Car Photo Of The Day: A pair of Alfas

alfas

My “I want it now” post of the other day has me fixated on Alfa Romeos at the moment. I’ve always heard that every true “car guy” gets one at some point in their lives… and now I’m seeing them everywhere it seems. I watched the two “Godfather” movies a few weeks ago, and there were a couple of Alfas in there too!

Here is a pair presented at the Amelia Island Concours a few years back. I suggest that if you are a car guy, that a trip to Amelia in March for the car show is worth it… one of those things you just have to do at least once in your life.

I want it… NOW!

Lust.

Those Europeans get all the good toys. See that car up there? That is an Alfa Romeo Spider. Not only is it cool, and awesome, and worthy of lust, it is also available with a 2 liter “JTDM” TurboDiesel engine. That’s right, an open-topped, two seater, oil-burning, sports car.

If Alfa brought this to America I’d be their first customer.

I’ve been thinking of an essay about Diesel, and sports cars. Stay tuned for more.

Car Photo Of The Day: Springtime!

springtime

OK, it is not quite spring here yet, but there is something in the air (well… OK it is thick fog, but a guy can hope, right?)

The above photo was taken on the New England 1000 a few years back. We were chasing an Alfa in northern Vermont, just after crossing the Canada-US border on a transit stage.

Sorry about the lack of posts of late… getting back from vacation of course just means more work. I also just now upgraded my WP installation after somebody managed to create an admin-level user in WP through some flaw at 7:26 this morning. I was notified instantly and disabled their account… but still. grrr.

Published, again.

I wrote a lengthy bit about communications as a key to surviving an IT disaster, which in many ways was a written version of the session I delivered at the MacIT conference at Macworld Expo last month. I tackle the stereotype of geeks as poor communicators, and lay out a strategy for getting IT departments into the communication habit. The stunning revelation that lead me down this road is a conclusion I came to when discussing an outage with a “layperson”… that is a user of technology rather than a maintainer of it. To him awareness was more important than downtime. Downtime didn’t bother him so much, so long as he was kept informed of what was going on, why, and when things would be back up. Forewarning would be even better. His downtime came about during a datacenter migration. A light bulb went off over my head, as I had successfully pulled off more than one datacenter migration within the past few years. Did everything go perfectly? Of course not, but the difference was that I put a huge emphasis on communication with our customers way before, before, during, and after the moves. I’m not some IT genius by any stretch of the imagination, and I’m not the first to use this tool effectively. It just seems that most IT professionals forget this critical part of their management strategy.

Anyway, for the terminally curious, the series is linked below. My editor wisely split it into two parts.

Part One

Part Two

On Vacation

mmmmmm.... beer

I’m on vacation this week, so now you know why I haven’t written or posted much lately… nor should you expect much for a few more days. 🙂

My parents had the good sense to retire to a ski town in Colorado, so every year we try to make time in the winter to visit them. We’re there now and though we have Internet access here (finally!) I’m too busy having fun to post daily as usual.

Things should be back to normal again next week.