He’s Just A Little Boy

As men, we look at our sons, sometimes without realizing it, and remember all that we want for our sons. We want them to enjoy the feelings of success in sports we, ourselves may never had enjoyed. We want them to enjoy the social success with their peers, we may never been able to fathom when we were their ages.

And so we drive them hard. We drive them to succeed. We push them to catch, to throw, to run, to shoot, to be better at everything at their age, than we were. Like it or not, we admonish them to be better than we were.

But here is the truth. It’s not about you.

It’s not about him being a representation of you. It’s not about your having a second chance to live vicariously through your son. It isn’t.

And that is a hard thing to admit.

Because, if you are lucky, will see yourself again and again in your son. When he goes to bat, when he is on the field somewhere, when he struggles with is homework, when he fails in a spelling bee, when he scrubs out on his brand new bicycle. When he goes to high school, when he stays out late, when he doesn’t get into the college you think he should.

When he defies you and tells you to drop dead.

He is as he should be. When he is a little boy, the man he becomes is directly proportional to the love, support and willingness to let him succeed or fail on his own merits. Teach him to play, teach him to excel, teach him to fail well.

Then step back and let him grow. Be there with him both when he succeeds and more importantly when he fails. Both have lessons he will need to learn and no one will ever teach him better than you.

Except maybe Mom, but we’ll keep that under our hat. He’s not a man yet. And every day you spend with him will make him the man he’s supposed to be. And that’s not you.

And that’s okay. Grow with him.

Not Dead Yet

In my LinkedIn account a member of our writing group asks the question: Is the short story a viable medium today or should people just write novels?

My Answer: The Short Story is very much alive today. (Now, perhaps, more than ever.)

Not only is it alive but it must continue to thrive. There are far too many writers out there who believe that telling stories is about stretching out a tale. They have learned the greatest tricks for embellishing and creating tangents which don’t add to the story, only extend it. The short story forces you to choose. To chose something, anything, and get to the heart of the matter. Telling the story.

Is the medium for stories harder to fit into? Maybe, but I don’t think so. We are living in an age where the issue is not finding someplace that will take our work, but competing against an entire planet of people who have the capacity to place their work into the arena with yours. A battle-royal of literary significance takes place whenever we write now.

Believe it or not this is a good thing. Pretenders will fall by the wayside, even as books such as Twilight get their moment in the sun, that time will pass. Only writers who stay the course, master the craft and connect with reputable distribution methods (whether that be through self publishing, small press, or the Big Six (er…Five)) opportunity waits around every corner.

There are 300 channels on television waiting to have something to be seen there. Internet television is growing at an exponential rate as well. Thousands of magazines, online and print pop into and out of existence each year, like the quantum foam underlying the universe. Blogs, news services, radio programs, movies, all sit waiting for that vital resource that short story writers have: crazed imagination willing to delve into the darkest corners of human experience to find the light (or more darkness, if that is your thing). We live in an age where, if we do our jobs right, force companies to acknowledge the value of the CREATIVE engine, we could conceivably change our world.

Doubt it? Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Ridley Scott thought so. He based his career of off that very short, very strange story. He and Phillip K. Dick altered the consciousness of a society, asking questions we didn’t know we would ever have. There is a future out there for writers, short stories or novels, but only if we are willing to seize the opportunity before another movie producer or television hack decides we should have another variation on Sleeping Beauty or Hansel and Gretel.

Find your niche and fill it.

Create your world, your view of it, populate it with beauty and dysfunction, reflect the world in all of its glory. Then release them again and again until they blot out the sun.

Make your place in the shade.

Veni, Scribo, Vici (“I came, I wrote, I conquered” from the Latin)

Thaddeus Howze @ Hub City Blues

E-waste Explosion Continues…

Having talked about E-waste in past articles on Open Salon (Forget About Saving the Earth… and on the Good Men Project in Gadgets: A Perfect Storm of Wrong) this recent info-graphic embodies more up to date information from the EPA reinforcing the idea we are not handling the development of technology in a responsible manner for the simplest of reasons: No one is being held economically culpable for the development of new devices without concern for the disposal of the old technology.

What should happen from the development of any portable technology is a disposal fee built right into the cost of the device. The provider pays a part and the customer pays a part. When it’s time to dispose of the tech it is sent to a facility to maximize its safe disposal rather than shipping it overseas and allowing the lowest paid labor to handle the disposal in the most toxic method possible, usually by burning it, releasing long-lived and deadly dioxins into the atmosphere.

Remember, this info-graphic only discusses e-waste produced in the United States. As other countries ramp up their production, these numbers will continue to skyrocket. The only thing we know about e-waste for sure is eventually it will be coming to a landfill or garbage disposal facility near you. You won’t have a choice unless we start handling this problem today.

Cutting Education: You just shouldn’t do it

How does Paul Ryan or anyone in a position of authority justify cuts in spending to the engine of education?

At a time when we need an technologically-skilled, highly-educated populace, now more than ever, it seems both short-sighted and even destructive to the future development of the nation.

Not that education is doing well at the moment. It is struggling under burdens of defining the correct pedagogy for the era, defining methods, increasing financial pressures, teacher quality assurance issues, the increasing dependence on technology for the delivery of services and the attendant cost of that technology.

Corporate America is both the greatest user of educated workers but also one of its greatest detractors, saying education today has not produced the kind of workers they are seeking.

Corporations are loathe to admit that through their tax-avoidance policies, some of the lasting effects on education development are due to an lack of funding for education nationwide. Corporations directly affect the bottom line of education when they decide to maximize profit before considering the long term effects on the social fabric they are dependent on, but not taking responsibility for by paying taxes.

Teachers are being challenged to educate students whose needs vary widely, whose backgrounds and starting points are quite diverse and expected to create people capable of working in a workforce transformed by both corporate need and corporate greed into a two class system.

The first class is the high-tech worker who will be required to critically think, analyse, devise new ways of problem solving, utilizing new technologies, and being driven to find new levels of profitability against what would be considered our own best interests, environmentally, socially and in the light of a future growing ever more crowded, dysfunctional, unhealthy and psychologically unbalanced.

The second class is even worse off than the first. No real expectation is made of that second class of workers. Since the economy is becoming more service oriented, meaning fewer manufacturing jobs are being created in America, than at any time since the start of the Industrial Age, the service industry is being asked to absorb workers leaving school but lacking the capabilities of the first tier workers.

Exacerbating this problem, service industry jobs are already, unfortunately, unable to absorb the ever-increasing numbers of both second tier workers whose educations were not able to create a first tier worker, but must also compete with first tier workers who cannot get jobs due to the ever-present specter of technological obsolescence built into the Information Age society.

Simply put, there isn’t enough work to go around, no matter what level of technological capability and educational training a person may possess.

The service industry is completely saturated and will remain so for the foreseeable future and while the tech/development/creative/professional parts of society are still in demand, they have not kept pace with the number of educated people coming out of school, let alone emigrating to the US. Far too many highly-educated people are competing for a job whose mantra may be “Would you like fries with that?”

The New Age of Malware (courtesy of BYOD)

BYOD: We can't repel malware of that magnitude! -- Admiral Ackbar

As I have mentioned in other articles, [http://exm.nr/x8dv4p] malware is not going away. If anything it is going to explode in the coming years due to the continued erosion of IT standards in the workplace. Technologies such as cloud computing, social media and memes such as BYOD (Bring Your Own Device [to the workplace]) are prepared to compromise enterprise security by:

1. Allowing devices that cannot be managed or secured into the workplace environment and allowing users to store company data on those devices. Such devices can easily be lost, stolen and the information vulnerable due to a lack of viable security measures or even the ability to be wiped remotely.

2. Devices such as smartphones or other mobile technology often has limited wireless security or protection, making grabbing data from such technology the next logical step from the cracking community. Do you remember Firesheep? A tool that allowed a remote hacker to grab information from Mozilla browsers in unsecure environments such as coffee shops. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firesheep]

3. As the rise of BYOD continues and resistance to standardization grows, malware will continue to be a rising threat for Android and iDevices alike, [http://zd.net/w20FMG - Android users hit by scareware scam], for the simple reason that apps created for both devices, while monitored loosely, are not absolutely guaranteed of being without sinister purposes in addition to providing whatever resource information they APPEAR to be providing. So while it may be providing you a map to downtown Boston, it could also be monitoring your credit card or online bank information at different locations as well.

4. Social media has not stopped being both a productivity time sink, costing the nation billions in lost productivity (neither commenting for the good or the bad of this, noting it, nothing more) and a vector for virus transmission, personal information gathering, and credit information hacking. Facebook, Twitter, Sony, Google and Amazon have all experienced theft, leaks, loss or outright sale of personal data in 2010-2011 and this trend show no sign of slowing.

5. While the cloud offers the option of being a means of creating virtual environments that are claimed to be safer than your current environment, it means relying increasing on an internet whose services are either being turned into commodities (allowing their prices to be changed, usually higher, without warning or recourse) or those services will be subject to powerful new government interventions such as SOPA or Protect IP [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act], which may make working with materials and providers who will be forced to increase the costs of their service to offset their increases caused by having to improve monitoring of their technology for copyright infringement. This cost is always directed at the user of the technology.

6. Nor does SOPA actually ensure you are any safer from hacking, indeed it may simply be another way such activity is lost in the shuffle as hackers are far more agile in their ability to develop their responses to technology than mainstream users. During the transition to SOPA standards, systems will be more vulnerable than ever.

7. It appears IT is losing the battle for standardization as a means of protecting the enterprise. New technologies such as virtualization promise the ability to deliver the PC experience to any device but most of those are also dependent on the Internet as the deliverer of service. This only means one thing. The cost of protecting your enterprise will increase as the vectors — devices, browsers, clients, cloud, virtualization, continue to proliferate.

In summary: Our enterprise networks have never truly been safe. The threats ranged from:

• Inadequate layered defenses against attacks: There are still numerous environments especially in small to medium size businesses that do not have firewalls of any kind, any sort of data protection, backup, or redeployment procedure in case of equipment failure, anti-malware, or anti-virus technology in place.
• Social engineering: manipulating users in an environment to release information about the systems they use to make hacking easier
• Poor Password Management: Not creating standards for the effective use, configuration or dissemination of difficult to crack passwords
• Poor standardization of environments: reducing the number of potential holes in the environment by reducing the number of different versions of operating systems, programs and infrastructure support systems
• Poor policy management: The inability of environments to create usable, enforceable policies designed to make repair, replication, storage, service agreements, backup and responsible use of the office technology to protect company assets from theft, loss, or accidental erasure.

There are many other threats, but our environments have been safer than before many of these ideas were enacted, but the truth of the matter has been our virus software is always at least one day behind the release of any new virus, malware or exploit. Indeed, the zero day release of a virus or exploit could allow thousands or even millions of devices to be infected before anyone is aware the problem has occurred.

In days to come, the already existing suite of issues will only be added to with the continued threat of cloud computing downtime, legitimate accessibility as well as unwanted attacks from outside sources, rising costs both in terms of energy use and costs from service providers and the increasing vulnerability BYOD will bring to the enterprise as hackers/crackers begin to exploit the weaknesses of said devices while under-staffed, overworked and under-appreciated IT departments attempt to stem the tide while providing these new and highly desired services and technologies users feel empower them, without understanding the consequences of that empowerment. It empowers the Dark Side as well. [http://www.csoonline.com/article/print/696325]

@ebonstorm – Thaddeus Howze Atreides

Thaddeus Howze featured on Black Enterprise

Featured on Black Enterprise

IT experts Thaddeus Howze (@ebonstorm) and Kevin Michael (@kevinvmichael) to faced off on BlackEnterprise.com with their two differing perspectives on cloud computing.

Thaddeus Howze, owner of Ebonstorm Media

I am not opposed to cloud computing. Computers connected together tend to be more useful and more capable than computers isolated. But with every technology paradigm there are things you do not expect. Networked computers gave rise to spam, malware and botnets, three of the greatest scourges of the networked world today. They are such problems they absorb billions of dollars in performance lost, damaged or destroyed technology and time wasted by employees worldwide. But we do not abolish networks despite these things because the network is simply too useful and too profitable to be without.

The cloud, one day, may offer similar benefits to businesses and people everywhere. But we are not there yet. There are hurdles that need to be addressed and issues people need to understand to make informed decisions.

Reliability

The ‘cloud’ is being sold as a mature technology that is robust, trouble-free, easy to use, easy to configure, and far less expensive than owning your own platform for the service. While this may be true for certain applications like, Salesforce, it does not mean it is all of those things for every application of the cloud technology.  The underlying Internet infrastructure is, in my mind, far less reliable, stable, or capable of supporting this glut of technology which includes:
•    phones and internet capable devices,
•    the increasing burden of millions of new sites,
•    billions of new users and exobytes of constantly moving data
•    video streams, dedicated connections, torrents, botnets, spam and malware generation and propagation.

As China and India (and to a lesser extent Africa and South America) adopt new technology and enter the Internet, how will this affect this over-stretched behemoth of technological wonder?

Security
Security is one of many issues underlying the configuration of the Internet. The Internet was designed as an open environment. Now we are trying to secure an environment designed to be open, and as such there will be unintended consequences to layering security measures. For example, the ever-increasing complexities of these new security measures add to the already unstable configuration of the Internet protocols. Do these security technologies complement each other or do they compete with each other?

Business Autonomy
There was a time when IT was a utility and providers like WANG and Intel provided you with your technology choices and you liked it. You paid and that was it. Once companies have you where they want you, they don’t ever try and take advantage of you and jack up their rates to unreasonable levels, or do they? They certainly do; think Comcast, AT&T, and Pacific Bell for examples.

With Cloud computing that ‘utility-style’ of business is trying to be make a comeback and I don’t think I like it. If you use cloud computing, you may be required to use tools recommended by your service provider which may make it impossible for you to move your data at a later time. I dislike the idea of losing control of my applications, data, software and information regarding my business.

Thaddeus Howze is an IT consultant with thirty years of experience working with all forms of technology including the military, advertising, banking, financial and educational sectors.  He is A+, CCNA, and MSCE Certified, and currently working toward a Project Management Certification (PMP). He is the owner and founder of Ebonstorm Media and Have Flash Drive, Will Travel and provides technical development and consulting services in the San Francisco, Bay Area.

You can read Kevin Micheal’s point of view on Black Enterprise’s site.

The Cloud Conversation No One Is Happy Having

Don’t kid yourself, it’s the money

We live in a wondrous age of technological sophistication. Even in this age of wonders the idea that you can do a thing does not necessiate that you should. No where would this thinking be more appropriate than with cloud computing. Cloud computing  is an excellent idea, caused by a convergence of outstanding technologies, but it does not mean everyone should rush out and put themselves in the cloud, no matter how many vendors are telling you it is a good idea, and I am astounded by the number of vendors who talk about the inevitability of our approach to cloud computing. It is unstoppable and inescapable, so you had better embrace it.

The operative word here is vendors. They are selling something. They want you to buy it. So they are certainly going to tell you about every amazing asset and attribute with as little information as necessary for you to make an informed decision. Now let’s be real about one thing. No one but IT people like to talk about IT. In most cases, only IT people have any true understanding of how their technology works and depending on their experiences, the thoroughness of their training, the size of the mistakes they have made during their career and their ability to focus on the issues at hand, will truly prepare them for the complexity inherent in their job; both the human issues and the technological ones.

So let’s couple a vendor’s need to sell you IT and the overall complexity of IT and you have the perfect storm that is “Cloud Computing.” A technology that promises you will not have to keep IT people in house confusing you with their jargon and expensive toys you do not understand and they are unable to do without. Cloud computing will move your IT needs to a remote location that is backed up, redundant, staffed by the best IT people on Earth, in a location that has power, back-up power, and surrounded by fifty feet of solid bedrock, cooled by being three thousand feet underground to an ideal temperature of 58 degrees. Nothing short of a nuclear device will even affect this site because a Service Level Agreement (SLA) says so. So give us your money, and your data, and we will take care of the rest.[1] [13]

Technology simplifies life, Doesn’t it?

It is amazing to me how often I have heard about the technology that is available for the cloud today. And how many different flavors of cloud computing you can have. Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service, I am waiting for Ice-cream-as-a-Service and I will know the cloud is truly ready. What strikes me strange is how often people want to claim this is a technology we should be putting in place to support our businesses, our lifestyles and our way of doing work in the future. All of the people supporting this technology are always fond of talking about how robust the technology is and how nothing can possible go wrong so it would be okay to place our most important data into the cloud, now.

Contrary to what is believed, it IS possible for a technology to have existed for a long time and still not be a mature technology. Longevity should not be mistake for maturity. The Internet has existed for quite a long time now and is still evolving, looking almost nothing like it did as little as fifteen years ago. I would call the Internet a perfect example of a long-lived but still maturing infrastructure technology. The fact there are highly available clustered servers, clustered storage subsystems, redundant networking infrastructure did not stop what I call the Great Amazon Cloudburst from occurring. Surely no one can say there was insufficient access to great technology and highly skilled technical staff at Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud service centers. But the functionality of their clients websites were lost for tens of thousands of people for at least 4 days. All of the support and technology was available and yet did nothing to mitigate the loss of service. Read their explanation about the event for yourself and see if you can understand what the problem was. I am betting if you are not an IT person, you will not have a clue. Reading it will not make you any happier. [2][7]

In the common fashion of this nation, the event is brushed under the rug and everyone returns to business as usual. The promotion of a service that is still too complex and growing more complex every day. The ever-increasing level of complexity of the systems in question has begun to plague all of our networks no matter where they are. Our phones systems have already begun to show signs of being overwhelmed by the complexity of the systems required to control them. Upgrade servers, remote access servers, game servers are all plagued by the increasing complexity of legitimate networks. This does not take into account illegal, illegitimate or poorly-configured network such as botnets which affect users all over the globe.[3][4]

Security isn’t a problem anymore for the Cloud

Pundits and supporters of the cloud say its secure even though we see news every day about the latest internet security breach from one company or another. Can you say the PlayStation Network and its estimated 70 million lost IDs? And these breaches grow larger and more data is gathered with each assault. I read a dozen IT trade magazines and see new security breaches happen that rarely make the evening news. I suspect that more companies do not voice their security issues but have them nonetheless, giving people a false sense of security. There is recent news indicating the PlayStation Network attack may have originated from Amazon Cloud Server environment. [12]

The truth of the matter is companies ARE loathe to let you know how often their systems are penetrated by any number of methods, including inside attackers, social engineering, system failures and security intrusion by outside attackers. If you knew, you might be less willing to put your personal information out there so easily, you might not be willing to bank online, or shop online or do all of these things our society has convinced you that you can no longer live without, because it creates profit for vendors, banks and finance agencies. This is about money, make no mistake. If you want to see information regarding security breaches you can look in The Register, a UK tech trade publication. Symantec mentions in their own literature, the increasing need for security software, potentially worth billions in the coming decade. [5][6]

The technology vendors want to tell you they are increasing reliability by adding virtual servers, virtual workstations and hypervisors which allow them to restore services easier after they are lost or have to be scaled to deal with companies that are growing and need ever-increasing performance. But the real reason this technology is being created and promoted is to send work and the systems required to do it overseas, reducing the need for internal IT infrastructure. No. I cannot substantiate this. It is my impression of the industry and how outsourcing has continued to dominate the landscape. How I arrive at that is another debate, but work with that premise and consider the following.

Outsourcing Considerations

We’re back to money again. Outsourcing for the win!

Corporations are outsourcing their services in record numbers. Human Resources departments, finance services, manufacturing inventory, company records, databases and now IT services are all being moved into outsource models reducing their cost to companies everywhere. But the question begs to be asked if after outsourcing these services, we also store the company’s data in the cloud, what we have said is, in the event of a catastropic emergency, even with a well-provisioned, well-equipped, highly trained service provider, a company will have limited to no access to its records, its databases, its human resource information, its healthcare records, its finance information, or any of it’s IT infrastructure including its virtual workstations, or virtual domain services or virtual telecom systems.

And I know, you are all thinking, this could never happen. But if you remember the Northeast Blackout of 2003 which left a large portion of the Eastern seaboard without electrical power and affected 45 million people in at least 8 US states. During this time, cellular, cable and telephone services were disrupted and the internet services of Advance Publications went offline, affecting three online news services for days. The nation was reduced to using amateur radios to pass emergency communications. [8][9]

The issue I worry the most about is how will the nation perform when hundreds or thousands of corporations are sharing the same series of servers and lose their infrastructure in a foreign land that is affected by a quake or tsunami or monsoon or any other of a number of catastrophic events outside of human control, what will your corporation do while it has placed more than fifty percent of its manpower and resources in virtual form, unable to be accessed for a day or week or a month. Can your business survive when all of its vital support services are unable to be accessed? You will lose even the ability to make even a simple phone call if your virtual network includes your digital telecom and voice mail services. Virtual domain services? Good luck being able to connect to your email, voicemail, VPN, SharePoint, file servers, clustered data services that you may have kept locally.

And yes, for all of you who are saying, there are failover technologies in place to allow redundant services to pick up the slack in case of an emergency. Amazon said that too, especially in hindsight, they were unhappy their failover technology did not operate as expected.

Did you test that? Prove it.

This is the kicker. Once you start aggregating clients into your environment, you come across a curious dynamic. How do you test your environment for failover to be sure it actually works. Anyone who has worked in an IT environment remembers how difficult it is to test your failover for your domain servers, or your remote email servers when it just YOUR company that you have to deal with across two or three timezones and you want to test to see if your email services will fail over to that redundant server cluster you are paying a princes wages to in Singapore. You are only affecting a few thousand people’s ability to work whenever they want. What happens when you are a Cloud Provider and you have five million different people scattered across the world and you want to test your failover services. Someone, somewhere WILL be inconvenienced. But it will need to be done, because if Amazon had done this test, they would have known something was incomplete in their process and would have pre-empted this problem which took them four days to correct.

This is not about painting a picture of worst case scenarios. But someone should ask the question, what DO we do in the event of a major failure when tens of thousands of companies have moved to this sort of infrastructure service and are unable to simply walk away because too much of their company is invested in that provider. Companies promise they will always maintain a certain level of performance, but history has shown as companies grow, their ability to maintain their level of agreed upon performance has suffered while they grew. Dare I mention, AT&T, Comcast, AOL, Time Warner and Enron just to pick a bunch out of a hat?

What we are really saying is ultimately, we are prepared to risk our entire livelihood on the development of cloud technology which we are doing our damnednest to get everyone possible to participate in every cloud provider we can find, whether they be public or private clouds. This means in fact, we are aggregating our businesses and their infrastructure into collective pots of provided services and depending on those services to be completely bulletproof, resistant to external hacking attacks and penetrations by unlawful persons. We are expecting it to be perfectly configured with thousands of companies sharing IP4 and now the new IP6 services, sharing switches, firewalls, shared servers, clustered resources, virtual environments and of course done by the company who offers the lowest bid and claims to have the best trained people in the industry. [10][11]

Single Point of Failure. You.

It seems a tall order to put the entire infrastructure of a nation into consolidated single points of failure without addressing what Plan B is supposed to look like, just in case Plan A, the world of the perfectly actualized, completely failure-proof, infrastructure that we already have, which never fails when we need it most, and isn’t staffed by over-worked, under-rested, hypercaffinated gearheads should happen to go offline for a month or two.

I am not a Luddite. I have worked with IT for thirty years at all levels of it. I have a healthy respect for technology and its seemingly supernatural ability to wait until it has the most people it can possibly have dependent on it and then unerringly to fail when you need it most. With that kind of perverse nature, do we really want our places of industry to be complete dependent on something that could simultaneously have us all conducting business on Post-its in our paperless offices? Can we find that happy medium that will not have the nation clutching our collective tuchas while we simultaneously wait for the same five or six cloud providers to figure out what went wrong today and how long America will be sitting in neutral until it can be fixed.

To quote Spongebob Squarepants: Good Luck with that.

Look through the references, read the articles and if you still disagree, please feel free to comment right here. Don’t bring me some vendor talking about how wonderful the cloud is. Bring me a real reason we cannot live without the cloud and what we need to be doing to mitigate some of the things I have mentioned in the article and that are in the articles listed in the references. We need to address this sooner rather than later. I am sure vendors will read this and dismiss everything I say and tell you to do the same. When the next cloud outage affects one million people rather than the twenty thousand this outage did at Amazon’s EC2 center, you remember who told you it was an inevitability. Remember, I am not trying to sell you anything, that vendor can’t look you in the eye and say that. He has a vested interest in making sure you bite.

References:

[1] FAQ: Cloud Computing Demystified; Network World; http://mediasphere.tumblr.com/post/5475321981/faq-cloud-computing-demystified [May 18, 2009]

[2] Summary of the Amazon EC2 and the Amazon RDS Service Disruption in the US East Region; Amazon Web Services Site; http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/ [May 9, 2011]

[3] When the Cloud Fails: T-Mobile, Microsoft Lose Sidekick Customer Data; GigaOm; http://gigaom.com/2009/10/10/when-cloud-fails-t-mobile-microsoft-lose-sidekick-customer-data/ [October 10, 2009]

[4] Sidekick lightning-struck but complexity is the real issue; Examiner.com; http://www.examiner.com/information-technology-in-san-francisco/sidekick-lightning-struck-but-complexity-is-the-real-issue#ixzz1MJWZj94l [October 12, 2009]

[5] Update on PlayStation Network and Qriocity; Playstation Blog; http://blog.us.playstation.com/2011/04/26/update-on-playstation-network-and-qriocity/ [April 26, 2011]

[6] Playstation Network Breach: It’s Really, Really Bad; Technologizer.com; http://technologizer.com/2011/04/26/playstation-network-breach-data-stolen/ [April 26, 2011]

[7] Cloud failover a challenge for Amazon competitors, too; Network World; http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/042711-cloud-failover.html [April 27, 201]

[8] List of Power Outages; Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_outages [Last Updated: May 1, 2011]

[9] Northeast Blackout of 2003; Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Blackout_of_2003

[10] Cloud computing providers: Clueless about security?; Network World; http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/042811-cloud-computing-security.html [April 28, 2011]

[11] Survey: Cloud security still a struggle for many companies; Network World; http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/093010-survey-cloud-security-still-a.html [September 30, 2010]

[12] Amazon Server Said to Be Used in Sony Attack; Bloomberg News; http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-13/sony-network-said-to-have-been-invaded-by-hackers-using-amazon-com-server.html [May 13, 2011]

[13] Dolcera Public Wiki on Cloud Computing; Dolcera.com; http://www.dolcera.com/wiki/index.php?title=Cloud_Computing

The Cult of Done Manifesto

There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.

Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.

There is no editing stage.

Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.

Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.

The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.

Once you’re done you can throw it away.

Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.

People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.

Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.

Destruction is a variant of done.

If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.

Done is the engine of more.

Update: James Provost made the awesome poster for the Cult of Done Manifesto.

Joshua Rothaas made this poster.

Creating the science fiction authors of the future!

Octavia Butler's Dawn, first book of the Xenogenesis Saga

How do we increase the publication of science fiction works (or for that matter, any writing) by African-Americans?

This essay was my response to a question posted on the Black Science Fiction Society Website. The question was posted by William Landis on August 3, 2010 at 9:34pm in Black Internationale on The Black Science Fiction Society Website

Any effort to convince young men and women of color to contribute to the potential pool of stories using speculative fiction, science fiction or fantasy of any type will first require the creative energies of young people to be directed toward the written word.

As a whole, African-Americans do not seem to have a love affair with the written word, but it is especially evident in our lack of interest in the science fiction genre. We would rather see works, judging by the popularity in bookstores, where we are engaged in illicit love affairs, scandalous relationships, pimping and whoring tales of excess, or tales of brothers and sisters making good except for their addiction to drama of one sort or another. Perhaps these tales more reflect an anchoring in reality as we know it. Perhaps they are a more fiduciary form of wish-fulfillment, since money is so difficult to come by and so prized by our community as a whole, that may explain the success of that type of fiction. We also have a love of historical works, if bookstore racks are any indication, a fascination for successful African cultures such as Kemet (Egypt), or of periods where African-Americans were discovering their power in American society during the Age of Invention in the early 1900s or during the 1920-30′s Harlem Renaissance, or the Civil Rights Movement when so much changed in the world for people of color.

With all that said, we are as a whole, less interested in speculative fiction, and I suspect it is partially an effect of modern media. It is rare that we saw science fiction with people of color participating effectively in those story lines. We did not see a successful agent of science fiction in the media until Nichelle Nicoles appeared as Lt. Uhura in Star Trek in the 1960′s. Science fiction was not a medium we appeared in often and I suspect it had some major effect on whether we were interested in it.

If we want to get science fiction to our people, we have to get them interested in science, in worlds larger than themselves, in ideas that span time and space, convincing them of a world greater than where they grew up. We will have to get them away from the television and useless social media that does not spawn true creativity. There was the question of the Digital Divide keeping our children from having access to computers but now that more of them have computers, they are still not inclined to use that technology to empower themselves. They use it more to communicate mindlessly using social media, often in ways that appear to be narcissistic and unproductive. Not a judgment, per se, just something I have noticed over the years and this is not something that is new. When AOL was still a basic subscription service back in 1986, people of color used the technology to communicate in real time, but having the tech did not seem to make any more of them more inclined to write for consumption or production.

I think the real issue revolves around a lack of personal creativity. Creativity is something you must develop and our children do not get the same energy devoted to creative thinking that you see in charter or private schools. I believe that time spent doing creative things boosts creativity. It is theorized that for every hour a child watches television, they lose some aspect of their creative ability. This makes sense, because television is a passive delivery system, requiring only that you sit there, not actively participate in any way. If we are going to return our children to the creativity we know they are capable of, we will have to promote creativity as the norm, something acceptable, no matter what form you use it in, and we are more than capable of being creative outside of the rap, music, or video industries where so much talent is lost or wasted pursuing a career of limited social value. (IN MY OPINION!)

If you wanted to foster creativity in writing with your kids, you will have to disguise it as something else and you will have to put your own creativity on the table. It might be uncomfortable at first, but after a time, you may discover your own creativity blossoming. So the plan might look like this:

1. Limit your child to six hours of television, non-school computer use or computer gaming per week. If you have a DVR then you can record all of the television during the week and they get to watch it at the end of the week as a reward for work well done. The same goes for gaming. The goal is to expand their urge to create something they have not seen before.
2. Since they will have more time during the week after their homework, it might help them to try and create simple children’s tales of adventure. They do not have to be complex, and in the beginning, it might help if it were following the oral traditions of storytelling before writing them down. My favorite method of creative story-telling is the round robin, where each person tells a piece of an unscripted story, and after a paragraph passes it on to the person on the left. This allows for open ended story development without any pressure to be great initially.
3. Allow the tales to take on a more fantastic vein over time. Do not be afraid to add more unusual elements to the story during your turn (as the guiding adult) and watch to see what the children do. Promote the development of story elements and description of scenes. This should grow easier with time and practice. Use diverse and unusual words where possible, and promote the addition of new words to the children’s lexicon. Let the stories take on the tone the children set for them and alter them only once they are comfortable with expanding their story lines. Do not force the creativity, allow a child to speak only as long as they are comfortable. Guide the story with the premise that a Storyteller cannot add more than one element in his paragraph of the story at a time.
4. 

   The right time to create an author

   Introduce them to published science fiction and fantasy, appropriate for their age groups. Do readings of published works during the week, when you are not creating stories yourselves. There are so many books out there, I will not make a list for you to consider, but keep it varied, keep it interesting and keep them involved. Let everyone read if they can. Discuss the chapter, talking about how the author told the story, what was good (to them and to you) and what they thought they could do to add to a story like that in the future.

5. Once they are used to telling stories, have someone become a Chronicler. The Chronicler does not participate in the round robin, they jot down the basic ideas of each Storyteller. If they are a fast typist, they can do more but the goal is to get the basic gist of the story and then have the group, take those basic notes and flesh out the tale from beginning to end. Keep the first Chronicles short so they can remain complete stories. As Chronicle creation gets easier, the stories can grow more complex and allow each Storyteller some time as a Chronicler. The Chronicles can then become chapters in bigger books.
6. If any of your Storytellers are more artistically inclined than verbally, they may also contribute to the story with their art, either in creating visual elements, or by enhancing the chronicle with their visual insights into the story. They may not be as quick on their feet with the Storytelling but they may enhance it visually, the same way a backdrop painting or a cinematographer adds to a scene with art or placement or pacing of a scene visually.

Using this iterative process, children could be convinced to be involved in story creation from a very early age, without any particular appearance of anything other than boosting their creativity and having fun. How would you approach the idea of bringing up new writers and what would you use as a training regimen?

On the Path to Enlightenment

Reasonable men adjust themselves to their environment. Unreasonable men attempt to change their environment to suit themselves. Therefore all progress is the work of unreasonable men.

– George Bernard Shaw

History is often unkind to unreasonable men. But I also know that nothing is ever accomplished by reasonable men. They are content with the status quo. They exploit and profit on the frailties of the human condition without making any changes to improve that condition. I strive to make the world a better place despite being told it was impossible. I am not a reasonable man.

–Thaddeus Howze

I was asked to give a short presentation to a group of young people who were trying to get to the straight and narrow path that a career might offer. Some of the young men had fallen from the path of education, of self improvement and had been convinced by the efforts of a dedicated few to return and try again. All previous sins forgiven, all that was required was a re-dedication to the efforts to improve their lives. I was asked to speak to them about taking some coursework in IT done at an accelerated rate in an effort to prepare them for a summer internship in the middle of next year. I became involved with mixed feelings.

Not because I do not think it is a worthy cause. On the contrary, I believe it is the worthiest of causes; without such efforts, my own redemption at an earlier point in my life would not have ever occurred and I would likely be dead, or in a state such that death might be a preferable condition. My trepidation came from having to tell these young men the truth about my occupation; or at least, as I knew it. I love what I do. I have done it now for over twenty five years; not the same job, but the same industry, information technology and communications with overlap into the publishing, banking, government, technology, game design, publishing, retail, small business and educational sectors.

How do you distill that into something someone can use? It’s impossible to write something technical that would be useful to someone who has never even done IT, so I decided to write down the things that I learned along the way; stepping stones that have to be touched on the stairway to occupational success. Thinking about these things, I decided these would be the things I would tell myself if I could meet myself on my way to my first IT job interview.

These are the fundamentals. If you aren’t careful, violation of these rules can cost you your job.

1. Pick your battles. Sometimes you have to lose a battle to win a war. Keep your eyes on the war. Give up some things to gain everything. Outlast your enemies. Just because you did not make them your enemies did not mean they did not declare war on YOU.
2. What got you to the top, won’t keep you there. Don’t get complacent. Stay frosty. Sharpen that saw!
3. Previous success is just that; what you did before. It has no bearing on your present circumstance other than it appeared on your resume. Succeed in a different way this time! Innovate, create something new.
4. Don’t be afraid to fail. Failure is a tool and a quite necessary one.
5. You learn nothing from success. (You got it right the first time!) Failure teaches and the world’s greatest minds learned best from this harsh schoolmaster.
6. If you work somewhere you cannot fail or failure is a punitive event, leave. They are not doing anything important there anyway.
7. Real innovation is risky. When forced to choose between innovation and efficiency management, the long-term win is in innovation.
8. Know the difference between being effective and being efficient. The first deals with deciding the right things to do and the other deals with doing things right.
9. Hire the guy who came in second. He tries harder. Persistence is the real talent. Plus he will love you for taking that risk and work even harder to prove he’s worthy. It has always paid off for me.
10. Be right. But don’t be an ass about it. Do your research; know your craft. Be right but if you make everyone hate you because of it, you won’t last long there, even if you were never wrong. Sometimes it is better to be heard than to be right.
11. Never compromise your work. Stand up for what you know, through dint of your effort, research and intellect to be the right thing to do. Find a way to get it done. IT that is compromised serves no one well and costs everyone.
12. When you become master of all you survey, allow your team to innovate and fail. The things they succeed with will amaze you. Empower your team. Give them the ability to make decisions on the things they work on. Less paperwork for you, more autonomy for them. Make them responsible for their work, because, well they are.
13. Insist on diversity. Hire people smarter than you. (Don’t be afraid. They don’t want your job. If they did, they would certainly have it already.)
14. Hire people who don’t look like you. Avoid groupthink. Give your team the power to tell you that you are wrong. This may be the second greatest thing you ever do for yourself. The first was hiring someone smart enough to tell you that you are wrong.
15. Just because everyone says it can’t be done, does not mean they are right. Believe and do it anyway.

Those core rules are non-negotiable and will likely work for any occupation. These are my IT-related truths. They too may be applied to any occupation. Adjust as necessary.

You must learn to love new things.

1. Every three years all that you know may become obsolete. Even if it does not, the IT industry will certainly have expanded further than expected. You have a lot of learning to do.
2. Start your career learning about everything you can. Specialize once you know what feels good to you and you are able to do with maximum efficiency and minimum wasted effort. Be a generalist when you can, specialize if you must but maintain your versatility. Your employment may depend on you being able to do an array of things.
3. Maintain your versatility over time by taking a variety of IT careers in a variety of business models. Business skills will become more important the further up the command structure of the corporation you want to go. Get some training or some education related to business if your mission is to conquer the executive suite.
4. Learn the soft/social skills of how to deal with people. That is a skill set that will only grow more valuable with age.
5. Find the time to take an assessment exam and to read books that deal with occupational growth and career design (i.e. Myers-Briggs, What Color is Your Parachute, Zen and the Art of Making a Living, the Success Principles by Jack Canfield.) These books guide you to consider your reasons for working in the occupation that you do now and how to maximize that experience, or suggest a career better suited to your skill set.
6. Learn 10 things today that you did not know yesterday. Real facts – don’t cut corners. (3,650 new ideas every year will keep you sharp, and yes, that means you learn on the weekends, too!)
7. Knowledge, Information and Data are not equal. Data is the raw stuff of databases and reports. In and of itself, it does nothing. When organized and understood, data can become information and has the potential to influence events and empower the person using it. Knowledge is the state that information assumes when it has helped to accomplish work. Knowledge is the ultimate expression of data in use. Knowledge is Power. Data is just data.

Know your limitations.

1. If you don’t know your weaknesses or limitations, ask someone you trust and don’t take it too personally if they tell you something you didn’t know. Then you should take the time to know yourself better. When in doubt find an enemy and ask him. He has nothing to gain by not telling you the truth.
2. Lose a bad habit a year, every year until you approach perfection. (You are not likely to become perfect, but people may like to be around you a lot more.)
3. Know yourself; do work that complements your skill set. If you don’t like databases, don’t become a database administrator, even if you know how. You will resent your work and it will show.
4. Learn your strengths and use them, they will grow even stronger. Don’t dwell on your weaknesses; you don’t plan to keep them anyway.
5. Be introspective. Introspection is a lost art. Introspection is the art of looking into yourself to find out who you are. You cannot do it with your iPod or stereo blasting at 11. You cannot do it while you are texting your friends or playing World of Warcraft. Introspection can only be done, in silence and the harsh light of honest analysis of who you are and what you do (or have done recently). If you cannot stand a silent room or be alone with your thoughts, ask yourself why? Then do it anyway. The life you improve will be your own. If you find introspection especially difficult, learn/take a class on meditation or yoga, (or both).

No one outside of IT will really know what you do or understand it. So kudos may be slow to arrive after you pull the company fat out of the fire for the fourth time this month. IT is your family now.

1. Love, admire, respect and support each other’s work. It may be the only acknowledgment you receive from your workplace. Cross-train so you can help each other over time and allow everyone to take a vacation sometime.
2. Complements are rarely given to the technical masses that do the most difficult of work. Know that the bulk of the people who benefit from your work, appreciate it greatly. Why management is less able to do that is still a mystery…
3. In some work environments, your work will barely be acknowledged; do it well anyway.
4. Your work is your signature. When you leave your work behind, it should be a monument like the Pyramids of Giza; built to last, with vision in mind. Also see: timeless.
5. When you become the boss of your own IT Empire, sing the praises of your team to everyone. That praise will be the greatest tool in your arsenal.
6. Under-promise and over-deliver. Keep the masses clamoring for your support happy with this simple mantra. Learn how to budget and manage your time. Be realistic when you promise your client a delivery date. Then deliver on your promise, in spades.
7. In IT, everything takes longer than you thought it would. Make sure you think of everything your client would want and a half a dozen things they never considered. Treat them as you would desire to be treated.
8. Document everything you do. Keep an electronic paper trail of your labors. Hercules had only 13 impossible things to do, so he did not need to take notes. Make a to-do list every day. Keep it on a flash drive or in a wiki. It helps you determine how well you are doing, what you are doing and whether it is what you should be doing.
9. Once a year, make a list of things you want to accomplish in that year and make sure those things get on your daily or weekly to do list. At the end of the year, check that list, if more than half are not done, where is your time being spent?

You must appear perfect in word and deed. Unrealistic? So what. Who said life was fair.

1. Your parents are responsible for what was, you are responsible for what is. If your life was not a bed of roses, get over it. Every day is a chance to make it better. Real life is progressive and iterative (meaning it builds on the work of the day before. So it will take time to correct all that was wrong. Do it anyway.)
2. Mastery of self must occur before you can master anything else. Self-control means control of your habits, your mind, and your body. The most powerful thing you can do for yourself is to maintain your self-control especially when everyone around you is waiting for you to lose it.
3. If you are out of sorts; get help. There is no shame in seeking support. The IT industry can undermine your self-esteem and morale. If you are psychologically stressed, IT work can drive you to the brink in record time.
4. If you say it, it must be so. Your word is law. Keep your word, your integrity is everything.
5. When in doubt, say nothing. Everything you say will be remembered. When you say nothing, you appear wise and inscrutable. “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.” No truer words were ever spoken. Remember them.
6. The most powerful words you can say are: I don’t know. But I will find out. Become a master of research!
7. Rest; use your vacation. Learn to walk away. Many IT types have an inability to walk away from a problem. This dogged determination is how they solve the impossible issues that end up on our desks. But it leads to stress, wear and tear on our minds and bodies over time, rendering us less effective over time. Don’t let this happen to you. Take time out. Plan for it. Then do it. You will be better for the time away. (Plus, it lets them miss you, especially if you are great at your job. Familiarity often breeds contempt.)
8. Do things not IT related. The greatest minds in the world have often discovered that things apparently unrelated to your work can sometimes inspire you to find new ways of solving problems. Rejuvenate your mind by doing things that don’t require a keyboard and a mouse. Read a book, take up painting, do crosswords or Sudoku, learn a new language, play a musical instrument… When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Get at least one physical hobby or sport that puts some wear and tear on your body. The sedentary life of an IT guru can add inches to your waist and pounds to you behind. Your mind is only as strong and resilient as the body that houses it. (Weight-lifting, aerobics, running, martial arts, bicycling, swimming, ultimate Frisbee, touch football, soccer, to name a few.) Get your heart rate up and keep it up for 50 minutes a day. Your life depends on it.

Love IT as the complex and dynamic craft that it is.

1. You must enjoy the challenge of finding the straw in a needle stack. You are about to become part of the largest, most distributed neural network on the planet and possibly the greatest technological wonder ever created by humanity. Savor the moment. Done? Now get to work. With that membership, you will also have the great responsibility to ensure that whatever part of that network you build, patrol, protect, guide or create, that you do it with a vision of the future, being mindful of present circumstances and with an awareness of what has gone before.
2. It will, if you choose it, be the hardest job you will ever love. People will tell you that what you do is not work. Do not listen. This career is as challenging as any being done anywhere:
   • IT is as challenging as medicine, because your patient will sometimes span the world, be in more than one place at a time, and have thousands of discrete elements, with millions of parts and billions of lines of code holding it all together. IT changes faster and more consistently than medicine ever has. (To be fair, medicine may soon accelerate the pace now that they are embracing IT in their diagnosis, management and coordination of information. More work for you…)
   • IT may be as hard to handle as law, because there are no precedents for every event. Each time may be the first time that circumstance has EVER been seen. What was true this morning may no longer even be relevant by sunset. Human laws develop at a geologic pace compared to the shifts that technology witnesses every year. (On average, law firms are incredibly slow when it comes to utilizing the full power of IT. I am amazed to see how many law firms are still running Windows 98 or NT.)
   • As difficult as architecture and engineering because what you build must offer stability and adaptability and is constantly under attack from threats within and without and yet must make the people using it feel safe and productive. Depending on the IT you are responsible for lives may hang in the balance. Be vigilant. IT is ever-challenging and has constantly expanding horizons.
3. Learn all you can, all the time. If you are not a strong reader, I recommend you work on expanding your speed and your literacy, because a strong and fast reader has a decided advantage in IT. Technical publications, both in print and online are your friends. Take an 8 hour work day, once a week and do nothing but read technical journals or publications on that day. Your productivity will still be higher than anyone who doesn’t.
4. IT will offer you impossible deadlines, put you in positions to affect the highest stakes (you have four minutes to save the world…) pair you with some of the strangest and often brilliant people, keep you working long and sometimes nonstandard hours, and ultimately provide you with immense satisfaction. IT will give you the satisfaction of creating something out of nothing whether that be a circuit board, a processor, a network, an application, a database, or a website, you will be creating something from the realm of ideas (Logos) and bringing it into the world. Create something the world needs they will pay you handsomely for it. (Sometimes, even if the world didn’t need it, you will get paid too, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.) Know that when your skills mature (in 5 to 7 years), you will be able to call yourself one in a million and mean it.
5. Mastery of this craft makes you rare amongst humans. Even the most sophisticated and educated often pale when confronted by a computer on their desk and a demand to use it. And despite our recent economic misfortunes, work in this field will likely continue to expand to those who stay at the forefront of their fields of expertise.
6. There will never be fewer computers on Earth than there are now. They may be virtual computers under unknown operating systems but the number of computers is likely to continue growing for the foreseeable future. And on the off-chance that the number of computers actually goes down, the skill level required to manage, understand and control those computers will likely be greater than ever. The only people who would have a chance of controlling or working with them would be people who already have the core fundamentals at hand. That would be you.

If you don’t love IT, you will leave it in 2-4 years for something easier, less stressful with a greater sense of acknowledgment from the common masses. Your powers will diminish somewhat but you will always remember what it was like to have your finger on the pulse of the world. Good luck. These ideas were from my private journey of twenty five years in the IT workforce. I am curious to see if anyone else sees anything familiar here. If not, share with me those things that made it possible for you to succeed. I am always looking for other great tools for my belt. About the Author: Thaddeus has an Information Technology blog at the Examiner.com.

His email address is: