SOA & WebSphere Process Integration Education – Day 2

When I got to the office for this 2nd day of class, I realized my 2nd Thinkpad was … dead. I hadn’t logged into it for a few days, so I guess I didn’t realize until it was too late. In essence, my HDD was down for the count. I had been considering for a while to add a 2nd HDD in the Ultrabay tray, but hadn’t had time to get to it.

So while preparing my material for my class, I removed the old HDD, place the 2nd one (another identical 30Gb drive) in, placed my LifeBoat CD (this is a custom Linux install for IBMers) and let it run through the install. What’s even cooler was that LifeBoat connects to an intranet server, and that server kept my settings from the previous install: I simply told it to install it in the same way, and bingo, it was done. Took maybe an hour or two, but it took care of all security patching for me as well… it doesn’t get any better than this, folks.

Meanwhile, I ran through the material for the eSTEW: the labs are well done, using a preview release of WebSphere Business Modeler was quite nice and I think most clients will be impressed at the feature set, yet the ease of use and the attention to details we’ve brought to this release (I’d show screenshots, but it’s not released yet, so…).

I also had a chance to discuss with some colleagues and will soon be contributing linux VMware images to their server farm, so we can speed up the delivery of PoT (Proof of Technology) to customers, by having ready-made vanilla installs of the major Linux distros.

In fact, this was such a busy day that after picking up my daughter from school, we got home and as I proceeded to disarm the home alarm system, I had a doubt. Nonetheless, I punch in my keycode and … BOOM!

The alarm starts. Man, that thing is loud! Anyway, I’m now very stressed as I know I’ve punched the wrong keycode, I can’t find the alarm company’s phone number, my daughter is getting nervous not understanding what’s happening. A few seconds (seems likes minutes to me), a lady from the alarm company calls, very courteous and polite… it takes me about 2 minutes and 3 tries to finally get my PIN to her, and to deactivate the alarm. By that time, the neighbours have come out to check things out, and I »m sweating all right.

Note to self: make sure the alarm company’s phone # and PIN are in my Sony Clie – ASAP!