Your hotel is booked. You’ve got your plane tickets. A cheerful registration e-mail is in your inbox. Maybe you’ve even signed-up for a few training sessions. Right now, the plan is that you’ll show up to the convention, get the keys to your room, and just see where the week takes you. You are stoked. Yay, convention! This is a terrible plan and you should feel bad because you came up with it.

I spent the last few days in West Virginia, visiting with friends, eating lots of good food, and hiking along the New River Gorge. It’s always a bittersweet visit. I love the forests and mountains. I love the people and the rain. West Virginia is a beautiful state. The towns are obvious rivets in the Rust Belt, but even the industrial decay of old machinery and factories holds a hipsterish appeal – wilted roses of rust and slowly growing coats of moss & lichen.

I spent last week in Las Vegas at AWS reInvent. It was my first visit and was very different from the other conferences I’ve been to in the last couple of years. The food was terrible, the sessions and hallways were uncomfortably packed, and we didn’t have the fast-track access to product managers and other experts that I’ve become accustomed to at other conferences (Thanks, account teams!), but it quickly became one of my favorite events.

I haven’t been outside in three days. The hotel maze has continually redirected us back into the hotel. We went outside earlier in the week to try and find food but were steered back inside without realizing it. It’s easier to stay inside, so we do. I have no interest in gambling or shows or anything else on The Strip. The rest of Las Vegas doesn’t hold any appeal either. Outside of a couple state parks close by and a sprinkling of jarringly green golf courses, it’s an urban wasteland.

One of my favorite business books is “The Ecology of Commerce” by Paul Hawken. It’s widely lauded as a pillar of business ethics and environmental stewardship, but to me, it’s really a book about design. I’m a design geek at heart. I’m not very good at the aesthetic aspects of it, but I enjoy all different flavors of design: industrial, architectural, graphic, technological, etc. Because the root of design is problem solving and reading authors like Hawkin and Buckminster Fuller gets me thinking about problems systemically.

IT departments, particularly infrastructure teams, are often thought of as being anti-user. We get the reputation of being grumpy cave trolls, unsympathetic to the wants and needs of those all those dumb, unreasonable end users. It’s all tech for the sake of tech. Sometimes that characterization is earned and fair, sometimes not. Either way, it’s a problem of attitude and perception. At the other end of the spectrum are people who consider themselves defenders of end users, protectors against undue change and hardship.

“Your service is entirely cloud-based, right?” “Yep. Absolutely.” “So there’s no on-premise hardware? Nothing we have to build, deploy, or manage?” “Well…” I don’t know how many conversations I’ve had like this with OEMs and VARs selling cloud products that are only “cloud” in the loosest sense. When they say “cloud” what they really mean is “hosted” or, in select instances – “hybrid”, either of which are OK, if that’s what you want.

Although it’s not always apparent to those I’m mentoring (Asking me for answers should not be your first step.), I like teaching. I like helping people work through problems and figure out how different components fit together holistically. Lately, there’s been a particular point I’ve been trying to hammer home in almost every conversation I have – with junior sysadmins, college kids entering the field, and anyone else who will listen.

I am regularly accused of not liking salespeople, sometimes by the salesperson I’m currently meeting with. I don’t think this is true, but I can understand why one might think it. If I smell blood in the water – an obvious lie, hyperbole, arrogance, insincerity – I go for the jugular. An example must be made, a lesson taught. I don’t mean to be this way, it’s just something in the way I’m wired – a neurological pre-disposition to not suffering fools.

Storage is cheap, especially in the cloud where you can pay pennies per geo-redundant gigabyte. For someone who once paid $200+ to replace their 400 megabyte drive with a 1000 megabyte drive, that’s almost unbelievable. No more expensive tape libraries. No more hiring couriers to ship data to an offsite vault. No more budget-busting SANs. No more uninstalling 1001 Amazing Fonts to free up space for Warcraft: Orcs vs. Humans.