Way back some time ago, our landlord, whom we were somewhat concerned about due to their financial state (lots of vacant spots here in our complex), had their mortgage called by the bank that took over for the bank they’ve had before, when it went belly up. That new bank called their loan. They didn’t notify us of this until we got the note from the lawyer demanding we pay them rent rather than the landlord.

[Update below the fold] My wife has this tongue-in-cheek “theory” on balance in the universe. Comes from being a physics geek I guess (yeah, we are a pair). Maybe I’ll tell the “spherical horse” joke some day again, in public. Our opening of 2011 was, well, crappy. And thats an understatement. We lost her father Frank to cancer. He had fought off one form, and 2 years later, it reared its ugly head.

Basically, their support rocks! Their switches are pretty good to begin with. But (apart from very long phone waits … 50+ minutes in this case), their support team is exactly what I want to deal with. No nonsense, speaking to someone who knows whats going on with the units. Kudos again to #HP !

… in climategate … The registers piece isn’t bad. Actually quite good. Their thesis is “this sort of stuff happens when you get big money/politics following dubious claims, a cottage industry and group think evolve”. They note similar examples from other industries. I am not saying I completely agree with their characterization, it sounds reasonable, but it is comparing somewhat dislike things with a similar metric. The issue is the public policy (and money, influence, power, …) flow from the political class and could polute the underpinnings of the scientific class.

We do lots of business with customers who want things yesterday. We do what we can to accommodate, but we do build things in a just-in-time model. Avoids costly inventory, and keeps us nimble. This also means we have to micromanage our suppliers. Many don’t quite understand what a “sense of urgency” means. When we tell them we want something by a specific date, and they ship it a month later … Or a case we are dealing with now, where we’ve had a long/huge wait from a supplier, who then shipped us something non-working.

Dust has finally …. FINALLY …. been released. We’ve had the driver update packs out there for a while, but finally we’ve released DUST. What is DUST you might say? How about a way to automatically update drivers from source/distributions? But wait … isn’t that just dkms? Sort of. We’ve found … horrific problems … with DKMS that we couldn’t solve. We wound up writing scripts to work around DKMS as it didn’t build things the way we needed them built.

Some locations are farther than others, and this makes shipping gear pretty expensive. We’ve been asked for a software only version of our stack from the 2 remaining continents we don’t have installs on (ok, 2 of 3 … not to much business in Antarctica right now). I won’t get into the positives/negatives of this business model. Shipping bits lowers costs as compared to shipping atoms. But atoms are tangible, and require a cost to reproduce patterns that bits don’t impose.

OMFG … we were (and are) continuously inundated with benchmarketing numbers. These numbers purport to represent the system in question. They don’t. We can derive their numbers by multiplying the number of drives by the theoretical best case performance, assuming everything else is perfect. Never mind that it never is perfect. Its that the benchmarketing numbers haven’t been measured, in a real context. We do the measurements in a real context and report the results to end users.

Yeah, this show had lots of folks talking storage. Obviously we did too. Nicole from Datanami (she had a terrible cold running at the time, I hope she is feeling better), asked me to give a short set of non advertising type interviews. Below is what I did, given no prep, no forwarning, and about 30 seconds to mentally prepare (and that might be generous). Part 1: Big Data in Media and Entertainment

Back in Michigan. ?Long flight, quite tired, but back. This was a good show for us. ?A very good show. ?Gave away lots of siMugs, released siFlash, did demos and had discussions. Generally speaking, we had good booth traffic, and many readers of this blog came by to say hello. ?Thank you for that! ?I very much enjoyed this, and meeting people in person for the first time. Sponsoring Beobash was fun.