抬头看到猎户座

我又回上海了。各位亲朋好友见谅,这次不一一拜访了,这次专门就是回来陪家里人。

记得去年回上海的那几天,正是背痛痛得厉害的时候。痛得最厉害的那两周,晚上睡觉都没法翻身,一换姿势就巨痛无比。以前经常听到美国人说lower back pain怎么怎么,以前都没当回事儿,心里想:不就是背痛么。那时候还以为lower back pain大概就跟晚上睡觉没睡好,早上起来落枕了一样。等到自己痛了才知道有多厉害。早上起个床要起一个钟头,都没法站着穿裤子。弯下身子穿个袜子都疼得哇哇叫。

偏偏那时候还要回一次上海。在飞机场安检,要脱鞋子。我只能让在边上,慢慢的慢慢的蹲下去,边上还要找个东西靠着,才能慢慢的慢慢的解开鞋带,再慢慢的慢慢的坐到椅子上,慢慢的慢慢的拽着裤管把脚提起来,慢慢的慢慢的把鞋子脱下来。然后再重复一遍另一只脚。过了安检,还要重复一遍同样的过程,把鞋穿上。

原本还以为因为背痛会连黄石的roadtrip都去不了了。后来从上海回来以后,看了正确的医生,吃了几个礼拜消炎药,背痛就好了。原来病因就是lower back那几节脊椎周围的筋膜发炎。拍了X光,确认椎间盘(美国人叫disc)没有问题,骨头也没问题,脊椎也没有错位。吃了消炎药(anti inflammation),过了几周就好了,黄石也去了,每天帐篷里钻进钻出。

背痛好了以后第一次坐飞机是感恩节去夏威夷。那天在飞机场安检,我一边脱鞋一边跟朱逢霖感慨,能自己脱鞋就是幸福啊。重要的事情要再说一遍:能自己脱鞋就是幸福啊。

经过了这次背痛,我算是深深的明白了这个道理:无病无灾,就算是很幸福了。很多人到病入膏肓的时候才想明白这个道理。那次背痛之后,我每天都觉得可以回到家里跟家人一起吃晚饭,吃完晚饭还能跟郑轶嘉一起玩一会儿,就算是很幸福了。

班还是要加,活还是要干,工资还是要涨,级别还是要升,新东西还是要学,钱还是要赚,有点子还是要去试,事业还是要有追求的。但就算维持现状,也该知足。我常常跟周围的人说,我们都要知足,我们中的很多人都已经属于美国甚至是华盛顿州收入最高的1%家庭了。占领华尔街运动针对的人里面,我们也是一分子。

干我们这行的,不用忍受风吹雨打、日晒雨淋,不用每天早出晚归,不用打卡,想什么时候去公司就什么时候去公司,想什么时候下班就什么时候下班,想翘一天班去滑雪就翘一天班去滑雪,有些人公司里休假还没限制,每年可以休四五个礼拜的假到处玩。我们这一行,除了有时候要on-call几天,除了常年看着电脑屏幕费眼睛,其他真的没啥可挑剔的。

平时朋友之间聊天,有时有人提到他有个大学同学去纳斯达克敲钟了,或者有人提到他的一个前同事现在在的某某某startup上市了,大发了一笔。说着说着会流露出觉得自己混得很so so的意思来。我说,我这两年想明白一件事儿:if we want to feel bad about ourselves, there are a lot of ways to be successful at that.

想要自己feel bad还不容易么,事业有成的可以羡慕别人事业更有成,嫁了个好老公的可以羡慕别人家小孩有出息,事业家庭都顺利的可以羡慕别人保养得好、身材不走样、皮肤不松弛。就是做到了微软的VP,照样可以feel bad:可以觉得自己的影响力还不够大。或者,自己原来手下一个老印,短短几年变成了自己的老板,而且还是CEO。遇到这种情况,完全有理由可以觉得自己很失败。

但我们这些人得要这么想:的确,山外有山,高人背后还有高人,但我们现在的生活,已经是大多数人想得到却一辈子都得不到的。所以要知足,要感恩。能和家人在一起,无病无灾,能自己系鞋带,就应该每天都感到满满的幸福。要记住那天晚上出去散步,抬头看到猎户座的那个moment。

2016-04-30-blog-orion

What Digital Camera and Public Cloud Have in Common

This is a picture featured in the March 2016 issue of the Outdoor Photographer magazine:

2016-04-07-panorama

To take such a high resolution panorama picture, traditionally it needs a high-end large format or at least medium format camera. But this one was taken by using a handheld Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III with a Canon EF 24-105mm ƒ/4L IS USM lens at 50mm, which is, in layman's terms, a mass market digital camera (although 1Ds Mark III is at the expensive end of that range). The composited panorama consists of five vertical images captured at ƒ/13 and ISO 400. We are seeing more such things in the digital photography world. Another example is the High Resolution mode of the Olympus OM-D E-M5 II camera. E-M5 II is a commodity camera: the sensor is smaller (Micro 4/3) and has only 16 megapixels. But it can shoot a 40 megapixel picture by shifting the sensor in half-pixel steps and capturing eight images over a period of one second. The moral here is, with the help of software, commodity digital cameras can achieve what could only be achieved by high-end cameras.

Replace “digital cameras” with “computer hardware” and that will be the spirit of the cloud computing. Cloud platforms, especially the public clouds like AWS and Azure, use commodity hardware to achieve what could only be achieved by high-end super computers and expensive networking devices. In this analogy, IBM’s mainframes and EMC’s storage systems are the large format and medium format cameras. Cloud platforms stitch together a bunch of commodity computers with the help of software, just like how George Lepp stitched together the pictures shot by a household DSLR, with the help of software, to produce a high resolution panorama pictures.

Having said that, in the digital photography world, there are still situations where we have to use high-end cameras. Take the panorama picture of the balloons as an example. If the balloons were some other fast moving objects, such as birds and buffalos, George Lepp’s technique wouldn’t work. He would have had to use a large or medium format camera to freeze all the motions in one single shot. We have seen similar situations in cloud platforms. There are still some situations where the computing has to be done in a single high-end computer. That’s why even in AWS and Azure, there are very high-end configurations of machines: Azure G-Series VMs come with up to 32 vCPUs, 448 GB of memory and 6.59 TB of local SSD space. The largest AWS EC2 instances are in the same neighborhood. However, local network speed is getting faster and faster: the best Azure VM type now supports 20 Gigabit network and AWS EC2 supports up to 10 Gigabit. The technology of 40 Gb and 100 Gb is already ready and 400 Gb is on the horizon. With faster Ethernet speed, more workloads can be scaled out, which wasn’t possible in the past due to the limitation of network speed.