Recent Posts by Patrick Shuff

Today has been an unusual day. I didn't have any meetings. I didn't have any conference calls. I didn't have anywhere that I was required to be. Very unlike the rest of the week. First, let's recap the events leading upto today. Monday:  - 6am work out. must start the week out properly  - 7:45 in office for meeting with team  - 8:30 meetings start to plan out how to accomplish tasks for the week  - 11:30 skip out of office and head to customer site - 1:00 meeting at customer...

My kids and I are constantly quoting movies. Some movies have more relevance than others and some are more quotable as well. We have been doing this for years. Every Christmas we watch It's A Wonderful Life and every February 2nd we watch Groundhogs Day. I realize that they are corny movies but they help build context. Two of our favorite movies are It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and What's Up Doc. These movies are movies that you can watch with the kids.At work we joke...

Does everyone think in terms of risk and reward. It seems like most people that I have talked to lately are greatly focused on risk and reward. I understand if a manager is looking at investing money in a product and needs to figure out if the cost of the software is worth the risk of not deploying it. I struggle with justification of software. Ok, I understand the need to get a word processor and presentation software package. Is it worth the $200 or so dollars to get Word...

I understand the concept of delivering a message to the audience. I also understand of not wanting to create enemies by saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. For example, if I say that a new business process or software package improves your life by making a daily task take 40% less time. If you are a DBA, your response is --- great. I hate typing in these commands or explaining my scripts to the latest new guy in the office. If the DBA's manager is in the room, it...

I was talking with one of my neighbors the other day. We both have kids and the subject of work and kids came up. When your kids ask what you do at work how do you answer them? When I was at a hardware company, the answer was simple..... I play with computers so that I can help other people who want to use them and make it easier for them to use the stuff we sell. My youngest thought that I played Nintendo all day and wanted to be just like his dad. The only thing that he...

So last week was a bit of a let down. I have been to Orlando a few times and stayed in bad and good hotels. I have had good and bad service. This past week I got a mix of both. The hotel that I stayed in was a Disney property. The hotel was loud, filled with little kids, and not very happy people. Most of the people staying in the hotel were bright and cheerful in the morning but not loving the world come the end of the day. They all had the look of "just shoot me now. Don't...

this week will be an interesting study in service. today i was in new orleans and got a chance to see life without services. we made a few customer calls yesterday and helped build a house through habitat for humanity. man, talk about no services. there was electricity but no running water in the new houses. we had to cart buckets of water to clean brushed and paint rollers. toilets were porta potties. very primitive. the airport is open but just getting back to normal. next...

>>> begin cynic mode <<< Am I missing something? If I have a production system in one city and a development team or production system in another city why not make them disaster recovery failover for each other? For example, I have a system in Houston that runs my production xyz service. I have a company that I acquired that runs a production jkf service. Why not create a new instance on each of the databases and use dataguard between the two systems?Given that the...

I have been reviewing a couple of accounts that I have been working with of late and one has a small but dedicated it department and the other has three or four employees and pays Oracle to host financial applications like HR or payroll. When you think about it how different is this from outsourcing all HR functions to a company like Administaff. At my last job I actually worked for Administaff and not the company I represented. This reviewing made me think what would I do if...