A little over a year ago, I started wearing a blazer to work. Originally I did it to try a new look. The more I wore blazers, the more I found myself keeping more and more things handy. It was nice to always have things within hands’ reach like a pen or chap stick. Also, I discovered I liked not having my wallet in my back pocket.

As time passed, I found myself carrying mints with me on a regular basis. I also ended up buying an iPhone and it was really was no big deal to carry my iPhone and my work Blackberry with me. At work we have a fairly large campus and I find myself having to walk from building to building and it’s nice to always be able to whip out my sunglasses.

Depending on what I am doing, like traveling or attending a conference or even just an off campus meeting, I will carry some additional supplies like hand sanitizer, tissues, business cards (forgot to add those to the picture), a camera, usb stick (another thing I forgot to get in the picture) and/or a notebook.

One of the added benefits to a blazer is that when I am at my desk I can take my blazer off and I am comfortable. I’ve taken to wearing blazers even when I am not necessarily at work. There is also the “gentlemanly” aspect of it. It’s so nice to be able to offer my jacket to the wife or my kids when we are out and they find themselves with a little chill.

I live in southern California and I wear a blazer year round. It doesn’t really add any discomfort from a heat perspective. Keep in mind, I work in an office and am not exactly out jogging around town in it.

I think more guys should think about wearing blazers, it’s way better then carrying around a murse.

I just love this concept. I can imagine homes of the future being built with this technology built into it. The thought of just laying down your phone or MP3 player on the table and it getting charged while there is just cool.

There have been some pretty famous spokesmen in the past who’ve made huge impacts to the companies they were representing. OJ Simpson and Hertz, before the whole legal issues of course. Michael Jackson and Pepsi, hum again before the legal problems and hair catching of fire stuff. Micheal Jordon and Nike, he hasn’t done anything too bad yet right?

Well now lump Eric Van Johnson in this category, hopefully minus the legal issues for awhile. In what will most certainly send this companies revenues through the roof, I have done my first video “endorsement” of a product. Now this is not my first brush with Internet stardom, a few years back I got my picture taken with Irina Slutsky of GETV but that was different she was more stalking me than anything else, this time it was business.

Oddly enough it’s not an Open Source product and I don’t even particularly care for it’s licensing model but with that aside, the product itself is very solid. Splunk on the most basic level is a indexing and search service for system log files. But its extendability really expands the product much further than just that.

Check out my video endorsement and then go and buy stock in this company. Mind you they are not publicly traded at this time but you shouldn’t let that stop you as they are obviously going to go main stream now that they have me doing commercials for them

Splunk> Eric Van Johnson

http://www.splunk.com/article/2741

I’ve stated before how I am fortunate to be in a position where I typically work on a Linux, OSX, and Windows desktops on regular basis. Depending on what I am doing and my location I might spend a good amount of time on any of these systems. For the most part, my life style makes this pretty easy. I live in “the cloud” a lot for things like email and even documents. I keep things standard complaint and use tools that are typically cross-platformed or have counterparts on other platforms. This has afforded me some great freedoms and have allowed me to unchain myself and not be too dependent on any one solution. Instead my life has become one of preference and knowledge.

However, with everything there has always been pain points, one for me has been IM. While yes, it no longer matters which platform I am on at any given time I am still able to access my Yahoo, AIM, MSN, Gtalk accounts, the issue comes into play when I move from one machine to another and forget to sign out of IM on the previous machine. Some of the IM services alert you when you are logged onto one accounts from multiple systems and allows you to decide what to do, like AIM which gives you an option to send it a command to log you out of your previous session. Some just don’t care, like Gtalk which doesn’t seem to be concerned with how many times and from how many locations you are logged in, I don’t particularly like this approach. Then there are services like Yahoo that just get upset and decides to log you out from one of your accounts, couple that with IM clients that battle to keep their connection like Trillian and you can end up in a situation where you can’t log into your account because another is already logged in and wont let go.

I’ve come up with a few approaches that have made this situation somewhat manageable. On my Linux and OSX box this is pretty simple, there is a command line command called ‘killall‘ that comes to the rescue. With the line ‘killall pidgin’ or ‘killall Adium’ my IM clients on Linux and OSX respectively, end. Add the ability to ssh into these systems and if I forget to log out I simple do a quick ssh connection to these boxes, run my command and I am done. Furthermore, I typically have a good idea when I wont be at those computers, so with that information and the killall command, I am able to add crontab entries to automatically run my command. So for example, I know at 3AM I don’t want to be up IM’ing with anyone so I run that command at that time in case I left my IM client running before going to bed. I also know Monday through Friday I am typically at work and in my office around 8AM so I run that command on my home systems at that time too in case I left the house without logging out. The command ends up looking like this in crontab, 00 03,08 * * * /usr/bin/killall Adium > /dev/null 2>&1 Worse case scenario, I ssh back to the system and manually run the command. Its a great system and works like a charm.

At work the story is a little different. First off, the system I run IM on is a Windows machine which doesn’t have the cool ability to just SSH to and even if I did install an SSH server on the machine it is located behind a corporate firewall so I wouldn’t be able to get it anyways from the outside. I do have the ability to log in via VPN but that is a lot of work to log into the corporate VPN and RDP to my desktop just to turn off an IM client. Windows also doesn’t really have crontab, it does have a “scheduler” which acts kind of acts like crontab but that coupled with the fact that Windows doesn’t really have the same powerful command line tools that Linux and OSX have makes this simple task a little tougher to accomplish.

I have come up with a solution however, there’s a command on my Windows XP called ‘taskkill‘, I am not sure if this command is available on all Windows platform but it is on mine so I use it. Now with this command, I am able to write a small batch file that has the one line in it like this taskkill /f /im trillan.exe. When ran this behaves very much like killall on my other machines. I then use the Windows built in scheduler to run this batch file every day, Monday through Friday, at 6:30 PM because if I am still at work at this time, I am done talking to people and need to finish up work and get home. Now for whatever reason, this doesn’t always work or maybe I leave work early and need to get on IM at home. Because of the before mention firewall issue, its not as easy as just SSH to the box and running the command manually. So I had to come up with a solution to reach into my computer at work from outside to kill my IM if needed. To do this I created an Outlook rule. Since I almost always run Outlook 100% of the time when my work laptop is on, so Outlook seemed like the best vehicle for this effort.

To accomplish this, in Outlook I’ve defined a rule that looks for emails from specific senders (for example my personal email address), looks for a specific subject line (like “Turn off IM”), and checks for something special in the body (example “Trillian”). If all these conditions are meant, then it runs my aforementioned batch job and kills Trillian.

That’s about it, that’s how I manage my IM needs that run of various different OS in various different environment during various different times and allows me to stay unchained, mobile, and free. Hope you found some of this information helpful.

Just something I came across and thought I would post about. This is a video about a “green project” called Air Trees. Pretty cool, would love to see one of these in person and feel how effective it is.

They produce climates and energy in a couple of different ways from cooling down the air to traditional solar power. Very cool stuff.

Just found this funny, check out “Cancer Test” is near the end of the clip. I hate it when my doctor doe this to me. You would think being 3 years in remission I would have learned this trick by now.

This is taking Online Roll Playing to the next level allowing you to play a character playing a character in a game. I think it might be time to start playing games online.

‘Warcraft’ Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing ‘Warcraft’

Will we have Sony to blame when computers become self-aware and start taking over the earth? I came across a news story today that leads me to think, “Yeah, maybe.”

Military Supercomputer Sets Record

Here is the piece that caught my attention.

“The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an I.B.M. Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.”

Check out the full story on The New York Times Website

I’ve been personally using an online service called Remember The Milk (RTM) for sometime now. It allows me to manage my tasks on-line where ever I am. It also ties into some great services such a Google Calendars, GMail, and Jott (all services I use). I’ve been using RTM pretty regularly for the past couple of years but still struggled with organization and tracking of tasks.

In conjunction with RTM I’ve tried other services and application based around the “Getting Things Done” (GTD) philosophy but none of them really stuck with me. Thanks to a awesome posting on the RTM blog, I feel I’ve taken a few huge steps forward in both how I use RTM and how I manage my GTD life. I strongly recommend this read to all my friends and colleagues. RTM is a free service but there is a Pro account that gives you a couple (but not needed) bonuses and “A warm fuzzy feeling” (there words not mine Check out the service and check out the blog posting.

Remember The Milk – Blog (Advanced GTD with Remember The Milk)