My new job

It's been a long time since I've loved my job. I didn't realize it but for many years I haven't liked what I did. I stayed busy and that's important to me. I felt like I was doing something productive and that's equally as important but I never truly loved it because there was little challenge in it. Let's face it, the year of PKI never arrived.

Now I'm challenged.

I'm enjoying my new position with VMware as a product manager focusing on the security of their ESX platform. It's exciting, challenging and the great part (and I know this sounds trite) but we're changing the world. Literally. The way people use our platform changes everything about how they manage their IT networks. It's more efficient, it's faster, more reliable, more available, less disaster-prone, and more flexible. All those good things that people wish from their IT networks.

I see what this can do for security inside an organization too. Think about this term "agile security". Bring security to the places where you want it. Make it more fluid and use your resources more efficiently. Putting out a new promotion or service on your web site? Move your firewalls and IDS so you can monitor more closely; put up more IPSes so you can quickly inspect more deeply inline; snapshot your servers so that you can recover from bad OS patches, exploited vulnerabilities, or misbehaving apps.

The possibilities are immense and as much as virtualization changes an organization's datacenter, it can even more profoundly change how they view their security posture. Imagine your being able to manage your risk as quickly as you can put up a new app.

At the same time, none of this is well-defined yet. This is where the challenge comes in. Are there new risks? sure. Have we found them all yet? No. Are we going to? Absolutely. Can we make this more secure than before? I think we can. There's opportunity for organization's to decrease their risky exposure and change their risk profile at a moment's notice (Threat level on SANS goes to red, increase your available resources to prevention and attack counter-measures...at gree, you can move those resources to event monitoring and correlation).

what else do you think we can do with this transformational platform?

The Food obsession

We've become obsessed with food...now more so than ever.

My wife and I always liked good food, we would try new dishes at home and we'd hit new restaurants just to get a sample of new dishes that we could try. However, it's now that we have a child that we've become even more in tune with our eating habits and our diet.

My daughter is now eating solids as of April, 2007. It's been great! She eats whatever we eat (puree'ed mostly) and she has a reaction to all new kinds of tastes. Mostly, she's happy to eat though as she'll take in broccolli, peas, sweet potatoes, fruit, chicken soup, salsa, etc.

Here's the rub though: now that we're so busy feeding her we don't really get to enjoy our own dinner. Getting food in her becomes somewhat of a battle between making sure she likes it to trying feed her in between her hands swinging around as she display her happiness or plays with her blocks. The food ends up everywhere: on her, on me, on the floor, on the carpet, on the sofa. It's a blast but quite the mess.

My wife has even written an essay as we thought about the good parontha's that her mom would make (and still does that we pack and take home with us). Here's the article.

In short, life has become about eating...less time to do it but more fanfare around it.

Journey By Inner Light

Link to the essay, Journey By Inner Light by Meeta Kaur, my wife.

Journey By Inner Light

Some of you may know that my wife is a writer. It's a very up and down process...for months at a time she works on a story and through many edits, she'll keep revising. Eventually, an opportunity pops up to publish it. Well, finally such an opportunity arose. Strangely my wife didn't feel the need to scream this from the rooftops. Luckily I did...

Here's a synopsis from an email my wife sent out:
"Journey By Inner Light", Homelands: Women's Journeys Across, Race, Place, and Time
The essay is a mini memoir about my life journey to date about my hair which is spiritually known as kesh. Since you have been a tremendous supporter of my path as a writer, I'd like you to hear the piece! And if you are moved to do so, please buy the book. These essays are rapturing stories about the search for a woman's identity in today's world. Here's a review of my essay.

For those interested in purchasing the anthology, it's available on Amazon.com and in some local Berkeley, CA bookstores. I was lucky enough to edit the piece in its infancy and then read the final draft. I think it's one of the most powerful pieces she's written. And more importantly, for young Sikh girls this piece should give them an idea of why faith can be so important in one's life. The ability to lift one's self out of the most dire consequences can be an incredible boon to anyone.

I'd encourage the Sikh audience out there (especially young girls and women) to pick up the book and read her essay. I hope you will find it as inspiring as I did. I hope my daughter will read in a few years and find it equally as inspiring.

Benanti-cam

yes, you too can watch my daughter on full streaming video

I gotta find a way to post this on YouTube. Any ideas?

And here comes the baby!

Well, she arrived a week early...what a surprise (thank god it wasn't while I was in China or NY). She's gorgeous, of course. Doesn't every dad think his kid is the cutest? I must admit, her head was elongated when she first arrived (yes, I was there for labor AND delivery), but they explained that was because of how she was positioned in the womb. Whew! I thought she was gonna have a funny head for the rest of her life!

Here's a pic at 2 day old --


Ain't she cute? Full head of jet black hair! I expected no less since I had the same when I was born (as do most Indian kids for those that don't know). She's been very quiet (except when hungry) and she poops a lot. Amazing how quickly they learn the burping and farting...and it takes forever to train us to not do that in public.

Well, I'm a proud papa and I'm ready to give her all the best in life. I keep thinking and just don't want to screw her up. Is that something that would be possible to avoid?

Understaffed at home

Ever feel like you could use a couple more hands? A couple more hours a day?

Yea, me too. Well, what the hell am I blogging for then....

In the next 5 weeks I am taking a trip to NYC, Shanghai, and then having a baby soon afterwards. Work has just completely taken over my life. I feel this need to accomplish things and instead I attend meetings where we decide on actions and then I don't get any time to execute on them. Is this what every job is like? What's the point of having an action if I can't accomplish it? I've started skipping meetings. Now when I do that, people call me on my desk, on my cellphone and tell me I'm missing a meeting. No Shit. That's the reason I'm not there is to get away from all you people so I can actually get something done.

Then I get passed random assignments that are way bigger than what I could possibly do:
- Perform due diligence on our latest acquisition -- No idea how to evaluate an acquisition.
- Examine our 2006 prospects and which countries I want to do work in -- yea, as if I have time to do research
- Create roadmaps for 4 different product lines - HA! Who has time to create a roadmap?

Then I get reamed out from sales reps who tell me that the tools they use are difficult to understand. And this is my problem? Did I tell your sales managers to go out and use a crappy quoting tool? "Maybe you should write a FAQ or a tip sheet on how to use it" suggests one sales person. Yea, that sounds like my job description, "help you use your own tools". Oh and did I mention that this is the only salesperson having the problem? Everyone else seems to be able to use the tool just fine.

Always great to see that we hire the best and the brightest.

December Baby

I'm introducing life to a new person. Well, not just me, my wife has a lot to do with it...actually, now that I think about it, she's the one doing most of the work.

We're expecting our baby to arrive around November 30th. I'm having a lot of heartburn with this date (not sure how much of a choice I had in the matter...well, ok I had some choice). Here's the problem:

I'm finishing my MBA program in Dec. Dec 9th to be exact. Part of the program is to travel to NY for classes. I've also elected to travel to London and China for a week-long class and my international seminar, respectively. My London trip is Aug 19-26, no problem there. China is Nov 5-11...cutting it a little close. And our regular (and last) trip to NYC for classes is Oct 25-28. Oh, and finals are Dec 7-9. All these dates straddle the ultimate deadline of Nov 30th, which is also a moving target.

Now, I know this is probably a trivial issue but I was hoping there wouldn't be an overlap. I could finish my MBA and start the baby "job" just afterwards. I should be thanking my lucky stars the baby was not born while I was in Term 1 or 2 like some of my classmates.

Liikely I'm stressing over this before I need to and it will probably be ok since my in-laws are closeby and my parents are coming in Dec anyways. Well, if I have any say (and I have very little, I know) Dec 10th would be a great day to have a baby.