COMMON Day 1 - Good things are coming?

I woke up early in Charlotte, piled myself into my car and drove from Charlotte to Atlanta to Chattanooga and arrived in Nashville around 2:00 CST. The Opryland Hotel is entirely to huge. I will go into why I don’t like the hotel and how they fail as a good hotel for conventions from my first impressions.

COMMON on the other hand is set up really well. One day Hotels will set up their conventions so that are not mazes.  I always love coming to COMMON and seeing all the people who are here because they love the System i.

When I arrived and signed in I saw a few people I had looked forward to seeing. Everything is right where it should be. The Book store is in place and the Education table is up.  After wandering around for a bit shaking hands and saying hello we all ventured over to the main hall for the opening session.

The opening session was impressive.  I want to say there were over 1000 people in there if not more. I would like to say that I want the Opening Session to be exciting. Randy Default is not an exciting speaker. While I respect that fact that he is the president of COMMON I don’t think he should be speaking to get people excited. He is a very direct and scripted speaker. To start of with he covered some of the most boring information alive.

At some point he handed over the floor to Mark Shearer from IBM, while Mark is excited about the brand he is not very animated. I willpost what was covered in detail later in the blog.

There is some big info coming this week, they all hinted around to it and we all find out on Tuesday morning about the big news.

After the Opening Session which IMHO was a snooze and covered a bunch of crap I already knew. They opened the Expo floor, which is the same old same old. Got to see some old faces, The booths keep getting smaller. The food was pretty good on the floor. I am trying to eat better while on the road. It ain’t easy but I am going to try. I am also on my own dime this week so eating FREE food is cheaper than paying for it.

More updates later.

COMMON - Driving to Nashville

I am going to be driving to Nashville on Saturday! COMMON starts Sunday @ 9 AM for the SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) with a wonderful breakfast put on by the COMMON staff. What a nice thing to do.

I am going to tell you this now. You need to pay attention to this blog. Something huge is coming from IBM, I can feel it and when I get the scoop I am going to post it here! It’s a gut feeling and I have nothing to base it on but the “chatter” is really odd right now and I think we are looking at a huge news week next week for the System i community.

Stay tuned!

The furture of System i according to a few System i pundants and Bob

The article is rather old in news terms, but I wanted to post it a week before all the big news of IBM is coming and just to see how right on they are or are not.

—-> LINK PART 1 | PART2 (Can’t find a part 2, maybe it never happened)

Full Disclosure: I am not a fan of Bob Tipton. I think he knows it and could care less, but more importantly I want to make it clear I am not in complete agreement with his opinion in this post. I also think he never says anything new. He seems to like the “word of the day” or the current buzz word and makes general and irrelevant points in conversation.  I had a few run ins with Bob and he is very self important, but then again aren’t we all?

Elephant Trunk Camera, I thought this was really neat

Ok so this has nothing to do with System i but it’s just super cool and the pictures are very neat. —> LINK

Week before COMMON

It’s the week before COMMON and everything has gotten quiet. Next week should be filled with all kinds of new details as to the direction of IBM and the System i. Anyone want to make any predictions?

Sharing - How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong

I am a fan of Apple and know they have problems but I just wanted to share this interesting article with all of you and hope you all learn something from Apple’s Years of Doing things wrong! —> Link

Article - System i Resume Building 101 - Search400.com

Hello, and happy Friday. Just wanted to post a little bit here and let you all know I wrote a little article on Search400.com that summarizes my 20 years of looking for employment. It says System i but really can be applied to anyone looking for a solid IT job.

System i Resume Building 101

“When I was most recently job prospecting, the first thing I did was gather a group of my peers together whom I called my “Board of Directors.” I asked them to give an honest assessment of my resume package.This may sound a bit silly, but . . .”

Hope you all enjoy the read and if you have any questions please post them here on to Search400.com I will be happy to help you out if I can.

Bill Gates has no idea what he is talking about

First of all I am no fan of Microsoft. I have proven that fact over and over again. I do however respect Bill Gates, he is a smart guy with good form who knows his place in life.

But . . . Bill Gates has no idea what he is talking about when he says there are no decent Americans in the US willing to work for Microsoft. I know plenty of strong IT people who would work for Microsoft today if they had a way for them to get in and interview. I think there are a couple of things here going on.

1. Bill Gates is turning soft and forgetting about the country he has built his empire on, the USA, and is thinking he will be a global shill and pander to other “not so lucky” countries that would do anything to get here even work for less and not have as much “house hold goods” to move. It all comes back to money.

2. I would have worked for Microsoft if they would ever call anyone back. In the past 20 years I have read the Microsoft jobs web site and have found many positions I would like but have never even got so much as a call back on anything in 20 years. Getting into Microsoft, unless you are an H-1B visa holder, then they seem to be able to find you just fine.

3. Microsoft is now pandering to the country that is the second or third country to steal the most software from them. Most H-1B visa holders Microsoft wants to hire are from India, not Japan or China, but India and also a country that steals more software from Microsoft than the US.

4. Indians from India will work like crazy because they don’t want to go back to India and they don’t want to leave. If they work for $50 and hour 17 hours a day they and are only half as skilled as a seasoned US developer getting paid $120 an hour and only working 8-9 hours a day which looks better on the books? I have seen H-1B visa holders come over without any skills but the project leader who is India or the same nationality has moved them to the US only to have them learn the skills they need while in the US. Some I have seen come into the country as say Java developers, having never seen Java and work with a good developer so they they are lost in the shuffle, only later to find out the hard way they know nothing about Java, the team lead has been writing the code after work for them and they hold a position in a company a good hard working US citizen could fill but can’t. This happens a lot. It’s the H-1B visa shell game.

SO Mr. Gates. I urge you to look all over the US, there are developers here who are hard working US citizens and are willing to work for you for decent pay with decent work loads. PLEASE HIRE ALL THE US CITIZENS YOU CAN BEFORE YOU GO OVERSEAS. Another reason to buy an Apple I say!

System i - Something big is about to happen at COMMON this spring

So if your doing any reading around the community you’re starting to get in tuned with some big things are about to happen at IBM and inside the System i world. This COMMON I predict will end up being another landmark event.

“I’ve been watching and reporting on IBM and the System i world for about a decade, and basically, when two high-powered IBM executives get on stage at the same time for some kind of meeting or announcement of an initiative — in this case, Mark Shearer and Ross Mauri — something big is going down. COMMON members will definitely want to attend this Town Hall Meeting.” and he also said this, “IBM will host a special Town Hall Meeting, where COMMON says Shearer, as well as Ross Mauri, IBM’s general manager of IBM Power Systems, will make a special announcement of an important initiative, ‘The New Power Equation’.”

Chris Maxcer, NEWS Daily Editor, System i Network, Penton Media, Inc.

I don’t have to clue you in as to why Mark and Ross are going to be on the same stage do I? Since the renaming of the systems in 2000 there has been that ever present, often ignored theory that the System i is going to go away and everything will end up being some AiX-i5/OS mutant that can run both workloads. I never thought it would happen quiet like that but over the past few years there has been some movement to this moment in time. When the lines between the System i and System p are going to be blurred. We have reached that point.

I have been known to make Macworld predictions before and have been pretty good at them but nothing huge really comes out of these meetings that we don’t already know much about. The 515 and 525 came out last year. We all knew a box to replace the old 170 and 270 line was coming but the surprised us all with the way they were charging for it.

After thinking about it I am not going to make any predictions about COMMON. It could be fun but I don’t think we need to talk about it. I do think we will see the platforms merge so that there is one hardware offering and many OS offerings. I hope they also port Ubuntu Server to power.

Two things from IBM today. UC² and Lotus Symphony

While I don’t see anyone covering this, I figured I would so that IBM gets some fair play on the old blogs.

IBM has launched a pretty funny little movie about UC² that is about Unified Communications. Using Sametime and other Lotus based products to collaborate. I can assure you Lotus does this much better than any Microsoft product.

Lotus Symphony is being shrugged off as another Lotus product meant to deliver nothing and complicate the Lotus offering. I have found since I have started using it to be neither of the two. Lotus Symphony gives you an office product in your Lotus Notes 8 client. It’s well done and can only get better over time. If your a Word or Excel power user I think it’s going to take time before it’s that fancy but then again Excel didn’t get there overnight either. I can remember when people were complaining about Excel not being as full featured as Lotus 1-2-3? Link to article