Off Topic: Introducing "Mining Alfresco"

I didn't want to sully this blog by introducing a whole bunch of ECM/Alfresco stuff here, so I created a second blog for that content. Mining Alfresco will cover my experiences in learning the ECM market, Alfresco (look for a lot of technical postings), and how all of that relates to the topic of this blog, Cloud Computing. If you have an interest in ECM or "Content in the Cloud", you may want to check it out and subscribe.

I also want to apologize for the "dead time" in my posting, but as you can imagine spinning up a new job takes a lot of focus. I'll try to fit in several new posts in the coming days.

Blog Title Change: Leveraging the Wisdom of Clouds

As I discussed in my last post, the change of jobs gives me the opportunity to broaden the coverage of this blog somewhat beyond the basic topic of delivering SLAuto to enterprise data centers. To more completely reflect this, and (quite frankly) to increase visibility to those searching for information about cloud computing and utility computing, I have changed the title and description of this blog.

Now titled "The Wisdom of Clouds" (with absolute apologies to James Surowiecki and his great book, The Wisdom of Crowds) this blog will discuss cloud computing, utility computing, SaaS, PaaS and Haas as they relate to both the enterprise and individual users. This really isn't much of a departure from the topics covered in the last year or so--in fact, I considered sub-titling the blog "Covering your *aaSes since 2006"--but the explicit description allows more people to more readily discover my ramblings.

For those who have been following this blog for some time, as well as those who have just discovered it, I thank you. I hope you will join me in creating and shaping "the wisdom of clouds".

Off Topic: Just added Snap to site...let me know if its annoying

I just added Snap Shots to my blog, which will bring up previews of the target site/page when you roll over a external link. Let me know if you think its annoying. I'm really just experimenting, as I have both loved and hated this feature on other sites. Feel free to email me or comment below.

I have a client install that will take the next couple of days, so blogging is way down. In the meantime, keep track of what I am reading, Twittering, scheduling, etc at http://friendfeed.com/jamesurquhart.

Off Topic: Blog domain change

With increased interest in Service Level Automation in the Datacenter, I decided to take the advice of many a more successful blogger than me, and register my own domain name for the blog. I debated quite a bit about which name to select, but in the end I wanted a domain that would travel with me regardless of where my career might take me in the future. (No plans to leave Cassatt, but you never know where the future might take you...)

To that end, this blog will now officially reside at http://blog.jamesurquhart.com. The original URL, http://servicelevelautomation.blogspot.com will continue to operate, but will redirect you to the new site. All feeds should also continue to work unchanged.

Please let me know if you have problems by emailing me at james dot urquhart at cassatt dot com.

Off topic: Hey, my wife is an entrepreneur!!!

This is just too much fun.

Mia has been amazing throughout Emery's pregnancy, birth and early weeks. Her focus and determination has really made the addition of a new "startup" much easier than I anticipated (though its early yet :). She has seen to it that Owen knows he is still her favorite little boy, and I love the time we have been able to spend together between my family leave and the late nights.

She faces the difficult choice of returning to school in the next few weeks, and I just wanted to say publicly that I am so proud of all she is doing. She is the true entrepreneur in our family.

Off Topic:The next two weeks...

Just a quick note about what I will be doing for the next two weeks starting tomorrow morning. At 5:30AM sharp tomorrow, my wife and I will arrive at the hospital for the birth of my daughter, my second child. I will post pictures and/or video when it is available. (Also off topic, I know, but I'm just too proud...)

Once "Baby Girl" has arrived, I will be splitting my time between caring for my son, caring for my wife and baby girl, and caring for all three. In other words, the blogging will suffer a bit. Once we get settled in a bit, I'll start posting again. That may be a few days or a few weeks. Please be patient.

On a vaguely related note, I finally got Feedburner set up for my site, and I was happy to find so many of you were regular subscribers. I hope many of these are mutual subscriptions where I also follow your work, but if you'd like to let me know where and what you post, please post a comment here and I'll check it out.

In the meantime, for utility computing related topics, stay in touch with Nicholas Carr, Simon Wardley and Anne Zelenka. (Anne's post on GigaOM is especially good, and one that I seriously wish I wrote myself. She captured much of what I would want to say about the effect of utility computing on the middle class, and placed Nick's book in exactly the right context.)

5 things...

The latest blogosphere social phenomenon has reached me doubly this week. Both Ken Oesterich and Ken Wallich have tagged me in the ongoing "5 things tag" that has been sweeping the blogging community (especially the tech bloggers).

Here are five things most people do not know about me:

1. I was born in Reading, England.
2. I play pretty decent guitar. I don't know that many songs by other people (a problem when whipping out the guitar at parties), but I have several original works that I think hold their own very nicely against most pop drivel. Lately, however, I have been working on "Tears in Heaven" by Eric Clapton.
3. I played Mr Anthrobus in Thornton Wilder's "The Skin of our Teeth" in high school. I was a geeky, awkward teenager trying to play a 40 year old man, and was the only member of the primary cast not to win an award for my performance in that show. Now that I am 40, I wonder what the hell was so hard...
4. My computing career started in fifth grade in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I was lucky enough to get in a science focused program at a nearby elementary school, and one of the kids' moms was one of the first BASIC programmers at Rockwell Collins, the aviation electronics firm. She came to our school once a week and taught us the basics of variables, loops, conditional statements and subroutines. Very cool. I got caught a bunch of times programming on the teletype terminal in the back of the classroom while I should have been listening to the teacher. Later, my luck continued as the father of one of my close neighborhood friends bought the fifth (or something like it) Apple II computer in the state of Iowa. We would program in BASIC every day after school, and tried to get into writing games and such.
5. Later, in college, I was determined to be a Music/Computer Science double major...for all of one semester. I didn't practice the music stuff enough, so I got a low grade there, and I hated my systems organization class, so I lost interest in computer science. (Dumb reason, now that I look back, but it worked out.) Instead, I started taking every math and physics class that I could, and finished with a Mathematics/Physics double. The day of graduation, I swore to my friends "I will NEVER be a computer programmer for a living". Two and a half years later, I was coding C for a small manufacturing company. (Do not try to predict the future, even your own. Its pointless. Setting goals is OK, but be willing to float a bit with the breeze.)

Now, let me please introduce to you five more randomly selected from my blogosphere:

• My mom.
• Katie Tierney, a former collegue with excellent technical intuition who is proving herself to be a hell of a "head of household" as well.
• Rama Roberts, another former collegue whose blog never fails to entertain and enlighten.
• Management guru, Tom Peters, who reenforces my drive to amaze both my employers and customers by being a service professional first and foremost.
• Alessandro Perilli, author of the virtualization-focused virtualization.info blog.