Boom! It’s time for another round of Tech Blast, this time with some seriously random content from all over the technical landscape. Also, Kevin Bacon.

Brain Food

Five Days + Twelve Writers + One Book Sprint = One Excellent Book on OpenStack Architecture – Quite a lengthy title, but worthy of mention. As mentioned by Lowe, the latest book sprint on OpenStack Architecture is now available for free (as in beer). Very nice of the authors, and their employers, to allow a group of talented folks to essentially lock each other into a room and refuse to leave until a book was written.

SysAdmin Casts – I believe this one caught my eye from a tweet written by Matt Simmons. Watch a series of short, informative videos from Justin Weissig. The site is filled with all sorts of delicious technical nuggets of goodness, and I suggest you check it out (and snack on a few choice morsels).

Google Maps Updated to Version 8.2 With Voice Actions and Elevation for Bike Routes – I realize that a rather strong quantity of technical folks that I associate with like to ride bikes, and so I found this update interesting. It seems the latest update to Google Maps is now more bike friendly. Maybe I’ll try this out on the plethora of trails and bike paths that surround my home.

Show 196 – EVPN Introduction & Use-Cases with Russ White + Jeff Tantsura – I was listening to this particular podcast on the PacketPushers network on the way home a while back, and was very impressed. Not that I consider myself any sort of expert in BGP, but the concepts behind EVPN are very interesting to digest, and the special guests are extremely knowledgeable. Kudos on this episode, gents.

New Pluralsight Courses – There’s several new courses out on Pluralsight from authors that I know in the IT space. Specifically, EMC XtremIO Implementation by Jason Nash, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Booting and Runlevels by Nigel Poulton, Citrix XenDesktop 7.5: Upgrading and New Features by Elias Khnaser, and Introduction to OpenStack by Eric Wright (his first course). If you’re interested in any of these topics, head over to Pluralsight and make sure to provide a rating for the course!

Much like Highlander, eating this gives you the power of Kevin Bacon

3 Steps to Get Started with Cloud Event, Incident, and Problem Management – Rich Benoit offers a collection of thoughts around unified views and dashing aside silos. Although it’s a big heavy handed with pushing vCOps, I thought the meat was worthy of a read. The advice can apply to pretty much any situation or solution.

My Life as a Consultant – Q2 – Get into the mind of Jason Shiplett as he writes about his experiences as a consultant and VCDX applicant. It sounds like things are marching along, especially with the 100+ hours of design work for the architecture design. 🙂

A Timely Remider: Passwords and Pin Codes Are Important – Author Tom Howarth walks through some good advice around pin codes. It’s sad how that “12345” joke in Spaceballs has become reality for many security related incidents.

vExpert 2014 Q2 Announcement – We’re now up to 892 vExperts as of this latest quarterly influx of new blood. The last few years has shown explosive growth, especially when we tried to cram into a room to talk shop at VMworld last year. I wonder how large this thing can scale.

VMworld 2014 Gatherings, Tweetups, Parties and Activities – Speaking of VMworld, there’s a neat list of all the social activities (read: parties) that are taking place at VMworld 2014 US. If you spot something missing, plop it in there.