Kyle Ohme — In the life of a dot com

With everything going on lately its been hard to find some time to geek out but I had a friend call me this evening wondering how we are going to get internet up in the UP on our snowmobile trip. Last year we picked up a bridge and was able to pull in a wireless signal from a neighbor so that we have VOIP service and some web service to check up on work. It worked pretty well but we looked like true geeks when you walked into the house to see a ton of wires all over the place with laptops hooked up and phone bridges.
I was looking around a little and figured I would start to play with some of my Linksys gear again and install some new firmware.

Tonight I pulled out a few routers and started to play …
I have a few WRT54GAG routers at home that I don\’t use anymore as I updated to all Cisco – so time to build a lab.

We have done this in the past bridging two buildings together when we outgrew our old office and needed some extra room for some developers. We spent a lot of time playing with antennas and configurations however in the end got it working alright for the time. (However I do remember an Ethernet wire that ran across the parking lot that we used for a while =)

For the most part its very straight forward … simply follow the following directions .. \r\n

http://aruljohn.com/info/linksys/

I had this set up in the past at home as a bridge but about a year ago I started to play with getting a phone server installed on this … it worked however moving to Cisco SIP phones I didn’t have much of a need for it … now it will be a neighborhood hotspot so that I can get back into my network to share music when I am over at someone’s party. (I have 600+ CD\’s ripped – nice little jukebox)

If you haven’t done this in a while, they have made some strong advancements … the official site is located here http://www.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv3/index.php

This year we have a little more control over the power on the unit, a better bridge, VPN, QoS and so on … it should be a much better setup …

Press is rolling on the new site … (http://www.bladeuser.org)Here is an excerpt from the arctle talking about http://www.bladeuser.org

“Blade.org provides an invaluable interchange between users of blade servers and the vendor community,” said Kyle Ohme, Chairman of the Blade.org Customer Advisory Council. “Now that so many companies have deployed blade servers, many blade users have expressed the desire to join in a forum — like those in many other product categories that enjoy strong adoption — in which they can interact with their peers as well as the vendor community. Blade.org is becoming a diverse community where vendors can transform end-users’ needs for workarounds and custom development into off-the-shelf blade server products and specialized data center solutions.”

Check out the full page for all information.
Here is the full article .. Click Here

I wanted to take a moment and update everyone on a new site I have been working on … http://www.Bladeuser.org

We have been working hard as a Customer Advisory Council to provide a foundation and vision to the road ahead.  We are very excited as end users to be involved with such a powerful and innovative organization.  Its our vision to create an atmosphere that comes full circle merging the vendor and end user relationships.   We feel by providing feedback as a end user we can provide feedback to the vendors working to solve our issues and ultimately make our experiences easier and more productive with the solutions we use daily.  Our goal is to look forward not reinventing the wheel but rather improve and innovate new solutions that better fit the focus of the customer.
When the Customer Advisory Committee was formed over a year ago it was one of our missions to create an atmosphere that welcomes feedback and community involvement.  I am very happy at this time to announce http://www.bladeuser.org as the starting point to this process.

I invite you to check out the site and provide feedback and use the site as it is yours.

http://datacenterjournal.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1502&Itemid=40

Blade.org press release. 

Blade.org continues to grow and prove to be a leader in the space!

“Blade.org provides an invaluable interchange between users of blade servers and the vendor community,” said Kyle Ohme, Chairman of the Blade.org Customer Advisory Council and Director of Information Technology at W3i, a global, interactive media company. “Now that so many companies have deployed blade servers, many blade users have expressed the desire to join in a forum – like those in many other product categories that enjoy strong adoption – in which they can interact with their peers as well as the vendor community. Blade.org is becoming a diverse community where vendors can transform end-users’ needs for workarounds and custom development into off-the-shelf blade server products and specialized data center solutions.”

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Can I become a happier person with better time management?

Wow - Recently I have really felt the pinch of time.  I have lists and lists multiple pages and tablets deep that acquire new tasks faster than I can remove them.

I am a list person - I have lists for things I need to do today, this week, month and year.  I have lists breaking my day down by how long I expect the task to take so I can fit it into a time slot when I have a free moment.  I have systems to determine long term goals and dependent tasks. I have lists created for things I must pick up next time I go to the store grouped by how close the stores are and what time I have available. I have sliced and diced things so many ways in search for the perfect solution more times than I can count. Excessive – possibly .. but our success is so often tied to time. Success of a relationship, carrier, friendship and overall wellbeing.

I have been working on a better overall time management involving breaking down my time into “goals” first. Picking three goals from my overall yearly goals (work related) … Breaking the goals down into objectives .. breaking the objectives into milestones and breaking the milestones back into tasks. In the mean time I am also using the Drucker time management assessment process for the next three weeks to better align my time with my tasks. You can find more info about Drucker here http://www.friendly-ware.com/dtm/whyShldCr.htm

Time management is not a new concept to me or will this be my last attempt to find a better model.

Peter Drucker “The output limits of any process are set by the scarcest resource. In the process we call “accomplishment”, this is time … Of the other major resources, money is actually quite plentiful … People … one can hire. But one cannot rent, hire, buy or otherwise obtain more time.”

More to come …