Who knew TLC was the best source of Cloud Computing knowledge?

I'm not proud of this, but I'm the father of a child who has become a reality-show junkie. To be more specific, my child is a TLC reality-show junkie. Luckily it's not all the shows, some of which are quite disturbing, but enough to where a few of them have become part of our family's real-life activities.

What do I mean? For her birthday, my daughter told us she wanted to "go to Hoboken, NJ - to meet Buddy the 'Cake Boss'" (see picture at right). So being as my wife and I want to help our kids experience the world, we're making a trip later this year to NYC, with a side trip over to Hoboken to experience Carlos Bakery and their fine pastries and desserts. Hopefully the lines aren't too long.

So what in the world does this have to do with Cloud Computing, you may ask? Fair question. While setting the DVR for Cake Boss, I've been known to peruse the programming schedule for other TLC shows. Let's take a look at the TLC lineup and see how aligned they are with the Cloud Computing industry these days.

• "Hoarding - Buried Alive"- This show explores the lives of server huggers and other IT organizations that refuse to build shared-services environments. These groups are buried under the weight of years of under-utilized assets, unwilling to allow flexibility to breed in their environment out of "fear of losing control".
• "19 Kids and Counting", "Kate Plus 8" and "Quints by Surprise" - These shows explore the lives of IT managers struggling with VM sprawl due to a lack of control within their DevTest environment and weak "Self-Service Portal" policies.
• "Toddlers and Tiaras" - This show looks at the Cloud-based start-ups that don't have any of their own money but are loved, adored and glorified by their VC "parents" in hope of huge paydays in the future.
• "Extreme Couponing" - This show profiles the Cloud economists that extoll the virtues of commodity cloud services and how to derive personal value from the market without paying for anything.
• "My Strange Addiction" - Twitter, and it's ability to create friendships (or enemies) of people that have never met and have no idea of the other person's actual name.
• "Pawn Queens" - This show highlights a set of warehouses on the East Coast that buy servers and infrastructure from IT organizations that were told they should dump it all and move to the public cloud. The irony of the show is how many of those customers come back looking for their treasures whenever an outage on the cloud makes headlines worldwide.
• "I Didn't Know I was Pregnant" - This show follows several IT administrators that experimented with Amazon AWS instances and then realized that they didn't truly understand their application personalities when the bill arrived.

So if you're a wannabe Clouderati and are bored late at night, you now have a new source of information to scratch your Cloud Computing itch. Who knew reality TV could be so educational..??