Author Archives: Stan York

Something Like Iocaine Powder

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Battle of Wits from The Princess Bride

Battle of Wits Scene from The Princess Bride

I’ve mentioned before that I spend some time with young teenagers. Every May, we watch an end-of-school-year movie.  The Princess Bride is a popular choice. Perhaps that is why during a recent discussion with a client I found myself thinking about iocaine powder! In The Princess Bride, Wesley has developed a high tolerance to the poison and therefore, challenges “The Sicilian” to a which-goblet-has-the-poison battle of wits. But it is no contest, really, because both goblets contain iocaine: so Wesley knows he will win.

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Are You Well Connected?

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Old tech vs. new techWhen I was a child, there was a sticker on the telephone at the house of an old relative. Yes, I mean the telephone (there was just the one). The official looking AT&T sticker read “wait for dial tone.” When we visited, I’d wait for no one to be looking so I could pick up the phone and listen. Sure enough, there was always a dial tone–the days of waiting for an operator or mechanical switch to connect a circuit were already gone (I’m not that old). Things were connected!

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Respecting the Details

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brainI had already decided I needed to write about something less technical this time around, and then a 24-year-old writing about the Millennial Retirement Plan in Time magazine caught my eye. If that isn’t funny enough, Jack Dickey (the esteemed author) seeks guidance from a 31-year-old salesperson (oops) retirement planning expert.  Turns out I have some free advice for Jack, too!

Unlike Jack, I find myself just about in the middle of my productive work life: I’ve worked the 24 years of Jack’s entire life and realistically expect to work about that many more. Perhaps that is why Jack made me laugh out loud when he pontificates that “what little employability I have comes from my brain. I’m not going to break down in my mid-60s”.

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Turning to the Cloud

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cloud with arrowI have a reputation for calling things as I see them.  For example, by now, many of you know I’m firmly in the Android camp. There really is no technical comparison (like, who remembers 2012 anymore?).

I find it no surprise that one by one our clients are turning to virtualization and private cloud infrastructure.  As far as I am concerned, Amazon’s AWS platform is the definitive winner here.  Let me illustrate with a real life example.  Sorry, this may get a bit technical.

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We’re Paying Attention!

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paying attentionBecause Spitfire is a Microsoft ISV Partner, I have to renew my SQL Server certification from time to time. This month was one of those times, and you know what, I learned something in the process.

I learned that the test still covers topics that almost no one pays any attention to these days. I had started to think that it was only because I am an old timer that I still thought about things like “physical volumes” and “distribution of IO” and “types of indexes” and (gasp) “index fragmentation.” These days, when you are deploying SQL in a virtual environment with SAN-based storage, all these low level details just seem quaint. Performance and throughput are good enough, so these details fall off the radar. But for sure, all of that is still relevant, just thankfully less critical.

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