Hello Folks!

It’s been a hot minute since I’ve posted anything. Ok, so it’s been like 6 months. I have half a dozen excuses prepared. The VMWorld’s took OVER my life and then I was traveling so much I got status on an airline. (Hint: It’s not as glamorous as everyone fantasizes about.)

In reality, I started 2 posts but never finished them due to my travel schedule. When I came home mid-December (yeah, I was gone so long my youngest grew out of his clothing size of undies!), I fell into despair about the sheer amount that I wanted to accomplish before the year ended. And that is when I realized that I had taken on too much and started unloading duties. I have a horrible time saying “No” and it showed. I sincerely hope to have matured enough to say “No” more often in the future. Any how, it took a few pep talks from my colleagues to straighten me out. However, I never forgot about my blog.

Today, in honor of welcoming 2020, I will reminisce about some older technology that I used and managed through my earlier years. I hope you get a few chuckles over these if you recognize them!

Before I do that, I do want to share an insight I have recently come to about blogging.

One of the reasons I post so rarely is because this is new to me. Because it’s new to me, I’ve been learning from others and really trying to find my voice. Blogging is almost a personal diary of my journeys and I want this narrative to be true to my character and the lessons I’ve learned. It turns out that it takes a WHOLE lot of careful thought of what you should put down in words. Keep that in mind the next time you write an email!

And with that, here’s one of my lessons from my past that transitions from that point.

I once worked at an email startup (no need to guess, it’s on the internet) when I was pretty young. I learned many things at that startup – the emotional highs and lows of venture capital funding, how to restore a payroll database 3 times in one night, coworkers that like to press big red buttons in datacenters (you know who you are!), and how wonderful a small IT team can come together and work. So it is only fitting that my manager once sagely said to me,”Frances, be careful what you put in email because email is FOREVER.” You see, our company specialized in email servicing. I still remember a few things that manager taught me. (He also taught me “Your money is your money and his money is your money too!”) I’ve kept that saying in my brain every time I put something in writing. I promise you – every email you will EVER write will come back to you. You will NOT know who has seen it. When you put it in writing, expect that it will come back to you in the worse way possible. Every time I put pen to paper or before I send an email, I will read it and think to myself, “How embarrassing is this note if it comes back to me?” Is there anything in that note you are going to regret? Change it now. So now you see why blogging is so hard for me. When I put this down, I need to be ok with what I’ve written 20 years from now.

Let’s roll this forward and have a little fun now that the moral story has been told.

Prior to VMware, I was admin and an architect in the Silicon Valley for some 15 years. I’m a native of the Bay Area and so my career arc is not so hard to come by. The things I’ve seen though? Holy hell.

Does anyone remember this company?

I was a certified Compaq technician before HP bought them and prior to the massive rise of Dell. Talk about dating myself. Compaq did make a fine product during it’s time though!

During this time, I was a consultant and working with various clients through out the Bay Area. So does anyone remember what these are?!

Holy cow. This was BEFORE mapquest, the Tom Tom’s, AND my husbands’s favorite…..Garmin! I lived and got lost by these things! I think I was packing 6 of these things in my car at the time. You Gen Z’ers might be looking at that like it’s a mummified body out of a crypt.

What about this thing?

Can you believe I used to configure these things? I can’t even believe they are still shipping and rolling these things. I couldn’t even find a picture of the older ones I used to configure. They were all blue plastic with the SonicWall logo embossed on the top. Funny how they never updated the logo!

This was by far, my favorite cell phone before the iphone:

That’s right. It’s the most well known, well loved, and well sold flip phone on earth IMO. Do you know how many of my OG friends wants this back? I think this just shows that they are stuck in the past. Oh I’m sorry, that’s just my husband. He doesn’t read my blog. 😛

Alright, let’s move on to software!

The browser that won’t go away: Internet Explorer 6.0

How many of us still has some VDI or Citrix desktop solution JUST because we can’t get rid of IE 6.0? I cannot remember the number of man hours that my team spent managing a separate environment because we had to support IE 6.0 for some applications. IE 6.0 probably added two FTE to every enterprise alone.

JAVA – I used to keep a windows station with an EXACT copy of JAVA plugin on my browser that could access interfaces with some of my infrastructure devices because I couldn’t get the interfaces ANY other way. It was ridiculous that as an architect I had to keep such a jump box around.

With that, I gotta end this post as it’s getting pretty long. It was a lot of fun dragging all these past things up and it does put the technology that we have at our fingertips today in a great light. Our GPS, driving directions and ability to find a decent restaurant makes my life SO much more better.

Happy New Year’s to you and may your year be filled with all good things! <-should be in a fortune cookie, no?