DavePayne.com

On Feb 8, 2010, 1 year and 3 days ago, I started working for EMC Corporation.  I've been silent on the blog since then.  Mostly I haven't posted because I needed to focus on work and wrapping up loose ends from my former life at Xcedex.  Some quick updates:

Professional
I've been working as a technology specialist for EMC Backup Recovery Systems division.  I'm solely focused on Avamar, and mostly as it relates to VMware environments.  It's been a really fun ride, largely evangelizing the technology and getting neck deep with enterprise customers around the upper midwest.  We started a user group last year for Avamar.  35 people at the first group, 60 at the second group yesterday.  This product is really catching on and solving real problems for people.  EMC is a thrilling company to work for, a big pond full of incredibly bright fish.

Personal

My family is well, and I've really been able to reconnect with them since joining EMC.  Though it's a busy work environment, I've got my mind back.  My children are growing quickly and discovering life.  We run our own home school, which has been so far a fantastic experience for the family.
We moved, left the castle in Ramsey and live in a "rurban" house in Rogers MN.  (rurban is a rural house in a urban area).  It's much better suited for us and has opened a new world of adventure for the kids including a mini forest, pond, wildlife (foxes, variety of birds, armies of squirrels) and 4wheeling.

What's next
Stay tuned, the best is yet to come.  That being said, I've found that living in the moment over this last year has severely increased my happiness level.
"...take no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself..."

-dave

If VAT, Ditch the Income Tax

Why this is not obvious to an American is beyond me.

This past weekend, after President Obama addressed the annual retreat of Republican Members of the House, I, along with my Salem Radio colleague Hugh Hewitt, and John Fund of the Wall Street Journal, were also invited to address them.

This is an abridged and edited version of my remarks.

Thank you for this honor.

I have never been as proud to be a Republican as I have this past year with your unanimity in opposing Obamacare and the other bills that would transform America. Please know -- you need this feedback -- that your having been able to stand together and do this has been a luminous moment in Republican Party history.

I would like show you some of the large themes involved in your present work.

First theme: It is harder to sell truths than to sell falsehoods.

It is very easy to say, "Vote for us and we will give you, we will give you, we will give you." It is much harder to advocate what is right and to say, "Vote for us, but no, we won't give you" -- even though that is the more moral and the more American position. So you have the far more difficult task.

John Rosemond, who writes books on child rearing, says that the most important vitamin you can give to a child is Vitamin N, his term for the word "No." You have given America Vitamin N.

America needs it terribly because of another way in which God has stacked the deck against the fight for goodness in human history: Every change for good must be constantly renewed, but changes for the worse are often permanent. Goodness must be fought for every day, over and over. That is why every American generation has to be inculcated with American values. But once the change for bad is made, it is close to irreversible. The Democratic attempt to vastly expand the state's power would likely be a permanent change for the worse in American life. When they're candid, they admit that the health care bill is their way to get to single-payer medicine and, more importantly, to a government takeover of another sixth of the American economy.

You have to know how important your work is, and how many of us know this.

Second theme: You are not fighting liberals. You are fighting the Left. Democrats were once liberals. But you are not fighting liberals any longer. You are fighting the Left. And as leftists, they do not like to confront reality, even if it means rewriting it.

I'll give you two examples.

This Jew battled to keep the cross in the Los Angeles County seal. Liberals and leftists in California fought to remove the smallest image -- a cross -- from the county seal. Through my radio show, on a day's notice, we gathered about a thousand people to demonstrate at the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors when the board voted. The vote went along ideological lines: three liberals to two conservatives, to remove the cross.

I remember testifying before the supervisors and telling them, "You are rewriting our county's history. This county was founded by Christians. That's why there's a cross. Had it been founded by Wiccans, I would fight to keep a broom on the seal. But it wasn't founded by Wiccans. It was founded by Christians. That's why it's named "Los Angeles." It is not "Los Secularistos." If it were "Los Secularistos," I would expect an empty seal. But it is not empty. It was founded by Christians. It's not even a religious issue. You're rewriting my history. And it's frightening to see you do that."

The other example is what is now happening with Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts. Everybody knows why he was voted in. It was, after all, Scott "41" Brown. We all knew why he was elected. But if you read left-wing commentators, this history is being rewritten. They say it had nothing to do with opposing Obamacare. Nothing to do with it! In the Soviet Union, it took 10 years to write Trotsky out of the Russian Revolution. But this is a rewrite of history in one week! Scott "41" Brown's victory was not about opposing Obamacare.

In fact, the Left argues that the Massachusetts voters were for the health care bill, but simply "wanted to send a message" to Washington. I must say the voters of Massachusetts are not only not bright, they must be truly stupid if they are for Obamacare and send the man who will undo Obamacare as a protest on behalf of Obamacare. This is what we are told by the Left.

Third theme: Most people on the Left are True Believers. This is critical to understand. They are willing to lose Congress; Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are prepared to lose both houses to get this through. Why? Because losing an election cycle means nothing compared to taking over more of the American economy.

I can give you an example from our side. There are many folks on our side who, if they could pass an amendment against abortion, would happily sacrifice both houses for a period of time. Understand that just as strongly as some are pro-life or religiously Christian or Jewish, that is how strongly many leftists believe in leftism. Leftism is a substitute religion. For the Left, the "health care" bill transcends politics. You are fighting people who will go down with the ship in order to transform this country to a leftist one. And an ever-expanding state is the Left's central credo.

And finally, theme four: I have a motto that I offer to you because this is the ultimate moral case for us: "The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen."

We have to learn to make our complex beliefs simple -- though never simplistic. And this is our powerful response to government doing more and more for people: "The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen."

And here's how we explain it: The bigger the government, the less I do for myself, for my family and for my community. That is why we Americans give more charity and devote more time to volunteering than Europeans do. The European knows: The government, the state, will take care of me, my children, my parents, my neighbors and my community. I don't have to do anything. The bigger question in many Europeans' lives is, "How much vacation time will I have and where will I spend that vacation?"

That is what happens when the state gets bigger -- you become smaller. The dream of America was that the individual was to be a giant. The state stays small so as to enable each of us to be as big as we can be. We are each created in God's image. The state is not in God's image, but it is vying to be that. This is the battle you're fighting. You are fighting a cosmic battle because this is the most important society ever devised, the United States of America.

You can easily forget the big picture -- how could you not? You're there every day, battling. You are in dense jungle -- excuse me, rainforest -- you are in a rainforest/jungle, fighting, and I am, because of the nature of my work, in a little helicopter above the jungle telling you what it is you are fighting. America really is the last, best hope of mankind.

That is how important I consider the fights that are going on now, especially with regard to the takeover of health care. How can they, with a serious face, tell us that Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security are going bankrupt, and therefore the solution is to take over more of health care? How does one say that with a straight face? How does one look a fellow American in the eye and say, "Yes, we have failed in almost every way that government has significantly intruded, and that's why we need more government intrusion"?

It is mind-boggling. But that is what has happened. People get smaller and pettier, as the government and state get bigger. That's what you are fighting. proudest moment in my life as a Republican. Thank you for doing what you are doing.

-dave

One of my favorite comics, XKCD created this masterful workflow that shows how a computer genius figures out your problem:

I'm pretty busy these days, so consider this a self help chart to exhaust before calling me.  If you do run out of options, call me immediately toll-free at 911-DAVE.

-dave

"Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation…tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation." – Jean Arp

VMware is becoming a big boy now, a very big boy.  Two billion is a big number.

$2,000,000,000

Two thousand million.

or better, for the geek inclined, and to make it look really big, how about in binary, appropriate for a technology company:

2 000 000 000.00 = 0b1110111001101011001010000000000

I used google calculator to do that conversion.  notice the 'b', it gave up. Can't find many calculators that do binary to the billions,  must be a big number.

When I started working with VMware in 2003, they were not a big company relative to today.  I think revenues were in the $150M range or so.  There were maybe a couple hundred employees.  Certainly a respectable size for a software company, but no Oracle/Microsoft/Symantec/CA/Citrix competitor.  I admit that I fell in love with the technology at the time and became quite an evangelist for them.

I remember going to a partner conference for Citrix in Feb 2004.  Mark Templeton, Citrix CEO, gave a big rah rah speech and spoke about how the vision of the company was to become a $1,000,000,000 (1 billion) dollar company.  Citrix had been around for nearly 15 years at that point had achieved revenues of nearly $600,000,000 (600 million duckets).  As a partner I didn't care a bit for that vision, but whatever, if it gets Citrix excited, sure.  They almost made it by the end of 2005 with $900M, and overachieved in 2006 with $1.2B.  It took them over 16 years to get there.  And the last push was driven solely by revenue from many acquisitions, if you remember, Citrix was on the acquisition warpath for several years.  They had to get away from being the one trick remote access pony to becoming a total platform of sorts.

VMware has followed a similar path, but has done it twice as fast, with broader adoption and acceptance marketwide in my opinion than Citrix has ever been.  Many of the loyal Citrix fanboys all changed religion to VMware, in fact many of the VMware SEs in the early days were Citrix turncoats.

So a little rambling today to say to VMware "CONGRATULATIONS".  And an even bigger congratulations to EMC, who really gets to enjoy the financial success of VMware.  Citrix grew to a mega-software company by acquiring companies to get there.  VMware did that too, but achieved the biggest momentum push from being acquired by EMC in 2004.

I still believe that the EMC acquisition is the single largest factor that accelerated VMware's growth.  Certainly VMware had fantastic products, genius level engineers and was one of the most innovative companies at the time.  But none of that was getting recognized by the market at large.  As a guy that was on the street evangelizing the message at the time, take it from me, I saw it first hand.  The technophiles were passionately in love with the technology, but Joe Customer had other things to do than take a risk by running his servers in these "virtual-whatever-they-are's".  Post EMC acquisition in 2004, VMware became a household name overnight.  The EMC machine for lighting up a worldwide campaign that drives brand recognition, credibility, distribution and anything else needed to grow was all VMware lacked to hit it big.

And hit it big they have.  $2B in revenue and $200M of that is pure profit.  Smartest $625M EMC ever spent.

Perspective

---> If I could put things in perspective however...VMware/Citrix/EMC and the rest of them have labored and toiled for many years to become billion dollar software giants.  And with the wave of a magic goverment issued pen, our weasely elected officials spend that away as if it fell out of the sky from a money fairy.  A billion dollars appears as a larger than life number when you are a startup company dreaming of becoming what Citrix and VMware have become.  It is a nearly insurmountable goal.  As a bureaucrat, who has likely barely balanced a checkbook in their lifetime personally, a billion dollars is something that gets spent as a minor earmark to some other piece of legislation.  It's not enough to even upset lunch at the Press Club with.  Wave it away....gggrrrrr.....we work too hard for that type of disconnected leadership....




-dave

 In the first post on this subject, I spoke about how I've been able to arrange my home so I can effectively work from home.  The major focus of that post is on the physical side of the equation, with the most effective element being the door bar, a device that not only bars the door shut, but communicates to the family when I'm working and when I'm free.


Once I was able to conquer the physical barriers to working from home, I had to tackle the technical barriers.  A major challenge to working at home is the fact that you are physically separated from the people you work with.  Obviously this is why we typically trudge into an office every day, so we can bug each other much easier than we could otherwise.  With the right approach, we can invite our peers into our world to bug us on our schedule, and it's almost as convenient as being there in person.

Now, just like working in a corporate office, there are pros and cons to working from home.  The fact that you are physically separated from your colleagues, be they co-workers, clients, partners, etc, presents a benefit and challenge.  Benefit?  It's much more difficult for others to bug you at random.  Challenge?  Ad hoc communication and general socializing can suffer. 

Fortunately there are several technologies which make the world a much smaller place and mitigate some of these communication gaps that come from the distance.

There are some obvious technologies I use whether I'm at home or the office.  I won't cover these since they are ubiquitous (high speed Internet, email, cell phone, etc, blah, etc).  Let's focus on the stuff that makes working from home as good, or better, than working from the office.

1.  Skype
Benefits:  Cheap calls, Free Video Conferencing, IM included

I'm a big fan of Skype.  Free calls around the world.  Easy, decent quality, free video conferencing between 2 people.  I use the paid version of Skype that gives me an actual number and let's me call land lines from my computer.  Since Sprint is the anti productivity network w/ crappy coverage at my house, I generally use Skype for most of my calling from the home office.

Now Skype is cool, but you also need coolio headphones to use with Skype.  Of course you could use some speaker/mic combo on your laptop or computer, but a way better option is to get something built for communication.  Nothing better for rich 2 way audio than the stuff designed for gamers.  I use a Fatal1ty over the ear headset with a detachable mic. 

It's great for having a conversation where you hear everything evenly in both ears.  The quality is great.  I'd say 95% of the time Skype does me right with great voice clarity.  That's probably as good as any cell phone as far as I'm concerned.

2. IVDesk
Benefits:  Access anywhere, anytime, from any computer; Everything protected with no work on my part

I've been working with IVDesk for a couple of years now.   They have a fantastic solution for eliminating much of the pain associated with running corporate IT.  Their offering, essentially IT as a service, or I've heard them call it, Service as a Service.  IVDesk is short for Internet Virtual Desktop. They simply do it all for you and let you access your corporate desktop via an internet connection.  The desktop runs in their datacenter with all the functionality you'd expect, Windows, Office, Internet browsing, file sharing, Exchange/Outlook mail, etc.  Everything is there, monitored and protected 24x7 by their professional support staff.  I met IVDesk a while back when we were searching for a home for
Covalent Financial's Hosted Quickbooks service.
IVDesk became the provider for hosting this service for my friend Chuck Palmer.  They have provided fantastic service, always on uptime, and been a very good partner for him and me.

So I have a desktop that lives in the IVDesk cloud.  I can connect to it from any machine with a remote desktop client (which means any Mac/Windows/Linux/iPhone/Palm Pre/and others).  What's cool is not only do I not have to do any maintenance on this thing, it is always there.  If my machine takes a one way trip to the dump, I just find another machine and connect back to my session.  It picks up right where I left off, not skipping a beat.  No worries about losing data at all, it's all protected from the mishaps so common with PCs and laptops.  Plus, it's always fast.  If my machine is dogging for whatever reason, my IVDesk just zooms along since it runs from dedicated server hardware and is connected to a really really fast internet connection.

If you had an IVDesk connection that you used for work, think about how nice that would be on those days in Minnesota where it drops a foot of snow while you're sleeping.  You wake up and say, oh well, instead of driving for 3 hours through that junk, I'll just log into to my IVDesk from home and get right to work while those other poor souls battle it out on the freeways.  Very nice, very convenient.

3.  TokBox
Benefits:  FREE Multiuser video chat and video conferencing

I have to mention this snazzy service I just discovered a few weeks ago.  Situation:  I was to collaborate with some colleagues over at Agosto on a client presentation.  We were planning on running through the presentation all together.  I couldn't make it onsite, so planned to dial in and listen over the phone.  Not as good as being there, but at least I could listen in.  Then Eric Bandy invites me in to a TokBox session.  Wicked cool.  A flash based site that let's you have up to 20 video streams participate in a realtime video conference for the low low price of nothing.  Eric pointed his laptop at the presenter and I was at the presentation. 
Super cool.  I'm sure it would be useful for doing remote presentations, team meetings, and chatting with friends/family.  Certainly a great way to make collaborating with the team easier when you're working from the home office.  (Just make sure you dress appropriately...)

4.  Pandora
Benefits:  Freakishly genius music stations customized just for me

I know Pandora really doesn't have much to do with making working from home any better than working from the office, but I tend to use it ALL the time when I'm in the home office.  In the corporate office, if I listened to music, it was with headphones.  So I typically wouldn't because I didn't always have some nearby and I'd constantly be taking them off to talk to someone or make a call.  At home, I have speakers plugged into the notebook and I can crank music as loud as I want, muting it for calls when needed.

Pandora makes the music experience delectable.  It learns my tastes and finds stuff I'll likely enjoy.  For instance, when I'm doing work that requires serious thought, I play my "Thinking" station.  It's preloaded with classical, acoustic and movie scores from composers like John Williams and Hans Zimmer.  When I'm doing less serious stuff, let'er rip with anything from Jack Johnson to Eddie Vetter.

5.  Shower
Benefits:  I don't smell; I feel like a pro

Silly I know, but hells bells man, you gotta take a shower once in a while!  When I work from home, it's most tempting to jump right into work straight out of bed.  No harm there, but I certainly feel much more like a civilized human being when I shower/shave/get dressed in something decent even if I'm not going to see anyone else that day.  I always get more done from home when I dress appropriately.  Call me a behaviorist - Feelings follow behavior.  Dress professionally, feel professional, be professional.

If you have any other killer ideas for making work from home less work, drop a comment below.


-dave