Thinking aloud: Azure, AWS, DevOps, cars and opinion from Alex Neihaus

  • My daughter, the poet

    It is with great pleasure and pride that I turn over my blog, temporarily, to my daughter Rebecca so she can publish her humorous poem, The Germ Soldier. If you’ve ever seen a middle-schooler with a runny nose, you’ll relate to her art. The Germ Soldier By Becca Neihaus They spread like throwing sand, Since…

  • Quick bytes from turkey weekend

    Really quickly: I’m eatin’ turkey — a lot of turkey I’ve updated to WP 2.6.5 and still can’t get the blog to work with podPress 8.8 despite all the posts about how to do so and the “no revisions” plugin. Damn, this is tiresome. When will Automattic realize they are killing bloggers with these incompatibilities.…

  • Vieux Boulogne or Durian: Can a French Software Company Blog?

    This is one of those posts where I had so many metaphors going through my head as I wrote it that I’m gonna list ’em for you before I write the post because even I can’t keep ’em straight. And who wants to miss a good metaphor? Vieux Boulogne is the world’s stinkiest cheese Durian…

  • Vinyl records aren’t staging a comeback so don’t look for social media wisdom from analysts

    This morning, I was searching for blog posts about Gartner research and came across this one from David Scott really tucking it to Gartner for their lack of authenticity in social networking. It’s no big surprise that David thinks they’re inept. If there’s a firm on the planet that has fewer bona fides in social networking…

  • Politics is to beer as poverty is to Wi-Fi

    I’ve been way too busy to blog. But today, while my kid was drilling analogies in preparation for the SSAT, the blog muse struck. It’s Sunday, and I’ve just reviewed my retirement account statements from September 30. That was bad enough. But with the miracle of Quicken, I was able to see specifically the carnage…

  • Listen to Randy Newman’s Harps and Angels before it’s too late

    I’ve been a rabid Randy Newman fan since I was in college. When I was a student producer in the mid-1970’s at WBUR, I tried desperately (and unsuccessfully) to get Newman to interview on a show I produced called Around the Hub. It wasn’t so much that I thought Newman was of interest to the…

  • I finally get some security religion and discover how easy it really is

    With all the news lately about the fundamental flaws in DNS and the fact that my digital life is on my laptop, I decided to take a few hours today to reconfigure my router to use OpenDNS and to encrypt the whole drive in my laptop using TrueCrypt. After months of listening to Leo and…

  • Consumer Reports is the Church Lady

    I’ve been reading Consumer Reports since I was a teenager.  Without a doubt, they the most authoritative consumer product testers. And they know it. I’ve always been amused by their combination of geeky testing regimens and their 1930’s-derived Socalist practices (purchasing a subscritption to the magazine makes you a “member” of Consumer’s Union and eligble…

  • @I @surrender @to @social @media

    Last weekend, I attended PodCamp Boston. It was incredible. And there are two things I learned. First, my fellow vps of marketing in Boston, who at their networking event three days before Podcamp Boston indicated they’d never heard of this major event happening in their backyard, will remain with their heads totally stuck in the…

  • The first cut is the deepest

    This is a post about product liability. Or, more accurately my fury at Whirlpool for making it nearly impossible to lift their refrigerators without slicing off your fingers. Short version: we’re renovating the kitchen. Today, stainless steel appliances are all the rage. This despite the fact that they collect fingerprints, dent easily and cost more.…

  • Sorry, that fat lady never really did sing

    Years and years and years ago (OK, I’m feeling Boomer today), I was involved in the sale of a GUI-based application to the phone company. They resisted and resisted, despite our (and, unsurprisingly, Microsoft’s) ever-more-urgent importuning. We kept telling the executives that this was the future, it was the way they had to go and,…

  • Right Hemipshere: still grasping at straws

    Let me say right off the bat that I know that I really should get over it. I should stop being so competitive that I am willing to blast former business competitors for things that no longer matter to me (or the descendants of the original competition). But I can’t help it. It’s just part…