Monday, May 25, 2009

You’d Think I’d Learn

Today was the Plano Bike Association’s Memorial Day ridefest, DSC05906and like last year I wanted to participate. I’ve (finally) been riding more regularly, encouraged by the fact that as beautiful as my   is to look at, it’s better to ride.

In the start-up confusion, with probably a hundred cyclists milling around in the Arbor Hills Nature Preserve parking lot, you have to make your decisions fast – and live with the result. Today I put an exclamation point to my previous post; that which doesn’t give you a heart attack makes you stronger.

“25 miles, over here! 14-15 MPH!” Hmmm, my back is sore today but that’s too slow.

“50 miles, over here! Medium pace!” Hmmm, might be too long. I haven’t ridden more than a 30 mile ride yet, but the speed has been fairly high.

“40 miles, faster pace!” The distance is right, but I can’t quite tell about the speed. I carefully eye the riders lining up for the group; I don’t see too many emaciated hammerheads in it. I opt for shorter distance vs. speed.

Well. Long story short, we averaged about 22 MPH for the 17 miles I was with them before I cracked and was spat out the back of the peleton. I could hang with them in the flat, but just didn’t have the depth yet in my legs to accelerate up the hills the way they did.  One of the ride leaders paced me and another blown-up rider back up to the main group. I was composing what I was going to say to my wife to have her drive all the way out to the airport to pick me up when we stopped at a convenience store.

The 50 miler group was there also, and I shifted over to them. I was none too happy about adding an extra ten miles to my ride when I was already tired, but I didn’t really have much of a choice. Thankfully, at 16 to 17 MPH  the pace was more to my taste (and condition), and I completed the day with 54 miles at about 18 MPH – slightly longer, and slightly faster, than anyone else in that group due to my dalliance with the hammerheads. And let me tell you, a measly 1 MPH difference in average speed is a BIG difference in effort!

Walking slowly to the park pavilion after the ride, I received a tweet from Lance Armstrong that said, “Ouch ouch ouch, and more ouch.” Apparently today in the Giro d’Italia was really hard. But at least I was in good company!

After a little post-ride repair work (warm bath, back wrap), I feel pretty good. Other than the two minutes it takes me to climb the stairs…

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Wednesday, May 20, 2009

What Steve Larsen taught all of us

I learned from no less than Lance Armstrong today that Steve Larsen died Tuesday evening after collapsing during a running workout. He apparently suffered a heart attack.

This wasn’t the death of some couch potato salaryman trying to   larsen2003tdgcbgget in shape for his class reunion. Steve Larsen was probably the only professional who competed and won major races as a mountain biker, road biker and triathlete. He had a wife and five children. And he was all of 39.

 

To quote Velonews:

Larsen began racing in the 1980s and was on the Motorola team for three years in the early 1990s, racing the Giro d'Italia and other major European events. He then moved into mountain biking, winning the NORBA National Cross-Country title in 1997 and 2000.

In 2001, he switched to triathlon, qualifying for the Ironman in his first year in the sport, and finishing ninth at the Hawaii event. He also competed in XTerra offroad triathlons. He was reportedly the only American to compete in the world championships for road, mountain bike, track, cyclocross and triathlon. He was a member of the 1993 U.S. world road championship team that helped Lance Armstrong win his first world title.

When something like this happens, the second thing everyone does (hopefully it’s the second, after feeling sorrowful) is measure how close they are to the deceased’s situation. This is, of course, what’s bothered me: He was in better shape than all of us.

I’m significantly older than Steve was. I always comforted myself in the knowledge that (in addition to checkups) I push myself to my maximum heart rate often enough that if I was going to have a heart attack, it would have happened by now.

So much for that theory.

But…tonight is a beautiful spring evening in Texas, not even much wind, so I went for a club ride with the Plano Bike Association. 30 miles @ 17 MPH average with peaks of 25-26. Getting back in one piece, acquitted myself without TOO much wheelsucking, feeling thoroughly exercised like only a road ride does, shower, and spend a few minutes in the evening backyard watching the martins chirp like parakeets on steroids.

Get out there, accept the reasonable risks you always have, and don’t shy away just because you don’t repair as fast as you used to. Woody Allen once said, “90% of success in life is just showing up.” Show up at work, show up at the dojo, the starting line, the conference, the volunteer booth. That’s all you can do, isn’t it?

I think Lance has a good summary of the situation:

A msg to cancer, heart attacks, and accidents that rob us of ... on Twitpic

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go do some pullups…

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Creating a Virtual Machine Manager Guest OS Profile for volume clients that use KMS

I’m sitting in a VMM (Virtual Machine Manager) session by Mikael Nystrom called “Building The Master Image”. He provided an answer to a problem I’ve been wondering about (but honestly haven’t really pursued) for a long time.

The OS Guest Profile is a VMM component that specifies the operating system configuration to be used when VMM builds a new VM. When you build an OS Guest Profile, one of the fields you must complete is the product key. No problem, right? Well yes-ish. If you are building a Windows 2008 / R2 or Vista / Windows 7 machine in volume configuration, the preferred method is to use KMS. That’s the session I gave yesterday.

The problem is that a volume-built KMS client does not require a license key – indeed there’s no place for it. And there’s no equivalent key supplied with your license to put in the profile’s license key field. So what’s a VMM admin to do?

What I just learned is that there’s a table in the Volume Activation Deployment Guide that contains KMS client setup keys to be used exactly for that purpose. Depending on which OS you’re building, you use the corresponding key in the Guest OS Profile. You can bet I’m going to include this in the next version of my Volume Activation talk.

3.74!

…out of a possible 4.0 in the evaluations for my session yesterday. 74% were “very satisified”, 26% were satisfied, and no one was anything less. One comment was that the title should have been “Activation and Licensing Demystified” (good idea), another said “Thanks for that session. Finally got it.” 91 attendees for a session on (zzzzzzzz) volume activation!

On the strength of the session, the track chair verbally invited me back next year on the spot :).

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IT Manager panel discussions at Tech Ed

I had a chance yesterday morning to participate in a great IT Manager track on real-world challenges around virtualization. It was great to be able to simply sit on the panel with Edwin Yuen (aka “Ed-V”) from the virtualization team, Baldwin Ng for solution accelerators, Kevin Remde (all-round technical evangelist),  Peter Meister from Microsoft working on cloud computing efforts, Art Wittman from InfoWorld Analytics, and all the audience members that participated in the back and forth conversation. Great insights, and great fun as well!

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Recession Tech (Ed)

I've gotten lazy about blogging in the last few weeks, and it suddenly occurred to me yesterday that duh, this week probably merits some comment. I'm spending the week at Tech Ed 09, Microsoft’s main conference for IT professionals.

Attendance is understandably down; there are supposedly 6,000 attendees – about half of a good year’s population. The Los Angeles Convention Center is big, and though there are a lot of people here it definitely doesn’t feel as packed as in the past.

For the first time at a conference I'm wearing three different hats. Usually nowadays I’m at a conference because I’m presenting, and this week is no exception. I’m doing a session on volume activation. (It’s not my main area of expertise, but I had to do it for Intel, it’s confusing at first look, and people really need to know about it.) For the first time, I’m working with a Microsoft product team, Technical Audience Group Marketing (TAGM), to assist them in meeting with and talking to IT pros and IT managers in sessions and roundtables. Finally,  I’m also acting as an attendee and trying to get in as many System Center and virtualization sessions as my other duties allow. So it's a busy week!

I also always try to take time to reconnect with my professional colleagues and friends - Gil, MarkM, MarkR, Rhonda, Brian, Ulf, Laura, Karen, Jeff, Sheila, Kim, Kevin - that's I'm lucky enough to know and new friends that I make while here. Probably the biggest, but least appreciated benefit of speaking at conferences is that you can develop a network of really interesting, world-class people you'd never meet otherwise. I'm a person that's perfectly content working without the minute-to-minute in person people interaction that happens in an office; I've been working from home full time for the last nine years. My circle of colleagues doesn't necessarily communicate a lot with each other in between functions. After all, they're similar personality types as I am: kinda schizophrenic because they do long periods of working by yourself, interspersed with bursts of very public presenting to hundreds of people and visiting with your friends. But we do have a great time when we get together!

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