Accidental Obama supporter?

I think I just became an Obama supporter. I didn’t mean to but I was pressured into it by the propaganda. I’ve actually been on the fence until the Palin decision. (I have daughters and have a strong opinion about the difference between family values and statutory rape) Anyway I got an email that was anti-Obama in silly ways. I could name a number of things about him that truly concern me. I’m not sold that he would make a good president. Unfortunately our election is not about if he will be a good president, it is about if he will be better or worse the McCain. ...

October 30, 2008 · 6 min · Aaron Held

"really dumb idea" or "I hope my mom does not read this"

Last week I checked the weather and rode my motorcycle down to Philly with plans to ride back to Bucks County today. It was raining and very windy in the city so I left a bit earlier for safety sake. It was cold but the road was not too slippery until I ventured onto 95N. As soon as I got the bike up to about 40mph I got hit with a crosswind and felt the back tire move sideways. At this point higher brain functions kicked in and I slowed for the next exit, Aramingo road. ...

October 28, 2008 · 3 min · Aaron Held

Specialization is for Insects

The other night we had a security issue that came up at 3am. Our combined response toolkit included DNS changes, akamai CDN configuration, adserver updates, javascript, HTML, and lots of good old fashioned interpersonal communication and persuasion. In these days where I’m working with dedicated ‘Javascript’ engineers that don’t read Java and operations people focused on CDN configurations that don’t know the application innards the concept of specialization is a concern. ...

October 20, 2008 · 3 min · Aaron Held

I just had to click this ad

I had to click on this minimalist ad. I had to know where it went…..

July 14, 2008 · 1 min · Aaron Held

reminiscing the cache wars

Recently at work people are discussing the merits of different cache servers. That brought back memories of my days as the R&D Product lead for a line of cache systems. The high point was participating in the two week “Cache Bake Off” hosted by NLANR (the team broke off and formed The Measurement Factory. This was great fun where engineering teams from major companies got together to have thier systems pounded in a no holds barred performance test. I was working for a hardware company that had thier sights firmly set of being the leading tier two vendor (Tier one was considered too competative to take exponential growth risks). I think my gear nailed it by achieving 80% of the performance of the leadning brand at 1/5 the price. (And you could cluster 2 for less then half the cost and have over 50% better performance - if you order now you can get fee overnight shipping). ...

July 14, 2008 · 2 min · Aaron Held