Baby and Mommy are doing fine

Baby and Mommy are doing fine
Originally uploaded by LangFamily.

One of the rare public appearances for the dynamic duo.

The holidays have been a bit of a blur, and now we are back on track. Baby Grace has had a bit of a difficult time at here first Christmas, as she caught a cold from her brothers and has been struggling to keep it together through all of the visits and excitement.

A Star is Born!

DSCF0013.JPG
Originally uploaded by LangFamily.

Unidentified karaoke singer steals show.

The 80's are not dead, as evidenced by the impromptu performance of an unidetified karaoke singer, who decided to regale a mixed audience of Christmas partiers with his own personal lounge-lizard rendition of "Wild Boys" (Duran Duran), and other assorted holiday favourites. Sources suggest that several agencies have attempted to contact the singer, but he is holding out until he has assessed the job market for hockey players and superheroes.

Military History Wiki update

A brief update on Military History Wiki is available here.

Military History Wiki was a project that I started a couple of years back to provide an online repository for articles and information related to Military History. I had a lot of help from a number of friends, and especially from my brother-in-law John, who also shares the excitement. The site used software available under free license from Mediawiki, and was set up to run in a similar fashion to Wikipedia. I personally funded the hosting costs for the site, and also donated a significant amount of personal time to site promotion and updating.

After a while, several astute authors and historians noticed that there were many articles of relevance already posted on Wikipedia, and they started to cross-post or copy the Wikipedia articles to the MHW site. While this managed to expand the number of articles rather quickly, it also diluted the amount of original material. This is not necessarily a bad thing - in fact, MHW was picked up at Armchair General Magazine, and several other online sites including Military Spot, and Society for Military History.

Over the past year the contributors at Wikipedia have finally gotten their act together, and you can read about what has transpired as well as any new Military History Wiki information, here.

P really likes his sister

P really likes his sister
Originally uploaded by LangFamily.

P finally gets a chance to hold his baby sister. This is a very important moment for the little guy, as he has not been allowed to hold G until this point. He really enjoys her after this, and has even taken to getting his own baby doll so that he can mimic his parents as they care for her.

He loves to talk about how "cute" she is, and how soft her hair and skin is. He is very gentle, and tries to make sure that he is there to help out if he thinks there is something he can do to help.

My conversion to the world of Apple

If you had met me a few years back, you would never have believed that I would even consider an Apple product.

Well, finally, I have made the plunge. And I am here to tell you that the water is actually quite warm, and not as scary as you might think. And the more that I work and play in the world of Apple products, the more I realize how significant this decision has become.

A little background: until a little over a year ago, I had several MS Windows machines and a couple of Linux boxes. My work laptop was an IBM Thinkpad - which was actually a fantastic machine in it's own right. I firmly believed, along with the Windows masses, that if it was not happening in the PC world, it was not immediately relevant. And this generally made sense. The latest "in" software was usually written for Windows, the latest games were written for Windows first, and the files that I exchanged with my colleagues and customers at work were authored in Microsoft Office for Windows.

Unfortunately, it also meant that the majority of hacker and virus activity also happens in the Windows world. And this was fine for me for a while, until one fateful day when I picked up a virus on our main PC that just refused to go away. As I scrambled to try to rescue a number of important files, including family pictures and personal records (unsuccessfully, I might add), I stumbled across some of the claims made by Mac users and how happy they were with their simple to use and as yet uninfected Mac OS X systems.



I am not new to the world of Macintosh. Those who have known me for a while will remember back when I worked for Xerox Canada. Back then I believe it was Mac OS 7. Macs were used extensively in the graphics industry, as they were the primary tool for graphics designers. Much of the software used in the graphics industry used to be available only for Apple machines, so if you worked in the industry you usually had a lot of exposure to Apple products. This was back in the age of Extensions and Control Panels, when Mac users occassionally suffered with technical issues like hard drive drivers and Extension conflicts that would cause random crashes when you least expected it. And multitasking in Mac OS was absolutely terrible. In many instances outside of the graphics arts industry, Macs were treated more as toys than as real computers.

Fortunately for all of us, Steve Jobs and Mac OS X changed all of that. And for me, the discovery of Mac OS X Tiger was the end of MS Windows on both my home and work machines. I sold our home PCs, or relegated them to the basement as fileservers (see FreeNAS). And at work, I managed to get my laptop changed to an iBook.

I haven't looked back since. All of the applications that I used to have on my Windows PC were either available on my Mac, or have even better equivalents. I am now using devices and software that was designed to be easy to use, instead of requiring a significant amount of time and effort for me to learn how the developer wanted me to work.

And I have not lost a single document yet. Knock on wood!

GTEC conference material posted at Sun Microsystems

A couple of months back I attended the GTEC conference in Ottawa Canada as a partner of Sun Microsystems. The conference is designed as a technology show for IT folks in the Canadian federal government circles. I had the opportunity to meet with the Sun folks in Ottawa for extended periods of time, worked with some of them in the Sun Microsystems booth, and also met a couple of their reseller partners from the Ottawa region.

I noticed some interesting trends at the show. Several major vendors scaled back their presence significantly, including EMC, Oracle and Symantec. I mention these three because I frequently come across either the vendor or their partners at tradeshows. Also of note was a significant variance in attendance at the workshops. Folks seemed to be really interested in security, records management, and regulatory issues for IT. There was not as much attendance at purely technical presentations or demonstrations.

On the second day I presented a brief discussion of the risks and benefits associated with regulatory compliance, and some of the tools and technology that Sun Microsystems and AXS-One offer. The link to my presentation can be found at the Sun Microsystems site here.

Channel Management News blog

In 2006 I published an online newsletter for channel managers, called Channel Management. At the time I was the Regional Sales Manager for Canada and the East USA for Blueroads, a channel management software vendor that offered channel CRM as a service. It was an exciting time and industry to participate in. Unfortunately, the Board of Directors did not like the direction that the CEO was taking the company in, and decided to make some serious changes to the sales model and management team. As a result, I was let go as were the other sales managers. I made some new friends, learned a lot, and still maintain relationships with many of the people whom I met in the short time at the company.

One of the more interesting folks I have stayed in touch with is Axel Schultze, who was the founder and CEO of Blueroads. Since then, he has published a few blogs, written a book, started an organization and also kicked off a couple of new companies. He is a true advocate of software-as-a-service, and sincerely believes that it is the best way to interact electronically between sales channel partners. I will post more about Axel in an upcoming post.

Some people have been asking me what I have been doing since the Blueroads days. You can read more about my professional life at LinkedIn.

Personal Blog

Ok, I finally decided that it is time to get my own blog online. Stay tuned for more...