I’ve been fascinated by guns since I was very young. At an early age I was given a .22 caliber bolt-action rifle and very fondly remember my Dad teaching me how to safely handle and fire it (always under his supervision). As I grew up my interest in guns progressed and extended to all types of firearms, including shotguns, handguns and “assault” rifles. I have never been much of a hunter but I always appreciated the engineering, workmanship and precision that go into any of the guns I owned. I viewed (and a still view) shooting as a precision sport, not as a violent act.

During my time as a gun owner and enthusiast I became passionate about gun owner rights. I was a vocal supporter of the NRA and any other organization that lobbied on behalf of my constitutional rights to own guns. I made the same arguments that you hear being made from the NRA (and others) with regard to gun ownership; that all guns should be legal; that any gun control was a strike against my constitutional rights; that all types of guns were needed to protect me from my own government. The list goes on. I was only concerned about protecting my right to own the guns I wanted.

While I am no longer an NRA member, my position on gun rights – including assault weapons – hadn’t changed significantly. I saw no difference between a menacing looking assault rifle and any other type of gun. Until Friday.

The sheer thought of 20 little babies being shot and killed is simply too much for me. I don’t know why I make a distinction between this massacre and that of high school kids or college kids or mall shoppers, but that’s what’s happened. This one is just too much for me and it can just never happen again. Those little kids, and the teachers that sought to protect them, need to be more than news fodder. The thought of my beautiful little boy being one of those kids makes tears well up in my eyes and it makes my stomach queasy. I can’t stop thinking about it.

If banning assault rifles (or any other gun control measure) has even the slightest chance in making sure that this never happens again than I am okay with it. My guns – and the right to own them – are not more important than my child. Or your child, or our mothers, or our fathers, or our friends. For those that want to argue with me about constitutional rights, feel free. I don’t care. Call me a traitor, I don’t care. Take my guns, I don’t care. I only care about being able to watch my son grow up, free from the fear of being a victim of some senseless, random act of violence. If that means that I sacrifice my guns then so be it. I will make that trade a thousand times over.

The cloud has fundamentally changed business models; it has shifted time-to-market, entry points and who can do what. These byproducts of massive elasticity are wrapped up in an even greater evolutionary change that is occurring right now: The cloud is having a pronounced impact on the supply chain, which will amount to a tidal wave of changes in the near-term that will cause huge pain for some and spawn incredible innovation and wealth for others. As I see it, the cloud has started a chain of events that will change our industry forever:

1) Big IT used to rule the datacenter. Not long ago, large infrastructure companies were at the heart of IT. The EMCs, Dells, Ciscos, HPs and IBMs were responsible for designing, sourcing, supplying and configuring the hardware that was behind nearly all of the computing and storage power in the world. Every server closest was packed full of name-brand equipment and the datacenter was no different. A quick tour of any datacenter would – and still will – showcase the wares of these behemoths of the IT world. These companies developed sophisticated supply and sales channels that produced great margins businesses built on some very good product. This included the OEMs and ODMs that produced bent metal to the VARs and distributors who then sold their finish products. Think of DeBeers, the diamond mine owner and distributor. What are the differences between a company like HP and DeBeers? Not very much, but the cloud began to change all that.

2) Cloud Computing. Slowly we got introduced to the notion of cloud computing. We started using products that put the resource away from us, and (slowly) we became comfortable with not needing to touch the hardware. Our email “lived” somewhere else, our backups “lived” somewhere else and our computing cycles “lived” somewhere else. With each incremental step, our comfort levels rose until it stopped being a question and turned into an expectation. This process set off a dramatic shift in supply chain economics.

3) Supply Chain Economics. The confluence of massive demand coupled with near-free products (driven by a need to expand customer acquisition) changed how people had to think about infrastructure. All of a sudden, cloud providers had to think about infrastructure in terms of true scalability. This meant acquiring and managing massive amounts of infrastructure at the lowest possible cost. This was/is fundamentally different from the way the HPs and Dells and Ciscos thought about the world. All of a sudden, those providers were unable to address the needs of this new market in an effective way. This isn’t to say that the big IT companies can’t, just that it’s hard for them. It’s hard to accept shrinking margin and “openness.” The people brave enough to promote such wild ideas are branded as heretics and accused of rocking the boat (even as the boat is sinking). Eventually the economic and scale requirements forced cloud providers to tackle the supply chain and go direct.

4) Going Direct. As cloud providers begin to develop strong supply chain relationships and build up their competencies around hardware engineering and logistics, they begin to become more ingrained with the ODMs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_design_manufacturer) and other primary suppliers. Huge initiatives came into existence from the likes of Amazon, Google and Facebook that are focused on driving down the cost of everything. For example, Google began working directly with Intel and AMD to develop custom chipsets that allow them to run at efficiency levels never before seen, and Facebook started the Open Compute Project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Compute_Project) that seeks to open-source design schematics that were once locked in vaults.

In short, the supply chain envelope gets pushed by anyone focused on cost and large-scale.

…and here it gets interesting.

Cloud providers now account for more supplier revenue than the Big IT companies. Or, maybe better stated — cloud providers account for more hope of revenue (HoR) than Big IT. So, what does that mean? That means that the Big IT companies no longer receive the biggest discounts available from the suppliers. The biggest discounts are going to the end users and the low-margin companies built solely on servicing the infrastructure needs of cloud providers. This means that Big IT is at even more of a competitive disadvantage than they already were. The cycle is now in full swing. If you think this isn’t what is happening, just look at HP and Dell right now. They don’t know how to interact with a huge set of end users without caving in their margins and cannibalizing their existing businesses. Some will choose to amputate while others will go down kicking, but margin declines and openness of information will take their toll with excruciating pain.

What comes of all this? I don’t know. But here are my observations:

1) Access to the commodity providers (ODMs and suppliers) is relatively closed. To be at all interesting to ODMs and suppliers you have to be doing things at enough volume that it is worthwhile for them to engage with you. That will change. The commodity suppliers will learn how to work in different markets but there will be huge opportunity for companies that help them get there. When access to ODMs and direct suppliers gets opened up to traditional Enterprise companies so they can truly and easily take advantage of commodity hardware through direct access to suppliers then, as they say, goodnight.

2) Companies that provide some basic interfaces between the suppliers and the small(er) consumers will do extremely well. For me, this means configuration management of some sort, but it could be anything that helps accelerate the linkage between supplier and end-user . The day will come when small IT shops have direct access to suppliers and are able to custom-build hardware in same way that huge cloud providers do today. Some might argue that there is no need for small shops to do this — that they can use other cloud providers, that it’s too time consuming to do it on their own, and that their needs are not unique enough to support such a relationship. Yes, yes, and yes… for right now. Make it easy for companies to realize the cost and management efficiencies of direct supplier access and I don’t know of anyone that wouldn’t take you up on that. Maybe this is the evolution of the “private cloud” concept but all I know is that, right now, the “private cloud” talk is being dominated by the Big IT folks so the conflict of interest is too great.

3) It’s all about the network. I don’t think the network is being addressed in the same way as other infrastructure components. I almost never hear about commodity “networks,” yet I constantly hear about commodity “hardware.” I’m not sure why. Maybe Cisco and Juniper and the other network providers are good at deflecting or maybe it’s too hard of a problem to be solved or maybe the cost isn’t a focal point (yet). Whatever the reason, I think this is a huge problem/opportunity. Without the network, everything else can just go away. Period. The entire conversation driving commodity-whatever is predicated around delivering lots of data to people at very low-cost. The same rules that drive commoditization need to be applied to the network and right now I only know of 1 or 2 huge companies that are even thinking in these terms.

There are always multiple themes in play at any given time that, when looking back, we summarize as change. People say that the Internet changed everything. And, before that, the PC changed everything. What we’re actually describing is a series of changes that happened over a period of time that have the cumulative effect of making us say, “How did we ever do X without Y?” I believe that the commoditization of infrastructure is just one theme among the change that will be described as Cloud Computing. I contend, however, the day is almost upon us when everybody, from giant companies to the SMB, will say, “Why did we ever buy anything but custom hardware directly from the manufacturer?”

Some days are better than others and some days are better than those. A warm day laying in a hammock with a breeze off the water and the sound of horseshoes clanking in the background makes for one of those days.

As I suspect a lot of people did, I saw a tweet about the Mattapan Mobile Farm Stand on my phone. I thought it was great and wanted to help. I clicked the link to take me to the contribution page and selected the contribution amount and clicked next. From here I was taken to the payment page where I saw that Paypal was one of my options which was great as I’m a fan/user of their service. When I selected Paypal however the authentication process of Paypal was loaded inside a modal box as was the final confirmation screen of Paypal. Have you tried interacting with any type of nested box on any mobile browser on any type of phone? Painful.

At this point I had to really want to contribute to the project because the incentive was there to bail. Too many boxes, too many hidden navigation buttons and way too many questions. I’m not blaming the site developers at all (but I wish they’d think mobile) but it did make me wonder why the process was so tedious. There were over 5 steps involved in me making a very small donation which just feels like a lot of friction for a simply task. If there aren’t already better systems then there should be. I can imagine something more like Eventbrite that already has my Paypal info (or LevelUp, Square, etc.) and the link I click from Twitter on my iPhone takes me directly to this page (or app) and I simply selected the amount and hit submit. 2 steps.

Maybe this already exists and I’m just not seeing it but the last few times I’ve run into cases where I’ve wanted to donate money I’ve run into this exact same scenario so if better software does exist the people looking for money aren’t using it. So there’s a software problem or a marketing problem but either way trying to give money away shouldn’t be a difficult task.

There’s a lot to take in from the Daily Practice and trying to diligently adhere to the system seems a bit overwhelming at first so I decided to ease into the system by addressing the first and probably easiest of the areas; the physical. One of the main tenets of the aspect of the Daily Practice is to get up early and get 8 hours of sleep so this means getting up at 5am and getting to bed at 9pm… no exceptions.

I have now done this for the past couple of months –getting up at 5am and getting to bed at 9pm (UPDATE: Getting to bed at 9am has proven to be very hard for me)– and guess what, it really works..for me. The first day/week was hell of course and I had to drag myself through the day but since then it’s been great. Here’s how it works. I get up @5am, shower (at least weekly), dress (not well), eat breakfast (Paleo) and then catch the 6:02am commuter train. I get in the city at 6:20am and at my desk at 6:45am consistently. One of the interesting things about being this early is that the mass transit system actually works much better when there aren’t a lot of people using it! Who woulda thunk?

So now I’m at my desk at 6:45am which is roughly TWO HOURS before anyone else gets in. It’s a software company so early mornings are not traditionally our “thing” which means that I have ~2 hours to answer email, work on important things that require my fully attention, plan my day, and the list goes on. One of the other great side effects of getting into the city early is that on nice days I have the time to walk from North Station to the Back Bay which is approximately 2.4 miles and takes me through Government Center, through the Boston Common, around the Duck Pond and past Copley Square. Not a bad way to start a day.

Getting into work early also means that I leave early, usually right at 4pm. Again, if I am walking to North Station this means that I catch the 5:10pm train home and if I take the subway it means that I can generally catch the 4:40pm. In either case it allows me to get home in time to see my wife and play with my Son,and eat dinner as a family. Yeah, I might continue working after dinner but by then the wee-one is asleep and the day is wrapping up.