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This Week Is a Coming-Out Party for Android Tablets http://ping.fm/hbuwa

via Ping.fm

Posted via email from 2WheelTech

MR340

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Safety meeting

Posted via email from LifeStreaming

MR340 - 88 Hours of FUN

We are off this afternoon to support my son in his 2nd MR340 race. This is a canoe, kayak race from Kansas City to St Charles.

8am Tuesday morning is a go.  Look for reports from riverside.

Posted via email from LifeStreaming

What your Basis support goes through on Go Live weekend !!!!

It's Go-Live weekend, everything is prepared and you are ready for the joyous feeling of kicking users out of the system at 6pm on Thursday. But in the back of your mind, as a Basis consultant, you know that by the end of this process a Go-Live party is the last thing you want - all you'll want is your bed.

The first question I suppose for most people is why do Basis consultants have to stay up for so long.

Well there are two answers for that

A. An upgrade runs 24x7, and there are many times that you have to interact with the upgrade, quite often these interactions will fall outside normal working hours. In my most recent upgrade, all the Basis interaction seemed to fall between 1am and 7am for both the upgrade and the Unicode conversion, which was not ideal.

B. No matter how well practised your upgrade is, there is always something which does not run the same way it has in all the other upgrades. So you cannot leave it running on it's own without someone watching it.

Another question is why don't you just spread the load more so people do not work such long hours

If your project can afford to employ lots of Basis consultants for each individual upgrade, then that on paper would be the answer, the reality is that it is unlikely all these people would have experienced the full end to end upgrade process. That is a risk, because nobody's documentation is perfect enough that you could give it to a person unfamiliar with the process and expect them to do it perfectly. So you have to maintain a continuity of experience within the upgrade process, this means for every shift at least one person has to have a high level of experience on this client's upgrades.

This brings me onto another point about the number of people that should be on-shift at any one time.

The decision on how many people have on shift depends on many things

A. The length of the actual process.

For my last upgrade the downtime was over 25 hours and the unicode conversion was 26 hours in total, post processing work and testing was scheduled to take 30 hours, this gives an overall runtime of nearly 4 days.

B. How many people do you have available to watch the processes and can they be trusted to interact with them in the right way.

For long running phases of the upgrade, and for the Unicode conversion I am happy to have non-Basis people monitoring as it is easy to determine if things are running as they should. Also I have been lucky enough that on my last few upgrades, we have been upgrading more than 1 SAP application and this has meant that there are 3 or more Basis consultants on the project. In order to reduce the pressure on each person within the project team, I have two people present when interaction is required - 1 person to do the action, another person to validate it.

C. How often does the team have to interact with the upgrade

With hardware getting more powerful and SAP improving the upgrade process, elapsed downtimes are becoming shorter. Which can be good news, but it means that there are fewer long phases for people to snatch some needed rest. On the other hand it means that people have an overall shorter go-live period.

But what can you do to make sure your go-live is not a complete nightmare and you are not too exhausted at the end of the process.

1. Work out how much sleep you really need in order to function and make good decisions - you do not want to make the wrong decision because you were tired,  know your limits!!

2. Have good tasty food available to you, at some point you are going to start swapping calories for sleep - so make sure they are readily available in the form of highly calorific food (my choice, not nutritional advice.)

3. Watch out for the caffeine, I believe you should grab sleep when you can, so even if there is a phase that runs for an hour I will grab at least 30mins - if you are wired on caffeine that will be very difficult to do.

4. Bring lots of things to do while you wait, 'the devil makes work for idle hands', let the upgrade/conversion get on with it's tasks - do not fiddle with it unnecessarily. Curb these urges by reading, listening to music, watching films.

5. Have a comfy place to sleep during your breaks, in all my upgrades I have followed two rules

A. Upgrades are done from a local hotel, with the shifts being run from a meeting room

B. The hotel is no more than 10 minutes drive from the office

This means that when people are off-shift they can easily grab rest and still be quickly available to the project team if required.

Hopefully this has given some insight as to how some Basis people execute upgrades over Go-Live weekends.

via weblogs.sdn.sap.com

We are about to go through several rounds of go live. This is a good thing to remember. Especially since our Basis support is outsourced.

Posted via email from LifeStreaming

Vancouver and Whistler

Heading out to Vancouver for a couple days.  Will get to the Opening Ceremonies and a couple competition events.  Also getting a tour of some of the back room technology around the Olympic network. Should be WAYYYYYY cool.

Watch this blog for a ton of pictures.  I'll post them in their own area.  Some will go here on my blog, others will end up in Picassa.

Look for us in the audience participation portion of the opening ceremonies. ;-)

Posted via email from daveploch's posterous

READ AND TAKE NECESSARY CORRECTIVE ACTION.

        The Center for Disease Control has issued a warning about a
new virulent strain of a communicable disease. The disease is contracted
through ignorant, promiscuous, and irresponsible behavior. The disease is
called Gonorrhea Lectem and is pronounced "gonna re-elect 'em." 
        
        Many victims contracted it in 2008, after having been
"brainwashed" with promised change and then screwed. Naturalists and
epidemiologists are amazed at how widespread this disease has become since
it is so easily cured....by voting out all incumbents!

        
        Apparently, there is a vaccine available in Massachusetts.

Posted via email from daveploch's posterous

Happy New Years

It's New Years Day so it's another great ride out at George Winter's Ranch.  There were 50 brave men and women who showed up for a lap in the 20 degree weather.  Fortunately it was a bright sunny day so while it was DAMN cold the sun made you forget about it (mostly). We all did a lap and at least one crazy person (my son, Christopher) turned around and did another lap. It took me about two hours to do about 3/4 lap.  I bailed after falling and skewering my back on a rock or branch.  Didn't realize I did that for another couple miles when it started to burn.

After the ride, there was a TON O FOOD.  Chili, ham and beans, bbq, wings, brownies, cookies and assorted other items.  Much consumption happened and there was a smile on everyone's face.  

George is a FANTASTIC host.  If the weather is above freezing we do the feasting outside with several propane heaters running to take the chill off.  If it's really cold, he opens the house and we spread out there, in the heat ;-)  Obviously we were in the house today.

Phil Shouldberg (retired photographer for AB) took a group portrait, Can't wait to see it.

I can now say, I rode on th coldest day of the year.  Unfortunately it's going to be even colder tomorrow so I guess I'll do a Castlewood ride.

Happy New Year all, 

Posted via web from daveploch's posterous