MIX07: Bat Signals and Five Minute Field Ops Centers

I apologize for cutting short my live/raw soundbyte blog post on the MIX07 keynote yesterday.  I was literally called out of the keynote (audience) to fix an issue caused by a server update-in-progress back at the office. IM's went out to the team at MIX (the "bat signal" reference) to convene in Koji's hotel room, pronto.  Save post, close laptop, exit stage right.  The server issue was resolved in less time than it took to power walk from the Venetian conference center to the hotel room / makeshift ops center.  Why do the conference centers have to be on the far side of the shopping mall and casinos?

Even after telecommuting to Redmond from California for most of the past year, it still strikes me as pretty cool that, short of total hardware (or power) failure, with a good Internet connection we can set up a field command center in a matter of minutes and fix just about any service problem from any location in the world. 

Of course, the downside to all that is when the cabana boy shows up at your beachside sand chair with the big red phone. You have to get pretty creative to take a vacation where work can't follow.  We are neither shackled to the desk nor entirely free in the field. 

And people ask me why I go to so much trouble to travel to such strange and far away places...

Icebergs in Gerlache Strait, Antarctica

MIX07