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The United States is a great country, but after spending 10 days on a whirlwind trip across France, here are a few areas where the USA can learn a thing or two.

Tipping

In France, tips are not expected, even at full service restaurants. In the United States, the tipping culture has gotten out of hand. Its gone way beyond wait staff at full service restaurants, today we see tip jars popping up all over the place. I’m a generous tipper, but things are out of control. Employees are getting underpaid, and consumers are expected to fill up the gap.

Driving

I was amazed how well motorists behave on the highway in France. First off, nobody clogs up the left lane. Everybody moves immediately to furthermost right lane when not executing a pass on the highway. Nobody passes on the right hand side.

Roads

After driving over 2500 miles, I was shocked how smooth the highways are in France. Literally, I did not hit a pothole of significance during the whole trip. I don’t know what the French are doing differently, but their roads are clearly superior, and I didn’t see much construction going on during our trip.

Gas Station Coffee

In the United States, if you want drinkable coffee you are forced to go do a dedicated coffee house. Gas stations and rest stops have horrible coffee. I’m sorry folks, but Wawa and Sheetz have shitty coffee. Donut shops have shitty coffee. In France, every rest stop has automated espresso machines that make decent coffee. Its not great, but its way better than anything in a gas station in the USA.

Food

There is great food in the USA, but its not the norm. You can easily have a bad food experience. Its hard to have a bad food experience in France, especially if you avoid the touristy sections.

After four months of using a corporate laptop running Windows XP 64 bit edition, I finally made the jump to desktop Linux on my corporate laptop (Ubuntu 10.4 aka Lucid Lynx). In the past, working in various IT roles, it was easy for me to run whatever OS I wanted, and take the time to configure it to my liking. However; in a software pre-sales role you cannot afford to have any downtime, especially when you role is 100% dependent on having a functioning laptop. Something that was once a nuisance, such as external display issues with a projector, is now a mission critical bug.

Device Compatibility

Using Linux on the desktop in some form for over a decade, I’m simply shocked at the major strides Ubuntu has made on device compatibility. After the OS installation, every device on my Dell e6500 worked out of the box. The wireless networking and bluetooth worked right out of the box. The screen was at the optimal resolution. The power functionality of sleeping and hibernate worked with no issues going in and out of the dock. Some of these items may appear to be trivial, but 5 years ago Linux laptop users generally had to use custom kernel modules and various hacks to get things working right. Even on the Windows side, you generally have to spend a lot of time hunting down correct device drivers. With Lucid, I was 100% functional after the base OS install.

From a third party device perspective I was also blown away by Lucid. I have a wireless aircard from Verizon. Getting it to work on Windows and OSX requires me install third party software from Verizon. With Ubuntu, I simply plugged the device in, and a wizard came up asking me my country, and my wireless carrier. That’s it, it simply worked like any other integrated networking device. Printer configuration was a similar experience, I simply picked the device from a menu and it just worked. No bloated drivers from HP.

Virtualization

Because I’m running enterprise software demos inside VMware VM’s, naturally I have VM workstation installed. I also used the VMware converter to convert my previous laptop Windows installation to a VM so I can run my old corporate desktop image as needed. Having used VMware for quite some time, the biggest advantage for desktop use in the last few years has been “unity mode.” Unity mode displays virtualized applications as native applications, so in Ubuntu I run Outlook and Visio without having to move back and forth from the virtualized operating system.

Areas for Improvement

There are still some areas where corporate Ubuntu users still face major challenges. Exchange compatibility is still my number one issue. Evolution works great if you have direct MAPI access, but for road warriors we usually only have access to Exchange’s web interface. Outlook can connect to Exchange directly through OWA (Outlook Web Access), and Evolution supports OWA integration too, but only with Exchange 2003. Most corporations are running Exchange 2007. Corporate VPN connectivity still requires some manual configuration and hacking to get it working. Web presentation tools such as Webex have very limited support for Linux. If your forced to use Microsoft’s Netmeeting, then you must use Windows.

Cloud computing is the most overhyped, misunderstood computing trend since “Web 2.0.” In recent polling it’s also the #2 CIO initiative for 2010, with virtualization being #1. Like any popular IT fixall buzzword, people seem to ignore the prerequisites required for a successful implementation.

Cloud computing is really just an evolution of virtualization. Like virtualization, there are prerequisites that are required for a successful implementation. In the case of virtualization, a sound SAN strategy is needed. Having a hypervisor utilizing one local disk controller among 10-20 virtual machines is a recipe for disaster.

In the case of the cloud, whether it’s internal or external, full stack OS provisioning is a requirement for any true cloud computing initiative. What is full stack OS provisioning? It’s the ability to provision a production ready server (physical, virtual, or cloud) without requiring any manual software configuration handoffs before it is production ready.

When you look at most organizations, there is generally a large gap from the time a server is requested till the time that server is ready for business. Base OS installation is generally not the problem; it’s everything that goes on after the operating system is laid down: monitoring, backup, middleware, applications, and application configurations. Each one of those items usually requires human handoffs and manual configurations in order to finally get a server to a business ready state.

If your server OS provisioning process is not producing business ready compute nodes, then any cloud initiative is going to suffer from the same problems your organization already experiences with regular servers. Cloud computing and virtualization can rapidly speed up the ability to provision new compute nodes, but its only as fast as your provisioning process.

Two months ago, I bought the Withings WIFI scale, which has a bunch of unique features, including the ability to report weigh-ins to twitter. I decided to conduct a two month personal experiment where my scale would report to twitter every time I stepped on it. Because my twitter account is hooked up to Facebook, the scale also updates my Facebook status.

I had two goals for the Twitter diet:
1. Don’t gain any weight in the month of December
2. Lose 10lbs by the end of January

Amazingly, I managed to acheive goal #1, but I fell short of goal #2. I only managed to lose 5lbs during the twitter diet. The Twitter diet was unique because everybody around me was reminded that I was on a diet, which created a built-in weight loss support group. If somebody saw me eating junk food, I would be ridiculed.

The daily reporting of my weight caused me to really think twice about what I was eating. For the first time in my life, I experimented with various diets. I went veggie for a few weeks, I tried the the low-carb thing too. There is no way I would have been motivated to diet if it wasn’t for the Withings scale.

Overall, I think the twitter diet has a lot of potential. I’m actually going to keep the scale sending tweets, but on a weekly basis instead of daily. The weekly reporting should be enough to get me embarrassed if I start to creep back up, and thats the real benefit. The public reporting of weight, gets people who would otherwise not care to really think about how much they weight, what they are eating, and what they are doing.

Its been 24 hours since the iPad was announced, and I have to say that with every tick of the clock, my opinion of Apple’s new device gets more negative. During the announcement, I wasn’t blown away, but I was positive. However; the more I started think about the iPad, the more I disliked it. Its really just an oversize ipod touch.

I thought Apple’s device would be a really strong e-reader, but sadly the Kindle is far superior. A backlight display is not preferable for reading, so Apple’s choice of an OLED screen makes the device a substandard e-reader. With the Kindle, there are no data fees, and there is infinitely more content, and to top it off, the books are cheaper too. So I have to have a monthly network access fee, to buy more expensive books, in a store with less selection, and I must read those books on screen that will strain my eyes? No thanks!

Photos, videos, and music all look very nice on the ipad, but why would I buy an iPad when the iphone/ipod already has all that functionality? The video display is better, but what is the actual use case for the iPad video? An airplane trip? If I’m in an airplane, I already have my laptop, so why bother with an iPad? Again, the more I think about it, the more the iPad doesn’t make much sense.

Finally, the one solid use case I had for an iPad is a living room computer. Something I could share with others in the house to check e-mail, browse the Internet, and carry on the road when I’m on the go. The lack of multiple user profiles makes the iPad a horrible option as a living room computer. Multitasking has existed on personal computers for 16 years, but the iPad wants to party like its 1989? There is no camera, there is no standard video out, and there is no usb port. No sane person would buy a computer that requires you to purchase a bunch of proprietary junk to have basic connectivity.

I’m the type of personal who can rationalize just about any technology purchase. I’m the guy in line to buy the new gadget the day it goes on sale. There is no way to rationalize purchasing an iPad in its current form. The device makes zero sense. It reminds me of the Macbook Air, a device for people who have more money than brains.

I recently purchased the new Withings Wifi enabled scale. The scale is unique because it uploads your weight and body fat measurements to the Internet via wifi, and the measurements are accessible via a web page and iphone app. A new feature allows you to publicize your weight to twitter. It sounds completely stupid, but I thought it would be interesting to see if reporting weight via twitter would actually lead to weight loss.

For the next two months, I’m going to report my daily weight measurements via twitter. December is probably the absolute worst time to start a diet, but I need to get an early start. I have a very challenging cycling “vacation” at the end of March, and my current weight is the cycling equivalent of morbid obesity.