Mike D’s Blog

I came across an interesting site today for an event called “Shutdown Day“.

Shutdown Day announces the Annual 2009 Campaign. Just like in years past, Shutdown Day 2009 calls on every net obsessed, computer–addicted individual to SHUT DOWN their computers for 24 hours on May 2, 2009 and do something else!

New, Shutdown Day 2009 will be promoting several organizations that help young people suffering from computer addiction. A bunch of events are also organized for May 2, 2009, so stay tuned and watch this space.

I find this to be an interesting concept. Personally on May 2, I’ll be on vacation in a place where I get no cell reception and my wife would throw my laptop into the ocean if I start using it. But what about the rest of you? Do you have what it takes to shut stuff down for a day? I think it would help everyone to spread this around. It may actually help some of our fellow geek friends save their marriage. What are your thoughts about shutting down for a day?

It’s time to take a break from virtualization and cloud computing for a minute and do something much simpler to help out Mother Earth – turn the lights off. Earth Hour started in Sydney, Australia in March 2007. This year it will be held on March 28, 2009 at 8:30 pm local time wherever you are. It’s stupid simple to participate – just turn everything off from 8:30 pm – 9:30 pm in your local time zone on March 28. Spread the word so your neighbors and friends now and then put it on your calendar.

For more on Earth Hour and to participate go here.

One of my favorite new sites is change.gov. It’s the website for President-Elect (soon to be just President) Obama. Whether you support(ed) Obama or not you have to respect a leader reaching out to the people to get ideas. As part of that outreach Obama’s team created the Citizen’s Briefing Book.

Basically you come up with an idea and you login and stick it in the book. Other people can then see your idea, comment on it, and vote it up or down. The top selections get put into a real book and delivered to Obama to act on. I think this type of thing should go on in every organization and company – not just with the President of the United States.

Anyhow, a co-worker of mine put in the idea to use virtualization to help move towards Green IT as the US moves to a centralized health records system. I think we can all agree this is a good idea.

The good news behind all of this is a lot of the federal government already uses VMware today. Heck, most companies in the health care industry and health care providers use VMware (or some form of virtualization) today as well. Pushing it further to help with the medical records system won’t be that hard.

This is actually a good transition into federated clouds. The government could build a cloud to house all of these medical records. That cloud could be distributed for redundancy and ease of access to the health care providers and insurance people that need access to the information or services it provides. By building a cloud strictly for medical records you could concentrate on compliance issues such as HIPAA.

So open your browser (if you’re in the US) and go vote up the idea to use virtualization for the planned digital health records system.