Colin McNamara - CCIE 18233 , VCP, EMCIE, NCDA, GEEK » san diego

Colin has moved to the San Francisco Bay Area

colinmcnamara — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:40:09 +0000

You might ask “Why would you leave a perfect place like San Diego for the fog and traffic of Silicon Valley?” That is a great question, and it boils down to one thing – Family. I have a wife and two kids, and I intend to keep them. Last year I flew 53 round trip flights, and stayed 110 nights in a hotel room.

Why was I traveling so much?

Two years ago I was asked to team up with a good friend and start a data center practice by my regional vice president. We put together a strong go to market strategy, that tied in strongly with key product initiatives from Cisco and other vendors. To make a long story short, it was immensely successful. It was so successful that we transformed the region from being seen as a Voice and Service Provider partner to being the top Data Center partner in the operation, capturing the #1 places in both Enterprise and Select.

This level of success came with a price. Originally I had negotiated that every third week I would spend three days in Silicon Valley. With each win came additional mind and market share. We were able to use that success to attract some amazing individuals, which created even more buzz and business. In the blink of an eye my travel schedule had been transformed from a manageable three days every third week to Tuesday through Thursday pretty much every week. There was even one stretch where for six weeks I was only home for two days (one day was flying down to San Diego for a lunch and to grab a change of clothes).

Work Life Balance

The funniest thing, is that I am probably one of the most militant work life balance fanatics that I know. I make it clear to everyone that I am a father and a husband first, and an employee second. When I maintain that balanced life I am more valuable to the company (and my family) then if that equation is reversed.

One story I like to tell is of a former boss who ran software sales for DEC in Europe. He lived in Boston at the time and spent over three hundred nights a year abroad. The saddest thing I have ever seen was him trying to create a relationship with his daughter while she was going away to college. Eighteen years that you can never get back were flushed down the toilet in exchange for corp card dinners and fancy hotels. I witnessed this after spending eighteen hours a day working at my last startup, and pretty much missing the first year of my son’s life. I had vowed to never fall in this trap again, however the success of our data center practice had set the stage for history to repeat itself.

The tipping point

The more time you spend away from your family, the harder it is on your wife and kids. This was becoming readily apparently to me late last year. I sat down and talked with Ashley and discussed some alternatives. I could step down from a leadership position in our regional DC practice, and return to focusing on Systems Engineering for our Health Care and Indian Gaming practice. I could leave my current job and take a Director role at a company local to me. Or we could move the family up to Silicon Valley where 80% of my travel was.

I brought these options up to our leadership. I didn’t pose it as a threat, just a harsh reality. Something had to give, and I wasn’t going to fall into the trap that so many other people do of choosing their job over their family. Luckily I work with some very good people, who understood exactly where I was coming from. Our leadership all the way up to the C level recognized my issue and we settled on option number three, relocating me and my family to Silicon Valley.

Life in Silicon Valley

Choosing from all the varied towns in the bay was a tough one, but we ended up settling down not far from where I first came to the bay during the dot com boom – San Ramon. It has good schools, it is about 45 minutes from the high tech clients in the south bay as well as the same distance from the financial clients in San Francisco. Yes, traffic sucks. But luckily I still work from home, so most of my travel is off commute times heading to client meetings or speaking at events.

The best thing about being up here is that Silicon Valley really starts going at 10:00 am. This means that I can sit down and have a proper breakfast with my kids almost every day. After a year of hotels and Starbucks breakfasts, being able to make some omelets and get an ear full about the latest cartoon superhero drama is just awesome. I am now able to be the dad and husband that I should be. I am present in my family’s life, as well as fully energized to kick ass at work. What more can you ask for?Similar Posts:

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--Colin McNamara

Colin has moved to the San Francisco Bay Area

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Twitter Updates for 2008-06-05

colinmcnamara — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 07:59:59 +0000

Nexus 5020 – Consolidated 10 Gig Ethernet and 4 Gig Fibre Channel: Cisco released an addition to th.. http://tinyurl.com/5ujn7c #

UPDATE – Sorry for the RSS spam, I have been playing with twitter (and frankly am failing to see its draw) and setup twitter tools to integrate my blog with my twitter microblog. I apparently left the create daily twitter summaries on. My appologies for the RSS spam.

–ColinSimilar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Twitter Updates for 2008-06-05

Tags: blog, C, CISCO, Colin, error, Fibre Channel, Nexus, Nexus 5020, Technology, twitter

What do you do for fun?

colinmcnamara — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 01:10:53 +0000

One of the best parts of my job is that I get to meet new people almost ever day. Many of them have interesting ways of blowing off steam. Some build race cars, others build fish tanks, others like me enjoy photography. Josh Carley IT Director at a local Casino tops us all, he is the lead singer for a local San Diego rock band called FM Revolver. They headlined Saturday night at the Brick by Brick, putting on an amazing show. I was lucky enough be invited, and be allowed to shoot. Check out some of the pictures I took that night -

To see this in a full size window please click hereSimilar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

What do you do for fun?

Tags: Brick by Brick, C, Colin, FM Revolver, photography, Pic, san

PHP / MySQL / FLASH website integration

colinmcnamara — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 21:27:00 +0000

First I have to say, check out the new Ashley McNamara Photography website at http://www.ashleymcnamara.com/

We had it designed by Bludomain.com. At first I was a little reticent about using them, but now I am very happy about the move. The interface for maintaining gallery’s is superior to how I was doing them before. In the past Ashley would bug me to update her pictures, and I would bug her to provide them in for proper format. Now she just logs onto a web interface and uploads her pictures, updates her content, and whaam.. the site is updated. All this happens without one honey do this. I say that is worth its price in gold

Once I saw this “seamless” interface I had to figure out how they are doing it. After a little pocking around their source code I found out that they were using PHP to pull information out of a MySQL database, and use that for dynamic content insertion into a flash template. From what I can tell, the first thing that happens is the base flash template loads. Each button shape is hard coded in flash, and an actionscript is bound to each button.
This actionscript runs a PHP web application that logs into a local MySQL database, selects from a table, creates an array, then runs a for loop to populate each submenu for items in each drop down.

The net net of this is that you can have a few default templates, and just populate unique configuration options a MySQL db. This simplifies the whole content management issue while still providing the Content Protection that flash gives you.

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

PHP / MySQL / FLASH website integration

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Taking a closer look

colinmcnamara — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 17:45:00 +0000

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Taking a closer look

Tags: blog, C, CCIE, Colin, Pic

Study on Perspective – Set 1

colinmcnamara — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 17:03:00 +0000

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Study on Perspective – Set 1

Tags: blog, C, CCIE, Colin, Pic