2014 Graduation Parties

2014 Graduation Parties

Todd Swank's Diary Entry for June 8, 2014

On Monday night, we had our last Boy Scout meeting before the summer.  We were so proud of Luke and Avery as they were awarded the rank of Life Scout and are now going to be working on becoming Eagle Scouts in the next year or so.  Unbelievable!

On Wednesday night, I was on another airplane heading out for a business trip.  I'm always surprised how often I end up flying directly over the top of my house.

I did a connecting flight through Phoenix on my way to Irvine, California.  The weather was beautiful in California, but 104 degrees in Phoenix when I switched planes.  Glad I wasn't staying there for long because I'm not real fond of the Heat.  

I was in Southern California to meet with a company I've never met with before.  Amazon.com.

This was my walk from the car to the building.  We need Palm Trees in Minnesota.  They're just kind of pleasant to be around.

I've been selling computers and servers for more than 20 years now, but the cloud is a real threat to the traditional business model for computer sales.  Which is why I was here.  According to the Gartner Magic Quadrant, Amazon Web Services currently maintains an 83% market share in Cloud Infrastructure as a Service.  They told me while I was there that Amazon is adding enough data center space every single day to run the entire Amazon.com website which is a $7 billion operation.  And their web services division is adding that much capacity EVERY SINGLE DAY.  If you want to make money in computers going forward, it's probably a good idea to learn how to take advantage of their offerings.  According to their sales people, customers are screaming for help on how to do it.  I'd like to be one of the people to figure out how to take advantage of that.

It was quick trip and I was on a plane heading home on Friday.  I just love flying over mountains.

When I came home, Luke was excited to show me what he found.  We're dog sitting for a friend and on Wednesday night the dog was sleeping in Luke's bed with him.  Around midnight, Luke rolled over and started petting him when he suddenly felt an odd bump.  It turned out to be a tick.  But it was about 10 times bigger than any tick we'd ever seen before.  We read that it was most likely stuck to the dog undiscovered for four or five days.

That's an awful lot of dog blood.  (My wife really didn't want me to publish this photo.  For those of you who think it's too gross, I want to let you know we simulated the blood that would have been found in the tick by pouring Hershey's Chocolate Syrup in the bag.  For those of you who find this kind of thing cool, I want you to know it's absolutely real.) 

On Saturday, we got to visit a lot of friends going to 4 different graduation parties.  The first one we visited was for Dana Bunker.

   Our next party was for the rock star, Andy Bollig.

We had a lot of fun at this party visiting old buddies from Nor-Tech.  And Nick Rahman.

Our next party was for Angelina Dao.  We had a great time seeing her and her family.

Our final party of the day was for our robotics buddy, Claudia Dube.  She has been an inspiration for our boys the last couple of years in robotics so we were honored to attend her party.  By the end of the day, we were pretty tuckered out from all those graduation parties.  Best of luck to all 2014 graduates!  We hope you are able to go after and achieve all your dreams!!