Cave is now operational.  The task of unpacking of boxes containing kit and cables still remains though this will happen in the coming days, but I’m very excited to have all my computer kit back out of storage again.  Photos of the completed room to follow…

I will be overhauling my home lab configuration so expect to see more regular posts on my home lab and a more steady flow of posts covering virtualization, general IT and tech topics.  I did contemplate overhauling the look of the TechHead site though due to the Man Cave preparation activities taking much longer than anticipated I have unfortunately run out of time, though the current site’s theme still seems pretty robust so should be good for a while longer.

A side project that myself and Simon Long kicked off  around 18 months ago was vBeers (see here for more details) and in early 2011 we decided to make things easier for people to create and spread the word of their own vBeers event by creating a dedicated vBeers site. vBeers.org was born. Both Simon and I have been really pleased how the virtualization community has taken to the concept of vBeers and the site itself.  With an increasing number of vBeers events being held every month the world over.  Any mechanism to increase the communication and opportunity to meet like-minded people who work in the virtualization and IT space can only be a good thing, especially in a relaxed social context – so from both Simon & myself thank you for partaking in vBeers!   

If you haven’t taken part in a vBeers get-together yet then why not check out the vBeers site for an upcoming vBeers in your area.  If there isn’t one planned, why not plan your own – it’s real easy.  Check out the page here for more details on how to do it. 

For all the vBeers regulars, just to let you know we plan a number of improvements to the vBeers site in the coming year.

So to end this post, a massive thanks to all of the existing and new readers of TechHead and as always I welcome and value all of your comments.  It was great to meet some of you at some of the tech events I attended throughout the year. 

Thanks very much and a Happy New Year to you and your family.  All the best for 2012!

See you back here soon.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

TO YOU ALL!

Hope you have a great Christmas and

All the Best for 2012 !

More regular content coming this year! 

What a crazy couple of months it’s been at work!   You can probably tell from the lack of blog posts on the site that I have been busy doing other things, namely working with a small group of others from the EMC vSpecialist team to create a VMworld EMC hands on lab offering for the upcoming VMworld events in Las Vegas and Copenhagen.  Plenty of hard work and brain power has gone into creating an engaging (we hope attendees will agree) though informative and relevant 60 minute lab for VMworld attendees to come and sit.  Although there were quite a few products in the EMC portfolio to choose from we (shout-out to our Technical Enablement Team Lead, Chris Horn) decided to include the products listed below as between them they cover a nice even spread of EMC’s offerings, all of which are directly relevant to today’s modern business and IT department.  The EMC products you’ll be able to come and get hands on time at VMworld 2011 are:

• EMC VNX including the VMware vCenter VSI plugins
• EMC Isilon (Big Data and an all round cool product in my opinion)
• VMware vShield 5 with Data Security (using RSA technology)
• EMC Avamar (backups and recovery)

It was definitely no easy task trying to cram all of this into a 60 minute lab but we’ve managed to do it and I feel we’ve created an interesting ‘real world’ type scenario to follow, which will make the lab all that more engaging.  Throughout the lab scenario attendees will follow a fun storyline that touches on each of the products named above to solve various common issues faced by many IT departments and businesses.

This week (starting 8th August)  I’ll be working with the VMware VMworld lab team to run through our lab and perform further testing and ‘tweaks’ to refine it and make it ready for show-time at VMworld.

As someone who loves the IT industry and tech in general I feel very fortunate to do what I do and have the opportunity to work with such a talented bunch of people.  The hours can sometimes be very long though luckily for me even the longest of days don’t feel like a chore due to my genuine geeky interest in what I do.  Just as well as I think I could have possibly gone mad by now.   

Below is a picture of our new lab room (still being unpacked as you can probably tell) where much of the EMC VMworld magic is being created.

Some of the spare time I have had I’ve channelled into a side project with Simon Long called vBeers.  We have now put together a vBeers (www.vbeers.org) web site that helps fellow virtualization and IT geeks create their own social gathering of like minded individuals, and get news of their vBeers event out to the masses.  Although it is called ‘vBeers’ it isn’t actually about the consumption of beer (many prefer soft drinks or wine) but the coming together of virtualization and tech enthusiasts who share the love of tech and like talking about it with others in a social and relaxed environment.  The concept of vBeers has certainly gained momentum over the past six months with new vBeers events created by individuals going up on the vBeers.org site every few days.  We’re so pleased that vBeers has been embraced by the vCommunity and that the site is helping the virtualization and IT community to connect.  If you haven’t heard of vBeers head over to the vBeers.org website to find out more.

Anyway… I thought I’d put this short post together to give you an insight into what I’ve been up to and why the number of new TechHead posts have been rather scarce over the past month or so. Start expecting to see some new blog posts hit the TechHead site in the coming weeks as I start to catch up on many half written posts.

Thanks for reading and as always please leave a comment with any questions or other.

Simon

I was disappointed to see that Cisco are considering closing their division that produces the Flip Video Camera.  I have been a satisfied Flip customer and user for a couple of years, in fact the vast majority of videos I have taken for the TechHead site have been on my trusty Flip Video Camera.  Sure, many people would say with the quality of video found on Smartphones such a the Apple iPhone surpass that found on the Flip though I personally have found the weight and feel of the Flip pleasant to use and features such as anti-shake make it a winner in my opinion.

My only ever gripe with the Cisco Flip has been its lack of an external mic jack socket though in the majority of situations the inbuilt microphone has been just fine.

I do understand the pressure that the Cisco Flip would be under from the Smartphone market though it is a shame that this great little cost effective camera is seeing the end of the line.

The closing of the Flip division of the company may not be the end of similar consumer level products being dropped from Cisco’s portfolio with company spokeswoman Karen Tillman informing that "We will be substantially reducing our investment in the consumer market as a stand-alone business and will invest in it only in partnership with enterprise and service providers customers". 

Here’s hoping that they don’t touch the entry level Linksys range of switches that are extremely popular in many business and home IT lab environments.

For more information on the Cisco Flip’s demise:

San Francisco Chronicle:  http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/12/BUC31IV1Q4.DTL

Financial Times:  http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e7b6bb0e-652d-11e0-b150-00144feab49a.html

The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/12/cisco-flip-camera-smartphones

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a fun video so here is my latest favourite by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost of Spaced and Shaun of the Dead fame.  If you haven’t seen either of these then I  recommend you get your hands on a copy.  Funny stuff.  Though for now I’m sure all you Star War fans out there will appreciate their video below! 

Here’s a quick video I put together on a Targus HeatDefense Cooling Mat that I purchased today.  I have an issue with my MacBook Pro i7 generating too much heat especially when video editing, running multiple VMs in Fusion or in fact even doing basic tasks such as email and web browsing.  This makes for much discomfort when I have my MacBook Pro on my lap and also makes any surface I have it on become very hot.

As such I was hoping that the Targus HeatDefense Cooling Mat would help reduce the amount of heat on the base of the MacBook Pro.  Check out the video below to find out how I got on with the Cooling Mat.