10 Years

Ten years ago I wrote the first post on this blog. 3:43 AM. I’m a late night kinda guy, I guess. Actually, I probably came home from a bar, installed WordPress 1.5.1, and started writing.

Ten years seems like an awfully long time ago. So much has changed in my life. I like my job, most days. That wasn’t true back then. That’s part of why this started, as a way to vent. I have a wife and a kid now… almost two kids, just a couple days more until it is man-to-man coverage around Chez Plankers.

I’ve been a little burnt out lately, with work and kids and life, and slacked off on writing in almost every way. As such, it’s been interesting to look back at some of my first posts here. Ugh. I wonder if, in ten years, my recent posts will be as irrelevant as those early posts are now. They’re not bad, per se, but I hadn’t found focus yet. There’s even recipes back in the archives. Hell, I made the panang the other night. And to this day my #1 post is the one where I show how to reassemble a faucet aerator. No kidding. #2 is how to disable Teredo, 6to4, and whatnot under Windows.

I am definitely a better writer now, though. It is true about Carnegie Hall — you get there with practice.

I wasn’t part of the virtualization community, early on. My goal was to write about system administration, mostly. I’d been virtualizing things for a couple of years at that point, but it was only when I discovered that EMC wasn’t recommending that people align the partitions on their disks, and that there were serious negative performance implications there, that I started writing about VMware. We had Dell PowerEdge 6650s and EMC Clariion CX3s at the time, ESX 1.5, vMotion but nothing more. vMotion made us laugh the first time we set it up. I think we spent an hour moving things back & forth, in a shared area, and by the time my friend & coworker Rich and I were done we’d accumulated a lot of our coworkers around us, witnessing the beginning of the next phase of IT.

So I started writing about it, among other things. I owe two people thanks for support in those early years. John Troyer, who forged the next generation of vendor communities. He reached out to me early and encouraged me to write more and often. He used the term “bully pulpit” at least once with me, but in that I found balance and moderation. He may also have been the first one to tell me I was a good writer, in front of a lot of other people.

The other is Marc Farley, who surprised me once at an early Las Vegas VMworld by reaching out, inviting me to dinner, and drinking tequila with me. I had no idea what to think when he first made contact, but by the end of the night I had gained a sense of the possible community and friendships. Also, tequila, which would repeat itself a few times here and there. Not nearly enough, though, mostly due to proximity.

Thank you guys.

There are so many more out there that encourage me, that have encouraged me, and give me hope and inspiration, reminded me there’s a point to this stuff. People I’ve enjoyed times with over the years, people I’m happy to call friends, even if we don’t see each other all that much anymore. Damian Karlson and an intoxicated evening in the Venetian. Frank Denneman and Duncan Epping and late night hot dogs in Copenhagen. Ed Czerwin, Chris Dearden, and Christian Hobbel, the vSoup guys, for ongoing support and love. Jason Boche, Todd Scalzott, Chris Wahl, Drew Denson, and Rich Lingk, people I can smoke cigars and talk about anything into the wee hours of the morning. Michael Keen, Stu Miniman, and Ganesh Padmanabhan, always up for a Moscow Mule. People I don’t even know how I know them anymore, who I love seeing, people like Julia Weatherby and Jay Weinshenker, Gina Minks, GS Khalsa, and Matt Vogt. Edward Haletky, Bernd Herzog, and all the TVP crew past & present. Stephen Foskett, Claire Chaplais, Tom Hollingsworth, Matt Simmons, Ben Freedman, all the TFD crew, and all the repeat offenders I meet at conferences, like Justin Warren, Howard Marks, Ethan Banks, Greg Ferro, Alastair Cooke, Keith Townsend, John Obeto, Curtis Preston, and more. The TechTarget folks, Nick Martin, Alex Barrett, Colin Steele, and Lauren Horwitz, who have taken my writing to the next level. And of course all the folks with vendors that keep good track of me, and allow me to see some of these people from time to time. Doug Hazelman, Sarah Vela, Jason Collier, Rick Vanover, Melanie Boyer, Eric Nielsen, and more.

It’s late and I’ve forgotten people in this list. People who are important. I’m sorry, and I’m thankful. Thank you to everybody who still works for and in this community of bloggers. Thank you for everybody that has encouraged me. Thank you to everybody who reads my writings. Thank you, all.

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Can’t seem to pull up the pictures of your aerator diagram from many years ago. Any chance you can send them to me via email. Thanks. Julie

  • Thought I’d let you know that I, too, am ecstatic about finding your reassemble-your-aerator post. Just today. And I’m now going out to the kitchen to see if I remember where I put that extra part and do it right! Thank you thank you.
    — “another Julie”